OXFORD | Historical Calendar

4th Annual NYC Area Oxford-Cambridge
Alumni Boat Race, 2008. Naugatuck Rowing
Club, Westport, Connecticut. Oxford mixed boat.

The following historical calendar of Oxford-college- related events is in formation.

Oxford college connections are noted.

February 
11 – Tolkien Heirs Sue New Line Cinema for $150 Million. 2008, settled 2009. Tolkien attended Exeter, Oxford. Fellow at Merton, Oxford.

April
23 – Baedeker Raids Start. 1942. Oxford was spared. Why, do you suppose?

May
1 – Joseph Heller. 1923. St Catz, Oxford.

July
1 – Hong Kong Returned to China. 1997. Chris Patten, Balliol, Oxford.

August
11 – Laurence Binyon, Poet, born.  1869.  Trinity, Oxford 1888.

September
3 – Stars and Stripes First Flown in Battle. Lawrence Washington, Brasenose, Oxford.

November
9 – Noel Godfrey Chavasse. 1884. Trinity, Oxford. Only person to receive the Victoria Cross with bar in World War I.
24 – St Catherine's Feast Day.  St Catz is named after her and her wheel is in the college arms.

BIRTH: Aug. 11 – Laurence Binyon, Who Wrote "For the Fallen"

Laurence Binyon

August 11, 2017 – Today is the birthday of poet and playwright Laurence Binyon, born to a Quaker family in Lancaster, England in 1869.  His 150th birthday will be in 2019.

Binyon studied at St Paul's School, London and came up to Trinity College, Oxford as a Scholar in 1888. He read Classics and published his first book of poems as an undergraduate. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1891.

His first job after taking his degree in 1893 was working for the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, writing catalogues for the museum and art monographs. His first book, Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century, was published in 1895. In 1913, he was made the Keeper of the new Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings.

During the pre-war period in London, he helped form Modernism by bringing East Asian visual art and literature to young Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and H.D.  His group, which often met at the Wiener Café, included Edmund Dulac, Lucien Pissarro, Charles Ricketts, Sir William Rothenstein, and Walter Sickert.

On the death of the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, in 1913, Binyon was among those mentioned as a likely successor, along with Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and John Masefield. Robert Bridges was the winner of the position.

Moved by the high number of casualties of the British Expeditionary Force in the Great War, in 1914 Laurence Binyon wrote "For the Fallen" when he was visiting the cliffs on the north Cornwall coast. Binyon knew Flanders well and was deeply affected by the losses suffered in the early weeks of the Great War. Written only a surprisingly few weeks after the conflict started, "For the Fallen" was published in The Times on September 21, 1914. His prescient words had an immediate impact on the nation’s feelings about the war, as when the poem was published, Britain was mourning its losses in the Battle of Marne. Unfortunately these feelings did not halt the carnage in the trenches.

Within the poem is the "Ode of Remembrance" – an excerpt from the poem,  either the third and fourth stanzas (out of the seven stanzas in the poem) or simply the fourth, starting "They shall grow not old...". Today, "For the Fallen" or the shorter "Ode" is often recited at Remembrance Sunday services in the UK; at Anzac Day services in Australia and New Zealand, and Remembrance Day services in Canada:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe. 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

At centennial remembrances of World War I in 2016, Professor Michael Alexander (Trinity, Oxford 1959), former Berry Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, spoke about Binyon.  He noted that Binyon retired from the British Museum in 1933, and the same year was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at Trinity. Pinyon continued writing and lecturing; in 1939 he delivered the Romanes Lectures, on "Art and Freedom". He died in 1943 at 73. His excellent presentation, which elucidates classical references in Binyon's poems, starts on page 29 of the Trinity College Report.

Poetry Foundation biography

WW1: Trinity College, Oxford (Comment)

The Summer 2014 Newsletter of Trinity College Oxford has many items to tickle the memory and warm the heart of an alum.

The Commem Ball

It is great news that the triennial Trinity College Commem Ball drew 1,800 guests and "is generally accepted as the biggest and best ball in Oxford." I was surprised and impressed to see that the College's Durham College Quad was painted blue and a stuffed zebra was featured inside a bandstand.

College President Sir Ivor Roberts, KCMG, former H.M. Ambassador to Italy and several other countries, confessed that he and his wife Elizabeth survived only to 2 a.m. The tradition among the younger set is to hang on till early morning and then go punting.

The last Trinity Commem Ball that Alice and I went to was with Philip and Daisy Keevil; their son Adrian, also a Trinity alum (1997) is noted in the Newsletter as now being Dr. Keevil, having been awarded a Ph.D. in Management from the Darden School at the University of Virginia.

Remembering the Great War

So much for the fun side. The College is devoting much of its exhibit space and reports to alumni to remembering the Great War, aka World War I. John Keeling, the Trinity Domestic Bursar, writes in the current Newsletter about the impact of the first 100 days of the war on Trinity. We forget, he says, that between 1900 and 1914, when the war broke out, "there had been over 100 regicides and high profile assassinations in Europe".

The assassination of the Archduke, however, set into a play, because of treaties, a domino effect. Armies had started assembling in Europe by the millions. At the same time, Britain failed to warn Germany that it would not tolerate a breach of Belgian neutrality. When Germany invaded Belgium, Britain was shocked and the war was on. Trinity alumni who enlisted did so because they "didn't want to miss the show".

The first Trinity man to be killed in action was Lt. James Gilkison (1903), in August. Another died in an accident during training. Three more died in September. Three more in October.  By Christmas, nine were dead.

Overall, by Armistice Day, November 1918, more than 700,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen would die, more than one out of every eight who enlisted. Trinity's loss was greater, one in five, because so many did get to see the "show" and fought in the major battles - the Somme, Gallipoli, Ypres. As a college with a family tradition, four pairs of Trinity brothers died in the war.

It was a Trinity alum, Laurence Binyon (scholar 1887) who wrote one of the great poems of The Great War, "For the Fallen". The poem was published in The Times on September 21, 1914.  The fourth verse is used in many memorial services:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not wither them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.

It ranks with John McCrae's "In Flanders Field" as one of the great tributes to the dead.

Trinity will have a talk about Binyon on November 9 (3:30 pm) and another one earlier on October 23 (5 pm) about Henry Moseley, who died at Gallipoli. Reservations are required. Trinity will also have an exhibition on those who died in, and those who survived, the Great War, as well as on the impact of the War on the life of the college.

Comment

I hope that Viscount James Bryce, a Trinity alumnus who served as H.M. Ambassador to the United States in the years up to the Great War, gets adequate attention in the College's remembrances. The German Ambassador, Graf Heinrich von Bernstorff, was pleased that Bryce had left before hostilities broke out in Europe, because he said that it would have been much harder to keep the United States out of the war for so long (i.e., not until the sinking of the Lusitania in 1917) had Bryce been in town bending President Wilson's ear.