BLOG VIEWS: 70K–May 25, 2015

May 25, 2015–This blog has had 70,000 Pageviews.

The top ten posts in the last month, rated based on number of Pageviews, are shown below.

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Entry		Rating
Why Did Hitler Not Bomb Oxford? Jun 8, 2013
Boat Race Dinners 2015 Mar 1, 2015, 1 comment
Oxford College Clues to the Stars and Stripes Nov 21, 2014
Douglas, Moray and de Vere (Oxford) Coats of Arms ... Nov 23, 2014
Early Reads on the British Election May 8, 2015
May 20 - W. H. Auden Becomes an American Oxonian May 20, 2015
Rowing Blazers - Ralph Lauren's Launch of Carlson'... Sep 24, 2014
82nd NYC Boat Race Dinner 2015 Apr 23, 2015
Wannabe American Oxonians - Raleeigh, Gilbert and H... May 20, 2015, 1 comment

AMERICAN OXONIANS: The First 3 Wannabes (Updated Dec. 22, 2015)

Sir Walter Raleigh, first of the settlers. Born in East
Devon, England.

On May 14, 1607 English settlers with the London Company landed at what came to known as Jamestown, Virginia. It was named after James I of England. 

It was the first enduring English settlement in the New World. But it was not the first.

Sir Francis Drake was the first to voyage from England to the New World, but he never intended to colonize America, only to explore it.

A sailor from Devon and Cornwall in the southwestern corner of England, where pirates roamed and Cornish was spoken, Drake and his relative John Hawkins brought back valuable navigational and mapping information. Drake's work made possible the successes of the first settlers, many of them his relatives.

First Expeditions by Oxonians Raleigh, Gilbert and Harriot in 1578 and 1584

Three Oxonians–two of them related to Drake–tried to colonize America before the Jamestown Settlement. Their motive was not curiosity or a search for religious freedom. It was rather what I call the Oxford model–entrepreneurs seeking to serve the British Crown while creating wealth for their family through land development. The Oxford model was the pattern for most of the colonial American settlements south of what is now New York State. 

The Cambridge model was driven not by love of the Crown or eagerness to serve its imperial urges or even a wish to own land.They were driven by a wish to practice their nonconforming religion without the worry that their religion would be viewed as treasonous and therefore punishable by death . The Cambridge model was the typical source of settlers in New England. (The cases of Maryland and Pennsylvania were mixed because they involved a search for religious freedom by Catholics and Quakers as well as being blessed with large grants of land from the Crown.)

Explorations by Raleigh (with Gilbert and then Harriot)

1578. About 30 years before Jamestown, two Oxonians started the explorations that led to the enduring English settlements. The two men, half-brothers, both born in Devon, England, set off in 1578 to explore the New World. They were Sir Walter Raleigh (Oriel College, Oxford) and Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Eton and Oxford, probably also Oriel College). They brought back useful information.

1584. Six years later and more than 20 years before Jamestown, two Oxonians worked on an expedition to settle the New World–Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot (St. Mary's College, Oxford - a now defunct college on Oriel land). Raleigh also hired a Cambridge man, another relative, Sir Richard Grenville. 

Raleigh's first settlement posse disembarked at Roanoke Island on July 4, 1584. Members of his expedition were trained in navigational skills by Thomas Harriot, who entered Raleigh's employment in the early 1580s, soon after coming down from Oxford. The Cambridge man involved was another Devon man and cousin of Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville. 

1585. Raleigh sent Sir Richard Grenville off on a second expedition with five ships that left from Plymouth on April 9, 1585. During an initial exploration of the mainland coast, a sterling silver cup was lost and the Europeans blamed natives of the village of Aquascogoc for stealing it. The settlers responded by sacking and burning the village as punishment. This proved, we shall see, to be unwise.

Grenville decided to leave Ralph Lane and 107 other men to establish a colony at the north end of Roanoke Island. These men disembarked on August 17, 1585 and built a small fort on the island. Grenville promised to return in April 1586 with more men and fresh supplies. 

1586. April 1586 passed without any sign of Grenville's relief fleet. Meanwhile in June, bad blood from the colonists' destruction of the village of the natives spurred their attack on the fort, which the colonists repelled. Soon after, Sir Francis Drake paused on his way home from a successful raid in the Caribbean. He took the colonists, including the metallurgist Joachim Gans, back to England. The Roanoke colonists brought back to England tobacco, maize, and potatoes.

Grenville's relief fleet arrived shortly after Drake's departure.  Finding the colony abandoned, Grenville returned to England with the bulk of his force, leaving behind a small detachment to maintain an English presence and to protect Raleigh's claim to Roanoke Island.

1587. Raleigh then dispatched a new group of 115 colonists to establish a colony on Chesapeake Bay. They were led by John White, an artist and friend of Raleigh who had accompanied the previous expeditions to Roanoke. Thomas Harriot eventually sailed to Roanoke with the second group of settlers, where his skills as a naturalist became particularly important. White was later appointed Governor.

Raleigh named 12 assistants to aid in the settlement and sent them to Roanoke to check on the settlers. When they arrived on July 22, 1587, they found nothing except a skeleton. The fleet's commander, Simon Fernandez, refused to let the colonists return to the ships, insisting they stay to establish the new colony on Roanoke. Shortly thereafter, colonist George Howe was killed by a native while he was by himself  searching for crabs in Albemarle Sound.

Fearing for their lives, the colonists persuaded Governor White to return to England to explain the colony's desperate situation and ask for help. Left behind were about 115 colonists – the remaining men and women who had made the Atlantic crossing plus White's newly born granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. White sailed for England in late 1587. Plans for a relief fleet were delayed by the captain's refusal to return during the winter, and then the coming of the Spanish Armada and the subsequent Anglo-Spanish War for which every ship was commandeered. 

1588. In the spring of 1588, White managed to hire two small vessels and sailed for Roanoke.  But the captains of the ships attempted to capture several Spanish ships and instead were themselves captured and plundered. With nothing left to deliver to the colonists, the ships returned to England.

1590. White was unable to mount another resupply attempt for three more years. Finally, he gained passage on a privateering expedition that agreed to stop off at Roanoke on the way back from the Caribbean. He landed on August 18, 1590, on his granddaughter Virginia's third birthday, but found no trace of the 118 settlers... and no sign of any struggle.

Notes

Raleigh: Raleigh Trevelyan, Sir Walter Raleigh (2004). biography.com/people/walter-raleigh-9450901.
Gilbert: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233536/Sir-Humphrey-Gilbert

AMERICAN OXONIAN: May 20–W. H. Auden Naturalized

W.H. Auden, 1907-73

On this day in 1946, W[ystan] H[ugh] Auden became a U.S. citizen. He was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. Auden began writing poetry in Gresham's School and had his first poem published in a collection called Public School Verse when he was 17.

He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, and made friends with other writers, including Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender and novelist Christopher Isherwood. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also liked Old English verse.

In 1928, the year he graduated from Oxford, his first collection, Poems was printed by his friend Stephen, the last of the Big Spenders. Two years later, another (different) collection called Poems was published, establishing Auden as a voice of England's youngest writers. He was a virtuoso of writing in different poetic styles and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James.

Auden spent a year in Berlin, then for five years taught in Scotland and England and worked for a government film bureau. He also visited Iceland and China. In the 1930s, Auden embraced leftist causes and went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. However, he was shocked by the destruction of Roman Catholic churches and returned to England.

In 1935, he married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika to help her escape Nazi Germany. In 1936, he published On This Island. In 1939, he moved to the United States, and his work became less political as he turned to Christianity, reading theologians Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr and in 1940 rejoining the Episcopal Church.

In 1940-41, he shared a house in New York with the writer Carson McCullers and the composer Benjamin Britten, writing Another Time (1940) and The Double Man (1941). He met Chester Kallman, his lover for two years, to whom Auden dedicated two of his poetry collections.

He volunteered to serve in the British Army when war broke out, but was told that 32 made him too old. He taught English at the University of Michigan, was drafted into the U.S. Army but was dismissed on medical grounds. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942-43 but decided not to use it. Instead, he spent the war years 1942-45 teaching at Swarthmore.

He visited Germany after the war to study the effects of the Allied bombing on German morale, came back to New York City and worked as a freelance writer while lecturing at The New School and occasionally at Bennington and Smith.

In 1948, Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety (1947), a poem about spiritual isolation in contemporary urban settings. He moved in his focus on religion from personal exploration of Protestantism to a study of Roman Catholic ritual, building on the writing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran minister who explored the ability of religion to provide relief from human suffering.

Auden was a literary virtuoso, accessing current events, vernacular speech, and many kinds of writing and data. His poems are often in the form of a journey for which he makes use of his own travels. Auden was an essayist and playwright as well as being esteemed as the greatest English poet of the twentieth century.

Auden served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to his death. He divided most of the second half of his life between a residence in New York City and a farm in Austria, staying in Oxford in 1956-60 while serving to as a Professor of Poetry.

He died in Vienna on September 29, 1973. This post draws on information in bios of Auden published by the Writers Almanac (Garrison Keillor) and the Academy of American Poets.

Comment

In the 1960s, after his stint at Oxford, Auden had some connection with Harvard. I sat opposite him at a formal Harvard College event in my senior year and my recollection of the table conversation was that it had both the fluency and incoherence of a current-news discussion drowned by too many glasses of sherry. (It was often rumored that the endless flow of Amontillado Sherry at Harvard in 1958-1962 was financed by the Ford Foundation; I have never been able either to confirm or disprove this rumor.)

I did not have any sense that Auden was even vaguely interested in unburdening himself of new personal insights. It was a quite different experience from a lunchtime conversation I had near that time with Quincy House Honorary Fellow (or whatever his title was) Robert Lowell, who spoke to me as if he were kneeling in a confessional box and I – an incredulous undergraduate – was a bishop.

Somewhere I read that Auden and Edna St. Vincent Millay are the only two poets in the 20th Century to have made a living from their poetry. However, when I ask Grandma Google to remind me where I read that, she only provides links to my own prior assertions of it. At any rate, Millay's ability to earn a living from her poetry benefited greatly by her having married businessman Eugen Boissevain, who gave up his business to become her agent and "cruise director". Auden said:

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his [or her] art than he [or she] can by practicing it.

Early Reads on the British Election

	David Cameron Carries On by Anthony Lane Cameron claimed that austerity policies were driven by necessity, whereas Ed Miliband argued that it was ideological. Economists will continue to thrash out the issue; meanwhile, the public has chosen whom to believe.
	What’s Next for the United Kingdom? by John Cassidy For a democratic union of two countries to survive, it needs majority support in both. This condition is still being met by Scotland and England, but only just.

Who would be a good speaker on this for Oxford Alums? Recommendations so far include Piers Morgan (did not attend Oxford) - Stephen Fisher (Fellow, Politics Tutor at Trinity College Oxford, has been in BBC TV on the elections) - Ian Williams, journalist at the U.N.

BOAT RACE: 82nd NYC Dinner 2015

The program is posted here.

Links to photos and remarks are posted if and when received.

Boat Race Events in North America - 2015.

The History of Boat Race Dinners in North America.

PROGRAM

6:30 pm

Drinks

7:30 pm

Dinner

Welcome

Sally Fan (Green Templeton, Oxford)

Introduction of Fr. Leahy

Antonia Apps (Magdalen, Oxford)

Grace

Fr. Edwin Leahy

Introduction of Seth Lesser

Antonia Apps

The Boat Races

Seth Lesser (Magdalen, Oxford)

Introduction of Peter Sealy

Antonia Apps

Toast to the President

Peter Sealy (Pembroke, Cambridge)

Introduction of John Tepper Marlin

Antonia Apps

Toast to the Queen

John Tepper Marlin (Trinity, Oxford)

In 1740 Thomas Arne wrote the original music for James Thomson's patriotic poem for a unified Britain, "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!"

At that time, Britain's ruling the waves was aspirational. But it became a reality. 

On Tuesday, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 89th birthday. She has completed the 63rd year of her reign.

Over the many years, she has unforgettably mastered three different waves.

First, the erase-the-blackboard wave. 

Second, the wipe-the-window wave.

Finally, the wave for which she is best known, the screw-in-the-light-bulb wave.

It is hard for me to imagine the darkness of a world without her.  

Please be upstanding.

Ladies and Gentlemen... The Queen.

Introduction of Paul Bernstein

Antonia Apps

Toast to the Universities

Paul Bernstein (Jesus, Cambridge)

Introduction of Herve Gouraige

Antonia Apps

Introduction of Steve Trachtenberg

Herve Gouraige (Merton, Oxford)

Response from the Universities

Steve Trachtenberg (Nuffield, Oxford)

Closing Remarks

Antonia Apps

BOAT RACE: Outcome 2015

The Oxford and Cambridge Men's and Women's Varsity Crews, 2015. This is the first day that both the men's and women's
Boat Races were held on the same day, over the same course.

To watch the Oxford-Cambridge BNY Mellon-Newton Boat Races with some suspense - if you don't already know the outcome - the various sources below are arrayed with the most suspenseful first and the least suspenseful later.

Putney to Mortlake - two stops on the train.

You have been warned not to skip to the end of this post to find out the results.

This was a race with historic meaning because it is the first one in which the women compete over the same course on the same day as the men. This was a long-running goal of the sponsor of the women's race, Newton Investment Management.

A German TV Clip on YouTube shows the entire men's varsity race with no advertising. Watch the whole race - beautifully recorded and, it seems, the first to be posted online.

The BBC Story includes two clips showing finishing half-minute of both varsity races (men's and women's), each preceded by a half-minute of advertising.

Interviews with the rowers after the races by Universal Sports

The Guardian

The Telegraph emphasizes the outcome of the women's race.

Daily Mail.

Daily Mirror

The Independent

Other Media (more than 200 articles/clips)

Spoiler coming
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Quick Recap:

Oxford, heavily favored, won every race - the varsity men's and women's races and the two reserve boat races.

The Oxford women's boat has won 12 of the last 16 races against Cambridge.

Cambridge maintain a lead over the life of the Boat Race, for both of the Blue Boat races - the varsity men's boat (79 Cambridge, 81 Oxford) and the varsity women's boat (41 Cambridge, 29 Oxford).

OXFORD LAW: Ian Turvill to Head Law School

Ian Turvill, Chicago.

April 10, 2015 – Ian Turvill has been active for many years with John Morrison in organizing Chicago's annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner, which takes place tonight.

Unless there are two Ian Turvills, he will be heading to Oxford to lead the Oxford University Law School. So there will be more than one farewell. (I have since been advised that there may indeed be two Ian Turvills who are Oxford-connected lawyers.)

I would be tempted to go to this history-making Boat Race Dinner, but I am in a different city–Boston–for someone's birthday party.

Ian is a lawyer and an expert on the marketing of legal services. Ambulance-chasing has given lawyers a bad rep–apparently there are more discrete ways of showing up at the right time and making one's skills known to the decision-makers at that time.

The Law School at Oxford is ranked #2 in the world after Harvard by QS.

The Chicago BRD tonight at the University Club features Prof. J. N. P. ("Nick") Rawlins (Univ.), Oxford's Pro-Vice-Chancellor. Also Sir Ivor Crewe (Exeter, Oxford) and Charles R. Conn III (Balliol), Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford. Black tie optional.

This will be the 50th dinner organized by John Morrison (New Mexico and Univ.), and he has announced it will be his last (he may be congratulated at JohnHMorrison@outlook.com).

The new organizer is James C. Dunlop (LMH) of Jones Day, jcdunlop@jonesday.com. For Boat Race information throughout Illinois, the Oxford Society coordinator is MicheleRDavies@gmail.com.

The history of the Boat Race Dinners in the United States and Canada may be found here.