The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day34

Dressed in cord trousers and V-necked sweater in a Fair Isle pattern, my uncle had a schoolboyish, startled look

Affluent neighbours were not the only passengers. One figure with a high profile also ventured up – Cosmo Lang who, by that time, was Archbishop of Canterbury. J.G. Lockhart writes that “Lang had an exhilarating experience” when a friend of the young Macdonalds took him up in an aeroplane.

My hunch is that it was Angus who piloted Lang. Perhaps Lockhart, whose book was published in September 1949 (three months after Simon presented a petition in an Edinburgh civil court to presume that Angus was dead) preferred not to refer to him by name out of fear of distressing Daisy.

Some warned against the archbishop’s decision claiming the plane was unsafe but Lang’s main concern was that the press might get wind of his spree and write a story about it in the papers.

To throw the hacks off the scent, 18-year-old Simon impersonated Lang by wearing his cloak, something the fun-loving prankster welcomed. “I very soon got over the first inevitable sense of dizziness,” wrote the 70-year-old prelate of his flight, “and was greatly excited to see the islands and Arran and the moors, with Largie and Ballure, from a great height. Indeed the experience seemed to anticipate a little what death might be like — old familiar objects becoming fainter and fainter as one rose into another world.” Startling note After finishing with Falklands House, I retraced my steps to Magdalen College for an appointment with archivist, Dr Robin Darwall Smith. A group of giggling students ran into the quadrangle and grouped together for a photo.

Amongst the old architecture, the young women in modern dress struck a startling note, as I expected them to wear mortar-boards and gowns, not open neck shirts, jeans, long blonde hair and high heels.

I stepped into Hall, traditionally the social nucleus for undergraduates, then drifted into the chapel; small, ornate and decorated, only its shell remains unchanged since the 15th Century. Both Win Coll and Magdalen were founded by bishops of Winchester, William of Wykeham and William of Waynflete respectively and each chapel is surprisingly similar in design, so it was an easy progression for Angus to make from his school to university college.

However, the atmosphere at Magdalen in the early 30s was different to the silliness of the 20s. Angus’s period here was part of a darker, harsher decade.

In the year that he went up to Oxford, when extreme right-wing Germans formed the Harzburger Front, Bishop Schreiber warned against the advance of National Socialism. Oswald Mosley was removed from the British Labour party and farther away but significantly for Angus, the Japanese attacked the Chinese province of Jehol in the final month of 1931.

Little is known about Angus’s Magdalen days. However, in his letter to Esther written from India on Easter Day 1939, five years after he went down, he states that he enjoyed it. My uncle followed his father and Jock to Magdalen, the seedbed for John’s lifelong friendships.

When my grandfather came up in 1891 Lang was Dean of Divinity, Alan Don, who became Dean of Westminster, was an undergraduate and the ultraTory Charles Fletcher was first full-time Magdalen don in modern history. Influence Herbert Warren, president of Magdalen from 1885, had retired only three years before Angus’s matriculation and, although the man’s influence had diminished over the years, his attitudes still prevailed.

Young men, he believed, must be physically fit and possess uninquiring minds, which should be directed towards service before scholarship. Christian morality and virtue were preferable to a sharp intellect.

Warren believed in preparing sons of the well-to-do to run the empire for the general good. However, by the time Angus went up to Magdalen, the college had already embarked on the long road towards egalitarianism.

Nevertheless, the trend persisted of accepting commoners into the college, either because they were the sons or grandsons of old members or for their rowing prowess and not because they were outstanding academically.

So, Magdalen was still renowned for its indolent commoner.

“A lack of academic seriousness invaded the whole undergraduate body,” wrote vice-president Driver in 1933.

Almost half the college’s intake was from public schools like Eton, Harrow and Winchester College and the subjects studied were mainly the humanities, although physics, zoology, economics, French and politics were beginning to be taken seriously.

At Magdalen, Angus read modern history, the subject his father chose 40 years previously. Modern history was more popular now, since interest in the classics had begun to fade. Science as zoology and chemistry were not prioritised yet and Angus’s ambition was to be a “good all-rounder”. Like other men from the main public schools, he was able to saunter through Oxford and still gain a second class degree.

Dr Darwall-Smith’s office was off the Cloister Quadrangle up a narrow, winding stair. He had invited me to view a photo of Angus when Magdalen went head of the river in the 1933 Torpids (in plainer language, he was part of a winning crew in a college rowing contest for oarsmen of second rank). Research “Jock Fletcher-Campbell gave it to us,” said Dr Darwall-Smith. The surname sounded familiar so I checked it out on my return home. Sure enough, Jock Fletcher-Campbell was a first cousin of Anne (nee Stirling Maxwell), Angus’s sister-in-law, brother Jock’s wife. “He came to watch the Torpids a few years before he died.”

It was a commemorative photograph of the college’s eight oarsmen seated in the quad. Dressed in cord trousers and V-necked sweater in a Fair Isle pattern, my uncle had a schoolboyish, startled look. Dr Darwall-Smith wished to help in my research but, unlike Win Coll, Magdalen kept few records of undergraduates from Angus’s time.

“Please let me reassure you on something,” he had written a few months earlier. “It is not so much a case of my not allowing you to see existing records here at Magdalen, as that, sadly, they just do not exist at all in any form or manner of any kind.

“Charles (he meant Angus) came up to Magdalen just before we began to keep files on individual students. Again and again it seems to me that, at this period, public schools were so much better than colleges at keeping records of their members, both during and after their time there. I’m therefore glad that Winchester came up trumps on this for you.” More tomorrow