Oxford isn’t just for toffs and rich kids - believe me
Photographer Dafydd Jones has published a book featuring a small subsection of British society with an exaggerated impact. Oxford: The Last Hurrah chronicles the party people of the dreaming spires during Thatcher’s Britain, from their first fling to their last dance. It’s the epitome of the “top toffs getting it off ” Oxbridge stereotype. Here we have an unrecognisably dashing Boris Johnson, there a ravishingly rouged Hugh Grant, louche in leopard skin.
Behold, bright young things who would not look out of place in the 1981 TV adaptation of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited that prompted this whole malarkey in the first place. It is the stuff of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911), Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946), and Naomi Alderman’s The Lessons (2010), all of which paint it as a posho paradise no prole shall pass, doing Oxford – and those who consider themselves excluded from it – a great disservice.
For Oxbridge is only ever the sum of its parts – the students themselves – and is, in this sense, self-selecting, bar the hurdle of interview. And the “top toff ” fiction alienates those who might otherwise benefit from it. As a Birmingham grammar-school girl, it almost alienated me, despite my going on to spend nine happy years there. None of the mythologisers ever mentions the principal thing about Oxford: that everyone works fairly hard, or they get thrown out, whoever they are – even Lord Sebastian Flyte.
Jones’s study covers the years 1981-1989, from Brideshead’s overnight cultural sensation to the year I “went up”, thus ending all that stuff in my capacity as Betts, champion of the workers. Even before this epochal moment, I can tell you that all that swaggering acting up was largely that: acting – a performance some of its players perpetuate to this day.
Johnson may have attended Eton, but he did so on a scholarship. Grant had attended a direct-grant school, son of the owner of a carpet firm and a state schoolteacher. The Oxford swank, the decadence, that echoing aristocratic drawl, were a blip that applied to about six people, half of whom were faking it.
By 1989, the pretence tended to go the other way, public and privateschool boys squashing their vowels to fit in with their tutors (often post-war grammar-school products) and state-school alumni such as myself. As for being acolytes of “Thatcher’s Britain”, in 1985 her alma mater had snubbed its nose at the Iron Lady by
refusing her an honorary degree. On the day she resigned, bonfires were lit to celebrate and the shops ran dry of champagne. At Lincoln College, where I was in my second year, undergraduates voted to set their stopped commonroom clock to mark the moment.
Images of the annual Bullingdon Club photograph – in all its stiff-necked pomp – became commonplace during the Cameron / Osborne / Johnson ascendancy. But as my friend, the writer Harry Mount who appears in the photo with Osborne, notes: “Even at the time, I felt somewhat ashamed of having joined it,” hiding his tailcoat and waistcoat under his arm “to avoid ridicule” when he stole through the city.
As a student, then a young lecturer keen to promote diversity, I learnt that admissions could be a case of whack-amole: if you managed to drive up the women and minorities, it would be to see the state-school intake tumble. A quarter of a century later, this situation appears on the way to being cracked. In January, Oxford announced that record numbers of state and BAME pupils had been offered places for October: 69 per cent and 22 per cent respectively.
This is testament to the overhauling of the application system, recruitment and outreach efforts, witnessed under the university’s first female vicechancellor, Prof Louise Richardson. Last year, it declared a new foundationyear scheme committed to boosting the proportion of disadvantaged and minority ethnic students from 15 per cent to 25 per cent by 2023.
Our top universities remain magical, life-transforming places. Witness the novelist Zadie Smith’s tribute: “Going to Cambridge changed my life. Nothing I have done would have been possible without it.” It’s the institutions that are rich, rather than the students, meaning scholarships, incredible teachers and libraries, grants and travel bursaries abound, padding life for the poorer.
Here lies the reality behind the fiction. And, if Oxford is searching for new literary role-models, it should look no further than Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire, in which the great weight of the Oxbridge myth is used to buttress its heroine against the poverty of her past. Copies should be sent to all sixth forms pronto.