My gaudy nights
For 50 years, Oxford don Oswyn Murray welcomed back old pupils to his college – except for one in 10 Downing Street
Gaudies are lavish feasts for former students of Oxford colleges, designed to keep them happy and keep donating to their old college. They are supposed to occur every dozen years or so for each graduate. In my 50 years as a Fellow of Balliol College, I have attended many of them. Once you’re retired, alumni are interested not so much in your replacements as in their old tutors and their own contemporaries. And we still get great enjoyment from meeting our former pupils.
Each gaudy has its own characteristics. At the first gaudy, everyone is young and full of themselves and their brilliant careers inventing Barclaycard or whatever; they also have small children to be excited about.
At the second gaudy, they are more chastened: many of them have lost their jobs, but are full of their new careers selling fridges to Eskimos or doing good works in the charity sector. Some of them have also lost their partners and/or found new ones.
At the third gaudy they have all settled into comfortable middle age, and now of course are proud of their own offspring as future Balliol undergraduates. At the fourth, they are basking in success and thinking of their retirement careers. At the fifth, they are wondering how on earth the college has missed them in choosing its Honorary Fellows. At the sixth, the college provides chairs and the field is narrowing. The seventh happens mostly in heaven.
Two gaudies stick in my mind. The first, in 1969, was also my first gaudy as a young Fellow – it involved ‘contemporaries from 1898 to 1920’. The span was so long because of all those killed in the First World War.
Harold Macmillan gave his hallmark speech: ‘Those who have not known Oxford before 1914 have not known what paradise is’ – and there followed a litany of the names of those who were missing.
I had looked up, in the College Register, the careers of those sitting near me. On my right was a Spanish marquess.
‘I see that you fought in the Spanish Civil War,’ I said brightly. ‘Which side did you fight on?’
‘Ze wrong side,’ he replied, ‘but I have made up for it ever since: I have worked for world peace.’
Opposite was someone who had invented BBC television; and beside him was the most beautiful old man I had ever seen, tall, slim and elegant. From the Register, I had learned he’d fought in the North West Frontier Rifles in India, and in the First World War. He’d owned the only coal mine in Pakistan. After the First World War, he’d given it all up to study sculpture in Paris. In the Second World War, he had joined the RAF. What a career, I thought, as he smiled benignly at me. But alas, his mind had completely gone and he said nothing all evening.
From the back of the hall, throughout Macmillan’s speech, someone was shouting, ‘Bollocks!’ – the archetypal Balliol revolutionary, I thought.
We listened to Macmillan’s reminiscences, drinking whisky in the Senior Common Room till well past midnight. On the next day, we breakfasted with him in the Master’s Lodgings, with champagne at 11am. Gaudies were hard work in those days.
The second gaudy, I recall with affection, was on 24th June 1989. It was for my contemporaries who had joined the college in the same year as me – 1968. I was deputed to speak on behalf of the Fellows.
The revolutionary generation were spread out before me, except for Howard Marks, Mr Nice, the great drugs baron, awaiting extradition in Spain before his sentence of 27 years in a Miami jail.
I spoke of the graffiti our generation had inscribed on the front of Balliol. The graffiti had been carefully recorded by my predecessor Russell Meiggs as a professional epigraphist, before it was washed off daily (having been considerately written in chalk) by the college scouts: ‘Max Weber is a Fink’; ‘Is this a Sparrow or a tit?’ (this caused John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, to write a formal letter of complaint).
I ended by recalling the great desecration of the Senior Common Room the night before the dinner for Prime Minister Ted Heath (a Balliol alumnus), with the words in red paint (still almost visible): ‘F**K HEATH’.
Unfortunately, the two Etonian revolutionaries (the President and Secretary of the Junior Common Room) who perpetrated this outrage wore tight designer jeans, and one of their wallets fell onto the floor. The following morning, as they were expressing their shock at this desecration and their intention to pursue the culprits, the Dean presented the owner with his wallet, with the words ‘Is this yours?’ This was the only time I recall that anyone was expelled from the college.
My last gaudy was in 2019. It was Boris’s year. I’d already sent him a renuntiatio amicitiae (a ‘renunciation of friendship’ – the formal letter emperors send when they want someone to commit suicide or go into exile on the Black Sea).
I bought an EU bow tie to wear with my dinner jacket. Fortunately it was just before the election and Boris decided not to come. But I sat between two Brexiteers – so the tie was not wasted.