Reflections from Sir Bryan Cartledge
(DPhil Russian History, 1955)
The distinguishing characteristic of 1950s St Antony’s was its smallness: around 40 students, representing almost as many countries, and a dozen Fellows. One could be, and I was, on first-name terms with the entire student body, several of whom became lifelong friends. The Steward, Fred Wheatley, presided over a magnificent wine cellar and a kitchen that, by common consent, produced the best food in Oxford – thanks partly to the relatively small size of its clientele. The founding Warden, Bill Deakin, seemed to know personally every great name in the land; as I found on promotion to a Research Fellowship, many of them visited the College as guests at High Table on Thursdays. I recall a fascinating evening sitting opposite Nye Bevan (who happened to be one of my political heroes at the time).
The small size of the College enabled it to offer its students accommodation that was lavish even by the more generous standards of the time. As a student, I occupied a large bed-sit with shared bathroom in Winchester Road and, as a Research Fellow, a huge study/sitting room with separate bedroom and private bathroom on Woodstock Road – all within the College perimeter. I was equipped with my own telephone line which I was happy to share with our Soviet Russian student, Viktor Popov, so that he could make his mandatory weekly report to the Soviet Embassy in London. Thirty years later Viktor had become Soviet Ambassador in London while I was serving as British Ambassador in Moscow.
Perhaps the one disadvantage of a very small College was that we could not field teams in university sports competitions – although we did take on local villages at cricket (and beer consumption) in the summer. St Antony’s did dispose of a newly-built and well-used squash court plus the hard tennis court inherited from the nuns who inhabited the building before us.
Overall, the cliche that ‘small is beautiful’ certainly applied to 1950s St Antony’s.
The JCR suggestions book and College food
The earliest surviving JCR suggestions book covers the years 1952 to 1963. The comments and complaints in it, both serious and tongue-in-cheek, make for entertaining reading. Aside from plenty of witty student banter, there are comments and complaints about life in the relatively new college. These range from complaints about dogs in the JCR and late newspapers in the common room, to standards of dress at dinner and excessive champagne consumption by other JCR members.
Most of the comments in the book, however, concern College food. Food was still being rationed in the UK when St Antony’s opened in 1950. The availability of meat, bread, dairy products, preserves, sugar and even fresh fruit and vegetables was limited, leaving the College chef and his team very few options for creating varied and interesting menus.
'A strong protest against tinned tomatoes'
10 Feb 54
Sir,
May I enter a strong protest against tinned tomatoes? Not only have we had them with monotonous regularity almost every day for a fortnight, but they have moreover been used in the most unexpected and unwelcome connexions, on one occasion with roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. Imagination should certainly be encouraged, but not nightmares of this sort. Secondly, I would suggest that we be given some form of cheese other than mousetrap?
Comments could be brutal. In 1952, one comment asked ‘Could enquiries be made about how the fish was cooked for lunch today? If not dangerous to life, it was certainly repellent’. Another reads ‘Both at lunch and at dinner on Saturday 8 November the soup tasted rancid. It is possible that the chef mixes meat and fish stocks when preparing this witches brew?’
Other comments include a tirade against raspberry jam at breakfast from 1954, and a claim from 1961 that College food was giving the students ulcers (allegedly due to the excessive quantity of ‘pickled substances’). The photograph shows an entry from 1954 protesting against the chef’s excessive and unwelcome use of tinned tomatoes. There are frequent calls for the ‘abolition’ of unpopular dishes, such as the now-unfamiliar ‘lamb picasso’ and a particularly offensive meat pie served at lunch in June 1960.
St Antony’s in the Deakin era
George Gomori (BLitt Literature, 1957)
I am one of the few people still alive who was a member of the College during Bill Deakin’s Wardenship. I am a Hungarian-born retired academic whose first English university was Oxford. I got a studentship at St Antony’s thanks to Max Hayward and Bill Deakin, who had selected me for further studies in Vienna in November 1956, after I left Hungary due to the Soviet suppression of the revolution. Before becoming a student in the College, I passed a Cambridge Certificate examination, after which (with Hayward’s warm recommendation) in May 1957 I moved to St Antony’s and was accepted by the University to write a BLitt thesis on post-1945 Polish and Hungarian literature. Because of my traveling to the Far East, I finished my thesis and was awarded the degree only in 1962 (it was published in book form by the Clarendon Press in 1966).
My spacious room was in the Old Building, just above the boiler – a popular meeting place in wintertime. I lived there until December 1959, when I moved to London to a rented room where I could concentrate on my thesis. In 1961, however, I moved back to Oxford. The College during these years was a vibrant, exciting international community where on my corridor lived a German and a French student, as well as Joseph, an exiled Prince from Burundi. As for the Fellows, my best friend remained Max Hayward, the brilliant Russian scholar, translator of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, but thanks to the Warden’s wife (‘Pussy’ Deakin), I was often invited to the Warden’s Garden Parties where you could meet such people as Sir Isiah Berlin. During 1958-59 I was in charge of an Eastern European subdivision of the Library named after the revolutionary Polish general, Józef Bem. In 1961 I married Gudrun, an Austrian, who by 1963 obtained a graduate degree in anthropology. In 1962-63 we lived in a house in Summertown, while I worked as Research Assistant for Max Hayward. Finally, I should mention the ingenious Steward, Fred Wheatley, facilitator of many memorable subterranean parties in College.
The first St Antony’s monogram
Does anyone remember using early College monogrammed cutlery and silverware at formal dinners? As part of the College’s efforts to build its own identity during its earliest days, it commissioned a monogram for its silverware. The monogram, featuring the letters ‘St AC’ intertwined in a distinctly art nouveau style, was designed by the first Bursar of the College, Major Peter Hailey. In a letter of November 1955 to silverware suppliers, Elkington & Co Ltd, Major Hailey enclosed a drawing of the monogram (which has unfortunately not survived), adding ‘Please note the little “t” between the S and the A’.
The College monogram, as it was referred to by Major Hailey, was ordered to be placed on a range of silverplated cutlery and serving dishes, teapots, coffeepots, and pepper pots. The letters would have originally been filled in black, rendering the design much clearer.
It’s not clear when the monogram stopped being added to newly-purchased silverware, but it appears to have been in use throughout the 1950s and 1960s until cost-savings had to be made. These necessitated the replacement of the elaborate monogram with a much simpler, more functional form of lettering.
The photograph at the top of this page has been reproduced by kind permission of Gillman & Soame photographers and can be ordered online here.