This video, provided by Antonin Besse (grandson of College Founder Antonin Besse) was filmed on the day that the Founder received his honorary DCL (Doctor of Civil Law) from the University – 12 June 1951. He would pass away a month later, aged 74. Although we can’t identify all of the locations and individuals, Antonin has provided a breakdown with relevant timestamps of what he knows about the video below.
This lovely house must be somewhere in the countryside outside Oxford. Could it be the house of Lord Simon (formerly Sir John Simon)?
One of the Founder’s daughters, Monna Adie, walks towards the camera.
The Founder is recognisable in his trademark bow tie. The woman with him could be Lady Deakin.
The Founder with his back to the camera and Monna Adie is shown, although the rest of the people are unidentified.
Wild guess: the tall gentleman in the middle of the frame is Lord Simon (previously Sir John Simon).
The lady turning towards the camera is Hilda Besse.
Hilda Besse and maybe Sir Maurice Bowra (Warden of Wadham).
Hilda Besse and perhaps the Warden of St Antony’s, Bill Deakin.
Monna Adie and Mary Bell (later Mary Besse after marrying one of the Founder’s sons, Peter) with an unidentified third person.
The Founder in a deckchair.
The procession coming out of Convocation in the Divinity School after the DCL ceremony.
The Founder emerging in his red DCL robes. The person he is with may be Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham.
The Founder with Monna Adie (on the right).
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 perfect Oxford put down
Mary Rusinow (Warden’s Secretary, 1956-58 & 1959-63)
Vladimir Dedijer, Tito’s biographer, had been spending a year at Manchester University, arranged by Warden, Bill Deakin, after disagreeing with his boss at the time of the break with Stalin. The Warden was away but Professor Dedijer came to give an evening talk in which he touched on various aspects of Yugoslav culture and the problems of mixed cultures, ethnicity and languages. He had been using Ivo Andric, who was given the Nobel Prize for Literature for his book The Bridge on the Drina and discussing opinions in it. The evening was attended by many of the well-known historians of the University and Fellows of All Souls. One of them, I think it was Max Beloff, asked suddenly ‘How can you know what Dr Andric really thought?’. Professor Dedijer smiled quietly and replied, ‘Well he was married to my aunt!’.
St Antony’s small family in 1957
Professor Georges Nivat (Russian Literature, History of Ideas, 1957)
I studied at St Antony’s College in 1957 – 1958. But I never was a regular fellow. I was a student at Paris Normal Sup, studied Russian, and, as such, was sent to Moscow for a year. There I met a British diplomat called Dr Orchard, and he recommended me to spend a year at the newly founded St Antony’s. My room was on the second floor of the old Anglican monastery. The bathroom had four cubicles separated by stained glass, and one was always occupied more than half an hour by a Spartan German who liked cold water.
At Schools I attended lessons by Isaiah Berlin and was often invited at his mansion-house. Lady Berlin was French and it was amusing to go through the secret corridor of anti-clerical pictures with the Oxford Catholic chaplain. Max Hayward and George Katkov where my main teachers and became great friends. When Mrs Besse visited the college, I was appointed as her gentleman-in-waiting.
At St Antony’s I learned a new style of conversation, different from the French or the Russian. At breakfast, no conversation. At lunch, possibly. At dinner, obligatory. Jokes with Fred the main scout were also obligatory.
There I met Gömöri from Hungary, Wolfgang Leonhardt from Germany, and above all, Philip Windsor from Merton college. We talked endlessly about the ‘revolution turning into tyranny’. Philip and I were great friend with Nobutoshi Hagihara, a Japanese historian and we spent nights helping him for his lecture scheduled the next morning…
I came to St Antony’s a second time in August 1960, after I had been expelled from Soviet Union. But I soon left to serve in the French army in Algeria.
St Antony’s was at that time a small and close family. When I visited our former dean, Bill Deakin, at Le Castellet in Provence, after he had retired, it was an immense pleasure to continue the conversation with that secret hero who knew what it is to make history, not only to study it.
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.