Which St Antony?
If you have ever looked at the St Antony’s College Flag Flying Policy, you’ll notice that in addition to national and international commemorations, the College flag is flown on two saints’ days each year: the feast day of St Anthony of Egypt on 17 January, and the feast day of St Anthony of Padua on 13 June.
There has been much confusion and ambiguity about which ‘St Antony’ the College is actually named after. The name St Antony was first used in the late 1940s, alluding to the College’s founder, Antonin Besse, a French entrepreneur and businessman based in Aden. Besse had agreed that ‘Antonin’ would be a difficult name for a new college and accepted ‘Antony’ as a reasonable approximation.
When the arms of the new college were drawn up in 1952, St Anthony of Egypt was the saint they clearly had in mind. St Anthony of Egypt (251-356 CE), also known as St Anthony the Great, or St Anthony the Abbot, was a Christian monk, known for enduring temptations during his time in the Egyptian desert. The new arms featured the colours of the Red Sea (red) and the desert sand (gold) along with mullets borrowed from Antonin Besse’s own trademark and the tau crosses of St Anthony of Egypt.
Only a year later, however, the College appeared to move allegiance to another St Antony. In 1953 sculptor Ivan Meštrović was commissioned to create a statue of St Antony for the College (which now stands on the ground floor of the Hilda Besse Building). Meštrović allegedly asked which St Antony it should be. This prompted some debate amongst the fellows who plumped for St Anthony of Padua. A Portuguese priest, St Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) is one of the most well-known Catholic saints. Had St Anthony of Egypt been forgotten already?
By 1954, the preference towards St Anthony of Padua certainly seemed firmly in place. That year Governing Body discussed on which days the College flag should be flown. The saint’s day of St Anthony of Padua (along with Antonin Besse’s birthday and Bastille Day) were selected, but there was no mention of St Anthony of Egypt.
Only in 1961 was the matter of which St Antony finally decided after a slightly embarrassing run-in with the writer Evelyn Waugh. Waugh had spent time in Aden in 1959, and knew of Antonin Besse and his founding of an Oxford college. He telephoned the College to find out which St Antony it had been named after. In ‘A Tourist in Africa’, Waugh writes: “when I enquired here, no one knew or had troubled to conjecture which of the twelve canonized Anthonies (sic) they were commemorating.”
The call had been taken by the then Bursar, Peter Hailey, who reported to Governing Body that Waugh had not been impressed by his ignorance on the subject. This caused some consternation amongst the fellows and discussion ensued. Some fellows felt that ‘it was just a name’ with no intended religious significance. Others thought that a saint’s name could never be just a name. Some even joked that a simple solution would be to move the apostrophe to accommodate more than one St Antony. The debacle forced the College to come to a decision and in January 1961, it was decided that St Anthony of Egypt should be its official patron saint, but that the College flag also be flown on the feast of St Anthony of Padua on 13 June. The ambiguity did not end there, however. When the official College History was written in 2000, author Christine Nicholls asked the first two Wardens of the College, Bill Deakin (Warden, 1950-68) and Raymond Carr (Warden, 1968-87), which St Antony the College had been named after: Deakin said Padua; Carr said Egypt.
Alice Millea, College Archivist
