Oxford and class prejudice.

 

Bodleian Library Oxford

I was member of the Bodleian library in Oxford in the early 1980s. I think we had to swear or give an undertaking that we wouldn't start fires within the precincts or within the vicinity of the library. The building is very impressive and huge but I didn't find the library very accessible or the staff very helpful or friendly. It isn't easy to use.

One particular day, I heard a fellow student, tell his history tutor that he'd stopped going in the Bodleian Library. When the tutor asked him why, he told him that he always felt humiliated because some staff members belittled him because of his Brum accent. I heard the tutor say to him, "Let me give you some advice young man. The next time you go in the Bodleian Library, walk in as though you own the place. These people can smell fear." I fell about laughing when I heard this but I thought it was extremely sound advice.

They do have a thing about social class and accents at Oxford, it's quite extraordinary and pathetic. An American would be far more at home at Oxford than somebody with a provincial English accent. Yet, Derek Robinson who taught economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, was a Yorkshire lad from Barnsley. This son of a miner, seems to have had no difficulty fitting in to college life. A colleague once told him that he'd observed how Derek's Yorkshire accent had become more pronounced and stronger the longer he'd been at Oxford. Robinson told him that you had to define your own territory in this life. I think he was absolutely right.

The English Marxist, philosopher, literary theorist and critic, Terry Eagleton, taught at Oxford University for many years. Having been born in Salford doesn't seem to have been a barrier to Eagleton either socially or academically. I believe Eagleton's lectures at Oxford were very popular and so we're the lectures of the historian, A J.P. Taylor, who was born in Southport.

All his life, Taylor liked to be controversial and he attributed his failure to win a Balliol scholarship to the examiners' prejudice against a candidate with "no manners and a rough Lancashire accent." He refused to accept that he'd caused offence during the interview, when he'd been asked what a "radical of his persuasion would like to see happen to Oxford", he replied "blow it up." It sounds like a good answer to me. I think John Ruskin held similar sentiments.