For a brief moment between the wars, Oxford sparked into life. But was it as glamorous as Evelyn Waugh thought? By Daisy Dunn
The real Brideshead revisited
DORA CARRINGTON / GETTY IMAGES
‘A
ll the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect, it all seems very dull. Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home, though some were one or the other. ‘You see English Society of the ’20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs. I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is.’ So wrote Lady Pansy Lamb – novelist, biographer, Lord Longford’s sister and the artist Henry Lamb’s wife – to Evelyn Waugh, following the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945. It was a brave letter, considering Waugh’s dislike of criticism. At the beginning of that year, Nancy Mitford had fulfilled the unenviable task of reporting to Waugh the opinions of friends to whom he had sent copies of his novel. She tempered his complaints with words of reassurance. Osbert Lancaster was ‘jealous’. Cyril Connolly disliked the ‘purple passages’ but couldn’t put the book down. Maurice Bowra bemoaned the choice of words – ‘or some nonsense’ – but was obviously much impressed. Pansy Lamb, addressing Waugh directly, felt no such compunction to water her opinions down. It was not that he had got the era wrong in his book. 34 The Oldie April 2022
Henry and Pansy Lamb, 1929. Right: Evelyn Waugh
Rather, she felt, he had attached too much glamour to it. No one was quite as brilliant all round as his story would have readers believe. As deflating as her words might have been for Waugh, Pansy Lamb had a point. The world of Brideshead, while it existed, was illusory exactly where it glittered most. I have read the novel lots of times, and never more closely than when I was
researching the history of Oxford in the early-20th century for my new book. The world of Brideshead is, after all, in one part the world of Oxford in the twenties. Waugh may have spent less than nine terms at the university before going down without a degree, but it was here that he had Charles Ryder begin the story following his prologue. That story was coloured by more than a few of the novelist’s own reminiscences. Waugh came up to Hertford College in 1922 with an eagerness ‘to taste everything Oxford could offer’. This included the drinks. Located above a bicycle shop on St Aldate’s, near Christ Church, the Hypocrites’ Club was among his regular haunts. The club was in theory dedicated to philosophy, but in practice to beer and bawdiness. Members adopted a hypocritical motto from an ancient Greek ode: ‘Water is best.’ One of the most enthusiastic Hypocrites was Harold Acton (1904-94). Known for his dapper silk stockings, bowler hat and Oxford ‘bags’ (preposterously wide-legged, pleated trousers), Acton was the chief inspiration for aesthete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. The classicist Maurice Bowra – ‘the most remarkable figure of his time in the university’, according to the Times, and the model for Mr Samgrass in Brideshead – once saw Acton reciting poetry through the windows of Christ Church using a megaphone, just as Blanche does in the novel. Some of these men lived as frivolously as Sebastian Flyte. As members of the Railway Club, Waugh, Acton, Alastair
