Without Knowing Mr Walkley

Radcliffe Library. There were for us none of those terrific morning conversations which echo across the quads in the men’s colleges, completely preventing reading except in vacation, but which really constitute most of the fun of being at once young and intelligent. At St. Hugh’s, everyone worked conscientiously behind closed doors, and the passages were as silent as the catacombs except in those few minutes when the whole college was speeding to eat in Hall or to pray in Chapel. At half-past ten at night, there was generally another outburst. Punctuates the moment, a bell was heard in the passages, and then here and there a door broke open, and there reeled out the besotted guests who had been solidly drinking cocoa inside, since the clock had struck ten half an hour before. For the discipline was supreme, and those parties were timed to the half-minute. No one expected to live her own life, or to keep her own hours. Women’s colleges had then an untarnished schoolgirl complexion.

The authorities constantly reminded us that we were not members of the university, but its guests. No university tutor need accept us as pupils. Those who taught us did so from their belief in the Higher Education of Women, and if our manners did not reach the standard they expected from us, they might at any moment refuse to teach us at all. It was like walking the tightrope, for we had to keep a balance between two yawning gulfs. Some tutors boycotted the women’s colleges because of the students’ lack of charm. One critical don succeeded in stopping hockey for several terms after he once met the teams coming home, and saw the hot and swollen faces of some of his pupils. On the other hand, there were those who disapproved of us for fear that the ‘sweet girl graduates’ might endanger the morals of the university. I was once reported to Miss Moberly as having worn an amber necklace at a lecture, and amber is notoriously magnetic. Fortunately I possessed no such talisman, so I escaped being sent down.

Our lectures were heavily chaperoned. We sat on the dais in the college halls, well out of reach of the common herd of scribbling young men; and anyone wishing to attend a lecture to which no other women students were going, had to be accompanied by an accredited chaperon. I only remember one dramatic interruption to a lecture, and that was when the hall of Lincoln College was suddenly invaded by a mob which rushed in to beat the bounds. The boundary of two parishes apparently runs across that spot.

Marcia Rice and I sometimes heard Evensong in the Chapel of Magdalen or New College, after which we walked in the college gardens. We had often done this before one of us happened to read St. Hugh’s House Rules, and there we saw that this ribald practice was forbidden unless we took a chaperon with us. I know not if such rules still exist.

From the point of view of scholarship, we were, I think, luckier than the women undergraduates of today. There were in my time very few women tutors, and those advanced and leading university dons who believed in women’s higher education, felt it to be their responsibility to take a real part in it. My own tutor was A. L. Smith, Master of Balliol, a great scholar, an alarming wit, and a most individual personality. There was in his donnishness that peculiar quality which only grows in the fusty atmosphere of an ancient college. One thinks of it as one hears the names of Duns Scotus, Erasmus, or Lewis Carroll; and university life must be thinned and watered down unless it brings one up against such characters as these—odd, idiosyncratic, and wilfully learned. There are not many of them today, and none of them are women. This kind is born of a combination of old books, old port, and old Common Rooms, and it smells of all three.

Yet out of these old things there comes forth something perennially fresh and racy. To come upon it is like finding a new book bound up in old covers.

I was at Oxford for four terms in all, but they were not consecutive. In those days I had very bad bronchial-asthma, and I could not live in Oxford in winter. When I was there, I had a rigid regime laid down by the doctor, early to bed and late to rise, and a great deal of lying down during the day. Even so, I went down without taking schools, though Mr. Smith cheered me by telling me that I was taking something away from Oxford which was more valuable than the results of an examination. This was true, and it was he who gave it to me. It might be summed up in one of his interruptions to the first essay I read him.

‘What is your authority?’ he said sharply, after one of my statements.

‘Stubbs,’ I stuttered.

‘I know. I know. Of course. But what was his authority?’

Those five words showed me what Mr. Smith possessed, and what he thought worth handing on to his pupils—the resolve to seek truth only at first-hand. This was for me the real lesson of Oxford.

At Oxford too I knew some remarkable people. First among these was Miss Moberly herself. As I have said, she was a distant relation of my mother’s, but my parents had seen little of her since she went to Oxford, and I should never have known her but for St. Hugh’s. In her sitting-room there, two family portraits were hung—those of her mother, and of her Moberly grandmother. Miss Moberly’s mother, painted by Sir David Wilkie, as a vision of femininity—swan neck, sloping shoulders, oval face, sidelong glance, vast feathered hat with veils, and a little hand fastening a glove. The grandmother had a square dark Slavonic face, and looked from the wall into the room with rather a forbidding expression.

Beneath the portraits of her two