William Waldegrave - part one

Duration: 1 hour 11 mins
William Waldegrave - part one's image
Description: Part one of an interview of William Waldegrave, politician and later Provost of Eton, by Alan Macfarlane on 12th and 13th June 2011, edited and summarised by Sarah Harrison
For a fuller account of his life see his autobiography, 'A different kind of weather', published in March 2015.
 
Created: 2015-02-05 18:00
Collection: Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng (English)
Keywords: Waldegrave;
Transcript:
0:05:07 Born in 1946 at Chewton Mendip in Somerset, the youngest of seven siblings and the only one to be born post-war; my brother who is the nearest was born in 1940, and my five sisters born in the 1930s; the Waldegrave family is always described in seventeenth century genealogies as "ancient"; we were of the minor aristocracy, and in the very early days post-Conquest, senior landed gentry of East Anglia; as with many English families, it is a tree which starts with Warren de Waldegrave coming over with the Conqueror and marrying his cousin in order to redeem the family lands already here, which I think is a pretty good propaganda story by the Normans; we were about in the twelfth century as Sheriff of London, third Speaker of the House of Commons; knighted on the field of that dreadful battle at Towton Moor, and prominent under Mary Tudor where we became national, and again under the Stuarts, married off to an illegitimate daughter of James II whom he had by Arabella Churchill; then into the higher aristocracy, having gone into exile came back in 1723 having negotiated their way back, having changed religion, a step up in the peerage to an earldom, then sent straight back to Paris to spy on Berwick, his close cousin, and close confident and public servant in the period of Robert Walpole; the following I think shows why, unlike the French, we did not have a revolution; Edward Walpole, older brother of Horace Walpole, a fairly idle son of the great Prime Minister, had chambers in Pall Mall above a milliner's shop; in the shop there was a pretty girl and in France we would know how the story ends; in England, the pretty girl and Edward Walpole live happily together for thirty years until they both die; they produce a daughter, Maria, who marries first, James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, the grandson of James II and at that time a powerful figure in national politics; when James, 2nd Earl dies, Maria Waldegrave marries the King's brother, the Duke of Gloucester, the man who said "scribble, scribble, scribble Mr Gibbon"; so from the milliner's shop to the King's brother is a matter of a few decades; although it caused a bit of a stink, and was one of the reason for the Royal Marriages Act, it was possible in England, and not possible, in my view, in France; this formidable girl, Maria Walpole, was Horace's favourite niece; she was quite a character and much painted by Reynolds; she produced the three famous ladies Waldegrave, painted by Reynolds, a commission undertaken for Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, where the picture hung; one of them married a first cousin Waldegrave which is why it goes down that line; anyway, Horace was fond of his niece, fond of her children, and left Strawberry Hill and all its collections in his will, with a life interest to Mrs Damer, a cousin of his, a sculptor; Mrs Damer gave it up early, and then it went permanently to the Waldegrave family, I think because he thought that the Waldegraves, great survivors for centuries, were a safe bet; not so rich that his possessions would be swamped in a great collection like Chatsworth; unfortunately we then had a very bad patch with two Regency characters who did a sale at Strawberry Hill in 1842, scattering the collection to the four winds; so poor Horace's intention failed, although he knew it would fail because in his 1784 description of Strawberry Hill he said that all great collections get scattered as his father's did; his father's pictures were sold to Catherine the Great by another of his elder brothers; he described his own collection so that when they were scattered they would have a genealogy, not quite like the Peerage, but more like race horses; then came an extraordinary episode because these two nere-do-well brothers both of them, one after the other, married this wonderful young adventuress, a Jewish girl called Frances Braham - one died of drink, and then she married the other one; she then made herself one of the great Whig, liberal hostesses of the mid-nineteenth century; she marries very well twice more, ending up with Lord Carlingford who was in Gladstone's Cabinet, and she makes Strawberry Hill a major centre of liberal politics; she is described by Disraeli as the real leader of the opposition; she buys back of lot of things because our little estate in Somerset, which had been given us by Mary Tudor for the lead mines, now began to produce coal, so she was rich for a bit; that sense of guilt about the destruction of Horace's collection in 1842 is why I have tried to collect a few things back myself

7:19:01 I am descended from the younger son, born posthumously, of my great-grandfather, who was killed at the battle of the Alma as Lord Chewton, leaving a pregnant widow; his elder son became a rather conventional, not very attractive, high Tory pheasant-shooting figure, at the turn of the century; he was Chief Whip in the Lords at the time of the Constitutional crisis in 1911, and the last-ditcher, who resigned in disgust at the compromises that were made and went back to shooting pheasants; he had a son who died of multiple sclerosis without producing a child; it then went across to the younger son who was a Church of England vicar, who produced my father; so the line was very thin then, and my father was brought up in the uncomfortable position of having an intimidating old uncle with a crippled, dying son, knowing that he was going to inherit from his uncle; it was a very uncomfortable childhood with no great prosperity at all in the various vicarages; he inherited the Earldom in 1930 and married my mother, a Grenfell from the great Liberal Imperial family, and her mother was a Lyttleton, another such family; Lyttletons and Grenfells cover the place at Eton where we are, with war memorials and achievements; they have everything from VCs to Governors of the Bank, they were the sort of High Liberal, Imperial families, along with many others; but my Grenfell grandfather was alternately very rich and very poor; he had made two great fortunes and lost them both; his last great speculation was chrome mines in Yugoslavia; I was brought up with the old boy sitting in an armchair, still bankrupt and paid for by my father, saying "Bloody fellow, Tito.." as he had nationalized his chrome mines; two of his brothers, twins, were killed in the First World War, one winning the VC; his first cousin was Julian Grenfell; eight or nine of them were killed then; he had the D.S.O. and was badly wounded; they were a classic of that generation that suffered then, and somehow went indomitably on; my mother's mother was Hilda Lyttleton; they were related to Richard Braithwaite, and Edward Lyttleton who was Head Master at Eton; Braithwaite's mother was a Lyttleton and I knew him a bit although my brother knew him better as he was at Cambridge

11:06:16 My father was brought up in a tradition, a kind of Toryism that doesn't exist any more; he was deeply suspicious of free markets, hierarchical, Christian, much more sympathetic to socialism than to capitalism; I found amongst his papers a letter from Walter Citrine at the time of the General Strike, in a beautiful copper-plate hand, thanking him for his support; he was a signer of the Peace Pledge in the 30s, a radical young man who believed in inherited wealth if it was made to work; my mother, long before the National Health Service, held clinics on the estate; they took their noblesse oblige very seriously indeed, with a Christian background of the Church of England; very high church; one of his sisters never married because her young man was judged to be too low church; they were modernist in a sense and pulled down the great Victorian house and moved into quite a modest house, described in Anthony Powell's diaries as not really suitable for an Earl but for a country vicar; they didn't have any indoor servants after the war and lived rather modestly, despite their wealth; they didn't have flashy cars or go to the south of France; all the money that was made on the estate, and farming was good in the fifties and early sixties, was mostly invested back in the estate, in improved houses and so on; so I was brought up with a strong sense of public duty, but at the same time, a sense of local hierarchy; I was the son of the relatively big house and everybody in the village lived in our houses, though many of them have been sold now, most people were employed by my father in his farms or the cheese business which he started, but he was intensely proud of the small businesses that he helped to start with his people; it was an old-fashioned paternalist, but rather admirable world, that will never exist again; it reminds me of some of the things in 'The World we have Lost', Peter Laslett's book; there is a picture of me handing out Coronation mugs to the villagers who are lined up respectfully; this was the task for the younger son; my elder brother, much grander, was Page at the Coronation and I was deeply envious of his sword and his uniform; the picture is of the children lining up in quite a respectful manner, and I aged six or seven, standing behind the table, with my Governess on one side, and the gentleman Vicar, whom I remember very well with a waistcoat and a gold watch chain, wearing a trilby hat, with a list of the children; it is extraordinary to think that that is in one lifetime; my mother was a scholar manqué; she was at St Paul's Girls' School and went up to Somerville on a full scholarship, and then left to marry my father which I think she probably regretted later in life; with her father having gone from great riches, living at Carlton House Terrace with a great picture collection, and the next moment he was bust; the first great fortune - a great company before the First World War called Select Trust, which was bigger than Cecil Rhodes' company at one stage, over-borrowed; then he fell off his horse while hunting and suffered from a broken back for six months and gave the company to his brother to run who was no businessman, and went bust; he owned that wonderful Titian, 'The Man with a Glove', that is now in the Frick collection, which he had to sell in 1916; there is a letter from him in the trenches to Frick, saying that it was a little uncomfortable out here but hoped he was enjoying his new picture - think of the distance from the trenches and the ruthless old businessman Frick who was buying pictures on the cheap in Europe; it seems to me that she thought to get stability by marrying my father young; she then produced seven children with an obvious search for an heir; she told me once that my father never showed any sign of disappointment when another daughter appeared, but when my brother was born in 1940, the church bells were rung and it was a major event; I was born in 1946 and I saw a letter somewhere to her saying well done, you now have guarded your ace; the production of sons in a family that had gone in a very narrow line obviously was an achievement

17:14:08 My father had elements of what now would be called bipolarism; he was subject to tremendous tempers - "a depression over the Mendips", we used to say - and he could be very frightening and uncontrolled in his temper; my mother was a rock-like equable person; she had taken the decision that come what may, she was going to look after him, and was determined, incidentally, to outlive him, because she was sure that he couldn't live without her; she died four or five months after him in 1995; it was a marriage that cannot have been very easy for her at times because his temperament was difficult; he was capable like quite a lot of such people, of putting on a wonderful show for outsiders; people would say what a charming man your father was, and he was charming, but you also saw another side where he could get very depressed and that took the form often of rage; I as the youngest probably suffered from that much less than some of the the others; some of my sisters were hurt by it, and my brother and he had a very poor relationship; it is a classic thing, poor relationships in landed families anyway between eldest son and father, but it was particularly so; one of the things it did was to train all us siblings in the avoidance of confrontation; when there were signs of danger, people absented themselves or found strategies for avoidance; I was much younger than Margaret Thatcher and she was always extremely kind to me, but perhaps that earlier experience did help; the thing I learnt from it was that there were times when you just had to put your head down and let the objects fly past you; I was close to my father even in his very difficult old age because he was a remarkable man - disappointed in many ways; he was very intelligent and had been sent up to read land management or something at Trinity, Cambridge, and always felt he was uneducated; he suffered another thing that his brothers-in-law, my mother's brothers, all had rather heroic wars as did his sons-in-law; he was in the Artillery and in the air defences of Bristol for a time, but was sent to the British Military Liaison Mission in Washington at the end of 1941 - he was thirty-six so not surprising - but he felt overshadowed by the Bernard Fergussons and the brothers-in-law who had all been conventional soldiers

21:08:07 My childhood was much more like being an only child than the member of a big family; by the time I became conscious, my elder brother was at prep boarding school; I was educated before prep school by a governess at home, with one other little boy, the son of the head of the theological college at Wells; I had quite a lonely childhood; my early conciousness is a lot to do with looking forward to siblings coming home in the holidays; quite a lot of others of my early memories are to do with physical things; I do remember the tremendous peal of the church bells at Chewton from a very early age; the little bedroom which I had opposite my parents, which doesn't now exist as it was turned into a cupboard; my mother never believed in nannies, she had governesses, but without nannies the bond with my mother was always extremely strong and remained so until she died; I remember the rumbling noise of the turnpike being knocked down at the bottom of the garden, and confirmed the memory with a contemporary of mine in the village recently; he remembered the same thing, American tanks on tank transporters going home when they were dismantling their bases, did knock down all the walls; I remember the empty big Victorian house which we never moved back into after the war, which was off limits because it was dangerous; it had been used by the American Army and was largely destroyed; I remember that post-war feeling of there being something mysterious, all the woods had remains of concrete and barbed wire, and over-grown things in them, that very strong over-hang of the war, which although when I was growing up was very near, was somehow already mythic and heroic; my elder sisters' early boy-friends, and their husbands in the end, had flown bombers and been in battles, but it felt, strangely, as far away as the Trojan Wars; I was a precocious child and wrote a newspaper on a typewriter that I still have, and I used to sell it when I was five and six; it was a mixture of science fiction, rockets and things, but a little bit of precocious politics that I must have been hearing; Mr Bevan's was a very alarming figure; in spite of the background, and intermittent terror when my father was angry, it was a very happy childhood, very protected, with a cook and daily ladies who came in, all of whom were great friends; it was a friendly, comfortable, but somewhat lonely childhood

24:58:12 I did fish, collect birds' eggs and moths; I was never very competent at these things; I found the remains of my moth collection, and there were only about two different kinds, so I collected only common ones; the birds' eggs were mostly thrushes and blackbirds; when I was twelve I was allowed to have a 410 shotgun; just as in Beavis, I remember the great day when I shot my first pigeon; no horses, as my mother had broken her back riding, and although some of my sisters rode a bit, we were never encouraged; also we were never encouraged to have anything much to do with the hunt because my mother thought it dangerous; my father, characteristically had intelligent and wayward ideas about fox hunting; he thought it unfair to hunt a nocturnal animal during the day; that was a kind of intelligent, landed intellectual aristocracy, which is hard now to conjure up; he had all kinds of quite radical ideas; my father didn't have a vote but my mother certainly voted Liberal in 1945; they both brought me up to believe that it was a very good thing that Churchill hadn't been re-elected - we would have had a dictatorship, and have gone to war with the Russians, goodness knows what would have happened; they were strong supporters of the creation of the welfare state, though I was also hearing that Mr Bevan was a dangerous man, but that might have been because they were supporting Atlee at the time

26:45:07 I had a governess before going to prep school at eight; I went to Pinewood near Shrivenham because the Astor family liked it; my uncle Reggie Grenfell was married to Joyce Phipps, the Joyce Grenfell, and a wonderful background figure in my childhood, and she was part of that set; it wasn't a very good school but I had the essential things, a teacher who taught me to read - Mr Vallen - and to write a bit, an art master who encouraged huge poster painting, and most of the school activity was building mud huts and tree houses; I went back to see it the other day - they asked me when I became Provost of Eton to speak at their Speech Day - and it seems immeasurably smart; you always think that places look much smaller when you go back but this looked much bigger and grander, and now co-educational and modern; I remember it with some affection; it taught me a little bit of Greek, and taught Latin well, mathematics well, and it taught me to read and had books in its library; I am sure I felt homesick at first, but my brother had been there and it seemed the natural thing to do; later on my mother told me it was the worst day of her life when I went to boarding school, the last of seven children; I don't know why I couldn't have gone to the Eagle School in Wells, for example, but that was the tradition, and it was all right; I was a moderate performer, began to do better towards the end, and to my astonishment when I did the common entrance for Eton, was placed in the Remove which meant I missed out a whole year; that seemed to me very wrong; I was extremely shy at this point which may seem difficult to imagine in someone who later became a politician, but I talked very little and was very anxious, as I think the youngest of large families often are, not to be made a fool of; the best strategy for that was to keep quiet; I remember an episode when I can't have been more than about eight; we were in a taxi with several of my older sisters, going past the Queen Victoria memorial outside Buckingham Palace; my sisters were ridiculing some young man who said it was one of Beethoven's best violin concertos; I didn't know what was wrong with this remark; I remember almost promising myself that I was going to put myself in the situation that I never did not know what is wrong with a remark like that

30:21:01 I was pretty hopeless at sport though I played a little cricket; my brother was a sporting hero, stoked the eight here, stoked the eight at Cambridge, and was in the Boat Race for two years, and was much worshipped by everybody; I was plodding along behind; I began to flower a bit more at Eton; I was never a spectacular intellectual, but I worked very hard; I had two slogans 'labor omnia vincit' from Virgil and one that I thought was Lenin's slogan 'Work, work, work', in Russian; I used to work very, very hard, and began to win prizes, from about the age of thirteen or fourteen; I did row relatively successfully for a time, but I was never going to be as good as my brother; I was allowed to do my 'A' levels early when I was sixteen, and did very badly; then I decided to give up rowing, and concentrated very hard on getting good 'A' levels and trying to get a scholarship to Oxford, and trying to win the Newcastle Prize here, all of which I then did, but not elegantly, not like proper scholars; I did it by application

32:12:16 My father was a Wykehamist and hated it, but my mother's family had all been Eton heroes; her father had been in the XI here; there had been Etonian Waldegraves before, one of whom drowned here as a little boy in the 1760s which caused them to boycott the school for a bit; I don't think my father made any serious attempt to send us to Winchester because he didn't care for it himself; I remember coming here while my brother was still here; I was sent early so arrived when I was twelve in the house of a man called John Marsden who was a rowing hero, a Commando in the War, a huge tough man who won the Wingfield Skulls; he could not have been a schoolmaster nowadays so I don't know what would have become of him; an eccentric, formidable man, whom I became devoted to; not an intellectual man but he knew what he didn't know; I remember him when I was about fourteen saying that I needed more intellectual stimulus, and finding a young master, a man called Coxall who was a wonderful aesthete who had come from Tubingen University; I remember going into his rooms and he had a print on his wall; his first remark was to ask me who the picture was by; into my head floated de la Tour which was correct; the next thing he mentioned was Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice' which I admitted I had never read, which surprised him; the great thing about a school like this is that there are masters like that; I was taught also by another formidable man who could easily have been a philosophy Don at Oxford, called John Roberts; I was at the end of a time when, apart from mathematics, the highest prestige was classics; all that changed not long afterwards, but I went up the classical route; I used to win the English literature prizes; I was very competitive; because of my elder siblings, I think I sounded much more mature than other boys so I wrote the sort of things that grown-ups liked, earlier I think; I won all these prizes from the age of sixteen up to the Prize Fellowship at All Souls, in every case feeling this was a fraud

35:35:06 I remember Eton as a tumultuous place; at that time it was in a strange state; Anthony Chenevix-Trench was Head Master, the ruins of a great man who was intelligent and fascinating; he beat too many boys, drank too much, but one was smart enough to see that this was somebody interesting who was damaged, and I was fond of him; my great influence at that level was Robert Birley, his predecessor, who was an enthuser - an antiquarian rather than an historian; his sermons always began with reminiscences, for example on glass in a Dorset church; he was an ideal Etonian, being a member of the Atomic Energy Authority and following the second lesson in his local church in the original Greek; that is not a bad ideal

37:09:06 I did no drama as I was far too shy; I rowed until I decided to give it up; I became a tremendous bureaucrat - President of Pop, then self-electing prefects' body - I was Captain of the Oppidans, I edited the 'Chronicle', I was a fluent essayist, so I did all those sort of things; I had very close friends, usually outsiders, Charles O'Hagan - Charles Strachey, Jamie McCulloch who died was a most talented sculptor and poet, and I was conscious always that I was not really a proper intellectual like Derek Parfitt or Edward Mortimer; just above me were some spectacular intellectuals, Mortimer and Parfitt amongst them, another called Haysloe who never quite did it; there was a mathematical prodigy called Simon Norton who was a little younger than me; the school was still an old-fashioned place; we had no top hats, but there was still fagging, beating; I was a progressive campaigner against various things and led a strike in my house against the food once, and campaigned against beating and refused to beat people when I was Captain of my House and President of Pop; a rather priggish youth, I think

13th June 2011

38:46:08 The changes in Eton then and Eton now reflect changes in society as a whole in many respects; its a far more humane place; then there was still beating of boys and a greater remoteness from the outside world; particularly as a younger boy, you were not allowed to go to London or see your parents except in limited circumstances; although the curriculum was beginning to be reformed at the end of my time, it still descended at least from the Victorian; there was a classical side and the top class, A1, was a classics division; the grandest prize which carried the greatest prestige, a classics and theology prize, was the Newcastle Prize; mathematics was the other; rather like the double first at Oxford in Gladstone's day of mathematics and classics; you had to choose at sixteen whether you went one way or the other, so in curriculum terms now there is a far greater range with boys doing ancient Greek and chemistry, and so on; classics still carries prestige but is not quite the centre of everything as it was; I remember my uncle, a sensible modern person, trying to persuade me to do PPE on the grounds that that was a modern thing to do, which had decorated itself by trying to call itself Modern Greats in order to borrow the prestige of real Greats; but it never occurred to me to do anything but Mods and Greats at Oxford, partly because I genuinely loved the classics, Plato, Aristotle and the pre-Socratic philosophers, and then classical history but I was never a good enough linguist to be completely fluent as one should be as a real classicist; at Eton then, discipline was very pre-modern although Birley was a liberal man, he was not interested in that sort of thing so didn't reform that aspect, although he started another fundamental reform of the school in that when he arrived about 70% of the teachers were Old Etonians and about 60-70% of the children were sons of Old Etonians; both proportions were reversed by the time he left; so now it is more humane, it is more catholic in its curriculum and interests, and a fundamental change which really took place just after I left and Michael McCrum became Head Master; along with a number of other Clarendon schools and other great Independent schools, as the state abandoned the grammar schools and Direct Grant schools and academic selectivity, to some extent the independent schools moved to fill that place; the academic entrance standards for Eton became much stiffer in the period after I left; when I came it was first come first served; you put your child's name down at birth, and if he could pass common entrance, which was a pretty low hurdle, you got in, and there was a fourth form, so called, with really quite non-academic children; Birley used to say he was running a strange, socially select comprehensive school, which in academic abilities he pretty near was; in those days, apart from our scholars, our elite would never have thought of competing with Manchester Grammar School or Wolverhampton Grammar School, or the top academic order; now we are a more academic school, though not a specialist academic school; we don't try to come first in league tables, if fact we have withdrawn from them as we think they are misleading and foolish, but we are a much more meritocratic place; this means that the Provost receives complaints from the grandparents who were used to the old system on why their children are not getting in

44:05:14 Eton positively did for me what it still tries to do; the ideology of the place it to develop the individual in a whole range of talents; we are not particularly a sporting school though we are good at some; we are not particularly an academic school but we have very high peaks of academic life; we are delighted that we have a boy who designs and makes his own high fashion clothes; we have a pack of beagles; we have art schools, very good drama, very good music; the objective is to find something that everybody can do, even if it has not been done before, like the boy designing clothes; if you wanted to be an Olympic rower, we should help you do that, and have done for a hundred years; so the ideal is to try to find the individual skill of the student; four years ago, a fascinating, unknown wall painting from about 1490-1500 was uncovered in the Head Masters chambers which had been long covered by panelling; it is a very early secular wall painting of a large schoolmaster in the middle with little boys sitting at desks, some paying attention, some playing with hoops, Winchester arms on one side, Eton arms on the other reflecting our origins, and a quotation from Quintilian running across the top which says the job of the schoolmaster is to find the individual talents of the child; it was a very good motto in Quintilian's day, a very good motto in 1500, and remains our motto; that would be one side of it; the other side, which is the side that irritates people most is to try to build confidence; this can slip over into arrogance very easily and Etonians are often accused of it, but I notice with my daughter who teaches in difficult comprehensive schools, one of her constant battles is to raise the confidence of the children she is teaching, and show them that they have abilities that they can meet; it is pretty deeply attached to the DNA of this place that you should be able to handle yourself in any situation; I arrived here, as my son did, as a shy boy, and left confident, over-confident in my case; none the less that is an important thing to do to show people that they can be themselves and make their own choices; the downside, more than now, it was an inward-looking place; it had aspects of all the old novels written mostly by people who were very unhappy here - David Benedictus' was the scandalous novel of my day - 'The Fourth of June'; there was a homo-erotic atmosphere, much dissipated now because there is not much point if you can go into the outside world; there was a greater sense of distance from the world, partly most people came from a society that was much more hierarchical than now; I was trying to describe my father's old-fashioned sense of noblesse oblige, though he would never have used the words, but a sense of duty; the other side of that were arrogant people who thought the world owed them respect and living just because they were who they were; the unpleasant aspects of it was that there were probably more of the latter than there are now; but it is the same place in some essential ways; the little bit of anarchy was very much boy-led; we were always rather proud of the fact that in those days we wholly elected our own prefects, though that is somewhat moderated now; pop, short for popina, allegedly a Latin word for a tuck shop, was earlier a debating society and met in a popina; the element of anarchy here has always been attractive; there is a story in Roxburgh of Stowe's autobiography about him bringing a team in the late '30s to play Eton; they had been training and this was to be their big match, but when they arrived here nobody had any idea that the match was due to take place; a polite boy offered to find some people to play and managed to find ten; Stowe, of course, won the match; Eton were frightfully polite to them but didn't take is at all seriously; that could be seen as arrogance but could also been seen as muddle and freedom, which is rather attractive

50:39:21 The Newcastle Prize is local to Eton, but I won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford; it those days you did a university scholarship examination in the autumn; Corpus was a famous classical college, but I was attracted to it because one of my boyhood heroes was Isaiah Berlin who had been in Washington with my father during the war; though I didn't know him at that time, he was an intellectual presence and he had been in Corpus; it was a small college, and I thought that there no Etonians there because after leaving Eton I went rather consciously through a de-Etonianizing phase for a bit; it was the sixties then, when 70% of Oxford undergraduates were from the state system; it didn't seem that Etonians had inherited the world or that the Bullingdon Club was other than a really good bar - a better Oxford than it became the the '80s and '90s, I think; Corpus was a very meritocratic college; it was classics and medicine, it had no politicians, although I knew already I was very politically aware - it has lots now, and both Milibands were there; I also slightly consciously chose a small college as I have always been attracted by the idea of community; I don't regret my choice at all, although Christ Church people seem to think that Corpus is part of their back yard; Corpus is a beautiful college too, with a strong sense of its own history

52:44:19 On politics, I certainly used to dream when I was a small child, and later when I was alone at home, that I was the centre of cheering crowds; I think seeking applause is part of being the youngest in a family, and of a big clan because my mother had a good many brothers and sisters; my father was a Junior Minister, not really a politician, in Macmillan's Government between '58 and '63, so there were politician about; he was an agriculturalist and was in the House of Lords as a Junior Minister; I knew Alec Douglas-Home - there was a political background and Mr Macmillan was an early hero; my first political act was to write to Iain Macleod in support of his objections to the first Commonwealth Immigration Act in about '61 or '62; I had high ideals of the British Empire succeeding the Roman Empire at the time; there was a Liberal-Tory background in my life, and I became more and more politically interested at Eton, and went into the Conservative Association where I became President at Oxford; I was a poor debater but it was another thing I forced myself to do; I can do after dinner speeches and tributes at funerals, but I was never a really good knock about debater like Kenneth Clark or Michael Foot, let alone Enoch Powell; I joined the Union at Oxford and forced myself to do it as I thought it was a skill I needed to have; I even became President of the Union rather to my astonishment and luck because the Left were still part of the Oxford Union at that point, though they withdrew just after my time, protesting that it was a club, and that the Students' Union was the real thing; there were no great speakers in my time though there had been not long before

56:43:20 I read Mods and Greats but to my great chagrin I didn't get a first in Mods, quite deservedly and I was not a good linguist; mods is to some extent a language-based course, probably more than now there was still more reliance on measuring your capacity to write and read Greek and Latin fluently; I was very disappointed; my dear Tutor, Ewen Bowie who just retired the other day, told me that that year out of the eleven people going in for mods from Corpus, nine of them got Firsts; he suggested that when they got to W the examiners felt they couldn't award another; this was kind of him but as the scripts were anonymised it cannot be true unfortunately; I was very well taught, first by Richard Nisbet who became Professor of Latin, and then by Ewen Bowie; the central person in my development was Jim Hermison my philosophy tutor; it was the dying heyday of Oxford philosophy; the great names were Ayer and Ryle, Hare was at Corpus, Austin, and Wisdom from Cambridge - the later Wittgenstein rather than the earlier, Plato, Aristotle - Aristotle was an honorary Oxonian, his comment on ethics was the centre of all we did - and it was a very good education in my view, alongside very good history teaching; Brian Harrison was at Corpus later and I got to know him a bit; it was a very fine intellectual training and I don't regret it a moment, to have learnt economics of the day from Samuelson might have been useful, but not much more use to me as a politician than to know about first century Rome or Athens; I do regret not knowing more of the history of my own country which I have taught myself a bit since, but I really knew no history at all after the death of Marcus Aurelius until a good deal later; I lived in Corpus itself to start with, and then in a wonderful building on Folly Bridge, an imitation castle built by a local businessman in the nineteenth century in order to keep up with the colleges; if you look at my background it must seem to any analyst that I am somebody from the centre of the British establishment, but I never felt like that and always felt that I was an outsider of some kind; looking at the grand Etonians of the day, Robert Cecil and the cool young men who were debs' delights, I never felt like that; I did have one grand establishment girlfriend but she was a rebel, and my main girlfriend at Oxford was a Lancashire girl who had nothing to do with the University really; I remember consciously thinking that my model was Disraeli, that I was going to be someone that these grandees would have to hire for their party in due course, which was a lot of nonsense, but quite useful as a motivating force to feel that you don't deserve anything, but must work for it; I was never a member of the Bullingdon Club or those sorts of things; the Union was more like a club perhaps than later, but it was a political club; we had massive electoral machines in the University Conservative Association; my college being very small had to make alliances, and my alliances were with Exeter and St Johns, and colleges that were very meritocratic; Wolverhampton Grammar School was my main ally as an ex-school, and many of those people remain friends to this day; it seems odd to say that now as the second son of an Earl, who had gone to Eton, but if I had felt like that I would have gone to Christ Church or New College; I was very lacking in confidence; I never went to deb dances, or to country house weekends, I was extremely shy; Eton had built up my confidence intellectually, and was rather explosively argumentative, but socially still shy

1:02:13:19 I was told by my beloved teacher at Eton, John Roberts, in his very solemn antique way that there were five things you could do at university - religion, sport, academic work, sex - perhaps there were four; anyway, you had to choose one not to do, and he recommended not doing religion, but I really didn't do any sport apart from rowing for my college in the torpids for a year or two; I was never confident enough to do drama; I did politics, and my beloved girlfriend without whom I would never have got my First in Greats, looked after me; the last year I worked really hard, about six days a week according to a schedule - working through the great texts I had to do as Greats is a very long examination, and then having time to revisit things; I had a space to read alongside things so that one could keep up with the latest thing; I have always been a good examinee, it is a technique, rather a specious one really, but I knew if one kept up with the very latest publications that would really impress examiners then, probably not now; it is depressing seeing the boys being told for 'A' levels here that you just have to use the key words that the examiners are looking for, and that if you think for yourself you will get nowhere at all; Oxford, I hope, is still better than that; I was very well prepared for Greats and got a very good First, but by heavy lifting and hard work, not an Oscar Wilde performance

1:04:31:06 My approach to the Church of England is very much like that of my friend Martin Rees; I feel it is my tribe and I love the liturgy and the language of the Book of Common Prayer; I am respectful of it and get cross - it seems to me that some of the propagandists for atheism make obvious mistakes; equally I do not like being pushed by the evangelicals the other way; I like my relationship with something higher than the utilitarian world to be private; but I love the structure of the old-fashioned Church of England, which has rather fallen to pieces, and one of the very great pleasures of Eton is that our music, our liturgy is unchanged, and is done on a high day very well indeed, in a way that it is done in great cathedrals elsewhere or other colleges, and I find it very beautiful and satisfying; if I had been pushed intellectually at that time, or at Eton, I would have said I was an atheist; I was confirmed and went through a mystical period, and still regard myself as having elements of mystery and mysticism; I don't like entirely positivist explanations as I thing they are never fully satisfying; I would like to believe in ghosts, and mystery; another good side of Eton which I failed to mention was its encouragement for reading in all directions - I mentioned Nigel Fox CHECK who directed me to read the 'Stones of Venice'; I had a great period when I became deeply in love with the Arthurian legends and the poetry and writing of Charles Williams, and I love those things and still do; Gilbert Murray had a theory about the inherited conglomerate, that we all inherit contradictory things, and it depends what we are doing at any particular time, which part of our beliefs can be used; I am quite superstitious, and I am conscious on my intellectual side that it is nonsense, but I am still superstitious, but I have never been formally to commit myself to believing in Christian theology or any body else's theology; reading a little bit around the edges of Buddhism which I don't think is really a religion at all, I find some of that interesting; I don't want to live in a world where I am told that rather naive reductionist science is all that I feel; Dawkins seems to me to be a slightly absurd person though quite good at his science; I am much nearer to those scientists who like to say that there are limits to what we can know; I fell in love with Emanuel Kant's metaphysics at one period, the concept that you live within the boundaries of understanding and you can't really speculate outside them, but I have never committed myself for long to any formal religion though I get extremely upset if people try to knock over the Church of England, or indeed any other generous religion; my mother was interesting; she had strong views that we should read everything, but there was only a limited amount of time to read; her argument against pornography was that it was just a waste of time; she was against the Narnia stories for complex and quite interesting reasons, and I never read them until I did so to my own children; she said that if you wanted Christianity you should take it straight not in children's stories, but she was very keen on the grown-up Lewis stories - 'That Hideous Strength', 'The Screw-Tape Letters', 'Perelandra'; I have always loved mystical worlds; I am a great fan of Philip Pullman whose own approach to religion is not unlike mine in some ways, in that you can hear the hound of God pacing along behind him, and he is a beautiful magical storyteller; I didn't read Tolkein, apart from 'The Hobbit', until I was an adult, and again, I like it; I like private worlds; I became a great fan and a friend of Patrick O'Brian who wrote the stories on Nelson's Navy, I like enclosed imaginary worlds


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