Cecil Maurice Bowra | |
|---|---|
 Maurice Bowra being shown a computer in 1965[1] | |
| Vice-Chancellor of theUniversity of Oxford | |
| In office 1951–1954 | |
| Preceded by | John Lowe |
| Succeeded by | Alic Halford Smith |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1898-04-08)8 April 1898 Jiujiang,China |
| Died | 4 July 1971(1971-07-04) (aged 73) Oxford, England |
| Alma mater | New College, Oxford |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance | United Kingdom |
| Service | British Army |
| Years of service | 1917–1918 |
| Unit | Royal Field Artillery |
| Battles / wars | |
Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra,CH, FBA (/ˈbaʊrə/; 8 April 1898 – 4 July 1971) was an English classical scholar, literary critic and academic, known for hiswit. He wasWarden ofWadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served asvice-chancellor of theUniversity of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.
Bowra was born inJiujiang, China, to English parents.[2] His father, Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra (1869–1947), who worked for theChinese Imperial Maritime Customs,[3] had been born inNingbo,[4] and his paternal grandfather,Edward Charles Bowra, had also worked for the Chinese Customs, after serving in theEver Victorious Army under "Chinese Gordon".[5] Soon after Bowra's birth his father was transferred to thetreaty port ofNiuzhuang, and the family lived there for the first five years of Bowra's life,[6] except during theBoxer Rebellion, in the summer of 1900, when Bowra was evacuated to Japan along with his mother, his elder brother, Edward, and other women and children of the European community.[7]
The family returned to Britain in 1903, travelling via Japan and the United States, and settled in theKent countryside.[8] Bowra later said he had been fluent inMandarin, but forgot the language after settling in Britain.[9] Bowra's parents went back to China in February 1905, leaving their children in the care of their paternal grandmother, who, having been widowed, lived with her second husband, a clergyman, inPutney.[10] During this time the boys received tuition from Ella Dell, sister of the writerEthel M. Dell.[11] The boys also attended apreparatory school in Putney, where Maurice came first in all classes except arithmetic.[12] During his time at this school Bowra began his classical education with lessons from Cecil Botting, a master atSt Paul's School[13] and father of the writerAntonia White.[14]
In 1909 the Bowra brothers journeyed across Europe and Russia by train to visit their parents inMukden. They also visited the site of theBattle of Mukden and encounteredLord Kitchener.[15] Their return journey, which they made in the company of their father, took them through Hong Kong,Colombo,Suez,Naples andAlgiers.[16]
Bowra boarded atCheltenham College from April 1910.[16] He did not enjoy such features of the school as outdoor games or theOTC,[17] but he won a scholarship in the internal exams held in June 1911.[18] It became clear that he had a particular aptitude forclassics, for which the school laid a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin.[18] During his final two years, in the sixth form, Bowra became bored with his school work, acquired sufficient French to readVerlaine andBaudelaire, studied a bilingual edition ofDante'sDivina Commedia, and began to learn German.[13] Bowra maintained a connection with the school in later life, being instrumental in the appointment ofCecil Day-Lewis as a master there and serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.[19]
By 1916 Bowra's father was Chief Secretary of the Chinese Customs and resided in Beijing in a household with thirty servants.[13] In January that year Bowra's mother came to England to visit her sons, who were both about to see active service in the Army.[20] In May Bowra departed with his mother for China, travelling throughNorway,Sweden and Russia.[21] In Beijing he visited theGreat Wall of China and theMing Tombs, and witnessed the funeral ofYuan Shikai.[21]
Bowra departed from Beijing in September and on his way home spent three weeks inSt Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as a guest ofRobert Wilton.[21] During this time he attained a working knowledge of Russian[13] and attended operas in whichFeodor Chaliapin performed.[22]
After his return to Britain he began training with the OTC in Oxford[23] before being called up and sent to theRoyal Army Cadet School in March 1917.[24] He served in theRoyal Field Artillery on active service in France from September 1917.[25] He saw action atPasschendaele andCambrai, and in 1918 he participated in the resistance to theLudendorff Offensive and the Allied counter-offensive.[26] During this time he continued to read widely, including both contemporary poets and Greek and Latin authors.[26]
Bowra was left with a lifelong hatred of war and military strategists, and seldom mentioned the war afterwards.[27] He later toldCyril Connolly, "Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was far worse: inconceivably bloody – nobody who wasn't there can imagine what it was like."[28]Anthony Powell wrote that Bowra's wartime experiences "played a profound part in his thoughts and inner life",[29] and records that when a cruise ship they were travelling on held a ceremony to place a wreath in the sea as it passed theDardanelles Bowra was so affected that he retired to his cabin.[30] Following the Second World War he was accommodating to returning servicemen who wished to study at Oxford, telling one applicant who was worried about his deficiency in Latin, "No matter, war service counts as Latin."[31]
In 1919 Bowra took up a scholarship he had won toNew College, Oxford.[13] He took a first class inHonour Moderations in 1920 and a first class, with formal congratulations, inLiterae Humaniores in 1922.[3] Bowra was very sociable as an undergraduate, and his circle includedCyril Radcliffe (with whom he shared lodgings),[32]Roy Harrod,[32]Robert Boothby,[26]L. P. Hartley,[26]Lord David Cecil,[26]J. B. S. Haldane[26] andChristopher Hollis.[32] He also became a friend ofDadie Rylands.[26] The teachers who influenced him includedGilbert Murray andAlic Smith.[33] The treatment he received from one of his tutors in philosophy,H. W. B. Joseph, was said byIsaiah Berlin to have "undermined his faith in his own intellectual capacity".[34]
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In 1922 Bowra was elected a fellow ofWadham College, Oxford,[3] with the support of theRegius Professor of Greek,Gilbert Murray,[35] and appointed Dean of Wadham shortly afterwards.[36] When Murray vacated his chair in 1936 Bowra and others believed that Bowra himself was most likely to succeed him,[35] but Murray recommendedE. R. Dodds as his successor, rejecting Bowra because of "a certain lack of quality, precision and reality in his scholarship as a whole".[37] Some believed that the real reason was a whispering campaign over Bowra's "real or imagined homosexuality".[38]
Bowra became aDoctor of Letters of theUniversity of Oxford in 1937.[33] In 1938 theWardenship of Wadham fell vacant and Bowra, still the Dean, was elected to the post, keeping it until 1970[3] (when he was succeeded byStuart Hampshire).[39] Bowra was supported in the election by his colleagueFrederick Lindemann.[40][41] Lindemann had initially opposed Bowra's election as a fellow of Wadham, proposing that a scientist should be preferred, but had warmed to Bowra because of his vociferous opposition to theNazi regime in Germany and the policy ofappeasement.[40][41] The election was held on 5 October 1938,[42] and coincided with theOxford by-election campaign, in which Bowra lent his support to the anti-appeasement candidate,Sandy Lindsay.[43]
During theSecond World War Bowra served in the OxfordHome Guard[44] and was not offered any war work. When Berlin canvassed to find Bowra a position the file was sent back to him stamped "unreliable".[44]
Bowra wasProfessor of Poetry at Oxford from 1946 to 1951.[33] He wrote of the election for the post that "The campaign was very enjoyable andC. S. Lewis was outmanoeuvred so completely that he even failed in the end to be nominated, and I walked over without opposition. Very gratifying to a vain man like myself."[45]
Bowra spent the academic year 1948–49 atHarvard as theCharles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry[33] and gave the 1955Andrew Lang lecture. He delivered the 1957 Earl Grey Lecture in Newcastle on "The Meaning of a Heroic Age" and the 1963Taylorian Lecture on "Poetry and the First World War".[33] In 1966 he gave theRomanes Lecture.[46]
Bowra was at Harvard when the post ofvice-chancellor fell unexpectedly vacant in 1948, on the sudden accidental death ofWilliam Stallybrass.[47] When the most senior head of house,J. R. H. Weaver, declined the post, Bowra could have succeeded to it,[47] but he chose to stay in the United States andDean Lowe filled the post until 1951, when Bowra served his three-year term.[47] As chair of theHebdomadal Council he dealt with the business of meetings that customarily occupied a whole afternoon in as little as fifteen minutes.[48] WhenT. S. R. Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959 Bowra returned to chair the committee[49] and privately remarked that "jokes about hisbeaux yeux are not thought funny".[50]
Bowra was President of theBritish Academy from 1958 to 1962.[3] His tenure was marked by two achievements:[51] he chaired the committee that produced theReport on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes fromHM Treasury;[51] and he helped to establish theBritish Institute of Persian Studies inTehran.[52]
In his long career as an Oxford don Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass inEvelyn Waugh'sBrideshead Revisited is said to have been modelled on Bowra.[53]Cyril Connolly,Henry Green,Anthony Powell andKenneth Clark knew Bowra quite well when they were undergraduates. Clark called Bowra "the strongest influence in my life".[54][55] Waugh marked his friend's election as Warden of Wadham by presenting him with amonkey-puzzle tree for his garden.[56]
John Betjeman recorded his appreciation of Bowra in his verse autobiographySummoned by Bells, in which he evokes an evening spent dining with Bowra in a passage that concludes: "I wandered back to Magdalen, certain then,/ As now, that Maurice Bowra’s company / Taught me far more than all my tutors did."
Though he was not in any sense religious, Bowra signed the petition (in favour of theTridentineCatholic Mass) that became informally known as theAgatha Christie indult and regularly attended theChurch of England services in his college's chapel.[57]
Bowra had learned the value of verse during the First World War.[56] Cyril Connolly wrote that Bowra "saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes who fought back and tried to give life a meaning".[58] Bowra was an important champion ofBoris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for theNobel Prize in Literature.[59]
However, Bowra was never able to fulfil his wish to be accepted as a serious poet himself.[56] His output consisted of "sharp satires, in verse, on his friends (and sharper still on his enemies)".[60] His friend and literary executor,John Sparrow, once commented that Bowra had cut himself off from posterity "as his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable".[61] This was set half-right by the publication in 2005 ofNew Bats in Old Belfries, a collection ofsatires on friends and enemies written between the 1920s and the 1960s. Bowra wrote a satire onJohn Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented byPrincess Margaret with theDuff Cooper Prize on 18 December 1958. The judges on that occasion wereLord David Cecil,Harold Nicolson and Bowra himself as chairman. Duff Cooper's widowLady Diana Cooper observed that "Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words." (Philip Ziegler,Diana Cooper: The Biography of Lady Diana Cooper, Hamish Hamilton 1981, p. 310.)
Green with lust and sick with shyness,
Let me lick your lacquered toes.
Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness,
Put your finger up my nose,
Pin my teeth upon your dress,
Plant my head with watercress.
Only you can make me happy.
Tuck me tight beneath your arm.
Wrap me in a woollen nappy;
Let me wet it till it's warm.
In a plush and plated pram
Wheel me roundSt James's, Ma'am.
Let your sleek and soft galoshes
Slide and slither on my skin.
Swaddle me in mackintoshes
Till I lose my sense of sin.
Lightly plant your plimsolled heelWhere my privy parts congeal.
TheTelegraph, echoingCecil Day-Lewis on the man himself, warned that the book, likestrychnine, was best taken in small doses.[61]
Two poems onPatrick Leigh Fermor were omitted from the book, in deference to their subject's wishes, but were published after his death in theWadham Gazette in December 2011.[62][63]
Bowra washomosexual. As an undergraduate in Oxford in the 1920s, Bowra was known tocruise for sex.[64] He used the term "theHomintern"[64] and privately referred to his leading position in it, also calling it "the Immoral Front" or "the 69th International".[65]
Bowra retired in 1970, but continued to live in rooms in the college that had been granted to him in exchange for a house he owned.[39] He became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree ofDoctor of Civil Law.[33] He died of a sudden heart attack in 1971[66] and his cremated remains were buried inHolywell Cemetery,Oxford.[67]
In addition to hisOxford degrees, Bowra received honorary doctorates from the universities ofDublin,Hull,Wales,Harvard,Columbia,St Andrews,Paris andAix.[33]
Bowra was knighted in 1951 and was appointed aMember of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1971.[3] He was also aCommandeur of theLégion d'honneur in France, a Knight Commander of theRoyal Order of the Phoenix in Greece and a recipient of the order "Pour le Mérite" inWest Germany.[33]
In 1992Wadham College named its newBowra Building in his honour.[68]
Bowra also wrote a foreword toVoices From the Past: A Classical Anthology for the Modern Reader, ed. James and Janet Maclean Todd (1955), as well as forewords to other works.
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| Preceded by | Warden ofWadham College, Oxford 1938–1970 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University 1951–1954 | Succeeded by |
