Chronicle 687

44 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

In memoriam

Malcolm Oxley

Malcolm Oxley, who taught History and other subjects at the School from 1962–1999, died in May. During his 37 years of selfless service Malcolm was also a Teacher of History, Director of Studies, Housemaster of Segar’s and an inspiring director of plays.

If there was an ‘Oxley set’, pupils could elect to belong to it rather than having to wait to be selected. No one was rejected. He was enormously generous with his time, and it was on offer to all. Although he was obviously very clever and extraordinarily well-read, to a 15 year old he managed to be both formidable and approachable. I am still not sure exactly how he pulled this off. Perhaps the best way to characterise the lasting effect of his influence is to borrow the phrase de Tocqueville used to describe the characteristics which underpinned democracy in America. He called them ‘les habitudes du coeur’ – habits of the heart. Each of his former pupils will have their own habits of the heart which they can trace back to Malcolm. I suggest that there are some which many of us have in common. Among them these habits: • Learning is a life-long process. • Reading and learning are inseparable. • Books do furnish a room, though Malcolm did take this to extremes. His final home, Ritchie Court, felt obliged to call in structural engineers at one point, much to his indignation. • Hard work is a pre-requisite for happiness. • Institutions matter, but they and their leaders should not be reverenced. They should be teased. • Take nothing for granted. Life is full of contradictions and therefore full of irony. That is why jokes matter too.

The text below was written by Chris Jones OSE, Chair of Governors, and delivered as a eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral: I am here to pay tribute to the life of a very great schoolmaster, the life of a brilliant teacher and the life of a wonderful man. In doing so, I am under no illusion that I can do justice to that life, such is the scale and scope of his impact on so many of us. There is a story that used to make Malcolm chuckle. It is probably apocryphal, and it is very typical of North Oxford – a suburban myth if you like. It concerns the anxious mother of one of Malcolm’s pupils, enquiring at Blackwell’s about a list of books he had recommended, all of them I am sure deemed by Malcolm to be ‘crucial’. One was a biography of the first Stuart king, who was also the first to wear two crowns, those of both Scotland and England. ‘Have you’, she asked, ‘got a copy of King James the Sixth and I?’. When of course she meant, King James the Sixth of Scotland and King James the First of England.

It is an occupational hazard of tribute giving that, as the address advances, the speaker gradually creeps into prominence and his subject recedes: Malcolm becoming ‘Malcolm and I’ and then, Heaven forbid, ‘me and Malcolm’. Malcolm had such a profoundly formative effect on so many of us that it is very hard to keep oneself out of the picture. I am very grateful to my friend Rupert Walters (a friendship founded on our shared devotion to Malcolm, such friendships just one of Malc’s great gifts) for steering me to a remark which William Empson made about T S Eliot: ‘I do not know how much of my mind he invented.’ For Malcolm, invented is not quite the right word. This was not Professor Frankenstein. Nor did he seek to impose beliefs. His influence worked by osmosis, not injection; by the attitudes and behaviours which he consistently displayed, rather than virtues to which he laid claim. There were many things he loved to do, but he valued good conversation above everything else. And he was as good a listener as he was a talker.