Rhubarb December 2025

M alcolm Oxley made an academic out of me, without a shadow of doubt. It started with A Level History. He taught us Early Modern England and the history of the Crusades, a special topic that year. His model of teaching was that of an advanced undergraduate seminar. He expected you to come to class ready to talk and think, to know what you wanted to say and to get your word in. He also expected you to understand, and understand quickly, that the academic life was a vocation, a culture, a politics, a passion. I can remember, as if yesterday, what he said in that first class, and the sheer exhilaration of it all. Life starts here, was the general message! Regarding the Crusades, he started with a blunt demand that we put aside the received and romantic wisdom of the West. We would need to know the Quran as much as we knew the Bible, to understand the history of the Arabs and Turks in their own terms and not just as irritants in the peripheral vision of the West, and to develop familiarity, too, with the shapes and sounds of the languages, even if it was only matter of spelling the names right in English. This was 1977. It was the lightning flash I had been waiting for. It was the lightning flash I had been waiting for. In 1981, after A Levels, and readying myself for Oxford, I spent the summer travelling. The Gesta Francorum, the Alexiad of Anna Comnena and much more that Malcolm had introduced us to was on my mind. I had a 20-year-old's insatiable thirst for 'The East'! Istanbul was dingy and run-down, soldiers were on every street corner, and hotels in Sultanahmet would charge you 50p to sleep on the floor on their rooftops in a huddle of sleeping bags, to be bitten by mosquitoes and deafened by the call to prayer first thing in the morning. I got as far as Antakya/Antioch, a city with which I would later develop very close connections. The war in Lebanon, together with the Cold War alignments of Syria, meant I couldn't get much further. That would have to wait until much later. But it was the beginning of a process of becoming the strange kind of hybrid academic I have been for the last three and a half decades. I have moved happily between music and anthropology departments, and between university posts in various different countries, maintaining my life as a performing musician, too. I have devoted myself to studying modern Istanbul, Anatolian and Ottoman worlds, and adjacent Arab worlds through their music. So much has gone – Antakya, recently, in a shocking earthquake; a handful in that history class who were to be the closest friends later in life; and now Malcolm himself. I don't think any of this would have been possible without Malcolm's insistence – benign, patient, understanding, but insistence nonetheless – that I summoned my energy and took that wild plunge when it mattered . F or my sins I had a regular spot in ‘detention’ that he used to run but, that being said, he always made it fun and educational, even if it was detention! He’s one of the many great teachers from Teddies that I’ll never forget.

H e was a wonderful managed to help me get an A in Economics and Politics in 1969! What a gift to the teaching profession in general and St Edward's in particular. One of the great ones. teacher. He must have been, as somehow he

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I remember clearly the day that the dry subject of economics came alive for me and our class. He explored the practical essence of business economics, telling us vividly how the real world worked, explaining insurance, insolvency, integrity, morality, company law, government responsibility and everything in between.

FEATURE

Left to right, D.S. Wippell., M Evans., M.S. Oxley and A.D.G. Wright

W hat an amazing man and

historian, who dedicated his life, passion and immense talent to

the School for so many years.

When he wrote the last version of St Edward’s history, I couldn’t help but marvel that he had taught me history at Teddies all those years before and was still right in the centre of School life. Half a century later I recall visiting his flat once and being amazed to behold his book collection which was shelved solidly from floor to ceiling. His genuine enthusiasm for his subject was apparent and he instilled in me a lifelong love of reading. My project on three great British prime ministers earned me from Malcolm my one and only history prize (!) in the Fifth Form of 1965.

He clearly had a great love for the School as witnessed by numerous productions for which he was responsible.

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