Word: balliol
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time, Lindsay was the Master of Oxford's self-consciously cerebral Balliol College. But his students numbered as many underprivileged John Elkins as they did proper Oxonians. Son of a Glasgow preacher, he had long before decided to devote his life to both...
Bakers & Blacksmiths. At Oxford, Lindsay was a rosy-cheeked scholar, with a wry Scottish wit and a taste for disreputable tweeds. In lofty, oak-beamed Balliol College hall, undergraduates crowded to hear his quiet-toned discourses, and at Balliol's long, oak-topped high-table with its silver candlesticks, notables came from all over the world to dine and talk with him. But in his spare time, when his Oxford duties were done, the master was apt to vanish...
...bought a third-class railway ticket and hopped a train for London. After that he returned to Oxford-to his wife, who refused to share his title ("We are simple people," she said), to his lunches of cold mutton and prunes, and to his troubled surveillance of some of Balliol's new postwar, government-aided scholarship students. Once he told the House of Lords why he was so concerned: "They were from poor homes and poor schools; they were boys for whom getting a state scholarship meant absolutely everything. Therefore their headmasters . . . embraced them. Their dear parents embraced them...
Next week, Lord Lindsay's old routine ends. Now 70, he retires from Balliol, though not from teaching. He is moving bis books and few possessions to a rambling mansion three miles beyond the pottery town of Stoke-on-Trent. There, a new state-aided university has been founded-the first of its kind for British workingmen and their children. When Stoke opens next year, Lord Lindsay will be its first principal...
Eton Made Me. Connolly concludes his book with a chunk of autobiography that illustrates parts of his thesis. Like Shelleyblake, he too had shown high promise. From his prep school he won a scholarship to Eton; from Eton he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He drugged himself with the heady compliments of classics masters, and made a bible of the Romantic tradition. Now, he feels, it was hardly surprising that his boyish successes served only to underscore his inability to continue them. "I was to continue . . . being promising indefinitely . . . Promise is the capacity for letting people down...