In September 1868, a small boy “was hauled ignominiously” onto the platform at Oxford Station. From there he was taken by hansom cab to St Edward’s School, then in New Inn Hall Street. This was to be the centre of his world for the next nine years. Much later, he would recall his impressions of both school and city in an essay, Oxford Through a Boy’s Eyes, by which time he was an internationally-acclaimed author. His name was Kenneth Grahame.

He was born in Edinburgh on March 8, 1859, and could easily have become one of the body of great literary figures associated with the city. Fate, however, intervened. Shortly after his birth, his father, Cunningham Grahame, was appointed Sheriff of Argyll, taking the family away from Edinburgh to Inveraray. Tragedy struck four years later when his mother, Bessie, died from scarlet fever.

The young Kenneth also caught the disease, leaving him with permanently weakened health. His father, unable to cope, turned to alcohol, and Kenneth and his three siblings were taken to live with their maternal grandmother at Cookham Dean in Berkshire.

It was at Cookham that Kenneth discovered his love for the river and its surrounding woodlands, paths and meadows, which planted the seeds for his greatest literary work, The Wind in the Willows.

Arrival in Oxford, aged just nine, thrust him into wholly unfamiliar territory. Unused to urban life, he soon learned to appreciate the beauty of the city’s ancient streets, majestic buildings and secluded corners.

“It was my chief pleasure to escape at once and foot it here and there, exploring, exploring, always exploring, in a world I had not known the like of before,” he wrote in Oxford Through a Boy’s Eyes.

The essay is a fascinating portrait of late 19th-century Oxford, when Broad Street, St Giles and Brasenose Lane were still cobbled streets, many High Street shops had yet to give way to college expansion — he describes both Oriel and Brasenose as “shop-eaters” — the Blue Pig pub still reigned supreme at Gloucester Green, and New Inn Hall Street was a peaceful backwater.

“There was no opening through into George Street then,” he recalled. “The street turned at a right angle and ran right up to the ‘Corn’, this ‘leg’ now being christened St Michael’s Street. Lodging-houses, and a few private residences, one of which was soon to be taken over by the school for Headmaster’s quarters, Oratory, and a bedroom or two made up the rest of it. Altogether a pleasant, quiet street, central and yet secluded.”

Some things, however, never change. Grahame remembers even then “the exceeding blackness of the university buildings, which really seemed to my childish mind as if it was intentional, and might have been put on with a brush”. The Covered Market became a favourite haunt, with its “dusky and odorous corridors”, — in those days livestock was included among the varied wares for sale.

He also recalls an amusing incident in which a friend of his mistook “the castellated County Buildings” for Christ Church, “and insisted on being deposited there”.

Aside from the “urban joys”, of course, was the Thames, where Grahame was able to indulge his passion for the river by canoeing away from the city and into its leafy, rural surrounds, to explore the locks, weirs and abundance of wildlife. These experiences undoubtedly helped germinate those early seeds for The Wind in the Willows.

Schooldays, for Grahame, were something to be endured. Detailed descriptions of the old St Edward’s School are coupled with less than fond memories of strict discipline, canings and playing cricket “under difficulties on Port Meadow”. Yet despite everything his achievements at the school were impressive — head boy, captain of the rugby XV and numerous academic awards. His ambition to study at Oxford University was thwarted by lack of funds, so he embarked on a successful banking career in London.

But his heart lay in writing, and it was during his London years that he began penning essays and short stories for various literary journals, his work appearing alongside such illustrious names as Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and his fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson.

After retiring early in 1908 due to ill health, Grahame moved to Blewbury, near Didcot, and it was here that he completed The Wind in the Willows, which began as a series of letters to his only son, Alistair, born in 1900. These letters were preserved by his wife, Elspeth, and published posthumously in First Whispers of the Wind in the Willows in 1944.

The Wind in the Willows was published by Methuen in October 1908 to a surprisingly lukewarm response from the critics, but the public loved it and it sold so quickly that several reprints were required during the first few years of publication. It has never been out of print since.

Throughout his life, Grahame made frequent return trips to the city of his schooldays, but his final association with Oxford was one of tragedy. In 1920, Alistair — then an undergraduate at Christ Church — was found dead on the railway tracks near Wolvercote, in what was officially recorded as accidental but widely suspected to be suicide. Kenneth never fully recovered from the death of his son, and his writing output dwindled considerably during his final years.

In 1924, the Grahames moved to Church House, Pangbourne, where Kenneth drew some comfort from the close proximity of his beloved Thames. He died there on July 6, 1932, and was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, in the same grave as his son. The inscription on his gravestone — now badly weathered — was penned by his cousin Sir Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, and reads: “To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alistair, who passed the River on 6 July 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him more blest for all time.”