The ‘whose city is Oxford?’ question has been aired entertainingly in recent weeks in The Oxford Times’s Quad Talk column across the page from my weekly musings.
It started when student contributor Nick Hilton argued that he and his ilk were the “true elite”. He wrote: “Oxford is a city of, and for, undergraduates.”
Oriel College’s junior dean Alexander Ewing delivered a riposte in which he wrote: “In my humble opinion, though, Oxford’s ‘real elite’, if I’ve interpreted his concept correctly, are of course many distinguished academics, but also people like Christopher Brown (CBE), director of the Ashmolean, and Euton Daley (MBE), until recently the long-serving leader of the Pegasus Theatre. Even The Oxford Times’s Christopher Gray trumps the average three-year resident.”
I am not sure I care for that ‘even’. Still, I was flattered — as a ‘townie’ of 40 years’ standing — to be placed among the Oxford elite.
The exchange was still in my mind as I holidayed in Greece last month. Reading Jude the Obscure in the sunshine, for the first time in decades, I noticed how well Thomas Hardy argues for the townies’ supremacy in his fictional ‘Christminster’.
He writes: “[Jude] began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied and compendious than the gown life. Those struggling men and women before him [at ‘Fourways’/Carfax] were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all.”
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