Talk about gratitude, or rather the lack of it.

Imagine Viscount Nuffield, then aged 82, opening his copy of The Oxford Times at his home at Nuffield Place one November morning in 1959 — having already given away about £27m of the £30m (£11bn in today’s money) of the total amount at his death four years later — and reading the following tirade: “Lord Nuffield has done more than any other man to ruin Oxford by turning it into the Latin quarter of Cowley.”

The extraordinary outburst came from Tom Driberg, the Labour MP for Barking, and was uttered during a Commons debate on the future siting and design of industrial developments in the English countryside. It continued: “On the other hand, the University itself has shown no great reluctance to, so to speak, ponce on his earnings and the crowning absurdity of the harm done by its admittedly great benefactor of the University is that the college called after him — Nuffield College — has been built, one gathers at his own request, in the style of a Cotswold manor house — utterly inappropriate to a college devoted largely to modern studies in the mid-20th century.”

Of course, Nuffield had a thick skin — and he certainly had no regrets about having brought the motor car to millions of ordinary people. Very probably, indeed, he was more interested in reading the part of the debate that followed — concerning programmes for building roads for those cars to drive along. A statement from the Tory MP for Henley, John Hay, might well have caught his eye: “Everybody now agrees that new motorways and new trunk roads are urgently required, but we cannot, in constructing a new motorway system throughout this country, avoid making a pretty sharp impact upon the countryside."

But looking at that debate now, more than 50 years on, is a reminder of just how controversial the industrial development of Cowley was, particularly among people inhabiting that part of Oxford on the High Street side of Magdalen Bridge — many of whom found themselves in a quandary: on the one hand regretting the revolution that car building had brought to the “city of dreaming spires”; on the other welcoming the increased prosperity.

Juxtaposing the personalities involved is interesting too. Driberg, later Lord Bradwell, alias the gossip columnist William Hickey in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, who championed what some might call the elitist cause, was a long-time card-carrying Communist (whose papers, incidentall,y are archived at his old Oxford college of Christ Church, which he left without a degree); and right-wing Nuffield, who left the Church School, Cowley, at 14 to become a bicycle repairer, at 16 James Street, Oxford — and has since been accused of being sympathetic to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. (And is now unequivocally included in a Wikipedia list of that party’s “prominent members and supporters”.) Be that as it may — and no one can deny that Nuffield certainly played his part in turning his factories over to the war effort against fascist Germany — the range of his benevolence to medicine was astounding.

I am reminded of this every time I go to the dentist. Nuffield — or William Morris as he was then called — had had an unhappy experience at the dentist, but was impressed by the anesthesia he received when he visited a Mayfair practice and met anaesthetist Robert MacIntosh.

Subsequently he gave Oxford University £2m to establish a department of anesthetics, and MacIntosh became its first professor.

As for Nuffield College, asked during an interview with The Oxford Times on his 80th birthday what had been his greatest disappointment, Lord Nuffield replied: “That I was not able to found a technical engineering college in Oxford. I wanted Nuffield College to be just that.”

He added: “What is being done at Nuffield College today is very good, but here is the country crying out for technicians and engineers, and Oxford itself is beginning to meet just that need. But had I been able to found the sort of college I had in mind it would by now have been in full operation.”

He died in 1963 and left his home, Nuffield Place, to the college that bears his name. The college has given the house to the National Trust which is seeking to raise £600,000 in order to preserve it.