Free Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain

to Oxford, but threw in my own continual requests to go to college to make up the balance. To his surprise, our visitor took this expression of feminine ambition entirely as a matter of course, and even mentioned one or two of his son’s acquaintances among the women students. Like many men who have been brought up without academic contacts, my father was at first more ready to listen to family cronies without any special title to their opinions, than to unfamiliar experts with every qualification for offering advice. The fact that his highly respected old friend regarded the presence of women at Oxford as in no way remarkable undoubtedly caused him to revise his opinion on the whole subject of the higher education of daughters. This transformation process was completed by a course of University Extension Lectures given by Mr J. A. R. Marriott - now Sir John - in Buxton Town Hall during the spring of 1913.
     
    Of recent years I have sometimes heard criticisms of Sir John Marriott by his political opponents both at Oxford and elsewhere. These party criticisms usually imply, more or less directly, that long experience as a university teacher does not adapt a man or woman to political life, and that it was probably owing to his academic qualities that Sir John lost the supposedly safe Conservative seats of Oxford and York.
     
    In this country, apart from university constituencies, there is certainly a rigid line, difficult to cross, between the political and the academic worlds - a line which in parts of America is becoming indistinct, with advantages to both sides. Judging from my experience as a graduate of one university and the wife of a professor attached to another, it does seem to me that academic life in any country tends to make both men and women narrow, censorious and self-important. My husband I believe to be among the exceptions, but one or two of his young donnish contemporaries have been responsible for some of the worst exhibitions of bad manners that I have ever encountered. Apparently most dons grow out of this contemptuous brusqueness as the years go by; elderly professors, though often disapproving, are almost always punctilious. On the whole I have found American dons politer than English, and those from provincial universities more courteous than the Oxford and Cambridge variety.
     
    To attribute, however, to Sir John Marriott the brusquer characteristics of academic Oxford seems to me to argue precisely that lack of perspicacity that Party opponents so often encourage in themselves. (I write this without rancour, since I belong myself to that Party whose programme is anathema to Sir John and his colleagues. To-day I can agree with few of his political opinions, but if he believed every clause of the Versailles Treaty to be divinely inspired I think I should forgive him, so deep still is my thankfulness for his breezy and uncalculating intervention in my obscure affairs.) No man could have had less contempt for unfamiliar ways of living, or more interest in the by-paths of experience. On the only occasion that they met I remember how skilfully he persuaded my father - with whom he can have had next to nothing in common - to discourse with lively enthusiasm on the technique of paper-making, and to relate the modest history of our mill.
     
    For me Sir John remains and always will remain the kindly, stimulating teacher in whose genial presence obstacles hitherto insuperable melted away like snow in April. He represents the deus ex machina of my unsophisticated youth, the Olympian who listened without a hint of patronage or amusement to the halting account of a callow girl’s vaunting, ingenuous ambitions. To him I owe my final victory over family opposition, my escape from the alien atmosphere of Buxton, and the university education which for all its omissions did at long last equip me for the kind of life that I wanted to lead. It is a debt that I acknowledge with humble gratitude, and can never hope to