I have spent the last few days reading this biography of one of my university history tutors from half a century ago. It has been a nostalgic journey, and a surprising one: I didn’t get to know Jeremy Catto well at the time, his death and obituaries in 2018 passed me by, and the book was a chance encounter on a Christmas shopping trawl in Blackwell’s.
Had I known my tutor better, I might have omitted to pay for the book and attempted to sell it back to the shop, as the undergraduate Catto did with books to the value of £30 in 1961: an aberration described by his tutor at Balliol as ‘flat insanity’ but which in the opinion of his adoring biographer ‘should not be viewed as anything other than a relatively minor indiscretion.’ After a year’s suspension, Balliol welcomed him back from the wilderness, and he repaid Oxford with interest.
While at grammar school in Newcastle Jeremy had converted to Catholicism – a thought-provoking episode marked ‘Private’: Vaiani doesn’t do God – and learnt the value of ‘teaching with courtesy’ which would be a hallmark of his own style. He taught and did his doctorate at Durham for a few years before finding a niche at Oriel, where he remained for nearly forty years, dispensing alcohol and wise advice to those in need; a benign eccentric, cherished and remembered with affection by all who knew him. They were a wide network extending far beyond his parish, into politics, business, royalty, the Vatican and a tap on the shoulder from the secret world. An Oxford don of the old school, in fact. In his preface, Alan Duncan suggests a composite of characters from CP Snow, Tom Sharpe and whoever wrote Goodbye Mr Chips. I found myself leaning towards Anthony Powell’s Sillery.
How clever of me to have chosen a period of European history that no don in my college could teach, with the result that I was farmed out to Oriel for weekly one-on-one tutorials with ‘one of the truly great university teachers of the age’(AN Wilson’s verdict). And how foolish to have failed to get to know him better. Friendship was more in his gift than mine, however, and I now know him quite well thanks to Vaiani, a Cattomite of a more recent generation who has produced a diligent biography, sensibly structured, extensively annotated and with much tiptoeing around the more delicate aspects of his subject. Catto was good at ‘compartmentalising’ his life, apparently.
Much of the book takes the form of testimonials from ‘Orielenses’ and beyond, many of them repetitious and perhaps selected more for name-dropping value than fresh insight. One after another, and another, they line up in agreement: Jeremy Catto was ‘amusing, humorous and witty’ … ‘very much a college man’ … ‘the quintessential don’. Or so ‘it would be not unreasonable to argue.’
Sifting through the banalities and circumlocutions leaves plenty of good stories illustrating the gaiety of life in Catto’s Oriel. The compartment I enjoyed most is entitled ‘Pastoral’ and deals with his unlikely appointment as the college’s Senior Dean, responsible for discipline (ha ha). Remembering Oxford’s lenient treatment of his younger self, Dean Catto operated on the principle that undergraduates were good chaps whose life chances should take priority over the victims of their riotous antics.
When an Oriel freshman staged a late-night raid on Hertford with the intention of pouncing on Catherine Bennett, but jumped mistakenly into a bed occupied by the college principal and his wife (the formidable Mary Warnock), the sentence handed down by Catto was a bottle of port for him and a bunch of flowers to unruffle her feathers. The Dean ‘was able to see the funny side’ when someone shot at a girl with his air rifle, and when an after-dinner bunch of Union bravos (possibly including Dominic Grieve) threw Damian Green off Magdalen Bridge into the shallow water of the Cherwell, Catto dismissed the incident as ‘harmless tomfoolery’ and invited Green to a party where he met his idol, Catto’s lifelong friend Bryan Ferry. No hard feelings.
Catto advised his charges not to take their studies too seriously and to pursue sport if they were good at it. He took a similarly broad-minded approach to admissions. Rather than recruit swots with academe in their sights, Oriel on his watch went for future bankers who would support the college and diplomats whom Catto would be able to visit in their embassies around the world – and he did.
Of course he had his faults. He was a terrible driver, and an enthusiastic one, who travelled by car from Oriel to the Examination Schools because of the gradient on the High Street. On longer journeys he had trouble fending off sleep and would occasionally stamp on the accelerator to jerk himself awake. When apprehended in a bus lane near Christ Church and asked by a policeman, ‘So we think we’re a bus do we?’, Catto replied, ‘Yes officer’, turned to his passengers with a request for ‘Fares please’, and drove on.
Flippant repartee was his stock in trade. When asked by a guest at High Table what his speciality was, Catto’s response was ‘1468’. Vaiani attempts no explanation for this, but I can’t help wondering: was the date picked at random, just for fun, or was there more to it? The apogee of the House of Burgundy, perhaps; a turning point marking the end of the Age of Chivalry? It would be an amusing conversation, anyway.
After retiring from Oriel in 2006, Catto kept himself busy editing a history of his beloved college. One contributor reports that he was ‘ruthlessly efficient’, an accusation that could not be levelled at Unicorn’s editorial team. (I doubt it contains any cyclists, by the way, otherwise they might have known how to spell pedal).
Oriel: a history was well received by all but those who felt the need to object that its contributors included no women. ‘It is not unreasonable to argue that the end result will not be surpassed for quite some time,’ David Vaiani remarks with a thud. That sentence, and many others like it, reminded me of a question posed by the author in his introduction to the book. What would Jeremy Catto have thought of it?
Is it possible to edit with courtesy? In the nicest possible way, Catto would have put his red pen to good use.
Several generations of Orielenses, and other friends of Jeremy, will enjoy the nostalgic read. As to the wider appeal of a life story illuminating social change … perhaps. It is a Catto-esque approach to history but I’m not sure Vaiani pulls it off.
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