That was before he pitched over the front of his bicycle returning in his cups – he was the most convivial of drinkers – to his unkempt is not the word for it flat (tea pots and dirty dishes in the kitchen from weeks past, Marks & Sparks wrinkle-free shirts on clothes lines in the bathtub) up the Cowley Road and broke his glasses. We didn’t see him for days. When he finally appeared one evening at The King’s Arms, he had a horrific swath of bruises and bandages across his face, his glasses crushed, but said it was nothing compared to his first and only karate lesson: “If it hurts that much to throw yourself on the mat, what must it be like to have someone else throw you on the mat?”

He left a wonderful collection of Hokusai prints to the Ashmolean. What happened to the treasury of 33 1/3 operatic gramophone records which caused me the cardinal sin of envy I never discovered.

He had resigned his position at “The Times” in London following years in Oxford and taken his entire pension to come to Cairo, something he had always dreamed of doing. He knew he must love that well which he must leave ere long. Dear Derrick at his best – the soft laughter, the always cigar. He smoked and drank his way up the Nile to Aswan on one of those paddle steamers.

I didn’t attend the funeral. I was in Germany at the time. James Holliday, who was Senior Tutor at Trinity, telephoned to say Derrick was dead. He was a gift.

Derrick Grigs (1933-1972), Film Critic

He is, of course, right that Bowra’s Oxford “has vanished forever” but he is wrong to thank God for it, as a letter from RD Dunn (Merton 1978) captioned “Bowra’s boys” makes clear: “The remark speaks volumes about what is wrong with politically correct Oxford today.” (“Oxford Today,” Hillary 2010, p.46)

But Sir Anthony’s review, as well as Mitchell’s informative but tedious biography, also makes clear that no one was neutral about Sir Maurice. His detractors despised him for his “loose morals” or “sketchy” scholarship; or both. His friend John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, wrote that “his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable.”

But there is the wonderful and actually true story of the Fresher who approached Sir Maurice sans jacket in the front quad of Wadham and, having imperiously instructed the Bowra to take his luggage to Staircase X, Room Y, gave him a tip. Sir Maurice took the gratuity and carried the Fresher’s luggage to the appointed room. One can only imagine the Fresher’s chagrin when at the evening meal the Warden appeared in academic gown – another Oxford tradition sadly lost – and took his place at High Table for the evening meal. “In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”

“If you want to understand something,” he said as we roared down Boar’s Hill in total darkness but full of good cheer. (I still had the roadster then.) “Read it. Then read it again. Once you think you have the hang of it, read it once more.” The voice was like canon shot.

Bowra was a coat of many colors and the most encyclopedic of men. It was he who told me to go to Iran.

Sir Maurice Bowra (1898-1971), Warden of Wadham College

Then he turned to me across the oval table. “Bind up the sheaves. Bind up the sheaves.”

Nevill was of course an original member of “The Inklings” but I suspect is better known for his modern English edition of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Many of us, however, will remember more fondly his wonderful theatre productions, – Puck skipping across the lake at Worcester College as the sun sank behind him and the lights in the trees came on. No one noticed the wooden trestle Nevill had constructed inches below the surface of the water; nor the “nightingale” that sang at exactly the same hour each night.

Nevill Coghill (1899-1980), Merton Professor of English Literature

Many years later, I was walking down the Turl on a cloudless summer morning and, as I always did, stopped in front of Duckers. There, in the show window, was a pair of shoes on sale for £100. This was too tempting. I went into the shop.

“May I help you?” asked the small, well-dressed, balding man in his fifties.

“Yes,” I said. “I should like to enquire about a pair of shoes in the window on sale for £100. Are they made by Ducker & Son?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Only they are made in Morocco; but with materials we supply and under our supervision. They are of the same quality as all of Ducker’s shoes.”

“Then I shall buy them.”

As he was boxing the shoes, a man wearing a leather apron – clearly a shoemaker – emerged through a door in the back I supposed led to the workshop where shoes were made.

I said, to no one in particular, “I bought a pair of Duckers more than forty years ago and am still wearing them.” Then, jokingly: “Would you guarantee these shoes for the next forty years?”

The man wearing the apron was not amused. “My God, Man,” he said. “This is Duckers.”

And now Duckers, like so much of what was Oxford, is no more.

She lived in three small rooms on the south side of the main entrance and rented the rest of the two-story house. Hastings and I occupied the remaining rooms on the ground floor: a large sitting room with bay windows at the front of the house, my cramped bed-sit opposite the large bathroom and Maurice’s larger bedroom at the back, opposite the spacious country kitchen.

I remember returning from the Bodleian one day and hearing his booming voice coming from the kitchen. He was seated at the large, rectangular wooden table where we ate. Seated opposite was the local Constable who had come up from Faringdon to discuss something Maurice thought the charlady had taken from his bedroom.

“Well,” Maurice asked in that Indian cavalry voice of his, “How do you manage to get information from” – he paused – a ‘person of interest’?”

“Well, sir,” came the Constable’s reply in a heavy Oxfordshire accent. “You see, we only asks them one question: Do you want it easy or do you want it hard? And if they say they want it easy, then we makes it easy. And if they say they wants it hard, well, sir, we makes it hard.”

Maurice’s monocle fell from his eye and dangled between his legs.

Our parish church was “The Fox” which in those days was Freehold. The interior was one large room divided into two sections by an open, double-sided fireplace which, in winter, burned an enormous oak log. There were large and comfortable armchairs on either side of the fireplace. We used to drive in the roadster late Sunday mornings and stay for afternoon tea. In between, lunch was accompanied by much Guinness and good conversation.