A kaleidoscope of talents

Walter Oakeshott

December 20, 1996

Walter Oakeshott was surely the Renaissance man among headmasters, for, as John Dancy demonstrates in this welcome biography, his career was marked by a kaleidoscope of talents and by many-sided achievement. Outwardly it might have appeared simply as a straightforward cursus honorum, a first in greats at Balliol, followed, after a brief period in the County Education Office in Kent, by assistant masterships at Merchant Taylors' and Winchester, culminating in the headmastership of two prestigious schools, St Paul's and Winchester, in the headship of an Oxford College, Lincoln, and with the office of vice chancellor of the university.

But the motive forces that shaped Oakeshott's life were more diverse than those of the average schoolmaster. In supervising the evacuation of St Paul's to Easthampstead Park in the second world war he displayed an unexpected talent for administration and, as a teacher, he had a remarkable gift for arousing the interest of his pupils, so much so that in giving a talk on William Harvey and the circulation of the blood one collapsed in a dead faint. There were, however, manifold outside enthusiasms, a lively social conscience that had led him as Balliol to start a news-sheet, The British Independent, to foster reconciliation in the general, and Winchester later gave him leave to make a study of unemployment under the guidance of William Temple who remained one of his heroes, resulting in the epochal and judicious Men Without Work (1938). A far-reaching scheme for educational and social reform, A Plan for Youth, which he prepared in 1942, remained stillborn, and the disappointment he suffered at this seemed to stem his further interest in educational change.

More and more he concentrated his attention on certain aspects of art and cultural history, for which he was to show an inspired flair, especially in identifying the work of writers and artists. In the Winchester library he discovered the earliest pre-Caxton text of the Mort d'Arthur and he was to recognise Walter Raleigh's hand in a commonplace book he had bought. The focal point of his scholarship was to be a detailed study of the Winchester Bible and its artists, of which the culmination was his finely illustrated edition. Not all art historians agreed with what the more pedantic among them described as Oakeshott's inspired guess-work but he had created for himself a significant niche in the field of art history.

This interest had a practical side from which Winchester, Oxford University and Lincoln College in particular were all greatly to benefit; in the restoration of ancient buildings, the chapel at Winchester, the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford and at Lincoln in the splendidly successful conversion of All Saints' Church into the college library.

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Dancy describes well the achievements of this many-sided man, the span of whose scholarly and public interests included the Skinners' Company and the Pilgrim Trust, but he admits an elusive quality in Oakeshott's personality. He seemed to lack some of the more robust qualities of the conventional headmaster and at the end of his time at Winchester was involved in an awkward and sad crisis. Basically he was a humane and sensitive man, but sometimes seemed remote, even to his wife, as if living in another world beyond his friends' ken. A man of deep spirituality, regular in his attendance at school and college chapel, prominent as a contributor to the literary panel engaged in the translation of the New English Bible, he yet seems to have lapsed from conventional religious views, finding strength in a humanist agnosticism rooted in Plato's theory of the good. Dancy has written a scholarly and engaging biography of one of the outstanding teachers and educationists of his generation.

Vivian Green is an historian and former rector, Lincoln College, Oxford.

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Walter Oakeshott: A Diversity of Gifts

Author - John Dancy
ISBN - 0 85955 219 5
Publisher - Michael Russell
Price - £24.00
Pages - 370

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