PROFILE

Oxbridge and Anglophilia

John Shelton Reed

Published online: 22 November 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Awhile back Ed Yoder, the syndicated columnist, invited meto speak at the Oxford and CambridgeDinner, a black-tie affairheld annually at the National Press Club in Washington. Afriend and a former Rhodes Scholar, he thought for somereason that I might be a suitable person to give the “toast tothe Universities.” I was given pause by the fact that I’m notactually a graduate of either University–thus hardly a graduateat all, by their splendidly arrogant reckoning. That I went tocollege in one of the nine Cambridges in the United States(the one in Massachusetts), was a visiting professor at one ofthe 20 American Oxfords (the one in Mississippi), and havevisited both of the originals as a senior member signifieshardly at all. I was never an Oxbridge undergraduate. I havenever been sconced, or sported my oak. I have never raggedabout, broken windows, or been chased by proctors. I was intomy thirties before I knew a buttery from a battel, a dean from asenior tutor. But I have regretted this regrettable fact ever sinceI learned what I missed. I share Joseph Epstein’s “hopelessyearning,” his sadness at not having gone to Cambridge orOxford. I haven’t gone so far as to become what he calls an“English impersonator,” but, like him, I’ve spent so muchfantasy time at Oxford and Cambridge that I feel I deservesome sort of degree. (Epstein suggests that “a disappointingsecond” would be about right.)

So how could I have said no? Besides, I’d always wantedan opportunity to say the words, “My Lords, ladies, andgentlemen.” (In the event, I don’t think there were any actuallords on hand, just a senator or two, but I did share theplatform with Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, whois now Lord Rees of Ludlow.) Here’s more or less what I said.

A speaker at an earlier Dinner called the occasion“Washington’s annual exercise in Anglophilia,” and it’s natu-ral that it should be such an exercise, if only because thosewho didn’t savor their Oxbridge experience are unlikely toattend. Although going to England and complaining about thefood, or the weather, or the class system is evenmore pointlessthan going to California and complaining about narcissism,there have always been such soreheads. These days, however,American Anglophobia is a mere shadow of what it was in thetime of Colonel McCormick. Witness the fact that PrimeMinister Blair was more popular in the United States than inhis own country. American Anglophobes of the old schoolused to complain about being dragged into Britain’s wars.Now the complaint runs the other way.

No, for us Anglophiles the real threat these days is notAnglophobia but indifference, or nonchalance. One of theorganizers of the Dinner observed that these days some youn-ger alumni of the Universities seem “jaded”; their time inEngland “was not their first extended stay abroad and, indeed,for some not even their first time at Oxford or Cambridge.”For earlier generations the experience was “qualitatively dif-ferent and more affecting.” Ed Yoder has written to the samepoint, in his memoir Telling Others What to Think . For his1956 class of Rhodes Scholars, “England was virgin territoryand the Atlantic crossing a novelty”; the Atlantic was still“cultural moat it had been for three centuries” and “theEuropean experience had not been democratized and, if truthwere told, rendered banal by tourism.” Ed went by ship, buteven those of us a bit younger had to change planes in NewYork, maybe even lay over in Iceland. It was a big deal. Nowthat there’s a flight every evening from Raleigh to Gatwick, itisn’t the same.

Moreover, the England we went to was very different fromthe United States. I recall such prosaic things as pub closinghours and one-bar electric heaters and pounds, shillings,and pence. Inevitably, these days, we old-timers can’t help

J. S. Reed (*)314 Carolina Meadows Villa, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, USAe-mail: johnsheltonreed@yahoo.com

Soc (2014) 51:64–67DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9739-9

feeling that England has become less English . In the early‘90s when my wife and I returned for the first time since1978 (we’d missed the entire Thatcher era, which I take tohave been a major turning-point), no sooner had weentered the Underground than we saw an advertisingposter that showed a couple of good old Southern boyssitting on a front porch in Benson, North Carolina, drink-ing Budweiser. Am I the only one who finds it sad thatBudweiser is available at all in the country that taught meto like bitter and brown ale?

The problem is not just creeping “Americanization,” thatperennial bugbear of the English left and the old Tory right;it’s galloping cosmopolitanism in general. In the cafeteria atthe Victoria and Albert Museum we found no British beer atall, just the Dutch and German lagers that one of my Englishfriends calls “Euro-fizz.” In a Knightsbridge delicatessen thepleasant young Pakistani behind the counter looked puzzled atmy inquiry. “Wensleydale,” he said. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”When I went to an Oxford Street shop to buy some tweedjackets—the ones I’d bought there 25 years earlier hadn’tchanged shape with me—all I found were unstructuredItalian numbers with wide pointy lapels. (The clerk suggestedhaughtily that I try “someplace that caters more to the touristtrade.”)

The changes aren’t all bad. Only someone who hates theBritish could begrudge them central heat and double-glazing.And thanks to Europe and the New Commonwealth andTesco and, yes, Americanization, it’s much easier to eatwell in England than it was when Ed Yoder wrote homeabout how much he missed turnip greens and cornbreadafter a steady diet of Oxford’s “drab” brussels sprouts andcooked cabbage, “unpalatable” soups, and “potatoes, andmore potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, etc., but alwayspotatoes.” In 1978 my wife and I had to take our daugh-ters to a McDonald’s in London–there were only four inthe country—for the Big Mac that was their birthright asAmericans. Now, of course, McDonald’s is everywhere,and say what you will about Mickey D’s, it beats Wimpyhands-down.

But facile generalizations about cultural convergence raisemy suspicions. I’ve made a career of arguing that AmericanSoutherners still share a distinctive culture, despite the aston-ishing economic, demographic, and political changes of thepast few decades. Just so, the England that most of us firstknew is still there. You can still find chip butties, baked beanson toast, and deep-fried Mars Bars. It’s true that Britishtelevision has become a vast wasteland of vulgarity and ce-lebrity, but there are still broadcasts of snooker tournaments,flower shows, and sheepdog trials. I can’t deny that theQueen’s Jubilee in 2002 was marked by a concert featuring,among others, Ricky Martin, Atomic Kitten, Ozzy Osbourne,and Tom Jones singing “Sex Bomb.” But there was also agarden party at Buckingham Palace where each of the lucky

guests chosen by lot received (I’m quoting from the newspa-per account) “a Waitrose hamper containing ‘Jubilee’ chickensalad, shortbread, strawberries and cream, a rain poncho and ahalf-bottle of champagne.” And although, as the Wall StreetJournal has observed, about the only blood sport still legal inBritain is hunting and torturing the Royal Family, a millionpeople gathered on the Mall to celebrate the Jubilee—amillion people , all sorts and conditions, all colors, all agesand classes–waving Union flags and cheering their Queen.(The next morning the Guardian , faithful to another Britishtradition–bloody-minded republicanism—led with a storyabout something else altogether.)

No, there is still much for an American to love and to envyabout England. Emerson wrote, in English Traits , that “theEnglish shrink from a generalization” (itself of course a gen-eralization), so I risk showing my essential American-nesshere, but let me count some ways. Every Anglophile has hisown catalog of admirable English qualities. Joseph Epstein’sincludes the sort of “English cool . . . represented by EvelynWaugh, stepping out of a bunker during a Nazi bombing raid inYugoslavia, looking up at a sky raining down bombs andannouncing, ‘Like all things German, this is vastly overdone.’”Bill Bryson, the American whose Notes from a Small Islandspent over 60 weeks on the Times bestseller list, loves theclassic British fortitude summed up in the expression “Mustn’tgrumble.” I have a friend who admires the insularity of theBritish working class, the refusal to take foreigners seriously–even when the foreigners are Americans like himself. (He hasclipped and saved a classic tabloid headline: “Why Don’t theFroggies Like Us?”) For my part I treasure a refreshing differ-ence between England and America that my friend RichardBlaustein once summed up nicely: “Brits think a hundredmiles is a long distance,” he said. “Americans think a hundredyears is a long time.”

American distances really can be incomprehensible toEnglishfolk. A woman moving to North Carolina’s ResearchTriangle noticed that Tennessee is the next state to the westand asked me if her daughter could study with a violin teacherin Knoxville. When I started to explain by pointing out thatNorth Carolina is slightly bigger than England, she was(as she might have said) gobsmacked. This attitude is catch-ing. After a few months in England I find myself thinkingthings like “It’s 120 miles to Southampton. I’d better plan tospend the night.” Of course it takes a long time to drive those120 miles, and you’ll pass through dozens of villages andtowns, most with old inns, manor houses, or parish churchesthat are worth a look. I like that.

And I like a place that has a history it takes for granted,where you run into 12th-century buildings still in use thatdon’t even make the guidebooks, where something called“New College” was founded in 1379. When Sam Pickeringwas an undergraduate at St Catharine’s, Cambridge, in the1960s his rooms were in a fifteenth-century building that was

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finally condemned as unsound. Sam went to the dean andbegged to stay, saying that it meant a lot to him, as anAmerican, to live in a building that predated Columbus. Thedean let him stay, but only after he signed a statement waivinghis right to sue if the building fell on him.

Another thing I like about England is the sense of irony thatis second nature tomost of myOxford and Cambridge friends.It largely immunizes them against the orthodoxy and senti-mentality that clutter and constrain so much of Americanacademic conversation these days. True, mawkish nationalweepfests like Princess Diana’s funeral suggest, that I haven’tmeet a cross-section of the population, but people who thinkSeinfeld has an ironic take on life need a few evenings at HighTable. My English friends’ impatience with cant is reflected inthe well-honed English art of putting each other down. Even ifAmericans had words like twee and naff we probablywouldn’t use them often–not because we don’t have whatthey describe (Lord knows we do), but because they’re rootedin social-class distinctions that we’re far more squeamishabout than the English. When one of my friends sniffed thatmobile phones are “all very well for jumped-up estate agents”it spoke volumes about the Thatcherites’ failure to makeenterprise an English trait.

I also admire a sort of temperamental conservatism thatmight drive me nuts if I were English, but that as an outsider Ifind very agreeable. The English I like best are nearly allattached to some combination of cricket, football, dogs, realale, Europhobia, and the Church of England. I only share theirtastes in beer, Europeans, and Anglicanism (and those notalways), but in general a Southerner like me understandspeople who like being what they are and intend to stay thatway. When British Air proposed to replace the Union Jack onits airplanes with something more modern and Euro-friendly–why, you’d have thought they were going to take the SouthernCross off the Mississippi state flag. This conservatism isn’teven usually political—Lady Thatcher, for instance, wasn’tconservative in this sense—and it may not even be the major-ity attitude these days, but it’s widespread enough thatsomeone who shares it doesn’t feel like an alien.

In this respect as in others, both Oxford and Cambridgeare major repositories of Englishness. Although outsiderslike me find the Universities’ similarities far more strikingthan their differences, I think there’s some truth to thestereotype that Oxford, especially, resists fashionable in-novation. When John Wesley preached a sermon there in1744, William Blackstone, then a young student, de-scribed it this way: “He informed us: 1st, That there wasnot one Christian among all the heads of Houses. 2ndly.That Pride, Gluttony, Avarice, Luxury, Sensuality andDrunkenness were the General Characteristics of all Fellowsof Colleges, who were useless to a proverbial uselessness.Lastly, that the younger part of the University were a genera-tion of triflers, all of them perjured, and not one of them of any

Religion at all.” Wesley’s sermon created a stir, as you canimagine, but Blackstone reported that, “on mature delibera-tion, it has been thought proper to punish him by a mortifyingneglect.” Mortifying neglect is exactly the right response, ifnot to Methodism, at least to a great many trendy –isms, andOxford has it down pat. When Max Beerbohm was askedwhat he thought about Freudianism, for example, he replied:“They were a tense and peculiar family; the Oedipuses, werethey not?”

For an American academic, an Oxbridge Collegemeeting can be a strange experience. At one, for exam-ple, we approved the lifetime appointments of two newfellows with almost no discussion, then considered indetail the dining rights of several categories of honoraryand quondam fellows. At another meeting we quicklyand indignantly rejected an outside auditor’s suggestionthat the College stop selling wine from its cellar tofellows for their personal use, then debated at lengthwhether the advowson of a parish held by the Collegeshould be transferred to the Bishop of Ely.

And High Table conversations are nothing likeAmerican academic discourse. American academics usuallywant you to know how much they know, and talk shopincessantly, but the approved Oxbridge style is still, as EdYoder observed in Oxford in the 1950s, “to wear learninglightly, almost off-handedly.” As Yoder learned, it is often“bad form to talk about one’s own academic specialty; thetrick,” he concluded, is “to be witty and well informed, andif possible provocatively amateurish, about someoneelse’s.” Of many memorable High Table conversations,two in particular stick in my mind. One was with avenerable Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, an ancienthistorian (in both senses of that phrase) who affected not tohave heard of Elvis Presley. The other was a discussionwith a clergyman, over good wine and, yes, brusselssprouts at St Antony’s, Oxford, of the relative merits ofterry-cloth and fur covers for one’s hot-water bottle. Fromtime to time in Oxford or Cambridge, I confess, I’ve felt asif I’d wandered into a scene from Porterhouse Blue . Thissort of thing may be what Isaiah Berlin had in mind whenhe observed that “After Oxford, Harvard is a desert.”

There are many reasons to treasure the Universities—theircontributions to knowledge; their preservation and renovationof architecture, choral music, and literature; their productionof generations of leaders, not just for the United Kingdom butfor our own country and much of the world–but someone wholikes England because it’s not like America, not likeContinental Europe, must be especially grateful that whiledoing all this Oxford and Cambridge remain distinctly, stub-bornly, obstinately English . George Orwell is always a goodname to drop with Anglophiles. In his wartime essay “TheLion and the Unicorn,” after generalizing delightfully aboutBritish traits himself, Orwell wrote, “It needs some very great

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disaster . . . to destroy a national culture.” In England, “theStock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough willgive way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned intochildren’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will beforgotten, but England will still be England, an everlastinganimal stretching into the future and the past, and, like allliving things, having the power to change out of recognitionand yet remain the same.”

The same can be said of the Universities. Change willcome, as it must, as it always has (even the Boat Race maybe forgotten), but Oxford and Cambridge will surely endure. It

was with that in mind that I asked my fellow Anglophiles torise and to drink the health of the Universities.

John Shelton Reed,William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology Emeritusat the University of North Carolina, is author most recently of DixieBohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s . This essay is based ona talk first delivered at the 59th Annual Oxford and CambridgeDinner, Washington, D.C., National Press Club, May 4th, 2005,and it is adapted from “An Anglophile Confesses,” Front PorchRepublic (www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/05). Portions are takenfrom “Missing,” Brightleaf, Fall 1998.

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