Education: Oxford Tour

The languid young man who conducted the London-to-Oxford University tour was quite unlike any guide the tourists had ever seen before. “You must be very patient,” he drawled as the bus pulled out of London. “You see, anything might happen on this tour.” As the day wore on,-the sightseers saw just what 20-year-old Tom Stacey meant. The trip they took last week—the first ever run by Oxford undergraduates—was something to remember.

The bright idea had come to Old Oxonian Stacey when he got to thinking about Britain’s festival year. Why, he wondered, shouldn’t Oxford students themselves cash in on the tourist-trade boom? His undergraduate friends agreed, and within a few days he had signed up 90 of them to act as guides at IDS. a tour. He gave them careful instructions (“You know, point out the Dean’s bathroom and that sort of thing”), and to add a bit of glamour, he even hired some London models to accompany each bus out of London and point out the sights along the way.

Missing Stars. For the first tour, of course, a few details went awry. The model was on hand, but “my very dear friend who carefully wrote down her commentary,” Stacey dolefully announced, “took . . . um … a different route.” Some of the star guides were also missing. Undergraduate Miles Jebb, son of the U.N.’s Sir Gladwyn, did not show up to conduct the tour through Magdalen College (“He’s so tired of being his father’s son”). Nor did the Hon. Antonia Pakenham, whose bailiwick was Lady Margaret Hall (“She had her parents down yesterday”).

Nevertheless, said Tom Stacey happily, “we’ve lots of charming others.” Among them was John Shakespeare (“One of those phony descendants of William. He wants to be a diplomat and a politician and a song hit writer”). There was Peter Kenworthy Browne (“He’s highly cultured, served in the Irish Guards—and that makes him so very conscious of his dress”) and 20-year-old Michael Macquaker (“He’s got such a nice girl, and that makes him interested in women’s fashions and comparative religions”).

Lost Bodies. As the bus unloaded at Oxford (“I must ask you not to go astray. We’ve absolutely no machinery for lost bodies”), the tourists split up into groups, each with its own guide resplendent in colored waistcoat and checked cap. The tourists had lunch at the Golden Cross Inn, saw such sights as the place in the Christ Church library where Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland, ended the day with tea and Mozart in an undergraduate room.

The guides confessed that they were “somewhat woolly on dates,” but they made up for the lack in other ways. They chatted about everything from Aristophanes to “fumage”—a new art form produced by holding a lighted candle under a piece of paper and “being unconsciously you.” They described the various Oxford types, tried to explain what Oxford life is like these days (“Less cash, more parties. Champagne instead of sherry, though we can’t afford either”).

All this, the tourists seemed to think, was fully worth the price of three guineas. “Delicious boys,” said an English matron. “Enchanting,” said an American grandmother. Added a cautious Finnish gentleman: “It was verry different.”