Colleges: Boola, Booia Balliol

Architecturally, Oxford’s Balliol College is a Victorian Gothic pile of no great distinction; in vintage its statutes are junior to Merton and University colleges. Yet it sits at the head of Oxford’s intellectual table—a proud hatchery of Prime Ministers, archbishops, cardinals and viceroys. Of Balliol’s 400-odd students, 20% regularly win first-class honors on final exams—a record unmatched by any other Oxford college, not even haughty Magdalen.

This year Balliol (pronounced BALE-yul) is seven centuries old, and it celebrated the birthday in a flurry of skyrockets, French cuisine and champagne toasts. On hand were 2,000 Balliol graduates (Prime Minister Macmillan excused himself to dine with J.F.K.) from Lord Privy Seal Edward Heath to King Olaf of Norway and Boston Financier William Appleton Coolidge. Whether or not Balliol really was 700—an agreed age more than a historic fact—they cheerily drank the ancient toast, Floreat dornus de Balliolo, meaning roughly, boola, boola Balliol.

Conversion at 8. Balliol began as a penance imposed on John of Balliol, a Scottish baron who kidnaped a bishop in a dispute over land, and to make amends endowed a hostel for 16 indigent scholars at Oxford. The resulting college went on to harbor such notables as John Wycliffe and Adam Smith, but its star did not really rise until the advent of Benjamin Jowett, the great classicist who took over as master in 1870, molding men and minds for 23 years.

Master Jowett disdained “all persons who do not succeed in the world,” exhorted Balliol men to do or die the empire over. “Never apologize, never explain,” Jowett advised one viceroy-designate in a famous aphorism. “Do you possess the art of picking other people’s brains?” he asked another. “This is a great shortening of labor and saves many mistakes.” Viewing his office as one of the kingdom’s greatest, which it still is, Jowett once found something “offensive to God and highly displeasing to me.” No friend of doubters, Jowett is supposed to have warned one lad: “If you do not believe in God by 8 o’clock tomorrow morning, you will be sent down” (booted).

Balliol’s current master, Sir David Lindsay Keir, is a legal scholar who maintains Jowett’s old stress on under graduate minds and muscles via stiff classics, intimate tutorials, rugger and rowing. Graduate research is still rare at Balliol, but science is finally getting its head; of the 39 fellows, nine are scientists and mathematicians. The, others remain brilliant eminences in philosophy or Sanskrit—men like Theodore Tylor, tutor in jurisprudence and one of Britain’s best bridge players, although he is almost blind.

And Lord Peter Wimsey. Balliol wafts along on a modest budget of $450,000, costs students about $1,260 a year, and is well laced with state scholarship boys. To spruce up the premises, it is launching a $2.8 million birthday fund drive, but bricks interest it less than brains. Only the brightest apply each year, and only about one out of six (including six or eight Americans) gets in. Hardly anyone drops out.

“Once they’re here,” says Master Keir, “the rest of us help keep them here. We are not rigid.”

Since Jowett’s day, Balliol has turned out four Archbishops of Canterbury, two Roman Catholic cardinals, famous politicians with names like Lansdowne, Asquith, Curzon, Grey and Amery, plus platoons of ambassadors and lesser British civil servants. Mystery Writer Dorothy Sayers quite naturally made her erudite hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, a Balliol graduate (after Eton, of course). Flesh-and-blood Balliol literary figures include Matthew Arnold, A. C. Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Harold Nicolson, Nevil Shute and Hilaire Belloc. It was Belloc who unabashedly wrote:

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again;

And the best of Balliol loved and led me,

God be with you Balliol men.