²ÝÁñÊÓƵ

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. We spoke to Ashley Jackson, Professor of Imperial and Military History at Kings ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ London and Old Member of ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ. Jackson recently published Oxford's War: 1939-1945 (Bodleian Library Publishing), a pioneering account of the extraordinary and often hidden role that Oxford played in Britain's war effort. The first comprehensive examination of Oxford’s extensive involvement in the Second World War, it brings to light stories and material from the University archives.

What is the subject of your new book? 

The book I've just brought out, Oxford's War: 1939-1945, is a history primarily of the University, but one that hopefully tries to set the University's war experience within the context of the city and indeed the wider county. It came about many years ago when I was at Mansfield. There was an enormous, thick black thing beneath one of the windows in the library, and I always wondered what it was. When I asked the librarian, she told me that it was a blackout pelmet holder. And so I wondered what on earth there was a blackout helmet holder there for. And she told me that the library had to be blacked out, like all of the windows in Oxford, specifically there, because the library and the college had been taken over by the Admiralty. So this is a question which, arose for me back in the mid 90s, and it's taken me all this time to actually get round to doing some research to try and work out what was happening in Mansfield, but also other colleges and indeed the university in the city during the Second World War. 

What was ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ's role or experience in the Second World War? 

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ, like other colleges, had the standard range of experiences: a huge drop in the number of undergraduates (it being an all male college at the time), disastrously bad food very often in as rations struck home. But there also is one particular vignette, some that I can think of. Early in the war, the Warden of ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ is visiting London, working on a committee dealing with conscientious objectors, and he's actually knocked over and killed on a London street, and then, bizarrely, afterwards, some years afterwards, his underwear is used to dress the corpse that is floated ashore as part of Operation Mincemeat. which is a rather famous operation.

²ÝÁñÊÓƵ also exemplified the kind of role that Dons undertook during the war. So, for example, a ²ÝÁñÊÓƵ fellow at the time and for many years after the war, Christopher Cox became a really, really important adviser to the Colonial Office. 

At the same time it changed the very fabric of Oxford University, the Second World War brought intellectual diversity and development. To what extent did the War enrich Oxford's place as a cultural hub? 

As is often the case, the war was a force for change within the University. Intellectual change, a stimulus in many ways in terms of, say, science and medicine, but also in the arts as well. One of the main features of Oxford's war and indeed the pre-war decade, is it becomes one of numerous refuges for people fleeing terrible events in various parts of Europe. Through the sponsorship of people within the UK, and scholarly networks set up to help refugees flee places like Germany, there was a major injection of talent into the University's research pool. For example, Frederick Lindemann's chief scientific adviser actually went to Germany, years before the war, and deliberately targeted scientists who could help with the investigations into what eventually became the atomic bomb project. 

There were also a lot of people who might have been bringing expertise in, for example, battlefield medicine, plastic surgery from the Spanish Civil War, but also in terms of of arts and literature and music, there's a very large number of people who are fleeing Europe, who end up in Oxford and Cambridge and London and places in America, too. And they're part of an enriching and, if you like, an enhancing of the outward looking perspective of the University.

How has your experience of Oxford changed now that you understand how vastly the spaces and buildings changed across the last century? 

One of the things that I found most rewarding about researching this book was the fact that, like many people, I've lived around the city for some years and and I'm familiar with its layout, its buildings, some of its institutions. When writing the book, I was able to look at this place that is so familiar to so many people, many, many years ago, and appreciate how many things that are very familiar were just different then. This is very much something that I try and do early in the book: give a sense of what Oxford was like as a University and as a physical space, in the 1930s and 1940s. So before we even really got to the war, what was Oxford like? And it was it was very different in many ways. first of all, things like the smallness of the colleges, their maleness, the fact that many buildings that we're familiar with didn't exist then, whole colleges that we know just didn't exist, and also many things that we do know now didn't exist then. There were different shops, lots more shops, different streets, different bustle, lots more hotels, a lot more independent shops, different street lighting, different street furniture. So that was something I thought found very interesting was having the opportunity to walk around, rather indulgently looking at different buildings and how they had contributed the war. 

What surprised you in your findings for this book? 

One of the main things that interested me was the sense of smallness, of Britishness, particularly of Englishness, before the war. And also, how the war was responsible for changing that, along with other things that were happening in society more widely. But then you must also ask "What really changed after the war?". Can we look at Oxford in the 1950s and say it was appreciably different from, say, the 1930s or the 1940s? I think that's one of the most interesting things for for anyone who associates with Oxford: What constitutes change and real change, as opposed to what constitutes a change in one's own experience or perception? 

Buy Ashley Jackson's newest publication, Oxford's War: 1939-1945