On January 30, 1933, Lincoln student David Lewis was having tea with Adam von Trott, a fellow Rhodes Scholar from Germany, in Magdalen College when a copy of the Evening<\/em> Telegram<\/em> arrived announcing Adolf Hitler\u2019s appointment as Chancellor of Germany. Lewis recalled that von Trott \u201cturned as white as the wall behind him and stared at me with desolate eyes.\u201d 11 years later, von Trott would be executed in Berlin for his role in the July 20 plot against Hitler. Today his name is carved on Balliol\u2019s memorial wall along with the students who fell in the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the coming of fascism was not limited to Germany. There was a fascist presence in Oxford in the early thirties \u2014 Lincoln student DF Karaka wrote that the fascist organisation, made up of black shirted followers of Oswald Mosley in Oxford, \u201c[shot] up in the twinkling of the eye\u201d in 1933. Karaka described that the Mosleyites stood \u201cfor all the possible permutations and combinations of all political creeds, that it is a sort of jamboree in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n One of the most famous moments in Oxford\u2019s history happened soon after, in February 1933, when the Oxford Union debated the resolution \u2018That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.\u2019 The resolution carried with 275 votes in favour, and 153 opposed, and soon sparked a national controversy \u2013 one that is well documented in the Hertford archives. Gerald Bowser described the King and Country debate as the most memorable event of his undergraduate career:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The most memorable event (perhaps notorious would be a more appropriate definition) was the Oxford Union debate about not fighting for King & Country. It was entirely unrepresentative of university sentiments and most of us were embarrassed and ashamed. I personally did not even know the debate was taking place and only heard about it afterwards”.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Murray White attended as an \u201cinveterate pacifist\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “…fully prepared to support the motion, but I was so incensed by the speeches in favour that I actually found myself speaking & voting against. The supporter of the motion were not really interested in peace as such, but spent their time slanging ‘fascism’, ‘militarism’, capitalism’, etc. etc…”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Kenneth Robinson was in the audience but wanted to make clear in his questionnaire that he \u201cvoted \u2013 but took no other part.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n The result was immediately controversial. Hertford PPE student Bernard Keeling recalled that students rushed into the Union days afterwards to tear out the minutes of that debate. Some blamed an \u2018October Club plot\u2019 for the result, but Hertford student Dick Freeman (a founding member of the October Club) refuted that by pointing out both that the Union\u2019s cost meant that few October Club members joined and that the Club had held a meeting of 250 people elsewhere in Oxford that same night. Later, Randolph Churchill returned to Oxford to try and get the result expunged from the Union\u2019s books, but failed. DF Karaka, the Union\u2019s Secretary and a Lincoln student, roomed with Denis Johnson of Hertford. In an account unseen until now, Johnson recalled that Karaka was threatened with debagging for his role in the controversy and was \u201cscared stiff and never left the digs for three days.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hertford students dealt with the coming of war in different ways. Some, like Dick Freeman, saw it coming for years \u2014 Freeman believed it likely that \u201cthe world would be plunged into another war unequalled even by the last\u201d by as early as the summer of 1932, amidst the invasion of China by Japan. But not all were that prescient. Arnold Walmesley remembered that there were no widespread fears of war and Hitler\u2019s appointment as Chancellor had \u201cno discernible effect on College life.\u201d Gerald Bowser travelled in the early 1930s, meeting Nazis in Heidelberg and being in Vienna when local Nazis assassinated Chancellor Dolfuss. Despite being \u2018in the eye of the storm,\u2019 as he later described it, the event left \u201clittle impression\u201d on him at the time. Llewellyn Lewis, a Hertford student in the early 1930s, remembered that the rise of the Nazis caused \u201cbackground fears but few, if any, thought there would ever be a war again.\u201d Later in the thirties, J. Brian Liebert was gradually convinced \u201cof the inevitability of war\u201d by Winston Churchill\u2019s speech to the Oxford Union. By 1938, the shadow of the Munich Agreement loomed large over Oxford. John Poole Hughes recorded that Munich “dominated my last year\u201d but he only signed up when war broke out on September 1, 1939. Others, like Derrick Layton, joined the University Officers Training Corps in the months leading up to it.<\/p>\n\n\n The war soon changed Oxford dramatically. Following the Dunkirk evacuation, many of the survivors camped in Christ Church Meadow. As the evacuees recovered nearby, many undergraduates faced the reality that their time as a student would soon be over. Herford PPE student Geoffrey Hamber remembered that “the weather was perfect day by day. The news got worse day by day…We all ceased to work, and in my case just played tennis and punted on the Cherwell\u201d as they waited to be called to war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The number of students in Oxford during the war rapidly decreased as did, according to Brian Galpin, the quality of the food in Hertford\u2019s dining hall. The students were mostly studying \u2018short courses\u2019 before they would be called up to fight. Hertford PPE student Frederic Bayliss worked as a fire watcher at All Souls College to supplement his scholarship in spring 1944. He and his colleagues slept in a room overlooking \u201cthe High\u201d and were to put out the fire if All Souls was bombed by the Germans, despite the fact they were never told where the water or sand was. Oxford thankfully never bombed but Bayliss recalled \u201cwalking round the roof of All Souls on moonlit nights in the black-out was real Oxford magic.\u201d He also recalled an Anglo-Italian student from Romania who was never called up because of \u201chis indeterminate nationality\u201d and, as a result, spent the war in Oxford \u201cfree to have a splendid time in the women’s colleges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dom Mintoff, the future Prime Minister of Malta, was also at Hertford during the war, and was an active recruiter for the Labour Club. He was not apparently well liked as he was described as surly, keeping to himself and smoking \u201ca foul-smelling pipe.\u201d John Poole Hughes described him as a \u201cmousey little man, scuttling about the place\u201d and KAB Roberts remembered him being debagged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following the victory in 1945, many of the students who had attended on short courses returned to Hertford to complete their degrees \u2013 no longer 18 but war veterans in their twenties.<\/p>\n\n\n Rationing continued too, ensuring life was harder than the 1930s, especially during what John Nixon dubbed the \u201cgreat freeze and fuel short[age] of the winter of 1947.\u201d John Coates was reduced to using a lamp and electric fire that winter to achieve even \u201ca modicum of warmth.\u201d Bateson, a scout, woke up student Donald Browne with the comment \u201cGood morning Sir, there’s a foot of snow, your water has frozen in the jug and the chef died in the night so there’s no breakfast.\u201d In an example of the value of the multiple perspectives included in this collection, Miles Malleson also tells the story of Bateson reporting one morning that the floor was slippery due to spilled and frozen water and that the cook had died. But not all students returned. Hamber did not return to Hertford after the war because of what he described as \u201cthe death in the war of all my Hertford close-friends of that time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.hertford.ox.ac.uk\/library-archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/03\/secondkingandcountrymotion_Mar_1933.jpg\")
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King and Country<\/q> Debate.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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