THE OTHER BROWNING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 14

THE OTHER BROWNING

VICTORIAN ETON AND CAMBRIDGE, being the Life and Times of Oscar Browning, by H. E. Wortham; Arthur Barker, English price 21/-. HOSE who know Cambridge history will remember as one of the most colourful personalities fifty years ago and more, the don called "O.B." Oscar Browning, a history Fellow of King’s, became a legend, and much more of a public figure than many a don above him. He strode through life with é/an; a lover of good food and wine; so devoted to music that he was still taking piano lessons at over eighty; blend of egotist, hedonist and idealist; touchy and affectionate; a helper of lame dogs, including waifs; always happy among the young; chronically hard up; and a prodigious talker. Dismissed from his master’s post at Eton, a grave blow, he took refuge in Cambridge, where he made the history school at King’s the best in England. Much of the detail of his stormy career amid school and university politics (he never got preferment) told in this reprint of a book published in 1927 has little interest for overseas readers, but there emerge some important facts, and the author remarks in a new preface that questions of morals and curricula raised in the record are still with us. The Eton of Browning’s schooldays and mastership was part of the hard public school core of unrelieved classicism uncovered by the 1861 commission, and his revolt against this regime was a factor in his dismissal. He fought passionately for a more liberal education, and specifically wanted to educate the aristocracy decently. This picture of Eton moves me to wonder how many of England’s military and diplomatic battles may. have been lost in its classrooms. In Cambridge he put new life into the study of history, which he regarded as a basis of statesmanship, led the movement for a Teachers’ Training College, championed the cause of women, and was a pioneer in adult education. He wrote history, but his ambition to be a great historian was not realised. Where he left his mark was on the crowd of students he taught formally, and informally as their host. It is as a professor of enthusiasm, a reformer, and a "char- | acter," that he deserves to be femem-

bered,

A.

M.