The Bovadium Fragments, page 7
The conclusion was obvious, he felt: ‘No reasonable person could wish to see a road built across Christ Church Meadow…. The Minister should order a fresh comprehensive approach.’[50]
Dick Williamson, then a junior lawyer working at the Oxford firm of solicitors Morrell, Peel, and Gamlen that acted for the University (and who would act on behalf of J.R.R. Tolkien and later the Tolkien Estate and Trust), was instructed to round up submissions from a variety of worthies from Town (city) as well as Gown (university). The people he got agreement from included Alan Bullock (then both Principal of St Catherine’s College and Vice Chancellor), Dunstan Skilbeck (Principal of Wye College in Kent, who was called to cover the agricultural value of the Meadow), and the Heads of Worcester, Trinity, Lincoln, St John’s, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville colleges. The local photographer Raymond Stanton King, Sir Basil Blackwell, Tom Driberg (a local MP and Christ Church man) and Osbert Lancaster, the cartoonist, read out their proof of evidence and were available for cross-examination, but the Counsel for the City declined to cross-examine any of the University’s witnesses as they were all speaking in favour of the Meadow as a place of beauty, a fact not disputed by the City. There was, however, one exception in Mrs Christian Hardie who was called as ‘an Oxford Housewife’. Harold Marnham, junior counsel for the City, took the opportunity to cross examine her, claiming that as the wife of an Oxford don she was very much part of the ‘Gown’. She responded robustly saying that the Junior Counsel for the City seemed to have little idea of what happens in Oxford, adding that whether this was personal ignorance or lack of instruction, she did not know.[51]
The Battle Won
The debate over the Meadow Road in the middle of the 1960s took a decisive turn when it became clear to those opposing the road that the city would have to cease appeasing the motorist. Buchanan made this explicit in his evidence: ‘the idea of being tougher with the motorist has revolutionized the position’.[52] By the end of the public inquiry, Buchanan’s evidence, and the organized presentation of other expert witnesses from both within the university (Gown) and from the city (Town) saw the proposal for the Meadow Road change to one which ran well to the south of Sharp’s proposed route. This road (now called Donnington Bridge Road) would run from the southern end of the Iffley Road and run across the river to the Abingdon Road’s southerly end, enabling the east-west link up that Dale and Sharp had correctly identified, but without encroaching on Christ Church Meadow itself. The Sharp plans had also suggested redevelopment of the poor-quality housing at St Ebbe’s. This too would eventually come to pass, together with a new road from St Aldates to the train station (Oxpens Road), which were other badly needed elements of improvement to the city, but which were held up for decades while the debate over the Meadow Road continued to rage. For a while the Meadow plan would still be tentatively pushed forward, but the Secretary of State for the Environment in 1971, Peter Walker, eventually put an end to the discussion, debate and rancour over the Meadow Road once and for all. The deciding factor for him was ‘the unique and irreplaceable character of Christ Church Meadow itself, which is of importance far beyond the boundaries of the University or City.’[53]
Conclusion
The Meadow Road was an extraordinary episode in the history of Oxford, but also in the history of town planning, because it related to Oxford, with its combination of Town and Gown, and where the University had educated many of the men who would make key decisions in Government. The question was even discussed in Cabinet, so Lord (David) Eccles reported in a debate in the House of Lords in 1963:
‘the voices were pitched high; tempers were ruffled; passions were out in full force.The Balliol and New College men were on one side, the Magdalen and Christ Church men were on the other, while the Cambridge men looked down their noses in smug silence. No page of fiction, no ugly scene from the novels of Sir Charles Snow, could equal that abortive struggle.’[54]
‘Oxford is not a Museum’ wrote Alan Bullock in 1963, ‘and no one who lives and works in it supposes it can remain a great university without facing far-reaching changes.’
In the midst of the public debate over the plans, which it would have been hard to be unaware of in Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Bovadium Fragments. Although satirical, it was good humoured and moderate in tone, though the message is clear – the role of planners in changing the environment in which people lived in order to work and live, and in giving priority to the motor car, was both dangerous and negative. The changes that Bullock alluded to were not welcomed by Tolkien, and The Bovadium Fragments was his contribution to the debate.
Tolkien’s views on the motor-car have already been discussed, but the specifics of the impact of the motor-car and the motor industry must be seen in the broader context of Tolkien’s own sensibilities regarding modern life. From the perspective of the twenty-first century we might think of The Bovadium Fragments as a contribution to environmental literature, writing that is critical of man-made intrusions into the natural environment. Many doctoral theses, journal articles and entire books have been written in recent years on Tolkien’s imaginative writing and his concern for nature and the environment.
CAR TRANSPORTER OUTSIDE BALLIOL COLLEGE To any reader of Tolkien’s creative writing, the focus of The Bovadium Fragments comes as no surprise. His love of the natural environment is expressed throughout his Middle-earth work, both in the text and his own illustrations, and in a letter to Rhona Beare in 1958 he remarked that, ‘I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and “natural” objects’.[55] Trees were of particular importance for Tolkien, as he wrote to Jane Neave in 1962: ‘Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate’, and in 1972 he wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘in all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies’.[56]
Tolkien had a deep love for nature, but he also had a deep love for rural life, especially the older pre-industrial way of life in which man lived and worked in the countryside. His childhood visits to rural Worcestershire in the early years of the twentieth century gave him the opportunity to experience at first hand a way of life that was fast disappearing, and this would stay with him: ‘Any corner of that county … is in an indefinable way “home” to me, as no other part of the world is.’[57] This love of English rural life, imbued in Tolkien from such an early age, would find its way into his creative writing, especially as expressed in The Shire, the home of the Hobbits. The penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings sees the triumphant but exhausted Hobbits return at last to their beloved Shire, Frodo and Sam’s ‘own country’, the place ‘that they cared about … more than any other place in the world’. Here, at the end of their epic adventures, where they had hoped to return to their old life, unchanged, they received instead a ‘really painful shock’ seeing the traditional homes deserted or burned down, and what was worse, ‘looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air’.[58] These devastating changes were accompanied by authoritarian rule that threatened not just the environment to which the Hobbits had hoped to return, but the social order. Eventually the Hobbits would defeat the ‘ruffians’ (led by Saruman) but as they returned to Bag End:
‘the great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across theWater, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking overflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.’[59]
Such a moving and powerful evocation stands in a line begun earlier by writers such as William Morris and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who shared a love of nature with a love of Oxford.
Tolkien was especially familiar with Hopkins’s writings, and must have known of his famous poem ‘Binsey Poplars’, which has also come to be considered a classic work of environmental literature. In it Hopkins lamented the felling of trees along the Thames path at Binsey, a tiny hamlet within easy walking distance of central Oxford:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.[60]
The melancholy that ‘Binsey Poplars’ is steeped in also pervades the end of The Lord of Rings with the sense of time coming to reckon with the old established ways of living. J.R.R. Tolkien was not an active combatant in the war against modernity and the motor car in Oxford, or even the battle against the Meadow Road, but The Bovadium Fragments suggests that he was prepared, in his own way, to play his part. As Saruman’s forces are vanquished in the Shire, Sam Gamgee exclaimed: ‘And that’s the end of that’, and his completed sentence could have been written as a comment on the saga of the Meadow Road: ‘A nasty end, and I wish I needn’t have seen it; but it’s a good riddance.’[61]
RICHARD OVENDEN OBE
ANCIENT AND MODERN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank many of my colleagues in Oxford who gave valuable help during the research for this piece: Judith Curthoys, Julia Walworth, William Whyte, Dick Williamson, and within the Bodleian, Nick Millea, Faye MacLeod, the staff of the Special Collections Reading Rooms, and especially Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien Archivist. Huge thanks to Martin Parr for introducing me to the photography of Cas Oortuhys in Oxford. Finally, I would like to express my profound thanks to Baillie and Christopher Tolkien. On one of my visits to stay with them, Christopher told me about the Bovadium Fragments, and we had a long discussion about them and their origin. It was his idea for us to collaborate on the book. I miss his warmth, his sense of humour, and his deep knowledge, but give thanks for having known him.
R.O.
Works by J.R.R.Tolkien
The Hobbit
Leaf by Niggle
On Fairy-Stories
Farmer Giles of Ham
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
The Lord of the Rings
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
The Road Goes Ever On (with Donald Swann)
Smith of Wootton Major
Works published posthumously
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo*
The Father Christmas Letters
The Silmarillion*
Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien*
Unfinished Tales*
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien*
Finn and Hengest
Mr Bliss
The Monsters and the Critics & Other Essays*
Roverandom
The Children of Húrin*
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún*
The Fall of Arthur*
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary*
The Story of Kullervo
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
Beren and Lúthien*
The Fall of Gondolin*
The Nature of Middle-earth
The Fall of Númenor
The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
The History of Middle-earth – by Christopher Tolkien
I The Book of Lost Tales, Part One
II The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two
III The Lays of Beleriand
IV The Shaping of Middle-earth
V The Lost Road and Other Writings
VI The Return of the Shadow
VII The Treason of Isengard
VIII The War of the Ring
IX Sauron Defeated
X Morgoth’s Ring
XI The War of the Jewels
XII The Peoples of Middle-earth
* Edited by Christopher Tolkien
Endnotes
[1] See pp. 85 ff.
[2] See J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator by Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull (figs. 7, 16, 19, 25 & 60) and Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth by Catherine McIlwaine (fig. 63).
[3] Professor Clyde S. Kilby of Wheaton College, Illinois, stayed in Oxford from June to August 1966 to assist my father with The Silmarillion. An account of this is given in Scull and Hammond,Vol. I, pp. 701–2, who note that Kilby wrote comments on writings that my father gave him to read, and attached them to the manuscripts.
[4] [GUMS.] Elder tongue and popular. These terms are taken from F III. It is true that the word here rendered elder is of uncertain meaning, and may be derived from language A: its written form is ITA ; but there can be no doubt that the description ‘elder’ is in any case appropriate. The term popular supplies further evidence that A, a primitive survival from a more barbaric time, was confined to the fortress or ‘academy’ of Vasti, while even the rustics of the surrounding country now spoke the more cultured language B, from which our own harmonious speech is ultimately derived. The alternative renderings, suggested to me by younger scholars, native speech or vulgar tongue, are thus clearly unsuitable. It may be noted that the hitherto unexplained word academy, academia is clearly shown by these texts to have referred to the inner fortress of Vasti. I have, however, retained it in my translation.
[5] from lffley turn to Hinksey Hill. – Hinksey Hill rises between the villages of North and South Hinksey to the south-west of Oxford, and Iffley lies to the south-east on the other side of the Thames, not far from Cowley (see the note on Vaccipratum, p. 41).
[6] The phrase laici et togati is used in Fragment I (p. 13), and the words used in the corresponding place in Fragment II (p. 17) are ‘both learned and lay’. The adjective togatus means ‘wearing a toga’ (the cloak-like outer garment of a Roman citizen), but my father was using the word in a transferred sense, a robe of office; in laici et togati ‘learned and lay’ he was clearly thinking of the gowns of the scholars of the ‘academy’ of Vasti.
I suppose the same is true of cives et togati, but – in the spirit of Dr. Gums, p. 11 – I have left ‘wearers of the toga’ in my translation.
[7] On the history of the Meadow see especially Judith Curthoys, The Cardinal’s College: Christ Church, Chapter and Verse (London 2012), 22–35.
[8] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, 1844), text accompanying plate XVIII.
[9] Harry Carter, Wolvercote Paper Mill: A Study in paper-making in Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957)
[10] Stephen Ward, Ossie Stuart, and Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Cowley in the Oxford economy’, in The factory in the city: the story of the Cowley automobile workers in Oxford eds. Teresa Hayter and David Harvey (London: Mansell, 1993), 67.
[11] Martin Adeney, The Motor Makers: The turbulent history of Britain’s car industry (London, 1989), 79.
[12] Ward et al, ‘Cowley in the Oxford economy’, 71.
[13] J.P.B. Dunbabin, ‘Finance since 1914’ in History of the University of Oxford. Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century ed. Brian Harrison (Oxford, 1994), 647–8.
[14] Ward et al, ‘Cowley in the Oxford economy’, 83.
[15] John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest (London, 1938), 8.
[16] Betjeman, Oxford University Chest, 9.
[17] Quoted in Richard Whiting, ‘University and Locality’ in History of the University of Oxford. Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century ed. Brian Harrison (Oxford, 1994), 569.
[18] J.R.R. Tolkien Roverandom; Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (Oxford, 2018), 262.
[19] J.R.R. Tolkien, Roverandom eds. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (London, 1998), 87.
[20] MS. Tolkien B62/1 fols. 40r-v.
[21] MS. Tolkien 14, fol. 159r.
[22] Alan Bullock, ‘Oxford: an introductory essay’, in Cas Oorthuys, Term in Oxford (Oxford, 1963), 8.
[23] [Lawrence Dale], Christ Church Mall. A Diversion (Oxford, 1941), 4-4.
[24] Lawrence Dale, Towards a Plan for Oxford City (London, 1944), 23-26.
[25] Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea, Talking Maps (Oxford, 2019), 110.
[26] Thomas Sharp, Oxford Replanned (London, 1948)
[27] K.M. Stansfield, ‘Thomas Wilfred Sharp (1901–1978)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/31673.
[28] Sharp, Oxford Replanned, 19–21.
[29] Sharp, Oxford Replanned, 106.
[30] Cited in Brotton and Millea, Talking Maps, 111.
[31] T.F.L., ‘Co-operative communities’, Planning Outlook Series, 1 (1948), 50–53.
[32] J.N.L. Myres, ‘Oxford Replanned’, Oxoniensia, 13 (1948), 89–93.
[33] Roland Newman, The Road and Christ Church Meadow (Minster Lovell, 1988), 10.
[34] Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson ed. Richard Davenport-Hines (London, 2006), 179.
[35] Newman, The Road and Christ Church Meadow, 12.
[36] Cited in Whiting, ‘University and locality’, 573.
[37] Davenport-Hines, Letters from Oxford, 180.
[38] William Whyte, ‘Lost causeways: Oxford, experts and the motor age’ in Resplendent adventures with Britannia: personalities, politics and culture in Britain ed. William Roger Louis (London, 2015), 294.
[39] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien eds. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (London, 2023), 340.
[40] MS. Eng.c.3028 Papers of A.L. Goodhart, fol. 43r
[41] MS. Eng.c.3028 Papers of A.L. Goodhart, fols. 21r-22r.
[42] Newman, The Road and Christ Church Meadow, 14.
[43] MS. Eng.c.3028 Papers of A.L. Goodhart, fol. 12r
[44] Broadcast on 21 May 1961.
[45] Carpenter & Tolkien, Letters, 438.
[46] Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (London, 1977), 209.
[47] The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology eds. Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond Revised and expanded edition (London, 2017), 774.
