Oxford

Yes, thank you, I had a very nice weekend. Mary and I and our daughter Jenn visited Oxford yesterday, stayed overnight in Reading and popped into Bath on the way home today.

I have been to Oxford once before. About 10 years ago I took a busload of our most academic pupils to enjoy a taster day in the university. I liked it a lot but really didn’t see much of Oxford itself apart from the inside of some lecture halls. Yesterday we only scratched the surface but at least I did get to pay a visit to the Ashmolean Museum.

I’m sure you already know this, but the Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in the UK. It was created when Elias Ashmole passed on his collection to Oxford University on the understanding that it would be housed in a public museum which the University would build. Having seen at least part of the collection yesterday I’d say that the University got a pretty good deal out of it. I only scratched the surface when I got the phone call from Mary to come and have some afternoon coffee (I’m teetotal – I don’t touch tea) but the Museum had already passed the 2 hour test and while a coffee is always welcome I could have stayed longer.

Old Elias Ashmole seems to have been a bit of a lad, one way and another. He married a wealthy widow who was 20 years his senior so that he could avoid anything as distasteful as paid employment, for example. More pertinent to our story, though, was that he obtained the collection of John Tradescant the Younger. John’s father, John Tradescant the Elder was a very successful gardener to the nobility and even royalty, who was also an avid collector, not just of plants and seeds but also of curiosities. His son, John the Younger, was if anything even more of a collector. They called their collection, which they kept in Lambeth, The Ark, then the Musaeum Tradescantianum. Wily old Elias became friends with John the Younger and helped produce a catalogue for the collection. John the Younger lost his only son (John the Even Younger?) in 1652 and when he died in 1662 his will bequeathed the collection to Ashmole. John the Younger’s widow, Hester, contested the will – well you would, wouldn’t you? Her claim was that Elias had conned him into the will when he was blind drunk. Well, even if there was any truth to this, a widow, in fact any woman, could expect little sympathy from the courts in the 17^th century, especially considering that Elias had been a committed Royalist and had been rewarded at the time of the Restoration.

One less than finest hour for the Ashmolean concerns the remains of the ‘Oxford Dodo’. Tradescant the Younger had acquired a stuffed and mounted specimen of a dodo. We don’t know where from – there are records suggesting that a couple of dodos were brought to London in the last few decades before John II died, and it may well have been one of these. It was displayed in the Ashmolean from the Museum’s opening, but the care it was given was not all it could have been. In 1755 an inspection revealed that it was infested, and it was incinerated with only a foot and a head being deemed to be saveable. These are now in the Oxford Museum of Natural History. It’s not true to say they are the only extant remains of a dodo, but they are certainly the only remains with any soft tissue.

On the subject of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the museum first opened in 1860. Now, sadly, I just didn’t have time to visit yesterday, but it’s on my list. I love a Natural History Museum and I’ve visited them in many cities. It’s quite possible that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who included a dodo as a character in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was inspired by the Oxford dodo remains in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, in fact it’s highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen it, living in Christ Church College himself. The famous painting of a dodo by Dutch artist Jan Savery was also on display in the museum, and it seems highly likely that John Tenniel based his illustration of the dodo on this picture, bearing in mind the similarities. The story of the dodo was well entrenched in the Victorian consciousness by the 1860s as a cautionary tale about man interfering with Nature. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection” had been published on a few years earlier in 1859, and the huge furore surrounding it had heightened public interest in zoology and extinct creatures.

Coming back to the Oxford dodo, the tragedy is that these are the most complete remains of any single dodo, and the only known tissue remains  of one on the planet. As a footnote, in 2018 researchers from the University of Warwick, using highly powered scanners, discovered lead shot in the back of the head and the neck, leading to the conclusion that this dodo was shot, rather having died of old age or mistreatment as had been previously conjectured.

The phrase insult to injury seems somehow appropriate.