David Waddington Memoirs Read Online Free PDF

Oxford that I was going to become a barrister, mainly because a career at the Bar could, I thought, be more easily reconciled with being an MP than life as a solicitor. So when my father rang me to say he was giving up his solicitor’s practice in Burnley to become county court registrar and wanted to know whether on the sale of his practice he should make provision for me to become a partner in the firm, I told him he had no need do so.
    My father treated his former partners generously and they in their turn were very helpful to me. By a gentleman’s agreement they undertook to provide me and my family with free legal services andthey honoured that promise punctiliously, as have their successors in the practice. I am immensely grateful to them.
    At about this time I joined the Pullen Society, named after Josiah Pullen, a particularly undistinguished former principal of Hertford whose only claim to fame was that the Pullen Tree on the outskirts of Oxford had been named after him. The society was open to members who did not blow their own trumpets.
    It was the done thing to keep a little drink in one’s room for the entertainment of callers and this was invariably South African sherry which one could buy from the college buttery for five shillings a bottle. The food in college was poor but when in training the rowing eight received sumptuous fare. After one boat club dinner we tried to hit golf balls from the front quad at Hertford over the library in to All Souls. We weren’t entirely successful.
    A term was wasted because I fell in love. All I could do was sit on my window-sill looking down onto Catte Street hoping for Marigold to go by. My friends called her Poppy. It was rather an involved joke connected with her very beautiful dark complexion. My mother only made one visit to Oxford when I was there, and when I was escorting her across the high street I spotted Marigold about 150 yards away. I could not resist pointing her out to my mother and was very offended when she sniffed and said: ‘It looks to me as if she could do with a good wash.’
    Eventually I became President of OUCA and at the end of my Presidential term was responsible for the proper conduct of the election of my successor, and of the other officers and committee. The result of the presidential election was surprising. While all the well-known candidates had obtained only a modest number of votes, a Mr Christopher Vere Tombs of Oriel College got 220. That would not have mattered greatly had it not transpired that Mr Tombs, proposed by Cranley Onslow and seconded by John Morrison, was the statue in the front quad at Oriel. Cranley later became chair-man of the 1922 Committee. John, the second Viscount Dunrossil, was one of my predecessors as Governor of Bermuda.
    Looking back on my time in Oxford I can remember sitting up into the middle of the night debating the ills of the world and the shortcomings of the Labour government, which seemed to be making a mess of everything it touched. Countries which had suffered defeat and occupation were already well on the way to economic recovery while we remained enmeshed in a web of controls designed to make life as uncomfortable as it had been in the middle of the War. Those who dared attack the accepted wisdom of the day – that the man in Whitehall knew best – were derided, insulted and referred to as vermin. The patronising arrogance of some of the Labour politicians was beyond belief. When the Minister of Food, Dr Edith Summerskill, was asked in the House of Commons why there was no Stilton in the shops she replied: ‘The function of the Ministry of Food is not to pander to an acquired taste but to ensure that the people who have never had time to acquire these tastes are suitably fed.’ No wonder we laughed when, after she had challenged an undergraduate called Prentice to tell the difference between a piece of margarine and a pat of butter, a special tasting was arranged and Prentice emerged