Maurice Bowra - Academic Career

Academic Career

In 1922, he was elected a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, with the support of the Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray. When Murray vacated his chair in 1936, Bowra and others believed that Bowra himself was most likely to succeed his patron. Murray however, recommended E. R. Dodds as his successor, ostensibly rejecting Bowra for, "a certain lack of quality, precision, and reality in his scholarship as a whole". Some believed that the real reason was a whispering campaign over Bowra's "real or imagined homosexuality".

He became a Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1937.

Being passed over for the Regius Chair proved to be a cloud with a silver lining for Bowra. In 1938 the Wardenship of Wadham fell vacant and Bowra was elected to the post, keeping it until 1970, when he was succeeded by Stuart Hampshire. Bowra was supported in the election by his colleague Frederick Lindemann. Lindemann had initially opposed Bowra's election as a fellow of Wadham, proposing that a scientist should be preferred, but had warmed to Bowra because of his vociferous opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany and the policy of Appeasement. The election was held on 5 October 1938, and coincided with the Oxford by-election campaign, in which Bowra lent his support to the anti-Appeasement candidate, Sandy Lindsay.

During the Second World War Bowra served in the Oxford Home Guard. His friends were variously employed by the government, Isaiah Berlin, for example, being posted to the Washington embassy, but Bowra was offered no war work. When Berlin canvassed to find Bowra a position, the file was sent back to him stamped 'unreliable'.

Bowra was Professor of Poetry 1946–51. He wrote of the election that, "The campaign was very enjoyable and C. S. Lewis was outmanoeuvred so completely that he even failed in the end to be nominated and I walked over without opposition. Very gratifying to a vain man like myself."

He spent the academic year 1948–9 at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry and gave the 1955 Andrew Lang lecture. He delivered the 1957 Earl Grey Lecture in Newcastle on 'The Meaning of a Heroic Age' and the 1963 Taylorian Lecture on 'Poetry and the First World War'. In 1966 he gave the Romanes Lecture.

Bowra was at Harvard when the post of Vice-Chancellor fell unexpectedly vacant in 1948 on the sudden accidental death of William Stallybrass. When the most senior head of house, J. R. H. Weaver, declined the post, Bowra could himself have succeeded to it. He chose to stay in America, and Dean Lowe filled the post until 1951, when Bowra served his three year term. His briskness as chair of the Hebdomadal Council was legendary, the business of meetings that customarily occupied a whole afternoon being dispatched in as little as fifteen minutes. When T. S. R. Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959, Bowra returned to the chair of the committee, privately quipping that "jokes about his 'beaux yeux' are not thought funny".

Bowra was President of the British Academy 1958–62. His tenure was marked by two achievements. Firstly, Bowra chaired a committee that produced the Report on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes from HM Treasury. The second was the establishment of the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran.

In his long career as an Oxford don, Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is said to be modelled on Bowra. Waugh attended Hertford College (1922–24), and so, was in no sense, Bowra's pupil; indeed they scarcely knew one another at that time, whereas Cyril Connolly, Henry Green and Anthony Powell knew Bowra quite well when they were undergraduates. However, it was Waugh who marked his friend's election as Warden Of Wadham by presenting him with a Monkey-puzzle tree for his garden.

For all that they had in common, Bowra and George Alfred Kolkhorst were avowed arch-enemies, though both were friends of John Betjeman. Betjeman records his appreciation of Bowra in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells; he evokes an evening spent dining with Bowra in a passage which concludes: "I wandered back to Magdalen, certain then,/ As now, that Maurice Bowra’s company / Taught me far more than all my tutors did."

Though not in any sense religious, Bowra signed the petition (in favour of the Tridentine Catholic Mass) that became informally known as the Agatha Christie indult and regularly attended the Church of England services of his college chapel.