‘We’ve barely arrived in Oxford. We’re still just a few yards outside the railway station, and already we’re standing on a piece of land that has been an abbey, a station, and a business school … Every square metre of Oxford has been so many things that even the plaques are crowding each other out: plaque beside plaque, plaque over plaque, plaque to a previous plaque.’
Patrick McGuinness puts it brilliantly (Real Oxford, pp.23-24). Like footnotes about footnotes, wheels within wheels, mirrors reflecting mirrors, Oxford is multi-dimensional, multi-layered, and multi-plaqued.
This is hardly surprising when you consider the number of luminaries who have gazed upon our dreaming spires across the ages. The University website lists just a fraction of the ‘Famous Oxonians’ who have studied here: among them 31 British Prime Ministers, 58 Nobel Laureates, and 170 Olympic medal winners.
The 20th and 21st century register runs to well over a hundred names, from Tony Abbott the former Prime Minister of Australia, to Qian Zhongshu the man who translated the writings of Chairman Mao. The 19th century roll-call ranges from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde via Gertrude Bell, Lewis Carroll, Emily Davison, and WE Gladstone. And the catalogue of earlier eminences stretches back to before the Norman Conquest.
The category ‘Oxford people’ in Wikipedia (by which is meant mortals who did not study at the University) is equally numerous and rather more varied. Notable women include Yasmin Le Bon, Rosamund the Fair, Martha Combe, and PD James. Notable men include Ronnie Barker, Richard the Lion Heart, Martin Keown, and ‘Barn the Spoon’ (Barnaby Carder) a world-renowned wood-whittler.
So why do some people and places get blue plaques and others not? Here’s a link to the website:
In essence: people need to have been dead for at least twenty years and to have lived at the site of the plaque for at least five. Moreover, plaques cannot appear on colleges or listed buildings without special consent. And they have to be paid for via donation (the cost of manufacture and fixing has risen in recent years to approximately £850 – a fund-raising challenge that has, so far, been heroically met.)
[Come to think about it, it’s probably just as well the criteria are tightly drawn. Imagine you woke up one day to find the whole of Oxford plaque-splattered, like the morning after some hyperactive paintball fight …]
The first ever roundel to be unveiled (2001) under the Oxfordshire Blue Plaque scheme was in honour of the marmalade-maker Sarah Jane Cooper (1848-1932). The most recent commemorates Beatrice Blackwood, the formidable curator of the Pitt-Rivers museum from 1938-59. It also happens to be the 150th plaque in the series.
Our favourite examples are two which, although blue, are not officially sanctioned by the Oxfordshire Board: the first (in Harris Manchester College) because it is incomprehensibly oblique if you haven’t studied philosophy:
The second because it adds an air of mystery to the Covered Market:
One we could do without is another sort of spoof – but this time neither witty nor intriguing. It’s part of a so-called ‘Open Plaques’ initiative, the inane possibilities for which are endless.
As well as celebrating famous people, plaques can also be used to mark certain significant places and events. The Iffley Road Track, for example, where, on 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile. Or the laboratory where penicillin was developed (before being administered in the Old Radcliffe Infirmary – also enplaqued – in 1941).
The pub which spawned the club which was to become Oxford Utd bears a blue badge of honour, as, dishonourably, do the infamous Cutteslowe walls which, up until 1959, divided middle-class home-owners from their council-house ‘neighbours’. The place where the Civil War surrender of Oxford was negotiated (1646) is duly marked.
And we were intrigued to discover that the first home of the Oxford Playhouse is on the site (12 Woodstock Road) of what had previously been a ‘Big Game Museum’ which was subsequently converted into a motor-car showroom and later still hosted one of the first miniature golf courses in the country. Talk about plaque over plaque …
There’s even a plaque at Redbridge which, we learn with barely containable civic pride, marks the site of ‘the first enduring Park and Ride bus scheme in the UK’, inaugurated in 1973.
A few years ago we were invited to the ceremonial installation of a plaque (aquamarine rather than blue) on Folly Bridge. Sponsored by the Lewis Carroll Society, its purpose was to commemorate the river journey, 4 July 1862, which inspired Alice in Wonderland. Gyles Brandreth unveiled it with great aplomb and also, he confessed, a degree of trepidation, for he had once pulled aside such a shroud to reveal a sign saying ‘Blue Plague’.
What about all the other plaques? – we hear you cry. For there are brown plaques, green plaques, purple plaques, black plaques, plaques of all different shapes and sizes and materials …
There are, in fact, so many plaques we’ll have to postpone further analysis for another occasion. As one wit put it: ‘The only place you won’t find any plaque in Oxford is at the dentist.’
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The Chair of Oxfordshire’s Blue Plaques Board, the former Regius Professor of History, Robert Evans FBA, is the proud (erstwhile embarrassed) possessor of a mis-spelt ‘plauqe’.
Eda Forbes, to whom many thanks for expert advice with this Story, has been Secretary to the scheme for no fewer than 22 years. She writes:
There was much debate and not a little consternation when the plaque for the Reverend William Spooner, Warden of New College, was unveiled last year. Should it be called a ‘Plue Blaque’ in his honour, the board mused? In the end sobriety prevailed, although they did manage to squeeze in ‘Kinquering Congs’.
Stephanie Jenkins is official photographer for the Blue Plaque scheme. She also maintains her own website which is extraordinarily impressive in its range and detail – including myriad other plaques and inscriptions. One of her favourites can be seen above Christopher Wren’s 1669 entrance to the Divinity School opposite the Sheldonian. It is the only outdoor plaque in Oxford to be inscribed in Ancient Greek.
‘Tooth Fairy’ writes:
The sign outside number 42 St Giles doesn’t count as a dental plaque, I know, since it is a nameplate for the surgery. However, what people may not know, as they pass by, is that inside there is a different kind of plaque. It’s a framed copy of the marriage certificate of CS Lewis and Joy Davidman. For this was once the site of the old Oxford Register Office where they were wed in April 1956.
Both Lewis and Davidman have their own plaques in Headington. Lewis’s is blue.
http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/headington/davidman.html
http://www.oxonblueplaques.org.uk/plaques/lewis.html
An enthusiastic follower of Morris Oxford (and incorrigible punner) wrote in to ask if there was an instance of two plaques on adjacent abodes: in which case he could declare ‘a plaque on both your houses’.
The answer is Yes: at 34 & 35 St Giles’, and, arguably, 11 & 12 Crick Road – though the latter houses are detached.
‘A plaque on both your houses’ could also be interpreted in a different way: namely one honorand who has a plaque on two homes. In which case JRR Tolkien fits the bill perfectly:
One issue which exercised the Oxfordshire Board was the proposal in 2012 to put a plaque on the house in which Ronnie Barker had spent his teenage years – 23 Church Cowley Road. He had been dead for a mere seven years not twenty as stipulated under the official criteria; but it was argued passionately that he was such a household name and so widely admired and loved as an entertainer that the rules should, in this case, be relaxed before his memory faded. Thus far it is the exception that proves the rule. Malcolm Graham’s tribute makes fascinating reading.
