RAYMOND CARR

English Fox Hunting

1976

MY SPECIAL SUBJECT as an undergraduate was the French Revolution. I took it in part because Raymond Carr was teaching it. He was different from other Oxford dons. He assumed that you were as clever as him and talked as though to an equal. There was something of Groucho Marx about him, though he was taller and much more elegant. Perhaps it was his way of seeing the funny side of things, or his laugh at the folly of those with opinions opposed to his. The register of his voice moved between counter-tenor and baritone, with an intermittent sort of guffaw.

The lecture was at nine o’clock in the morning, in hangover time, not that that affected what Raymond might be saying. On one occasion his opening sentence was, “My God, Robespierre was a shit.” Charlotte Corday finished off Marat in the bath, the subject of a clearly improvised discourse from Raymond on what sets female murderers apart from male murderers. Unable or unwilling to draw a line between curiosity and mischief, he had called on Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley at Crux Easton, where they were living after their release from prison. He was there on the day that Julius Streicher, the most vicious and public of Nazi anti-Semites, was hanged. Raymond walked out once and for all when he heard Lady Mosley saying, “Let’s stand and drink a toast to a gallant Christian gentleman.” Raymond and his wife Sara had a house at Great Milton, a few miles from Oxford. I owned a Morris Minor and could drop in there uninvited, along with the jeunesse dorée of the moment. The atmosphere of permanent partying led Evelyn Waugh to write Raymond off as a “tipsy buffoon,” a phrase surely with an echo of envy. After I told A. J. P. Taylor that I was not prepared to have tutorials with someone as biased as him, I asked Raymond to be my tutor. It was against the rules to be taught by a fellow in some other college than yours, but Raymond paid no attention to trivialities of that sort. He once told me that he would admit to the college anyone with an x in their name, because they were likely to be foreign and exotic.

Original and inspiring, Raymond brought the past alive. When he was about fourteen, his mother caught him reading as usual and had asked, “Don’t you have any ideas of your own?” María Jesús González wrote a massive biography that treats him as the greatest contemporary historian of Spain. In the years when she was at work on it, he would keep muttering, “God, how I wish the woman would go away.”

The Jerusalem Committee was the brainchild of the ebullient Teddy Kollek; its purpose was to help him have his own way as Mayor of that city. Members of the Committee, Raymond and I were summoned to Jerusalem to discuss how to celebrate the three thousandth anniversary of the rule of King David. Professors and clergymen bombinated for much of the morning, until Raymond interrupted, “If I hear another German talking about his Geist [soul, spirit, spirituality] I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

The birth of one of his children had tested his own Geist. There were complications. The gynecologists asked him if they should save Sara or the child, as they could not save both. Sara, of course. When the moment came, the child was not breathing. Already summoned in case he had to give Sara the last rites, a distraught priest spilled holy water over the child who then came to life with a scream. Even a hard-bitten atheist like Raymond could speak of a miracle.

I never saw him out on the hunting field but others would say his courage was alarming. He survived horrifying falls. The usual spoilsports criticized his book on hunting, whose final sentence is a quote from Trotsky of all people, and a typically brilliant tease: “The attraction in hunting is that it acts on the mind as a poultice does on a sore.”