44 Lewis was almost certainly describing Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896–1958). He took a BA from Magdalen in 1921 and was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy there 1923–58. There is a good deal about Weldon in Lewis’s AMR. Weldon is also one of the subjects of the nine ‘portraits’ Lewis wrote about his colleagues in about 1927 and which are found in AMR, pp. 482–3. It seems likely that Weldon is the man Lewis was writing about in SBJ XIV in which he said: ‘Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”’ This may have occurred on the night of 27 April 1926, about which Lewis says in AMR: ‘In the evening…Weldon came in. This meant whiskey and talk till 12.30…We somehow got on the historical truth of the Gospels, and agreed that there was a lot that could not be explained away.’ See Martin Moynihan’s ‘C.S. Lewis and T.D. Weldon’, Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, vol. 5 (1984), pp. 101–5.