Soon after my return to Oxford for the Hilary term, I went along to the Radcliffe Infirmary to have the plaster cast from my leg removed. The joy in scratching the shrivelled flesh on my wasted limb was utterly delectable - although it took a while before I had got it back into normal shape and usage.

The routine rounds of heavy drinking were quickly re-established - as indicated in my journal entry of 29th January 1954.

In the meantime I had to apply myself with increasing diligence to the task of reading what was necessary for Prelims. The fact that I didn’t participate quite so wholeheartedly as some others in the round of social gatherings persuaded nearly all my friends that I was a sure bet to pass. I even heard one of them offering odds of a hundred to one that I’d get through; and I did expect to - but not with the ease they seemed to expect. I hadn’t found it easy to slip back into the habit of study, after the interludes of National Service and Parisian art school. Or perhaps it was merely that I hadn’t acquired any real interest in these subjects that I was studying for Prelims. It was Economic Organization this term, and my tutor was Blakey - an Australian lecturer at Nuffield College, whose general attitude to the subject was so laid back as to be almost soporific. And there was the additional subject of French to cover, with the necessity to read de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime. That was a labour which we all had to tackle on our own. I regarded the whole exercise as something imposed, without the inspiration of much genuine interest.

It was the extra curriculum activities which were perhaps the most valuable to my intellectual development - acquainting myself with modern English literature, and with the world of classical music. I also found myself rediscovering an interest in the game of chess. I’d been good at chess during the early years at my preparatory school, but had only played the occasional game when at Eton. I now found myself in the company of friends who relished the competitive edge within such contest - friends such as Ian Rankin, John Lucas-Tooth, Laurence Kelly, Tim Sainsbury and [H]. The latter was rather better than me at this stage, but the rest of us were more or less on a par. It was a pleasure which was to remain with me throughout the rest of my life.

The whole idea that I might ever sit the Civil Service exam in the hopes of joining the Foreign Office was now fading fast - even if I hadn’t dropped it completely. I touch upon the subject in my journal entry of 25th January 1954, when I am describing a particular conversation I’d been having with Laurence - whose father it should be recollected had been the British Ambassador in Moscow. Laurence himself had always assumed that he’d be following in those footsteps, but he’d been offensively derogatory when we’d been in the Life Guards together about my qualification to share such ambition. Far from being the perfect diplomat himself, he was too apt to set up his discussions where it was transparently arranged that the right people were present to carry the conviction in discussion which he lacked. In this instance he was endeavouring to profit from Tim’s presence, to hit me with the same message that he’d previously delivered. But I was successfully side-stepping his thrusts. I failed to convey this atmosphere in what I actually wrote.

It could be however, that I was gradually adjusting my own inner sights as to what I could reasonably expect from life. I was sensitive to the secret judgement that my friends might hold concerning my potential, and there was certainly a conflict of interests within the two careers that I was contemplating. I was perhaps looking for the right way of telling myself that I’d be well advised to drop all thought of the diplomacy stunt. And I touch upon that issue when seeking to lay down an outline of how I am hoping to benefit from these years at Oxford, within my journal entry of 12th April 1954.

I was seeing quite a lot of [H], either at the parties we both attended, or when he dropped in to have a chat with me. But his instant enthusiasms sometimes displayed a touch of madness about them. For example he was urging me on one occasion to join him in some madcap scheme to smuggle out some relative of his from Hungary. [H] was a member of the Oxford Flying Corps, so he had constant access to light aircraft. But the details on just how he intended to borrow one for such an exercise remained obscure to me; it was something about a rendezvous in a secluded spot just over the border from Austria. With a few drinks inside me, the whole idea sounded most exciting and I was agreeing to accompany him. But it was a project which had faded in both of our minds by the following morning.

His enthusiasms about myself might possibly be categorized under the same madcap heading. He had been the only person at the time of my exhibition to want to buy one of my canvasses - an intention which he kept on finding pretexts to retract after it had been stated. He did eventually take possession of the painting, having persuaded me to accept half the price, (I think it was £10,) with the other half reluctantly donated to him by the artist. But I know that with part of his mind he was constantly wondering whether I might not (just possibly) be going to emerge as a genius, whose work he ought to snap up while such talent was still in an immature state.

As a great many people concluded before very long, [H] could be tiresome. In his own uncertainty as to whether he might be making a fool of himself in evaluating me too highly, he would attempt to bring to the surface the uncertainty in my own heart as to the way I might deserve to be assessed. He accused me one evening of posing as a genius, saying that this was the impression that I gave a lot of people - without of course committing himself as to how he judged me personally. But he went on to suggest that I should submit to a series of psychological tests, such as he had probably been given himself by a qualified psychiatrist who (I was inclined to assume) had, at one time or another, been required to sort him out. I was happy enough to give him spontaneous answers to the questions he then posed, but it was irritating that he wouldn’t then offer me the conclusions which he had supposedly discovered.

What I really felt was that he was putting me at a disadvantage under bogus pretences. He was hiding behind the subterfuge of saying that complex questions needed to be expressed in a complex fashion. A couple of days later I received a poem from him, in contemporary poetic idiom which was far more advanced than anything which I myself had ever written, and sufficiently obscure for me not to have much comprehension of whatever he might have been trying to say - or not to say, as the case might be. But it left me feeling just faintly uncomfortable that his regard for me might be homosexual.

But I knew as well as others how [H] simply delighted in giving false impressions. It was his great game to present himself as something falsely, as much as it was to present himself in any true (but to him meaningless) colours. And it was perhaps because he sensed my inner perplexity on the subject of homosexuality that he chose to play that front to me - offering it as something I might take for real, and then reinterpreting it as an example of his own buffoonery. There were far too many instances when my patience was sorely tried, and it seemed to me that they were becoming progressively worse.

Initially it may have been harmless enough, like the times when he ran to the foot of the stairs in Meadows 5, crying out as if I was assaulting him homosexually. "Stop it Weymouth! Ouch! Let go of my cock! Ouch! If you stop hurting me Weymouth, I’ll do anything you want!.... Oh yes, that’s starting to be nice. Faster! Faster! Oh yes, I’m about to come! No wait, we can’t do it out here. Let’s go back into your room...." And so on. My problem was that I didn’t really know my neighbours well enough to explain [H]’s antics to them, so I knew not how literally they might be reading all that he so publicly proclaimed.

The worst instance of all started while I was taking a bath at Christ Church - in one of the private cubicles in the public bathroom for my portion of the college. I heard him calling out my name with an enquiry as to whether I was there, and like a fool I said yes. Then in typical fashion, [H] set out to make a nuisance of himself. To start with he was getting his fun by throwing objects over the top of the partition, so that they splashed into my bath when not landing on my head. Then he started ripping out the bathroom fittings such as the towel rails, adding them to his armoury of missiles. [H] was barred from more colleges than any other of my friends, for outrageous incidents such as this one. But he needed to get caught before he could be barred, and he must have realized that his present behaviour was liable to get me (rather than himself) into trouble, since I was the one whose name might be known to the others present. And there were indeed others taking their baths in the neighbouring cubicles, as the splashing sounds indicated. But my anger merely delighted him in its impotence.

The game then took a different tack. He began addressing me in whispers from outside the cubicle, insinuating that he was my lover and that all he wanted was for me to unlock the door so that he could take a look at me. I was shouting at him to go away, but he responded by climbing up the partition wall from the bath next to mine so that he could gaze down at me. I did finally manage to drive him from his perch with a deluge of water, but he was acting out the role of offended lover throughout these proceedings. And I found this to be outrageous in that he was deliberately seeking to create an erroneous impression in the eyes of people with whom I was liable to mingle.

After far too long, he did desist, and I imagined that I might now be left in peace. But when I returned to my rooms, I found that he had tucked himself up in my bed - and was still proclaiming his love for me. A struggle ensued with my purpose being to get him out. It is only this latter part of the proceedings which I saw fit to describe in my journal of 21st January 1954.

The fear of failing our Prelims became quite obsessive as the hour of our ordeal approached. And of course this wasn’t the only way of getting rusticated, or even sent down from Oxford. My friends Bendor and Ian learnt this to their cost. But they had created a long history by now, of provocation against the authorities. So I’ll pause to mention their most recent offences.

Bendor had succeeded in severing an artery in his leg, after putting his boot through someone’s window - his condition arising from the fact that he was too drunk to remember to withdraw his leg after kicking. After that episode he was placed upon a last warning by the Senior Censor at Christ Church. And Ian had found himself in trouble with the Proctors after the police had reported his involvement in a fight with some American servicemen. Ian had been passing a pub in the vicinity of the Grid-iron Club, when an American GI came stumbling out of it and bumped into him - to which Ian had responded by unleashing a punch. But the serviceman had called out to his buddies in the pub, who had promptly rushed out to join in the fray - whereupon the police arrived upon the scene.

Each of them knew only too well that the authorities were just waiting for any pretext to send them down from Oxford - with the expectation being that they would fail their Prelims. But they didn’t even last that long. Someone had thrown a champagne bottle through the study window of an undergraduate whom they regarded as a trog - for an offence which I cannot recollect - and even though Tim Rathbone had gone up with a specious confession that the hand which threw the bottle was his own, more attention was given to the fact that both Bendor and Ian were involved in the siege. Ironically in that this was just about the first crime where they were relatively innocent, they were promptly rusticated, but with permission to return to Christ Church in a week’s time to sit their Prelims - when it was assumed quite accurately that they would both fail. They were then sent back into rustication, with the sentence that they could resume their studies until the Prelims had been passed. Bendor never did make it, although Ian managed to confound everyone by passing them on his second attempt, and then rejoining us at Christ Church at the start of the next academic year.

I fared better myself, although I had no reason to feel proud of my results. Several of my papers were marked Vix Satis - which implied only marginal acceptance of the standard I had attained. Still, the hurdle was now behind me, with all its consequent release from the anxiety which this entailed. It would be a full two years before I had to sit any further exams, so that I could now approach the task of educating myself in somewhat broader scope, and at the more leisurely pace which lent itself to these expanding interests.

Quite apart from my life at Oxford, I was being initiated into new duties which it was hoped, I daresay, would establish me within a pattern of responsibility towards the local community at Longleat. I’m not sure whether the idea originated with Henry, or whether it happened as a result of a suggestion from Mr Wheeler, who was the Head Forester on the estate. But I was invited to sit on the Horningsham Village Council around this time. It wasn’t a post in which I felt at all comfortable. I only put in an appearance on rare occasions and, when I did, my sense of detachment from life in the village made it difficult for me to make any useful contributions to whatever required discussion. We might have been talking about life on another planet as far as I was concerned, and I felt silly about being there at all.

There was this feeling I suppose, that a new role within the village life should be worked out for me. The quasi-feudal structure of bygone days required to be replaced by something different - something more democratic. But no one was quite sure how I could be usefully integrated within the restructured social order. My separateness was all too blatant - no role models for me to imitate, and no social vacuum for me to fill. When Henry had been my age, the situation had been clear cut and traditional. Life up at the big house involved a whole organization of its own, which overlapped at established levels with that other system of organization for the social life of the village. But in moving back into Longleat, I had somehow set myself up as an identity on my own, and no one could declare with confidence just what sort of a role I ought to be playing.

An area where Henry wanted to prepare me for stepping into his own shoes was as Patron to the Lord Weymouth School in Warminster. This had been founded by the 1st Lord Weymouth, and the head of the Thynne family had presided over its functions ever since. Mr Macdonald who was the Headmaster, wasn’t aware at this stage that Henry intended to relinquish his own official role in the school’s organization, but he was quite happy that I should put in my own attendance at the annual meeting of the governing body, where it was proposed that I should come over and be introduced to the senior boys on the occasion of the school play. This was remarkably well-acted and produced, but I did not feel at ease being paraded before the cast backstage. Their smirks and titters made me feel ridiculous in the role where I had been cast, when at heart I knew that I was still little more than a schoolboy myself. They had no respect for the pretensions of my position as the school’s (deputy) Patron, and I felt that they were sniggering at me just as soon as my back was turned.

It was taking an inordinately long time for the transfers of land and capital from my father to myself (in order to avoid the payment of death duties) to be fully enacted. But the general plan was that I would soon be placed in effective control of the greater bulk of the Longleat estate - excepting the inner nucleus of the house and its park. And the Cheddar Caves, which is to say the only portion of the estate which actually made any significant profit in those days, were to be mine - effectively managed by our estate agent, Mr Algar and his team. So the current concern was to introduce me gradually into the routines of directing the various branches of the family business.

Then there was the question of whom should handle my finances, and there is a letter from Henry which addresses itself to this question - evidently in answer to a query I had made about the money that had been left to me by my godmother, Laura Corrigan.

I think that the breaking of the entail must have been enacted in various stages, with the transfer of capital being the first of the benefits to become effective within my life. There is evidence in my journal that the deal hadn’t been fully concluded as yet, although it was in the process of taking place. I think there was already a cash flow of some kind trickling monthly into my bank account - from stocks and shares in terms of dividend payments and the like. This probably dated from the beginning of this financial year. So I was no more reliant upon an allowance from my father. I was very soon to be financially independent, even a relatively rich man, but still totally unaccustomed to such an idea. Nor did I permit my new wealth to go to my head. I had been raised to be far too cautious concerning all money matters, so that the habits were unlikely to change overnight. In fact it could be true to say that I had been set in my ways long prior to this date, and that they were to last me for an entire lifetime.

It made very little difference within my life at Oxford in any case - which was beginning to look as if alcohol was featuring too prominently within what might have been assumed to be hours of study. I shall quote a passage from my journal entry of 27th April 1954, written shortly after my return to Christ Church for the start of the Trinity term.

There was one big difference now, in contrast to the two previous terms, was that I suddenly found that I had an interest in what I was studying. The subject was Philosophy - or Moral Philosophy to be more precise. And my tutor was [W]. The first essay that he required me to write for him was to examine the meaning of `good’. And it got me exercising my thoughts in a manner that had never happened with the Constitutional History, or the Economic Framework. And I was finding from the very start that [W] was offering me friendship, quite aside from being my tutor, which created a novel situation in my life - a situation quite usual in university life where the roles of friend and mentor can happily be combined.

Something which took me utterly by surprise was [W]’s insistence that I was far more intelligent than I seemed to imagine. In fact he endeavoured to prove his point by taking up a book in intelligence testing by Terman and Merill, and demonstrating to me how I was answering questions correctly from within the category they described as Superior Adult Class III. In fact he was claiming that I had an IQ of something over 150 - a score which I have never found confirmed elsewhere. (I might suggest a score around 130 as being more realistic.) But his line of argument was that there must be cultural inhibitions within my family background against regarding myself (or perhaps anyone at all within the Thynne family) as being intelligent. This was a handicap which I ought to surmount. And I ought to get myself to appreciate from the very start that it was within my reach to obtain first class honours in my final exams, if I truly set my sights upon doing so.

While I sit bemused, counting the ticking clicks,
a funicular carriage hauls me relentless to appalling
height, where I fight the panic which threatens to engulf me -
half in dread that the train will jump its track.
From a back door in a Western bar, dressed
a deputy sheriff, my finger ringing the trigger
of a new unnotched gun, I enter -
pensive in prospect that the bullets I’ve loaded are blanks.
Clanking cauldrons jacked to a stove, and blurping
troubled bubbles - an image more in keeping
with the bleeping thoughts my mind can mint -
contrasted with the fast dynamic shuttle of computers.
I feel as if I’m urged to wear a hat
denoting intellect I cannot match.

I did indeed feel stimulated by [W]’s assessment of my intellect. At the same time I regarded his judgement with incredulity. And when [W] got me to answer questions from an exam paper for him, he was obliged to take the line that my technique of writing essays was at fault. But my Finals were way ahead of me in time, so there seemed little reason to worry about any of that.

It was through [W] that my interest developed a lot further in the direction of psychology - that being one of the subjects which he personally had studied. He recommended some elementary books for me to read upon the subject, and I now saw some reason to regret that I hadn’t selected Philosophy and Psychology as the subjects which I should read. But it was a bit late now to think of switching, even if I was to suppose that the faculty would have been willing to accept me within that other fold.

Perhaps more than anything else over the course of these two terms, I had been firming up on the group of friends with whom my time at Oxford was to be associated. Or it might be more accurate to say that particular groups had made a definite bid in selecting me for membership, rather than the other way round. Right at the start of the Hilary term I had been elected into the Grid, and at the start of the Trinity term I was elected into the Bullingdon and into Loders - a Christ Church dining-club. And there was the Canning Club too, where members read a paper on a subject of their choice - to be debated by the other members over mulled wine.

All of these things had happened to me within the space of two terms, so that my undergraduate identity was now more or less defined. And it remains a bit obscure to me, even now, just what steps I could have taken, without giving considerable offence, to have arranged my life otherwise. Although it may have looked differently to me when I had first come up to Oxford, I could see now that I had fallen into a slot which had been preordained for me.

There were social activities this term which related to each of these clubs, but it will suffice here to quote from my journal entry of 24th May 1954, which describes the Bullingdon dinner and the Bullingdon cricket match against the local constabulary - starting with the former.

The cricket match against the local constabulary was a regular fixture at this time, for it was deemed (incorrectly as I was soon to discover) that it would result in our receiving more lenient treatment for our misdemeanours at the hands of the law, if we cultivated their friendship. And the general purpose of the game was to supply alcohol in such abundant flow, that we might expect to win from sheer drinking prowess, and not from any cricketing skills. The match was being held at Worcester College.

Right at the end of the term, I had to put in my attendance at the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry’s summer manoeuvres. This was at Tilshead which was conveniently close to Longleat. Even though our two years of National Service had been completed, there remained an additional two years of territorial service in the local regiment of our choice. And it had been a long-standing tradition for the Thynne family to serve with the Wiltshire Yeomanry, which was now under the command of Colonel Timmy Gibbs, who had in fact been Henry’s Second-in-Command in B Squadron, during the months leading up to El Alemein during the war years. There were quite a number of my former school friends doing their territorial service along with me - such as Charlie Morrison for example. Charlie was the first of my personal school friends to get married - announcing his engagement to Sara Long on the final day of this camp.

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