Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Then I drove to Great Zimbabwe, a magnificent and mysterious ruin, evidence of a highly intelligent civilisation in place as early as the eleventh century. Rhodes had looted it, of course: one of the noble ‘Zimbabwe bird’ statues was installed at his house (Groote Schuur) in Cape Town and another stands atop Rhodes House in Oxford. When I passed through Rhodesia in 1970, Ian Smith’s racist government had banned archaeologists from suggesting that Great Zimbabwe had been built by Africans, lest people get the idea that they could be clever: they were ordered to speculate that it was the work of wandering Jewish or Arab architects. Actually, it was almost certainly built by ancestors of the Shona people with the profits from trade in gold and ivory.

  After a tedious three-day drive through the monotonous countryside of Zambia came the thrills of the Serengeti, a World Heritage environment second only to the Great Barrier Reef. Revhead that I am, the experience of racing a cheetah travelling at 60 mph against the backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro stays with me still. So does the experience of being charged by a short-sighted rhinoceros, who pulled up a few paces from our jeep when he realised that we were not, after all, a love rival. Going over the top of the Ngorongoro Crater and descrying hundreds of thousands of flamingos on the lake in the centre of the extinct volcano surrounded by clearings full of elephants and zebras was another never-to-be-forgotten experience. But this was Tanzania, and despite the Christian socialism of its leader, Julius Nyerere – the gentlest man ever to preside over an African country – there were human rights abuses from which animals could not distract me for long.

  They were taking place offshore, in Zanzibar – the ‘zan’ in Tanzania (the new name for the old British colony of Tanganyika). Dr Nyerere, who had translated two Shakespeare plays and the Bible into Swahili, was by 1970 regretting the amalgamation which made the island’s ruler, Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume, his vice-president. The sheikh was the caricature black despot to whom South Africans liked to point in their attempts to justify apartheid: he announced that there would be no elections on the island for the next sixty years, since democracy was a Western luxury that impoverished Africans could not afford. Then he took it into his head to require local Arab virgins to marry black Africans. He decreed that any unmarried Zanzibar girl must accept a marriage proposal from a ‘physically sound male citizen’ – and shortly before I arrived, a number of unwilling Arab women were forcibly married to his party officials. When the parents objected, they were jailed. Then, to emphasise his point, he himself married a nineteen-year-old virgin, said to be unwilling (although it was a criminal offence to speculate). I ignored the beaches and the picturesque Arab dhows on the placid emerald waters, and wrote a story intended for publication in Nation Review once I was safely in London. My suggested headline was ‘Democratic Marriage on Zanzibar’, although Richie Walsh retitled it ‘The Sheik and the Single Girl’.

  Nyerere’s promise of ‘democratic socialism’ would soon be betrayed, not only in Tanzania, but in Kenya, Malawi, the Seychelles and elsewhere on the continent, by new constitutions establishing one-party states. Much later, I would be involved in the task of trying to unravel them. For the present, my problem was how to parachute into England in time for Michaelmas term – the arcane description of the first of three eight-week sessions that made up the Oxford University year. Air travel in 1970 was prohibitively expensive, unless you joined a ‘club’ that was entitled under some obscure IATA rule to organise cheap charter flights. For this reason only I joined a sports organisation – the sport in question being the hunting of big game – which entitled me to fly in an old jumbo from Nairobi to Benghazi (where we refuelled while surrounded by soldiers of the newly empowered Colonel Gaddafi, pointing their guns at our plane) and thence to Stansted, an airport in the Essex countryside where I was vouchsafed my first sight, on coming in to land, of the green fields of England.

  As a naïve Australian I headed for Earls Court (my knowledge of London was limited to this ‘Kangaroo Valley’ and the places that appeared on the Monopoly Board) and spent a week feeding unfamiliar coins into spluttering gas meters – although it was still summer, the temperature reminded me that in England, summer’s lease had all too short a date. But there was no time to be disappointed – the West End beckoned. My first stop was a play that would have been banned in Sydney for its blasphemy, although Abelard and Heloise (starring Keith Michell and a briefly, if memorably, naked Diana Rigg) deserved to be banned for its banality. Next I hammered a hire car around little England – I drove to Penzance, in honour of Gilbert & Sullivan’s pirates, and in the same day up several motorways to Inverness to watch the sunset ripples on Loch Ness. The places in the postcards sent by my father seemed less impressive close up: Stonehenge, for example, was just an array of battered old stones compared to the imposing ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

  Finally, the entrance to Oxford. It still provokes a warm tingle of wonder whenever I reach the roundabout at Magdalen Bridge and drive up the long, question-mark curve of the High Street, to see the jutting façade of University College leaning towards Queen’s and All Souls on the other side of this yellow brick road. Oxford, like Cambridge, is a collection of colleges with centuries-old reputations (most were there during the English Civil War) with which students are expected to bond more closely than with the department teaching their subject or with the university itself. Whenever you mention that you studied at Oxford or Cambridge to anyone who also attended those universities, their invariable response is ‘Which college?’ – a question much more significant than the identification of your subject or your supervisor. It evokes an old-boy network unlike any other, epitomised years later when I came face to face with Lord Diplock, the brilliant but reactionary judge who delighted in tearing my arguments to pieces in the House of Lords judicial committee. We were at a BBC seminar on terrorism (I was there to represent the terrorists) and afterwards, to our mutual horror, found ourselves face to face in the crush at the bar. Thinking quickly, I recalled seeing his name on some books that had been donated to the college library, so I ventured to thank him. His death’s-head face creased into a wide smile. ‘Ahh,’ he said, making an appreciative noise, ‘you’re a Univ man, are you?’ It was open sesame – he bought me a drink – several, indeed – and told me all about his secret work (he was commissioner for national security) until very late in the evening. This is how Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt came to infiltrate the security services on behalf of the KGB – they were hired and advanced by chaps who had attended their colleges.

  My alma mater was University College (invariably known as ‘Univ’) which had been founded in the thirteenth century. That made it the oldest, but not the richest, college. Australians generally made the mistake of choosing Balliol (where, in the unlikely event that they were admitted, they would be housed in small, newly built rooms alongside American postgraduates) or Magdalen (beautiful, certainly in the rooms that overlooked the deer park, but noisy during the rutting season). I had chosen Univ not so much for its celebrated socialists (William Beveridge, architect of British post-war social reconstruction, had been a master, Harold Wilson a don and Bob Hawke a student) but because it was currently the college of two liberal legal philosophers I greatly admired – H. L. A. (‘Herbert’) Hart and his successor as Professor of Jurisprudence, Ronald Dworkin. These men were intellectual lodestars, providing principles against the law tangling with moral standards, which chimed with Sydney’s criminologists and their practical reasons for abolishing laws against abortion, homosexuality and obscenity.

  Hart in particular had been the proponent in a celebrated debate with Lord Devlin about the continued existence of the common-law offence of ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’, a law so vague that it permitted judges (as one had declared) ‘to guard the moral welfare of the state against attacks which may be more insidious because they are novel and unprepared for’. That the job of preparing for and punishing new forms of misbehaviour belonged in a democracy to Parliament, and not to jud
ges, was precisely Hart’s point.

  Dworkin, a former Rhodes scholar from America, agreed, but took up the further argument that judges had a power, and indeed a duty, to interpret legislation according to certain fundamental principles which could be derived from the very concept of law, including respect for human rights. It required no personal propinquity to agree with these ideas, but it was certainly a privilege to dine and discourse with these intellectually renowned scholars. Ronnie supervised my thesis, which in due course became a book (Obscenity), and his philosophy was to be a life-long inspiration. We sat together at a seminar organised by the Times Educational Supplement shortly before his death in 2013, where I opined that the UK would never achieve true equality until Oxford and Cambridge universities were abolished. He was less shocked than everyone else.

  I meant it, although the thought would not have crossed my mind while I was at Oxford: the university had cast its spell over the thinking world. Here I sat a few feet from the pitted moonface of W. H. Auden and the noble, if ruined, visage of Robert Graves, listening to them declaim their verse. I heard Mikis Theodorakis bemoaning the Greek junta, John Kenneth Galbraith and Ralph Nader expanding on the arguments in their books – all, I think, in my first term. It was a time when the most famous people would go out of their way to speak at the Oxford Union, although this was really a juvenile debating society where students with political pretentions honed their blunt wits. Self-important politicians graced its benches so that they could report the fact in their autobiographies.

  It is ironic that the union gained its historical significance from a vote in 1933 that it ‘would no longer fight for King and Country’ – a support for appeasement that doubtless reflected the refined apathy that privilege engenders. Certainly, the university’s Law Faculty lacked all initiative and imagination – I had been better off at Phillip Street Tech, where by the time I left we had finally begun to think about law as a tool for achieving social justice. Oxford was a city with a car industry and increasing numbers of its employees were being thrown out of work by the policies of Ted Heath’s new Conservative government. It had problems of homelessness, drunkenness and delinquency. Yet no one in the faculty was interested: the dons flowed quietly, teaching property law. Of human rights law, they had not heard. When a young don, Bryan Gould – a former New Zealand Rhodes scholar – called a meeting to set up a legal advice centre for unemployed car workers, I was the only person who attended and we had to abandon the project. The lack of interest might have been defensible if traditional subjects had been taught with any creativity – as they were at Harvard, for example: lectures there having long been abandoned in favour of the case-study technique. At Oxford, the most celebrated professor in the faculty, who had written the textbook on private international law, turned up to read it, line by line, for sixty minutes. He wore a long black gown and announced at his first lecture that students would not be admitted unless they wore gowns as well. I read his book but refused to gown-up to attend his lectures.

  There were other unattractive aspects of the Oxford experience. On my first morning in my ‘rooms’ (we had two, unlike ‘redbrick’ students with a single room), I was aroused by an elderly retainer: ‘I am your scout, sir. I shall wake you with a cup of tea every morning, make your bed and do your washing …’

  ‘You shall do no such thing,’ was my immediate response, as I explained that I did not want to see him again until I gave him the traditional tip at the end of term. I should like to think that this was an Australian’s rejection of upper-class privilege – it was absurd to be cosseted by a superannuated slave – but it might have been more to do with the fact that his early arrival would interfere with my John Donne-induced fantasy of having bountiful English undergraduates sleeping with me until lunchtime.

  My South Australian friend Julian Disney was at Univ as well, occupying rooms recently vacated by Bill Clinton (we later joked about the stains still visible on the sheets). For a reason we could not initially fathom, we were both called ‘Bruce’ by undergraduates. Then we noticed how on Tuesday nights they all decamped to the television room (there was only one TV in the college) and we followed, to enjoy the lumberjack song in one of the early episodes of Monty Python. A previous episode had featured the sketch about the fictitious Woolamaloo University Department of Philosophy, where everyone bears the name of ‘Bruce’, so we laughed along with our would-be sledgers. The show was hilarious – at least it was in 1970, before all the repeats.

  I did my bit for the college, rowing (Rhodes scholars, heavier and heartier than weedy English undergrads, were good for ballast) and playing tennis, in which the team did well in a competition called ‘Cuppers’ (for a cup, presumably), although rain usually stopped play. The old college groundsman, who kept the lawn courts and the cricket pitch immaculate, was fond of Australians: ‘We had that Bob Hawke in our team once. He had a really safe pair of hands.’ (Not if you were Bill Hayden, he didn’t.)

  In order to indulge my interest in journalism I sought out the offices of Cherwell, the university newspaper, named after the slim stream that serves for summer punting and evokes memories of the riverbank in The Wind in the Willows. They appointed me features editor, from which position I was able to arrange interviews with those of the university’s philosopher–kings who were prepared to submit to them. Stuart Hampshire, the philosopher, literary critic and Warden of Wadham, pointed out the importance to the Oxford college system of the physical architecture – how the beauty of the buildings, their shape and disposition, provided an intimate environment for learning and reflection.1 I conceded the point – the gardens at Univ were great places to sit and think, surrounded by buildings that had cast shadows over scholars for centuries – but I was not sure (at least in my case) of the quality or worth of the thoughts that came to mind. I have always had more inspiration when looking at a brick wall – beauty is a distraction, as I found a few years later when I took a flat with a magnificent view of Sydney Harbour in order to write a book. Words did not come, just the yachts and ocean liners followed by my mind’s eye.

  Another editorial initiative of mine was to expose the scourge of alcoholism in Oxford and, I suspected, other towns in Britain where so many jobs were lost in this austerity period. We demanded that the town ‘spare a thought for Oxford’s shambling brigade of alcohol-poisoned beggars whose request for “a couple of bob for a sandwich and a cuppa” regularly touch student hearts and purse strings …’ It would be a good opening for a Hypothetical – Do you give money to a beggar? – because it is sure to elicit different but equally well-meaning responses. None are quite so puritan as my own at twenty-four: ‘The only truly charitable response to a beggar’s plea for food money is to take him to the nearest shop and to buy him the food he so obviously needs – NOT to give him money, which is invariably spent on alcohol.’ These days I’m less judgmental and hope my grateful beggars buy – and enjoy – a good whisky.

  It was a time when the popular press was headlining the horrors of drug addiction (when are they not?), so with the help of Oxford’s scientists I compiled comparative tables to prove that alcohol and cigarettes were more harmful than marijuana. My own experience of drugs was limited, and still is. I became drunk once at a teenage picnic and hurled my heart out beneath a gum tree, and have never imbibed alcohol immoderately since. (As for British beer, I have never imbibed it at all since the first sip of that insipid room-temperature brown water.) Nicotine has never held me in its thrall (remembering my mother, who fell for my father because he was the only fighter pilot she met who did not smoke). LSD I have never touched, despite the encomia of the youthful Keith Windschuttle – my brain is difficult enough to unscramble without chemical complications. Cannabis, of course, should be legalised, at least if they develop a ‘potalyser’ that can catch those who ingest the weed and then drive. Bill Clinton was unusually truthful when in answer to the question of whether he had ever taken marijuana at Oxford replied, ‘Yes, but I did not inhale.’
The mode of ingestion at the time was via hash cookies.

  As for cocaine, I have sampled it on only three occasions. The first, with Richard Neville, was in New York, in the approved way – through rolled-up hundred-dollar bills provided by one of his millionaire friends. It did produce a portentous feeling of invincibility, so I immediately went walking at nightfall in Central Park, then the mugging capital of the world. After forty-five minutes the effect wore off, I had lost my way and felt incredibly stupid and quite frightened. I resolved not to yield again to this temptation, but on the second occasion it was impossible to resist. I was at the house of a wealthy lawyer at Palm Beach, on the occasion of the legendary ‘gonzo journalist’ Hunter S. Thompson’s visit to Sydney. The legend and I were ushered into a room where lines of white powder had been generously laid out on the table. Snorting them seemed to be the right thing to do, under the tutelage of this drug-promoting ne’er-do-well, who – disappointingly – looked and sounded like an accountant both before and after he snorted what appeared, at least, to be cocaine: it had no effect on me at all. Perhaps it was washing powder, provided by a host who hadn’t the connections to indulge his famous visitor. The third occasion was in a London hospital after I’d had a wisdom tooth extracted, and a grinning Australian anaesthetist said he would pack the cavity with coke. The effect was to make me want to talk volubly, so I rang my wife at a dinner party to chat to our friends. She reported that they all thought me uncharacteristically charming.