Experiment at 70

For several moments, Alexander Dunlop Lindsay of Oxford University stared at the departing figure of the young man with the coal scars on his face. The man, a Staffordshire miner named John Elkin, had left school at the age of ten; yet he had come a long way to hear Lindsay lecture on philosophy. "I heartily wish," sighed Lindsay, "that all my university students had a brain as good as his."

At the time, Lindsay was the Master of Oxford's self-consciously cerebral Balliol College. But his students numbered as many underprivileged John Elkins as they did proper Oxonians. Son of a Glasgow preacher, he had long before decided to devote his life to both.

Bakers & Blacksmiths. At Oxford, Lindsay was a rosy-cheeked scholar, with a wry Scottish wit and a taste for disreputable tweeds. In lofty, oak-beamed Balliol College hall, undergraduates crowded to hear his quiet-toned discourses, and at Balliol's long, oak-topped high-table with its silver candlesticks, notables came from all over the world to dine and talk with him. But in his spare time, when his Oxford duties were done, the master was apt to vanish.

Sometimes he would bicycle to some Oxfordshire village to talk philosophy with bakers, blacksmiths and shopkeepers. He pedaled his way to grimy Black Country potteries to speak on political science. Night after night, he tramped through muddy lanes to lecture under the auspices of Britain's Workers Education Association, which he himself had helped to found.

Then in 1938, he took his turn as Vice

Chancellor (Oxford's rotating presidency), stood for Parliament as an "Independent Progressive," and in 1945 became a Labor peer.

Trilby & Tweeds. The title made only a slight change in his double routine. Before each session of the House of Lords, the new peer, in his crumpled tweeds and battered old trilby, bought a third-class railway ticket and hopped a train for London. After that he returned to Oxford--to his wife, who refused to share his title ("We are simple people," she said), to his lunches of cold mutton and prunes, and to his troubled surveillance of some of Balliol's new postwar, government-aided scholarship students. Once he told the House of Lords why he was so concerned: "They were from poor homes and poor schools; they were boys for whom getting a state scholarship meant absolutely everything. Therefore their headmasters . . . embraced them. Their dear parents embraced them. Keen competition had ruined their health, almost their minds. They could only pass examinations."

Next week, Lord Lindsay's old routine ends. Now 70, he retires from Balliol, though not from teaching. He is moving bis books and few possessions to a rambling mansion three miles beyond the pottery town of Stoke-on-Trent. There, a new state-aided university has been founded--the first of its kind for British workingmen and their children. When Stoke opens next year, Lord Lindsay will be its first principal.

To his lordship, Stoke is "an exciting experiment"--the end of his lifelong dream to give a university education to all the John Elkins of Britain. "Some have told me," says he, "that ... I am proposing to put a lever under a rock which has stood in one place for a great many years. Well, then, at my age, I cannot afford to wait too long."

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