The Warden of St. Antony's

One bright afternoon in the fall of 1948, a big car made its way through the streets of Oxford, England, bearing a tubby little old man with a scraggly mustache, who had come to take his first look at the university. At that time few Oxonians had ever heard of 70-year-old Antonin Besse. Nor did they know that he was the mysterious, anonymous French millionaire who had just given Oxford one of the biggest gifts in its history--$6,000,000 for a new college (TIME, Jan. 31, 1949). But by last week, the whole university was buzzing with preparations for Oxford's first new college in 13 years.

To house the students of the newest college, Oxford authorities had acquired a small group of buildings once used as an Anglican convent. These they renamed St. Antony's, in honor of Benefactor Antonin Besse. Then they began laying plans for the curriculum which St. Anthony's students would follow.

Explosion in Yugoslavia. Antonin Besse had laid down only one stipulation. He wanted both Frenchmen and Englishmen to be admitted, to study in an atmosphere of Anglo-French cooperation. To create that atmosphere, Oxford picked as St. Antony's first warden just the sort of independent-minded, well-educated Englishman Besse had learned to admire during the years he had traded and traveled all over the world. Slim, trim Frederick William Dampier Deakin was the man.

A Fellow and tutor of history at Oxford's Wadham College, he had worked with Winston Churchill on Churchill's monumental life of Marlborough. Right after Munich, he joined the army. He was the first officer to parachute into Yugoslavia,* worked so closely with Tito that the two were once wounded by the same bomb explosion. After the war, a lieutenant colonel with a D.S.O., he returned to Wadham, also began helping Churchill with his famed war memoirs. Last week 36-year-old Bill Deakin took over as Warden of St. Antony's.

Trouble in the Drains. So far, Warden Deakin had neither staff, students nor furniture--"just six files and me." He still had a great deal of remodeling to do to get ready for Michaelmas term in October. Then, "after getting all the drains settled," he would have to pick a permanent committee of British and French scholars to select his students.

As Besse had suggested, a third of those 50 students will be French. Though their pattern of study will be much the same as that of other Oxonians, its emphasis will be on European history and economics. And now & then, after things get started at St. Antony's, M. Besse himself will drive up in his big car to offer his advice. "I shall welcome it," says Warden Deakin. "He's an extraordinary man ... a genius."

*Under the command of cloak-&-dagger Commando Fitzroy (Escape to Adventure) Maclean (TIME, May 1)

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