N E W S L E T T E R - Radley College

Every Wednesday evening Radleians congregate in their boarding houses for ‘Social Prayers’. Talks are given
by dons which may have a moral or spiritual element, often they relate to events in the news, but sometimes
they simply inform the boys about interesting ideas and facts which might not otherwise find their way into a
curriculum. This is an address given by the Acting Warden, Andrew Reekes:
Standing at the bottom of a broad track, alongside
Capability Brown’s picturesque lake, is a gnarled
and twisted oak tree of considerable girth and
obvious antiquity. Since Radley’s early days it has
been known as College Oak, but Radley College
is a Johnny-come-lately when set alongside this
noble tree, which dendrochronologists from the
EU have recently dated as being c.1060 years
old. In truth, it is one of the oldest extant trees
anywhere in Europe.
Pigs foraging for pannage through the forests
attached to Abingdon Abbey evidently missed a
stray nut. It took root at a time when Edgar the
Peacable, from Wessex, was King of England and
St Aethelwold the Bishop of Winchester held the
Abbacy at Abingdon and so owned the woods.
The tree was already a century old when William
of Normandy conquered England; he came to
Abingdon in 1084 to celebrate Easter, hunted
boar across Radley land and left his son, later
to be Henry 1st, to board at the Abbey. College
Oak grew and flourished through the Angevin
and Plantagent centuries, one of scores of such
trees in these parts. A layman here would have
been trespassing and it is likely that only boar
and deer sheltered under its boughs; perhaps the
occasional courting couple romped in its leafy
shelter.
At some stage, centuries ago, a lightening strike
or a natural deformity led to a strange perversion
which makes College Oak unique; its 60 foot
long sideshoot, as thick as a child is high, lying
parallel to the ground and rooting in the soil in
its own right. It probably explains why the tree is
here today. With Henry VIII came a passionate,
competitive, dynastic desire to make a mark in
Europe and war inevitably meant the need to
defend these shores with a strong navy. Henry
ordered the building of huge oak men-of-war of
which the Mary Rose was one example. Because
of its size, and height, and the design of is
gunports it shipped water and turned turtle one
benign summer’s day on the Solent. Surveyors
then, as in the time of his daughter Elizabeth,
scoured the south of England for thick, tall,
straight oak timber. Radley’s was even then too
old, too bent, to pass muster. As in the late 18th
century when the Admiralty looked for English
oak to construct a navy against Bourbon, then
Revolutionary, finally Napoleonic, France,
College Oak survived the cull.
By then, too, something else had happened to it.
It had been incorporated into the leisure industry
of its era. Capability Brown, the greatest garden
designer of his era, architect of over 140 such
schemes, was employed here to landscape the
grounds surrounding newish Radley Hall on
lands freed, after Henry VIII’s dissolution, from
ecclesiastical ownership. Capability Brown’s
style was one of smooth, undulating grass
accompanied by artistically devised clumps and
softening of trees, with serpentine lakes, all with
the aim of creating the gardenless garden. College
Oak was a picturesque prop in an 18th century
stage set, part of a contrived landscape in the style
of Claude Lorraine.
Its final incarnation, now 900 years old, was to
act as bit part player in the new Radley College,
founded in 1847. So hungry were early Radleians
that they foraged like those Anglo-Saxon wild
boar of old, for acorns from College Oak; they hid
tuck from prying authorities in its hollow interior.
At some stage – not, of course, now – it was also
the secret repository of illicit cigarettes and the
occasional bottles of hooch. By the 21st century
it was, indeed, a hollowed-out oak, a hoary old
growth, but it still had life, and survived the
attentions of tree surgeons round the grounds in
the last decade.
So, it is rather humbling to review what it has
outlived. It was 100 years old when the Normans
came, 400 years old when England’s population
was halved by Black Death, 600 years old when
Shakespeare was born, 700 years old when
Royalists and Parliamentarians surged to and
fro across Radley’s lands as they contested the
Thames Valley and Royalist Oxford; 850 years old
when beacons were lit across Southern England to
warn of impending invasion by Napoleon in 1805;
the tree celebrated its millennium as Radleians
and Eastbournians (evacuated here for the war’s
duration) gazed skywards at German bombers
passing north overhead to seek out Birmingham
and Coventry. It is quite extraordinary that a
living thing could have survived so much – over
1000 years – of our island history. That survival
perfectly illustrates why we revere the oak tree
– its resilience, strength and durability has long
symbolised those enduring rugged, yeoman
qualities of the idealised Englishman.
THE RADLEY NEWSLETTER 9
THE RADLEY NEWSLETTER 9