Wolfson College Record 2021

wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Two Memories of Wolfson
in the 1960s
25 Linton Road in 1967–68
by Doug McIlroy (MCR 1967)
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy, adjunct Professor of Computer Sciences at Dartmouth
Colllege, is a pioneer of software engineering; a member of the team which developed
Unix. He recalls ‘a top highlight of my career’, his year in Oxford working with
Christopher Strachey, one of Wolfson’s Founding Fellows, in the Programming Research
Group.
Andrew Prentice and I were the College’s first resident members, living in an old
house on Linton Road that afforded us a close-up view of the gutting of ‘Cherwell’
on the Wolfson site and the blessing of the new foundation stone. My family
occupied two floors and Andrew Prentice’s family lived on the top floor. Some
rooms were vacant.
American caricatures of British heating arrangements were confirmed by the
immense boiler that (in our part of the house) heated one bathroom towel rack
and a solitary radiator in the three-storey stairwell. The only other radiator – in
the disused dining room – was shut off. But three electric storage heaters and the
kitchen stove provided enough heat to simulate American comfort. The Domestic
Bursar, Cecilia Dick, had thoughtfully furnished our quarters with everything we
needed, right down to egg cups. I forget what the rent was, but I do remember it
was quoted in guineas, a mythical unit so far as I was concerned, but I negotiated
it down to pounds.
Beside the boiler was a long-abandoned coal bin, and a coal shovel that I used to
clear the driveway after a snowstorm, unaware that in England snow disappears
quickly without human assistance. Near the boiler was a large electric closet
whose frightening contents resembled the jumbles of wires in the streets of Indian
slums.
Many vignettes from Linton Road are fixed in my memory. Great tits pecking open
the foil tops of milk bottles left at the door from an electric wagon; Frenchmen
peddling lovely strings of onions; the rag and bone man asking my wife: ‘Any old iron,
luv?’; Air Vice-Marshal McNiece-Foster, who lived next door, telling our two-year-
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Memories