Made in England 

A Thai friend and colleague here at The Nation is about to spend a year studying at Oxford University. He is a man of intelligence, charm, and unpolished energy-and he has never been to England.
"Have you packed your velvet smoking jacket?" I asked him.
"My what?"
"Never mind. Some silk cravats should do. By the way, how's your Latin?"
He didn't answer, but wore the expression of a man who has just realized he's left the bath tap on at home. He was ripe for advice, and over the last few day I have tried to explain to him what can be expected from a university that first opened it's creaking, wooden doors in the year 1167.
At the time, King Henry II was on the throne, and the language of the English court was still French-a linguistic hangover from the Norman conquest a century before. I know this because my ancestors were on the beach during the invasion and secured the first French teaching contract for unemployed Saxons. They went broke over the weekend.
Despite the savagery and debauched fun of the Dark Ages, Oxford University was to grow into an environment that would thrive on the oxygen of intelligence and discovery. It continues to do so. My Nation colleague may also be astounded to discover that there are still places of learning whose knowledge can never be obtained through the power of purchase.
The German writer, Wolfgang Goethe, said that, "Architecture is frozen music." Wandering around the colleges of Oxford, with their gothic towers, vaulted libraries, and elegant quadrangles, my friend will understand exactly what he meant. The gardens are serene and secret, and the lawns Wimbledon-green and immaculately kept-for turf is the landscape of settled civility.
Oxford is also a place that brims with wonderfully-brained eccentrics. Professors of science may still be glimpsed staggering from chemistry experiments trailing laboratory vapours, while bookish, bespectacled dons can be spotted muttering to themselves in the quad, dipping into their pockets for lines of lost poetry, only to fine bits of three-day-old toast-and their glasses. It's the don thing.
Oxford professors also tend to be expansive, unpredictable, and slightly dangerous; three fine qualities in a teacher. In the past, some have been burnt at the stake for their beliefs, and one even had the dubious honour of introducing acne into Rhodesia. Yet although each generation of tutors gradually becomes rich in years and dignity, and may well adopt lazy smiles and carry noble paunches, mentally engage them and they move at warp speed.
Many are men of letters, some are men of bottles, but all of them sincerely believe that exams should be tread as a brief interruption to the proper business of education. Real knowledge is not a qualification, it is a process.
The student clientele has certainly changed. Anyone could be sitting next to -you from future dukes, to potential dictators, to beautiful Israeli girls who drive Merkava M3 tanks over the Golan Heights during their holidays. There will also, no doubt, be a smattering of emotionally incontinent fops who clutch teddy bears and, through an absurd right of birth, will end up in the House of Lords- that last infirmary of noble minds. For them, it must be like going home.
I suggested that if he was in any doubt about how to address either a member of staff or a senior student, he should bow slightly from the waist and say, "My liege." Equally, when asked by his tutor if he agrees with what the tutor has just said, and he doesn't have a clue, he should simply nod wisely and reply, "Cunning plan my lord."
Although Oxford is a place where dead languages are taught in preference to living ones, I told him not to fret about his ignorance of Latin. The university has now radically updated it's classical curriculum. It has progressed to the Middle Ages.
He might be presented with a Jurassic computer and asked to deal with such challenges as:
A GOBLIN IS RUSHING TOWARDS YOU!
Kill the goblin with an exe.
BUT YOU DON'T HAVE AN AXE.
He shouldn't feel to hassled about spelling either. Shakespeare never spelt his name the same way twice, and he never spelt it Shakespeare.
Outside the hallowed halls of learning, Oxford has much to offer. It is a city of old money, pubs, and bicycles, that bulges with student accommodation. It has dormitories and "digs" I suggested that as soon as he discovers what that means, he should a get a place of his own. I actually know of some charming cottages in Moreton-on-the-Bog, just outside the city. These 13th century cottages are small but-wait for it-"have interesting spindle windows with thatched boon lobs on the truncated west mitchet." The terracotta poove vents are a later addition. Admittedly they are dark, even in the light, but he can pick up some spray paint from the 1,500- year old post office in the village. II advised him to buy the brand which is, "Re-commended by seven out of ten mindless vandals."
"What's a mitchet?" he asked."
"You'll know when it leaks."
I also gave him some social pointers. Don't drop litter. Foreigners who drop litter in Thailand are charged Bt2,000-even though there's not a garbage can for miles. Foreigners who drop litter in England are sent to Australia, nailed to the side of a ship. And these days you have to pay for the journey.
Try to be polite to everyone. Manners have little to do with class, though etiquette does. I know working-class people with the most beautiful manners, and upper-class people who behave like yobs. Just like in Thailand, manners are there to get you ahead without anyone noticing what you are doing.
I hope he enjoys the annual Oxford and Cambridge submarine race, while drinking pints of Scruttocks Old Dirigible. And there's a rumour that at the end of the summer,
Luciano Pavarotti will be bungy-jumping off the Magdelan College bell tower, naked, while singing that football song. That would be an education in itself.
If he's ever in trouble, he is welcome to visit my mum in Sevenoaks, which, due to a passing storm,is now called Oneoak and is not very well. She's used to taking in strangers.

By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

The hand in the sand

TRUTH IS often stranger than fiction. So if this bizarre case reads like a Monty Python TV script, I make no apology. A man named Arthur Rannage Howard was reported drowned on 10 October 1885 at Taylor's Mistake, a lonely bay near the seaside resort of Sumner, in Christchurch, New Zealand. An award of fifty pounds sterling was offered as a reward to anyone who could recover his body or supply any part of it for Christian burial. This message was duly published in The "Christchurch Times" newspaper.
On 16 December 1885, two brothers surnamed Godfrey and their two sons visited the sergeant on duty at the central police station in Christchurch. They crowded into the office and slapped down a parcel wrapped in newspaper on his desk. The sergeant gingerly unwrapped the package and found a human hand nestling in the folds of damp newsprint. It was pallid and wrinkled and on the third finger, left hand, was a gold ring. The Godfreys told him, "That's Howard's hand. Bit off by a shark!" Then they pointed to the reward notice in the local newspaper.
The Godfreys were also ready to make a statement. They had spent the day swimming at Taylor's Mistake, they said, and at about 2 pm the brothers had discovered the hand lying on the sandy beach just below the high water mark. The elder brother, named Elisha, asked the sergeant to examine the ring. The sergeant duly drew if off the cold, wrinkled finger and on the inside were the scratched initials "A.H."
The Godfreys were sent off without a reward. The duty sergeant thought that the whole affair smelt badly of opportunism. From that day on, the Godfreys were kept under constant observation by the police. The sergeant then called on Mrs Sarah Howard and asked her to come to the station. At the sight of the severed hand, she cried out that it was her husband's. Then she burst into tears.
A few days later, a coroner's inquest was held on the hand. Three insurance companies were represented. If the hand was indeed Howard's hand, they were due to pay out sums amounting to 2,400 pounds on three policies. The policies had all been transferred into the name of Sarah Howard.
The circumstances of the alleged accident were gone over at the inquest. On 10 October 1885, Arthur Howard, a railway workshop fitter, had walked from Christchurch to Sumner. On his way he fell in with some others who remembered his clothes and his silver watch on a gold chain. He said that he meant to go for a swim at Taylor's Mistake at Sumner, where in those days the waters were dangerously shark-infested.
The next morning (11 October) a small boy had found Howard's clothes and watch on the end of the pier at Sumner. A few days later insurance had been applied for and refused; the advertisement had been inserted in the local paper and, as if in answer to his widow's prayers, the Godfreys had discovered the hand on 16 December.
Appended to the coroner's report were the examination results of ten doctors who had examined the hand. They disagreed in small details, but all agreed on the following points: (a) The hand had not been long in the sea; certainly not since 10 October. (b) A shark had not bitten the hand off as the Godfreys claimed. It had been severed from the arm by the teeth of a hacksaw. (c) The hand was that of a WOMAN, not a man. This was certainly not good news for the Godfrey brothers.
This damaging report was followed by a statement from an engraver. The initials "A.H." on the inside of the ring had not been made by a professional's tool, but had been scratched by an amateur.
The Godfrey brothers were asked whether, in view of the evidence, they would care to make a further statement. Elisha said that in his former statement he had withheld certain information, which he would now divulge. He stated that he and his brother had been sitting on the sand after lunch when a man wearing blue goggles and a red wig suddenly sprang out from behind a boulder. The stranger told them, "Come here! There's a man's hand on the beach just over there!"
This multi-coloured apparition then led Elisha and his brother to the hand lying in the sand, and Elisha had instantly declared, "That must be Arthur Howard's hand!"" The stranger in the goggles and wig had then said, ""Poor fellow; poor fellow. The sharks must have got him."
"Why didn't you tell me about this chap in the goggles and wig?" The sergeant asked Elisha Godfrey.
"Because he begged me to promise that I wouldn't let anyone know he was there," said Elisha after a thoughtful pause.
The sergeant sighed wearily. He passed a copy of this amazing deposition across to Elisha Godfrey. "If you've still got the nerve, sign it," he suggested. Both Godfrey brothers read it through and then signed their names on spaces at the bottom of the last page. Then they left the police station, muttering darkly to each other.
Christchurch police then made routine inquiries for information regarding a gentleman in blue goggles and a red wig in the vicinity of Sumner and Taylor's Mistake on the day in question. To their intense astonishment they very quickly found what they were looking for.
Several people came forward saying that they had been accosted by this bizarre figure, who excitedly told them that the Godfrey brothers had found the hand of Mr Arthur Howard on the sand at Taylor's Mistake. This odd looking man had also been seen on the night of the alleged drowning, heading north on the ferry steamer. He had taken jobs as a manual labourer, and most strangely, he had appeared at dawn one day by the bedside of a fellow worker and tried to persuade the man to open a grave with him. His name, he had said, was Mr Watt. Perhaps most interestingly of all, the man with goggles and wig had gone for a long walk with Mrs Sarah Howard on 18 December, two days after the hand had been found.
Using this information, the police promptly arrested the Godfrey brothers and Mrs Howard on a charge of attempting to defraud the three insurance companies involved.
But a more dramatic arrest was made in a drab suburb of the capital city. Here the police ran to earth a strange figure that had been attempting to break into a deserted house. The man wore clothes too big for him, and was wearing blue goggles and a red wig. Yes, you've guessed it - the man was Arthur Rannage Howard, who had supposedly drowned on at Taylor's Mistake 10 October 1885!
At the trial in April 1886, the jury surprisingly found the Godfreys and Mrs Howard not guilty on both counts and Mr Howard guilty on the second count of attempting to obtain money by deception and fraud.
He was sent to jail for three years.
No clue has ever been produced as to the owner of the severed hand. Of eight graves that were subsequently opened in search of a body to match the hand, none contained a dismembered body. But the hand had certainly been hacked off by someone. Could Arthur Howard have bribed a dissecting-room janitor or enlisted the help of some undertaker's assistant? And as it was definitely a woman's hand; where was the rest of the woman? It was fairly obvious that Howard himself had scratched the initials "A.H." on the inside of the ring. He may also have sawed off the hand.
The most puzzling aspect of this case is Howard's extraordinary masquerade. In trying to "disguise" himself, he had in fact made himself grotesquely conspicuous. Why did he blaze a trail all over the country, making himself instantly memorable to all that saw or spoke to him? Was he a victim of the artistic temperament, or just plain loony? His antics were worthy of John Cleese, leaping about and yelling dementedly in an episode of the comedy series "Fawlty Towers".
The late Mr Justice Alper records that Howard's lawyer told him that he knew the answer. But soon afterwards the lawyer died. And Arthur Rannage Howard quietly did his jail time and never talked with anyone about his laughable attempt to swindle three insurance companies by faking his death by drowning and placing a severed hand on a lonely beach. Perhaps he was just plain embarrassed.

(Research, "The Case of the Hand in the Sand" by Ngaio Marsh, Xanadu Books, 1990).

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