LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
Evelyn Waugh
The blue plaque on the front of the Abingdon Arms commemorates the writer Evelyn Waugh, whose novels include Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and Brideshead Revisited (1945).
While at Oxford, Waugh rented a leaky horse-drawn caravan – “sans horse”, he recorded – in what is probably now the pub’s car park, which he shared with his lover, Alastair Graham, later the model for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.
On 28th July 1924 Waugh’s diary records them attending “a big feast” in the barn next to the pub, where “until about 3 in the morning the whole village sat and ate and drank and danced and sang.” Next morning, he cycled into Oxford to attend his viva, where he learned of his “certain third.” The following day he “rode back to Beckley where we drank champagne… It was another very drunken night at the Abingdon Arms.”
Alexander Waugh at the unveiling of the blue plaque, 2018
He returned often in the years that followed, using the Abingdon Arms as a writing retreat and refuge from the hectic social life of London’s ‘Bright Young Things.’ After his secret marriage to society heiress Evelyn Gardner, they honeymooned in an upstairs room looking over Otmoor, decorated with flowers by the “extraordinarily sweet” women of the village.
It was while working in the pub on Vile Bodies that he received a letter from his wife telling him she had fallen in love with a mutual friend. The marriage ended soon after. Waugh subsequently returned to Beckley to write parts of his first two African-set books, Black Mischief and Remote People.
The blue plaque was unveiled on 28th July 2018 by Alexander Waugh, the novelist’s grandson, at a ceremony followed by a ‘big feast’ inspired by the one Evelyn and Alastair had enjoyed exactly ninety-four years earlier.
Other Literary Associations
Evelyn Waugh is not the only writer associated with Beckley. Two notable members of the Inklings, the literary group founded by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, lived in the village from 1922-23, and – given Tolkien’s well-documented fondness for beer – it is quite possible that some of them might have visited the pub at the same time as Waugh. More recently, Beckley was the model for the village of Barley in Susan Hill’s The Magic Apple Tree.
There has long been a belief that the layout of fields and drainage ditches on Otmoor, visible from the pub’s garden with its stupendous views, inspired the chess board in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The claim seems to have originated with a former President of Magdalen College, James Griffiths, who was a relative of Alice Liddell’s, but unfortunately there is nothing in Carroll’s own writings to verify it.
It is certainly true that the landscape of Otmoor has been the setting for many books. Lorna Doone author RD Blackmore based two of his novels there. Aldous Huxley used Beckley Park, where he was an occasional guest, as a setting in Chrome Yellow – it also featured as a location in the film of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Robert Graves lived for a time in Islip, while John Buchan, a resident of Elsfield most famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps, set two novels on Otmoor.
Going further back in time, Beckley was also home to one of the first female playwrights and pamphleteers, Delariviere Manley. One writer who might have lived on Otmoor but never did was her contemporary Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, who tried repeatedly to get the living at Islip – but failed.