The Most Obliging Man in Europe. Life and Times of the Oxford Scouts

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Oxford men, "district juding in Bombay", have remembered their scouts long after their Horace and Herodotus are totally forgotten. College scouts were personal servants, appreciated and even loved far more than "remote and ineffectual dons". They were the first adults with whom raw youth, fresh from family and public school, might communicate as equals, sometimes as masters. To undergraduates college servants seemed mature, experienced and infinitely wise.Compton Mackenzie described one as "the most obliging man in Europe".This book recaptures an episode, all too brief, when College scouts and Oxford were synonymous. It lasted a bare 150 years. Scouts have long since given way to "part-time women" and the vacuum cleaner, never to return. "Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume / Gone are the days that are lost to me, lost to me".