the questions in the exam paper and whether I could twist them my way.
The college you chose as a preference was another major consideration. I chose Magdalen College as my number one. I knew a lot about its architecture, it had a Pre-Raphaelite connection through Holman Hunt and its Senior History professor was the medievalist K.B. McFarlane whose books I had read. My number two choice was Brasenose College because I liked its name.
IT WAS MID-NOVEMBER WHEN I sat the exam, all alone as I was the only Westminster boy to enter the “open” exam. The paper was a dream. I waffled on about how Edward II was a far better king than Edward I, how the Victorian additions improve the medieval original at Cardiff Castle (I can personally vouch that this view is not shared by HM The Queen), that Keble College, for years wrongly considered a red brick Victorian eyesore, is in the top three of Oxford’s best buildings; that the classicist Christopher Wren had advised that Westminster Abbey’s tower be finished in the Gothic style (it is still an unfinished ugly stump by the way), etc. I doubt if such an outpouring of muddled factual diarrhoea has ever hit an examiner. At least I had given it my best shot.
Three days later I got a letter from Magdalen inviting me for an interview. It said that I might need to have a second one and to come prepared to stay overnight at the college. I pitched up late morning at the porter’s lodge and was shown to a rather nice Victorian bedroom and told my interview would be at 3 pm. I didn’t know Oxford that well but I had time to check out that I was right about Keble College and, importantly, that Gene Pitney was top of the bill at the Oxford New Theatre that night. That was my evening sorted out.
After lunch with a lot of nervous young men who for some reason didn’t want to make conversation about Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity,” I joined a small group of the about to be interviewed outside a sort of common room and took a seat. It was then I noticed the Siamese cat. Or to be accurate, the Siamese cat noticed me. Now it takes two to know one and the cat was in no doubt. It jumped on my knee, purring loudly, and butted against my fist whilst engaging in the sort of intelligent conversation and occasional rub against the face that only proper Siamese cats do. After a while it settled down and kneaded my leg for Thailand.
When the door opened and someone said, “Mr Lloyd Webber, will you come in please?” I obviously couldn’t put the cat down. So I carried it in. I was invited to sit down and my new best friend settled contentedly on my knee. Facing me across the centre of a medium sized dining table was Professor McFarlane, flanked by various dons one of whom asked an easily answered trick question about the date of the nave of Westminster Abbey. I am to this day a genuine fan of McFarlane’s books and it was actually a joy to be interviewed by this great medievalist. It took a while but eventually he got around to serious questioning.
“Mr Lloyd Webber, do you like cats?”
I didn’t reply “how long have you got?” but the nub of my answer caused him to end the interview by saying that that would be all and that I didn’t need to stay overnight for another interview.
I was a bit alarmed, but on balance I thought things had gone pretty well. I bade farewell to the cat who followed me back to the little room I had been given. The big issue now was that I was told I wasn’t needed the next day and I wanted to see Gene Pitney. What if they wanted the room for some poor blighter who had to go through the hoop a second time? I decided to wing it. That night I heard “I’m Gonna Be Strong” for the first time.
I took the train next morning and went straight to my parents’ flat. Granny really wanted to know how I had got on. I explained about the cat. She looked exasperated and muttered something about how one day cats would be my undoing. I naturally took a different view. But I was masking huge jitters about the outcome of my interview. It wasn’t exactly textbook. So I phoned Magdalen College and asked if there was by any chance a list yet of new undergraduates for next year. Eventually I got through to a very important-sounding woman who said she was the bursar’s secretary. I asked her if the list of next year’s undergraduates was ready yet.
“I am afraid we only have the list of scholarship winners but the list of the names of the new undergraduates will be published in two days’ time.”
Two days was a long time to wait. “By the way to whom am I talking?”
I mumbled my name.
“Oh wait a second,” she said, “you are Mr Lloyd Webber, just let me see. Ah yes. Mr Lloyd Webber, congratulations. You have won a History exhibition.1 We so look forward to seeing you at Magdalen next year.”
I was speechless. Granny blinked back a tear. Here was I, a boy who had wasted a complete year at Westminster and I had won the only open award Westminster had to Oxford that year. I said goodbye to Granny, ran to South Kensington station where the train to Westminster took an eternity to arrive. I ran down Tothill Street into Dean’s Yard and to my long-suffering history master’s classroom. He had just finished a lesson. I told him the news and he went ashen. All he said was “Bless you, my boy.”
It was then that I realized just how far he had stuck his neck out to get me a scholarship to Westminster and how terribly I had betrayed his trust. I spent the rest of the day contemplating the ineffable powers of the cat.
1. Magdalen College’s terminology for a junior scholarship.
6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice
It was just before Christmas when my agent Desmond Elliott unleashed a project that was to dominate the next two years. Desmond ran a small publishing company called Arlington Books which specialized in niche areas such as cookbooks. He also represented Leslie Thomas, an author who a year later had a huge success with his novel The Virgin Soldiers. Leslie was a “Barnardo Boy,” in other words an orphan raised in a Barnardo home. These “homes” were founded by a Victorian philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had witnessed the plight of orphaned children in London’s Dickensian East End and, future wife on arm, started a rescue home that mushroomed into one of the world’s leading charities for homeless kids.
Desmond immediately divined in the Barnardo story a massive post-Oliver! musical. Kids, jolly cockneys, Dickensian locations, a hero who nearly lost the love of his life in his crusade against the Victorian establishment – this, Desmond decided, was stuff that would make Oliver! look like Salad Days. Leslie was supposed to come up with a storyline and I was to knock up a few tunes so Desmond could stitch up a producer. It was to be called The Likes of Us. Connoisseurs of musical theatre disasters will already have twitching noses. Years later a musical about Dr Barnardo (not mine) did reach the West End. Tom Lehrer was in the audience and was heard to mutter “a terminal case for abortion.”
There was a minor snag to creativity. I was still at school. Nowadays nobody would dream of having pupils who had outlived a school’s usefulness hanging disruptively around the cloisters. But January 1965 saw me back in College one more time. I simply had to get out. So I invented a story that I had been offered a part-time job by an antiquarian bookseller. It was an elegant solution for all. In February I was free and I wanted to start work on the musical. The trouble was there was not a lot of input from Leslie Thomas. With hindsight I wonder how much he knew about it. Leslie is a novelist not a scriptwriter.
IT WAS A WEIRD feeling suddenly having time on my hands, waking up not knowing how to fill the day. When you are old you fill blank days by doing pointless things like writing autobiographies, but that wasn’t on my radar at the time and Oxford was months away. So I spent the early part of the year looking at buildings. It was then that I cemented my knowledge of Britain’s inner cities.
Today there’s much talk about the new generation looking forward to a worse future than their parents. Based on some of the things I saw in 1965, it would have been hard for the new generation not to have had a better future than their forebears. It was common for four families to be stuffed into a clapped-out small terraced house sharing one toilet at the back of a stinking misnomer of a garden. If the era of Rachman, whose name was so toxic that “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was supposed to have been over