Charles Oldham Memorial Price

The examiners felt unable on this occasion to award the prize to one person and have therefore decided that it should be shared by

They gazed at the notice board in silence for some moments. Finally, Philippa bit her lip and said in a small voice:

"Well, you didn't do too badly, considering the competition. I'm prepared to honour my undertaking but by this light I take thee for pity."

William needed no prompting. "I would not deny you, but by this good day I yield upon great persuasion, for I was told you were in a consumption."

And to the delight of their peers and the amazement of the retreating don, they embraced under the notice board.

Rumor had it that from that moment on they were never apart for more than a few hours.

The marriage took place a month later in Philippa's family church at Brockenhurst. "Well, when you think about it," said William's room-mate, "who else could she have married?" The contentious couple started their honeymoon in Athens arguing about the relative significance of Doric and Ionic architecture of which neither knew any more than they had covertly conned from a half-crown tourist guide. They sailed on to Istanbul, where William prostrated himself at the front of every mosque he could find while Philippa stood on her own at the back fuming at the Turks' treatment of women.

"The Turks are a shrewd race," declared William, "so quick to appreciate real worth."

"Then why don't you embrace the Moslim religion, William, and I need only be in your presence once a year."

"The misfortune of birth, a misplaced loyalty and the signing of an unfortunate contract dictate that I spend the rest of my life with you."

Back at Oxford, with junior research fellowships at their respective colleges, they settled down to serious creative work. William- embarked upon a massive study of word usage in Marlowe and, in his spare moments, taught himself statistics to assist his findings. Philippa chose as her subject the influence of the Reformation on seventeenth-century English writers and was soon drawn beyond literature into art and music.

She bought herself a spinet and took to playing Dowland and Gibbons in the evening.

"For Christ's sake," said William, exasperated by the tinny sound, "you won't deduce their religious convictions from their key signatures."

"More informative than ifs and ends, my dear," she said, imperturbably, "and at night so much more relaxing than pots and pans."

Three years later, with well-received D. Phils, they moved on, inexorably in tandem, to college teaching fellowships. As the long shadow of fascism fell across Europe, they read, wrote, criticised and coached by quiet firesides in unchanging quadrangles.

"A rather dull Schools year for me," said William, "but I still managed five firsts from a field of eleven."

"An even duller one for me," said Philippa, "but somehow I squeezed three firsts out of six, and you won't have to invoke the trinomial theorem, William, to work out that it's an arithmetical victory for me."

"The chairman of the examiners tells me," said William, "that a greater part of what your pupils say is no more than a recitation from memory."

"He told me," she retorted, "that yours have to make it up as they go along."

When they dined together in college the guest list was always quickly filled, and as soon as grace had been said, the sharpness of their dialogue would flash across the candelabra.

"I hear a rumor, Philippa, that the college doesn't feel able to renew your fellowship at the end of the year?"

"I fear you speak the truth, William," she replied. "They decided they couldn't renew mine at the same time as offering me yours."

"Do you think they will ever make you a Fellow of the British Academy, William?"

"I must say, with some considerable disappointment, never."

"I am sorry to hear that; why not?"

"Because when they did invite me, I informed the President that I would prefer to wait to be elected at the same time as my wife."

Some non-University guests sitting in high table for the first time took their verbal battles seriously; others could only be envious of such love.

One Fellow uncharitably suggested they rehearsed their lines before coming to dinner for fear it might be thought they were getting on well together. During their early years as young dons, they became acknowledged as the leaders in their respective fields. Like magnets, they attracted the brightest undergraduates while apparently remaining poles apart themselves.

"Dr. Hatchard will be delivering half these lectures," Philippa announced at the start of the Michaelmas Term of their joint lecture course on Arthurian legend. "But I can assure you it will not be the better half. You would be wise always to check which Dr. Hatchard is lecturing."

When Philippa was invited to give a series of lectures at Yale, William took a sabbatical so that he could be with her.

On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Philippa said, "Let's at least be thankful the journey is by sea, my dear, so we can't run out of petrol."

"Rather let us thank God," replied William, "that the ship has an engine because you would even take the wind out of Cunard's sails."

The only sadness in their lives was that Philippa could bear William no children, but if anything it drew the two closer together. Philippa lavished quasi-maternal affection on her tutorial pupils and allowed herself only the wry comment that she was spared the probability of producing a child with William's looks and William's brains.

At the outbreak of war William's expertise with handling words made a move into cipher-breaking inevitable. He was recruited by an anonymous gentleman who visited them at home with a briefcase chained to his wrist. Philippa listened shamelessly at the keyhole while they discussed the problems they had come up against and burst into the room and demanded to be recruited as well.

"Do you realize that I can complete The Times crossword puzzle in half the time my husband can?"

The anonymous man was only thankful that he wasn't chained to Philippa. He drafted them both to the Admiralty section to deal with enciphered wireless messages to and from German submarines. The German signal manual was a four-letter code book and each message was reciphered, the substitution table changing daily. William taught Philippa how to evaluate letter frequencies and she applied her new knowledge to modern German texts, coming up with a frequency analysis that was soon used by every code-breaking department in the Commonwealth. Even so breaking the ciphers and building up the master signal book was a colossal task which took them the best part of two years.

"I never knew your ifs and ends could be so informative," she said admiringly of her own work.

When the allies invaded Europe husband and wife could together, often break ciphers with no more than half a dozen lines of encoded text to go on.

"They're an illiterate lot," grumbled William. "They don't encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.'

"How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i's William?"

"Because, I consider the dot is redundant and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language."

"Is that to be your major contribution to the scholarship, William, if so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the work of most of our undergraduates' essays would be able to tell the difference between an I and an i."

"A feeble argument my dear, that if it had any conviction would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn't mistaken for an h."

"Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the I from Hitler."