It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes how the city of dreaming spires woke up to the realities of the Second World War. His trawl through the archives has yielded a rich and glittering haul, containing much that will interest more people than mere Oxonians.

 Jackson sketches a picture of Oxford before the war as a small medieval market-town with cloistered colleges startled by modernity and the motor car. The university itself was only a ghostly presence. The thirty single-sex colleges were the real focus of belonging, with their warrens of staircases in ancient quads, their semi-feudal ‘scouts’ and ‘porters’, and their remote and chilly washrooms. He describes how opinions about war shifted in the 1930s: the Oxford Union voted not to fight for king and country in 1933, but applauded conscription six years later. As fascism flourished abroad, refugees arrived – Basque children fleeing the Spanish Civil War, Jewish families escaping the Nazis. Scores of foreign intellectuals rescued by the Academic Assistance Council went on to win Nobel Prizes, knighthoods and fellowships.

The Munich crisis in 1938 triggered air-raid precautions, including the distribution of gas masks and sandbags. Actual war in September 1939 brought rationing, recruitment and requisitioning. Ministries required buildings and the military needed billets. Everyone wanted both the old with brains and the young with brawn. 

In the churn of a world war, both ‘town’ and ‘gown’ retooled. The Cowley motor works diversified into making military hardware and repairing Spitfires and Hurricanes while dons dived into the fields of intelligence and propaganda. Bringing efficiency and order to the inherent muddle of war was one of Oxford’s great gifts, derived from centuries of estate management, organisation of scholarship and processing of students. Oxford University Press (OUP), one of the world’s largest publishers, changed gear rapidly. Bibles and Biggles books still appeared, but 90 per cent of its publishing became war work. Accustomed to maintaining security in its printing of exam papers, OUP began producing arcane cryptographic materials for Bletchley Park as well as reams for the Admiralty, including all Admiral Ramsay’s orders for the Allies’ seaborne invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. Fourteen pages of Oxford’s War are devoted to one astonishing creation of the Naval Intelligence Division, the Inter-Service Topographical Department, which took over Mansfield and Manchester colleges. Thousands of men and women laboured there to produce accurate and detailed geographical intelligence for the armed forces.

The bullying minister Hugh Dalton saw in wartime Oxford a ‘frightful lot of people, dim and wildly eccentric and totally out of touch with all reality’. But Oxford’s supposedly daft boffins helped win the war. Sporty J C Masterman, capo of ‘the Christ Church mafia’, went on to chair the Twenty Committee, which fed false information to the enemy. Fox-hunting historian Hugh Trevor-Roper joined what he called the ‘timid and corrupt incompetents’ of the Secret Intelligence Service, there helping to foil the Abwehr and track Hitler during his final days. Keble College was occupied by hundreds of women from the Security Service, MI5, who were bussed every day to work at their ‘country office’, Blenheim Palace. (MI5 later queried the Keble bursar’s bill. Could its ladies really have broken twenty-eight large coffee pots, 740 plates and 104 dishes in the dining room? Weren’t the servants to blame?)

Elsewhere, Oxford’s scientists led the fight against German U-boats with the ten-centimetre radar, which could spot a conning tower amid the clutter of waves. The Clarendon Laboratory’s early work on nuclear fission contributed to the atom bomb. Charles Elton’s ecologists helped to prevent rats and mice from eating a shipload of wheat every month. Howard Florey and Dorothy Hodgkin developed medicinal penicillin, ushering in the antibiotics that have saved millions of lives. Oxford also pioneered advances in anaesthetics, nutrition and surgery – St Hugh’s became a superb centre for head injuries. 

Other scholars were planning for the postwar world. The liberal intellectual Margery Perham, first woman fellow of the new Nuffield College, foresaw the end of Britain’s colonial empire. The All Souls Group helped R A Butler to change education. Sir William Beveridge, head of University College, paved the way for the welfare state with his report Social Insurance and Allied Services (mocked by waspish colleagues as ‘Mein Pamph’). 

The Bodleian Library deservedly features in this book, which is published under its auspices. The vast New Bodleian Library building, not formally opened until 1946, became a vault for national valuables, an air-raid shelter and the headquarters of the remarkable British Red Cross Prisoner of War Postal Book Service, run by Ethel Herdman. This sent reading matter to the thousands of British and Commonwealth ‘kriegies’ languishing in Axis prison camps, as well as exam papers. The English literature scripts were marked by Professor J R R Tolkien, who was then writing his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings. It feels appropriate that the very last words of Ashley Jackson’s most English and quirky book should be ‘the shire’ – the name of Tolkien’s fictional homeland of hobbits and his affectionate metaphor for England.