I don’t know whether any of you is familiar with Notes and Queries? It is a publication, founded in 1849, that publishes small facts of a philological, genealogical, or antiquarian nature. If, for example, one finds an instance of a word that antedates the OED’s earliest citation. Such a discovery, though a small triumph in its way, is too small to spin a full-length scholarly article out of. What to do with these tiny factual tidbits? Get them published in Notes and Queries. Or, if you have some nagging little scholarly question, you may pose it in the pages of Notes and Queries in the hopes that one of its legion of pedantic readers has the answer.
In honour of this humble yet fascinating and long-lived high Victorian publication, I have decided to steal its concept for this blog. I will give certain posts the label “Notes & Queries”, using them to share little facts which I am inordinately proud of discovering, facts which I may be the only person on earth interested in, facts which I absolutely must do something with or I will go mad. This is one of those posts.
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I have long been ashamed as a Canadian for never having read anything by Robertson Davies. Somehow, he did not end up on the reading list in my high school Can Lit course, and I just never got around to him. So I have decided to read his “Deptford Trilogy” (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders). I just finished The Manticore last night.
In it, the narrator, a wealthy alcoholic lawyer named David Staunton has gone to Switzerland for Jungian psychoanalysis. He recounts the various events of his life, including his time studying law at Oxford. There, he fell under the influence of his tutor, Pargetter, who is introduced thus: “He was a great law don, a blind man who nevertheless managed to be a famous chess-player and such a teacher as I had never known.” Although it is not stated directly, it seems that Pargetter’s specialty was criminal law, as this is the line that Staunton would go on to practice in. Much of Staunton’s education under Pargetter revolved around analysis of evidence and cross-examination to get at the facts of a case: “But Pargetter had honed his mind to a shrewd edge, and I wanted to be like Pargetter. I wanted to know, to see, to sift, and not to be moved.” Pargetter is frank in his advice to his student, has a keen interest in the moral aspects of law and its practice, and does not suffer fools gladly.
An Oxford law don, specializing in criminal law and evidence, expert chess player, blind, not suffering fools gladly. Based on this very particular profile, I immediately surmised that Pargetter was based, at least partly, on a real person: Sir Rupert Cross (pictured, 1912-1980). I have no idea whether Davies knew Cross personally, but they were only a year apart in age, and their time at Balliol College did overlap during the 1930s.
The coincidences are too many to ignore. However, Cross didn’t begin teaching until the 1940s and would have been a student rather than a tutor while Davies was at Balliol. Interestingly, there was a law tutor at Balliol at the time named Theo Tyler, who was also blind. He tutored Cross. A cursory search brings up little on Tyler, and I have found no indication that he was an expert chess player (whereas during the 1930s Cross was one of Britain’s top twelve players). So perhaps Pargetter is an amalgam of Tyler and Cross? In any case, I seem to be the only person to have noticed this connection, worthy of a place in The Spectacled Avenger’s “Notes & Queries”.
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