College Record 2019

MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
by Sir Robert Ainslie, British ambassador to
Turkey between 1776 and 1792, and were
published as Views in the Ottoman Empire
in 1803. The ceramics manufacturer Spode
copied the imagery for their Caramanian
dinnerware series. It is a nice coincidence
that what will still be the President’s
Dining Room in all but name is decorated
by images commissioned by another
ambassador.
This collection has a romantic background. It
was put together by Colin Kraay and his wife
Peggy. Together they sought out the prints or
ceramics in trips around antiques shops in
the Cotswolds and elsewhere. It must have
been more challenging and more fun trying
to make the pairings in the days before
the internet. They displayed their collection
in their elegant home at Hampton Poyle,
where I first saw it. Peggy subsequently
donated the collection to the College. If
you want to know more, the Archivist is
collecting material, but otherwise I suggest
the informal motto of the College: ‘Ask John
Penney.’
Colin Kraay was a leading Greek and Roman
numismatist, so I will turn now to coins.
Wolfson was founded before decimalisation
(1971). At that time the coins in your
pocket routinely included coins going back a
century to Queen Victoria. Coins really were
history in your hand. If you were then to
have taken from your pocket and examined
closely a coin of George V, you would have
seen on the neckline of the portrait the
tiny letters ‘BM’. These are the initials of the
designer of the portrait, the Australian-born
sculptor Bertram MacKennal, who was
Colin’s maternal grandfather. It is not too
much a stretch of the imagination to see
this as the source of Colin’s early interest in
coins. His own second initial, the ‘M’ in C. M.
Kraay, stood for ‘MacKennal’.
There is an excellent obituary of Colin
in the Proceedings of the British Academy
1982, penned by his predecessor as Keeper of
the Heberden Coin Room, Humphrey Sutherland,
who was brother of the artist Graham Sutherland.
Colin’s bibliography runs to 80 items. Its highlight
is the magisterial Archaic and Classical Greek Coins
(1976) which has stood the test of time despite an
ever-changing material record, particularly in the
form of new hoards. This bears witness to Colin’s
outstanding judgement, and it is interesting that his
wartime Record of Service had already noted that
‘His judgement is thoroughly sound and reliable’.
I will not recap the Academy obituary here, but
confine myself to three reminiscences. The first
is personal. I first met Colin when I was 15. I had
written a school project on the eastern bronze
coinage of the emperor Augustus. My Latin master
sent this to Colin, with whom he had been at school.
Colin not only invited me to Oxford but spent
the entire day with me. He took me to lunch in
Wolfson, which in 1973 was still in its first premises
at 60 Banbury Road. I am not the only Fellow still
alive to have lunched there, but I think I must be the
youngest. Colin allowed me to study the Ashmolean’s
collection of Julio-Claudian coinage, including the
spectacular Roman gold, but he advised me to
develop my interest in what was then called Greek
Imperial coinage: ‘No one is interested in those.’
He thus directed me early to what was going to
be the subject of my own doctoral research. This
area of numismatics, under its new name of ‘Roman
Provincial Coinage’, is now the subject of a major
research project based in Oxford. At the end of the
day Colin gave me a pile of Humphrey Sutherland’s
offprints on Roman Coinage. The experience
determined me to try to have his job one day. Which
I now do.
Second, and especially at Wolfson, it would be
impious not to quote what Isaiah Berlin had to say
about Colin: ‘It was not merely that he was charming,
courteous, distinguished, gay, exhilarating: he was all
these things, but apart from that I simply lived, was
made happier, by his presence anywhere. Colin was a
wonderful colleague – just, honourable, sensible, kind
– an ideal member of an academic or indeed any
society.’ I do not imagine that Isaiah was lightly parted
from such words.
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019