Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus
after he left a new generation of prefects, showing traits of character which they had unconsciously copied from him, so that his influence lived on. It was equally a feature of his [rugby] football that in the hardest game he always had something in reserve to call on in an emergency.
The golden boy had his mischievous side. One night he and his friends Roger Hunter and David Proctor stole a car belonging to Miss Terry, the French teacher. George, who had learnt to drive his father’s car at the age of sixteen, drove them to a scout troop camp, where they let the tents down and fled. George was demoted as a prefect for a fortnight, and caned by the headmaster.
At St George’s the youngest Hogg grew into a tall, goodlooking young man who delighted in singing and showing off his skills at the monthly Saturday-night dances. He was head boy at the age of seventeen, and almost naturally began a relationship with the head girl, Winifred ‘Muff’ Nelson.
The Nelsons provided a second home for the Hogg children in Harpenden. Although practising Christians, they were more relaxed in their observance of the faith, and their cheerful and fun-loving family life – a considerable contrast to the strict regime of his own home – made a big impression on George. So did another family in Harpenden, the Hunters, who also provided a home from home.
Muff Nelson, who had gained her nickname through her childhood affection for the nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’, was a good-looking redhead with a great sense of fun. A year older than George, she had been drawn to him from the time they had played together as young children. She shared his passion for sport, and his love of dancing and singing. As an old woman looking back over her life Muff wrote to a friend: ‘I adored the boy and always hoped we would grow up together and get married.’ After his death she wrote rather more formally in the school magazine: ‘There were nothing but words of admiration and affection for George both while he was at the school and after he left it. We all associate George with the headmaster’s well remembered cough followed by the quiet words, “Well done, boy.” ’
Although he and Muff were very much regarded as a couple at school, that did not prevent George from casting his eye over some of his friends’ girlfriends. St George’s golden boy, head of school, captain of the rugby XV, a dazzler on the dance floor and with a fine singing voice, knew he was attractive to women.
On his last night in England before leaving for China, George, Muff and other friends held a farewell at the Silver Cup pub in Harpenden. He promised her he would return within a year. She was devastated when he did not come back, and more so when it became clear that he had found a new and exciting life in China, and had no intention of returning to resume their relationship. Nothing survives of their correspondence while he was in China, but George’s letters home reveal that two years after he left he became aware that Muff had developed a relationship with his good friend Roger Hunter.
Muff’s sadness at the long separation from George had been compounded by the death of her elder brother Robert, a marine commando who was killed at Deal in Kent in 1940 as a result of one of the very few Italian air raids of the war. In the summer of that year the invasion scare was at its height, and the Battle of Britain had yet to be won. In these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Muff reached for the security of marriage, even if it was to the best friend of the man she really loved. Almost from the beginning the marriage was a disaster, and Muff soon moved back from married quarters at a coastal command base to her parents’ home in Harpenden.
Understandably, it was the more thoughtful side of George’s character that his contemporaries remembered when they paid tribute to him in the school magazine after his death. His close friend David Proctor said: ‘My impression of him was of a thinker. He strove for perfection. He was a man of few words but those words always made sense.’ Maurice Bowra wrote to Kathleen: ‘He had great reserves of character and seemed to have some inner vision of his own which showed him where to go and what to do.’ This was a remarkable tribute, given that Bowra had many letters of condolence to write to parents of his former students who died in the war.
In September 1934, at the age of nineteen, George Hogg arrived at Wadham College to read ‘modern greats’, as it was then called (it evolved into what is now known as PPE – politics, philosophy and economics). He was by now an assured young man, over six feet tall. He had fair hair which had never quite shaken off its childish waves. It was no surprise that he walked into the college rugby first XV, and went on to captain the team in his last year. Had he been more heavily built he would certainly have got his ‘blue’. As it was he played regularly for the university’s second team, ‘The Greyhounds’.
Wadham, one of the smallest of the Oxford colleges, was an eccentric place in the 1930s, with an admissions policy that depended on the whim of the examiner rather than academic ability. Michael Mann, a contemporary of Hogg’s, recalls going up to Wadham on the recommendation of an old waiter in the King’s Arms pub, where most Wadhamites did their drinking. Mann had taken a room at the pub while trying various colleges for a scholarship in Spanish. The waiter told him Wadham had the best course, and Mann found himself sitting the exam with two other candidates, without any sign of an invigilator. One candidate seized the entire supply of writing paper and refused to surrender so much as a page. Mann tracked down the senior tutor and complained. He was sent to a stationer’s in town with half a crown to buy paper, and given an extra fifteen minutes to complete the exam. He got the scholarship, which was not surprising: of the other two candidates, one thought he was sitting for a Hebrew scholarship, and the other left the exam early.
Hogg’s time at Wadham was dominated by one of the great Oxford figures of the twentieth century, Maurice Bowra. Bowra did not become Warden of the college until 1938, a year after Hogg had left Oxford, but in a sense he had already fulfilled the role for years. Even as a Fellow he cast a long and lively shadow over college activities, influencing most aspects of undergraduate life. His riotous parties for students and distinguished guests were famous for his practical jokes. Among other things Bowra would make up fictitious careers and achievements for his guests, and then introduce them to each other, enjoying the subsequent confusion.
In the 1930s Bowra personified Wadham College. He was a celebrity don who set out to shock. With a characteristic touch of high-table humour he declared himself anti-prig, anti-elitist, anti-solemn and very anti-Balliol. The purpose of a university, Bowra believed, was to break down barriers of class, convention and national sentiment, and to ‘revel in the uninhibited exercise of the mind’. His attractive view of life appealed to many of his students, and George Hogg was certainly among them. Bowra could have been talking of Hogg when he described the aim of university life as being ‘to take young men who arrived in Oxford suppressed and unselfexpressed and recast them into individuals with something to say’. Bowra had been born in China, where his father worked as a customs officer, and this gave him a special interest in Hogg’s later work and wanderings.
George’s sister Rosemary, known to the family as ‘Roke’ or ‘Posie’, was three years older than him, but they had spent their childhoods together and had formed the closest relationship in the family circle. They adored each other, and during his Oxford years when Hogg wrote home to catch up with family news it was always Rosemary who was on his mind. She remembered him talking with huge enthusiasm about college life, and about Bowra’s role as both a tutor and party host. She said: ‘You could not say that Oxford made him, because there were so many other early influences, but he loved his time there, he loved everything about the place, especially the freedom.’ Oxford gave him the chance to get away from the enclosed world of home and Harpenden. He had never openly rebelled against the inhibitions of life at Wayfarings, but like most young men of eighteen he wanted freedom. No more grim and gloomy Sundays being forced to read one of his mother’s ‘Sunday books’.
George Hogg was not by nature a political animal, although the mix of liberal and left-wing views he grew up with at home would have been reinforced at Oxford. His student generation was highly political, and vociferous about the big issues of the day: the infamous Oxford Union debate ‘That this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ had taken place in February 1933, the year before Hogg went up. The majority of 275 for the motion, with 153 against, was a gift for the news editors of Fleet Street, created a national furore, and was roundly condemned by the