New College has got to be one of my favourite Oxford colleges. It’s not actually new. For it was founded in 1379 by William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, a pile of honey stone buildings tucked away behind high walls to keep the academics inside safe from the medieval town’s riff raff. Approached down a narrow winding lane and then through a tiny door in an ancient timber gate, the place boasts a great wood panelled dining hall with a vaulted oak beamed roof, a bell tower, cloisters, a lovely chapel with a huge screen of sculpted saints set in tiered niches and a world-famous choir. It features a section of the original old city wall, and an ornamental mound.
And then there’s Nigel Ewers.
Nigel is a Visitor Liaison Officer. If you are lucky and it is his shift he is the first person you will meet if you want to look round. A naturally friendly front of house who laces impeccable manners with cheeky innuendo. Aged 63, he has worked here for around twenty-five years. Most of that time as Assistant Catering Manager and Butler to the Warden. A job that requires a variety of skills, from making cocktails for 50 in an hour, packing a case for the Warden to visit the Royal family, (it involves tracing paper), to pressing a duck, making gravies and knowing how to book the last ticket on Concorde. He’s tried to retire but was asked to return to do his current job when visitor numbers increased from just a few, to the hundreds that now queue up at peak times – the cloisters were used in the Harry Potter films and attract busloads of eager fans dressed as wizards from Hogwarts.
He is very good at it. For there’s not a lot he doesn’t know about the college. Who gets on with who, where to mind your head when negotiating the back staircases, which glass goes with which course at High Table. The college history plus a few prize titbits that you won’t hear from the tour guides. He’s outlasted two Wardens (that’s the head of college) and is just about to say goodbye to his third. As part of the college community, he is entitled to live in his grace and favour Jericho flat for the rest of his days. In 2008 he celebrated when his was the first same sex civil partnership registered within New College walls.
For Nigel it seems predestined that he has ended up in a place renowned for its choral music (when he first arrived, he sang for the Wykeham Singers, the College B team and affectionately known as the Wyke Hams.) Adopted into a strict Methodist family, he was singing in his parent’s church from the age of four. At eleven he was catching the train from his home in Eltham to London Bridge to sing in the choir at Southwark Cathedral. He became lead chorister. He accompanied them on tours to Switzerland and Canada.
“I loved it,” he remembers. “I found it easy. There was something inside me that liked seeing in people’s faces the feeling of calm or joy that we had created when we sang.”
But that life all changed when “I realised something was going on in my body and brain,” he says. “This was the mid 1970’s. I was effeminate. A doctor told my mother that I should be forced to play football. She thought I was ill. There was no understanding.”
Subjected to psychotherapy and electric therapy, he was sent to a private boarding school where it was decided strict discipline would knock it out of him. It didn’t. In fact, that’s when he discovered there were other boys like him. And at 16, when his parents refused to have him back in the house – “they were ashamed by me and I didn’t want to put them through all that,” he got employment in the London nightclub scene.
He’s had a colourful life since then. At one time he was a kept ‘mully’ for an East End criminal. He ran bedsits. He worked for large companies in communication.
His big break was when he won a place on a training management programme at The Savoy Hotel. Here he learned the skills needed to serve at tables that offered high end hospitality, (where food is cooked, carved or flambéed from a trolley in front of the guests). “You earn triple money if you cook at table,” says Nigel. “It was all very showy. You had to dress up. I loved it.”
He also learned to think on his feet. His first job was to find a way to pipe mineral water into Michael Jackson’s many suites. And once he was asked by Lady Gaga’s people to find a way to clean her rubber onesie. Washing up liquid and talcum powder apparently.
I’d been told all this and much more over a cup of coffee on Nigel’s day off. But today I have arranged to meet him at work to take some photographs. He is keen to show off his college, to introduce me to some of his old haunts, to give me a behind the scenes personal tour. And it is just as wonderful as you might imagine.
I get to see the medieval kitchens – the staff today working as they did in the 14th century, under the high beamed ceiling, soundtracked by the noisy clatter of pots on modern stainless-steel cookers instead of open fires. Nigel points out the spikes and pulleys once used to hang the carcasses in preparation for cooking – pigs, chickens, deer brought in from the College’s extensive farms and kept in the ‘Undercroft’ below until needed, an area now used as function rooms. The place is a labyrinth of old staircases and interconnecting rooms with names like Red Room, Chequers and Buttery. Above one doorway, carved into the spandrels many moons ago, are two free spirited figures holding flagons of small ale. “11, 12, 13-year-old boys, with beer from the cellars” Nigel tells me. “They would live in and serve in both the chapel and the great hall.”
A vast grand place in which Nigel seems quite at home. Today they are preparing for a canteen lunch, so only the High Table – literally as it’s placed on a dais above the rest, reserved for senior academics, fellows and their invited guests – is set for formal dinner. I can reveal that there is chalk stream smoked trout, Oxfordshire oyster mushrooms and New College asparagus on the menu tonight. Delicious.
In term time the Warden is the guest of the Senior Common Room, who have their own butler. For eight weeks his chair is placed at the end of the table, with his own special silver water beaker. Out of term he is seated in the middle of the table, from where he plays host.
Up until 1848 meals would be taken in silence, while the clerks sat by the windows reading from the psalm book, the graces sung from the minstrel’s gallery both before and after the meal. “I was quite surprised when I first came here to see Richard Dawkins reading grace,” smiles Nigel. “He was a fellow here. And well, he’s a famous atheist. But he just said, ‘It’s tradition Nigel.’ You have to learn their way of doing things.”
Every year before Christmas, after the students have left, the college holds its annual St Thomas’s Feast. There are eight courses served in two sessions. After the first session the guests take their napkins and withdraw while Nigel and friends reset the table and change around the name cards. Each member of the 55 governing fellows is allowed to bring one guest that has helped the college in some way.
“The first one of these I served at included Alan Ryan, (the Warden,) the Defence Secretary Jack Straw, Dame Antonia Fraser, Nigel Farage and Hugh Grant,” says Nigel. “After that I knew this was a place I wanted to stay.”
I am so pleased he did. For we have been given special permission to enter the Warden’s Lodgings. Which as Butler to the Warden for many years Nigel knows well. It’s still in the gatehouse tower as it was for the very first warden, William’s relative Nicholas Wykeham in the 14th century. There’s a back staircase for the staff as well as the grand central one. There’s a flat for the housekeeper, a laundry room and a freezer room. A chef’s kitchen and pantry. There is what is known as ‘The Bishop’s Room’ where the Royals get to stay. And there is a wonderful red reception room, with the coats of arms of all the Wardens going back to Wykeham’s Day are displayed on wooden shields around the walls. It’s where champagne and cocktails are served on special occasions and there are piano recitals. Once a year, at Christmas, the tables get turned and Nigel gets to be the guest.
The Warden’s personal space is naturally private. But I did catch a glimpse of his private garden. Linked to his rooms by a stone bridge behind the stables and barn on New College Lane. From here I can see the back of Hertford College chapel and All Souls. It’s got to be the most secret garden in Oxford.
And with that, duty calls Nigel back to the day job.
I’m glad to say that Nigel is now reconciled with his parents. They are both over 90 and he’s just been to visit them. And it seems that he is happy where he is at New College. As I leave, he is showing a visitor an age-old piece of fossil-filled stone from Headington, building material from when the college was first constructed. New College it seems is his stage. And long may he continue to perform on it.
The original staircase that leads to the buttery, (the modern servery.)
The modern kitchen in the shell of the old – with its medieval oak beamed roof, spikes and pulleys.
Early carvings of 14th century serving boys
They look as though they are having a merry old time.
Nigel standing by the Warden’s chair – as it is term time the Warden sits at the top of the table. The departing Warden is Miles Young. The portrait directly above Nigel is of Alan Ryan, the first Warden that he worked for. There is room for upwards of 200 students for formal dinner every night. The tickets go online at midday and they are all gone by 12.01 according to Nigel.
Many of the visitors are Harry Potter fans like these from South Korea. Many will have some kind of connection with the college. Others are VIPs. At the peak there can be between 700-1,000 a day.
The Long Room, the location for the original 11th century city lavatories and still a toilet block. You can see the back of it when you wander down Queens Lane. “In medieval times they’d say I was off for a long job – it was a social thing, they did it together” says Nigel. “When Wykeham bought this bit of land, this was the only building here. It was wasteland filled with people with carts and tents and dead animals being boiled down and all sorts of things like that.” It was also a plague pit. The Black Death decimated the population of Oxford during the 14th century and so Wykeham was able to buy the land for the college, just inside the city walls cheaply.
A reception room in the Warden’s lodgings. Today it has been laid out for collections – special student interviews.
The coats of arms of the three wardens Nigel has worked for. Alan Ryan, Sir Curtis Price and Miles Young.
Nigel in action at a reception in the cloisters. (photo courtesy of Nigel)
Nigel’s favourite view from the Warden’s lodgings. “To sit here and see the full moon above the buildings is something special” he says.
New College is open 7 days a week from 10.00am to 5.00pm. It is free for local residents.
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