Dr Francis Warner (1937–2021)

By Revd Professor Paul Fiddes

Francis Warner (or, Francis Robert le Plastrier Warner) came to St Peter’s College as Fellow and Tutor in English Literature in 1965. St Peter’s had received its Charter only four years earlier, and its growing reputation was to be intertwined with his. He came, at the age of 28, with an exceptional list of achievements already behind him. Having left Christ’s Hospital at the age of 16, and having secured a choral scholarship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he became the youngest-ever director of a play in the West End of London, putting on Dr Faustus in the Irving Theatre. He filled in the rest of his time before going up to Cambridge, to read English, by studying composition and conducting at the London College of Music. He was an accomplished musician, playing the trumpet (often in jazz bands in his school years), the cello and piano.

While an undergraduate, he formed his own orchestra and chorus and put on notable concerts, conducting his own re-scoring of Honegger’s King David in King’s College Chapel. While he was the final graduate student of C. S. Lewis, engaged in research on the medieval occult philosopher, Cornelius Agrippa, he became an undergraduate supervisor in English at St Catharine’s College, and published two books of lyrical poetry, Perennia and Early Poems. These, together with his Experimental Sonnets and Madrigals which soon followed, were to be awarded America’s Messing International Award. Thus early-accomplished in music, the theatre and poetry, Francis Warner was to excel in each of these areas as the years at St. Peter’s went by and as he dedicated himself to the life of the college. His Fellowship was to receive substantial endowment in recognition of his creative work, and he would be named Lord White Fellow and Tutor in English Literature from 1984. After his retirement, his two academic homes would recognize his distinguished career, Oxford awarding him a D. Litt., and William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri, an Honorary D. Mus.

When he arrived from Cambridge as a new, young Fellow in 1965, I was among the first batch of undergraduate students he taught. I and generations of undergraduates to come recall with gratitude trudging up the flight of stairs to his lofty room above the library, as if climbing the winding steps of Yeats’ tower towards ‘the breathless starlit air’. Later it was the stair to the top of staircase one. We would always climb the stairs with anticipation: perhaps Francis would be harbouring W.H. Auden, or Richard Burton, or Edmund Blunden, or Kathleen Raine in his high room—or one of the many other poets, playwrights or actors who struggled up those same stairs and whose acquaintance and conversation he would generously share with us. If Francis were on his own, this would be even better, for we would then have his undivided attention. And I do want to underline the word ‘attention’. All his pupils were made to feel they had a special contribution to make, that they had glimpsed what others before had so lamentably failed to see. In her recent memorial address for Francis, his daughter Miranda exactly caught this gift of Francis as a teacher and a friend when she recalled, ‘He believed people into being’.

His pupils caught the infectious enthusiasm he had for literature; he made them feel that reading mattered, and they would want to go and find the book in the library that Francis had just taken down from his shelves, locating it effortlessly, as if by magic, during the uninterrupted flow of his talk. Francis was his own theatre, always presenting himself with flair, but behind the dramatic front was solid substance. He made his pupils want to explore the landscape of both the mind and the spirit that he inhabited so easily.

From the beginning of his time in Oxford, Francis was making a considerable impact on the scene beyond the tutorial. Heedless of the fact that the English literature syllabus stopped at 1900, he drew enthusiastic audiences for lectures in which he energetically promoted the works of Beckett, Yeats, Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. In the words of Barry Webb, another member of that first tutorial group, ‘He burst like a firework both in the tutorial room and in the lecture theatre. In both places he turned them into stage sets.’ From 1967 onwards, he began a most audacious project for another kind of stage set, a theatre under the surface of Chavasse Quad in the form of a geodesic dome anchored into the water-table. His friend Samuel Beckett gladly gave his name to the proposed theatre, but although insufficient funds were raised to build it, the resulting Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre

Trust still provides generous awards which fund innovative theatrical productions. Francis’ experience in fund-raising also proved invaluable for several of the College building projects thereafter, which owe much to him personally.

At the same time as the Beckett Theatre project, Francis was developing his own skills as a dramatist, finally publishing sixteen plays. The trilogy Requiem, together with its three Maquettes both enchanted and shocked as the daring visual images and dazzling word-play combined to expose human life for what it truly is. After A Conception of Love, a love-comedy, Francis began a series of nine verse-plays which enable the audience to enter into the western tradition of intellect, religion and art. From classical Athens to Rome, and then on to the Renaissance and early modern Europe, we participate in the key intellectual debates and the personal passions of the time in often lyrical poetry. The plays were a great Oxford experience, most of them drawing in current pupils, past pupils, family members—his children Lucy, Benedict, and Miranda are in the cast lists, only Georgina seeming to have missed out— and their school friends. Francis also set up a visiting programme for American students to spend their term abroad in Oxford, and this was managed expertly by Penelope, whom he had married in 1983. Nor, certainly, was it just this venture to which he was referring when he in 2019 dedicated his Anthem for Easter Day to Penelope, ‘who shared it all’.

He continued to write poetry, publishing two volumes of his collected poems, as written up to 1999. In that year he became Emeritus Fellow of St Peter’s, and shortly afterwards Residential Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, thereafter dividing his time between Oxford and Cambridge. In 2001–2, in two long poems (By the Cam and the Isis) he celebrated his experience and love of both ‘holy cities’, providing verse portraits of his many colleagues and friends (including me) which brilliantly evoke the period.

Just as Oxford had been the stage for his drama over some thirty-five years, now Cambridge for the next twenty became the scene for his involvement in music, as it had been in his early days. In collaboration with the composer David Goode, he published seven volumes of musical settings of his poetry. One of these was the ambitious Blitz Requiem, performed by the Bach choir and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in St. Paul’s Cathedral in September 2013, and later presented in the Sheldonian theatre to celebrate Francis’s eightieth birthday. In this period, he also finally responded to the demands of his friends and admirers to publish the many prose pieces he had written over the years, and the title of the volume, Beauty for Ashes (from Isaiah 61) expresses his conviction, both aesthetic and deeply spiritual, that new life is always possible in the midst of the old.