Centenary of Waugh’s Coming of Age: 28 October 1924

Today marks the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s coming of age on 28 October 1924, his 21st birthday. In Waugh’s diary entry for the following day, he begins: “Yesterday I became a man and put away childish things.” (Diaries, p. 182)  The preceding months had been quite eventful, not always in a positive sense. In the summer Waugh had taken his final exams at Oxford. He resumed his diary about the same time, in June 1924. This describes several weeks of undergraduate celebrations concluding with the news at the end of July that he had passed with a third class degree. One consequence of this is that he went down from Oxford (i.e., dropped out voluntarily) before completing the 9-term residency required for the award of a degree. The poor degree ended his scholarship, and his father refused to pay the bills for the final term. Waugh was at work on a book he calls The Temple of Thatch, which he continued after leaving Oxford but later binned when Harold Acton gave it a decidedly lukewarm report. In late July, Waugh and his Hertford College colleague Terrence Greenidge decided to produce a film, which in due course was completed as The Scarlet Woman. Much of it was filmed in the Waugh family back garden and adjacent portions of Hampstead Heath.

In late September, Waugh started art classes at Heatherley’s School of Fine Arts in London. He reports in his diary that he is pleased with the results in early days and was glad to see the last of Oxford. But then as his university comrades began to return, Waugh drifted toward Oxford on weekends and then for longer periods. In his diary entry, he concludes that “it is not possible to lead a gay life and to draw well.” (Diaries, p. 183) According to his autobiography, his coming of age on 28 October 1924 was observed at his home but “was not celebrated.” (ALL, p. 209) Waugh spent more and more time at Oxford and tried to learn printing nearby but in the end resorted to teaching posts in boarding schools as the source of a livelihood, starting in January 1925 at a school called Arnold House in Llanddulas, Wales.

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