This morning I was going to write another excited piece about the strange way that things seem to cluster. What prompted my excitement was a story in Steven Garrity’s “How Websites Learn” I linked to in my last entry. Before I go any further I’ll give you the story, which is from Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” that he attributes to Gregory Bateson: The story goes:
“New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundations, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.
A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist, went up into the root of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that calibre nowadays?
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.
And he pulled his forelock and said, ?Well sirs, we was wonderin? when you?d be askin?.?
Upon further enquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dinning hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. ?Your don?t cut them oaks. Them?s for the College Hall.?
A nice story. That?s the way to run a culture.”
What excited me was that when I was writing “The Short Now” I was trying remember that story, which I thought I had read in one of Charles Handy’s books. So finding this story in Garrity’s piece reminded me of the odd way that things seem to turn up more less when you need them (The oddness is, of course, that we find it odd). I was just about to start writing something about this when my closet pedantry swept in. So I did a quick google. There among the 123 entries for “New College” “oak beams”, that, from a quick glance were mainly repeating the story, was a dampener from a New College alumni newsletter (PDF):
“…The Hall was last tackled on this scale when Sir Gilbert Scott put in the new roof in 1858, though a good deal of restoration was done by Champneys in the early 1900s and more again in the 1920s.
Myths have long accreted about the Hall. No matter how often the story is denied, newspapers and radio journalists still insist on believing that Scott used oak beams from trees that had been planted for the purpose almost five hundred years before. Since most structural oak was cut from trees of about a hundred and fifty years old, it would have been unlikely that anyone would plant it for use in five hundred years.”
We need this story to be true, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps, even, it probably isn’t. But I suspect like in the often repeated line from John Ford’s “The Man who shot Liberty Valance” what we will find is “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.”