Failure in Greats

When they saw his papers, the examiners – Bywater, Macan, Richards and Bidder – were shocked. Only one of them, Bidder, had actually taught Housman and none of his other college lecturers was an examiner, although they seem to have been informed of Housman's situation before the results were announced. Pollard later recalled that when he went up to Oxford for his viva (oral examination), which customarily takes place between the written examination and the announcement of results, he found his examiners bewildered

The fact that the examiners did not wish to viva Housman for a second or third or fourth class degree, shows how awful, empty or insulting his papers must have been. He may have allowed his contempt for some of the questions to shine through or may have deployed his coruscating and sardonic wit in his answers. Canon Nance, a St John's lecturer, said that on the philosophical side ‘his performance had been so ludicrously bad as to show that he had not made any effort, and to give the examiners the impression that he was treating that part of the business with contempt’. Pollard said nothing about Housman's possible distress at his father's stroke, nothing about bad blood between Housman and his tutors, nothing about Moses Jackson and gave no other reason than his preoccupation with Propertius for Housman's neglect of the syllabus. Housman himself later told Andrew Gow that his examiners ‘had no option’.