ABSTRACT
Philip Hendy had been prevented by his fatal wounding on the battlefields of the Somme from taking up his scholarship to begin studying history and classics at Queen's College, Oxford, in October 1917. Two years later Adrian Stokes applied to study history at Oxford where he won a scholarship to begin studying at Magdalen the following October. History attracted him as a means by which, he said, "all that was carried inside my mind, could be pinned down, arranged, comprehended". Adrian was derisive about himself at Oxford where he described himself as "a miserable recluse". Eddy Sackville might well have been the cause of a "homoerotic" letter which Durham and Ethel discovered and which decided them to persuade Adrian to join them away from Oxford at Rapallo at the end of his third autumn term at Magdalen.
