St Edmund Hall was not a popular destination for Oxford entrants from Westminster School during John Rae’s headmastership. Perhaps this reflected its status as far from the smartest Oxford college; perhaps it had something to do with the reputation of its Principal, Canon John Kelly – pictured right with the University Chancellor Harold Macmillan – for being rather a danger where young men, particularly the sportier ones, were concerned.

Not only young men either, to judge by Rae’s experience on a visit to Teddy Hall in 1977 when it hosted the annual general meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference, of which he was chairman. He writes in his diary on September 22: “At the top table [for the annual dinner] I sit next to John Kelly. Under the table, Kelly keeps putting his hand on my knee. Every time I gently but firmly move it off, after a few minutes it returns. It is a relief to be able to stand up, thank the speakers and declare the evening at an end.”

A proposition of a different sort had been made by Kelly a year earlier to beef up (so to speak) Teddy Hall’s admissions from Westminster. During a Greek charity ball at London’s Dorchester Hotel, as described in a Rae diary entry for December 15, Kelly leaned over to Rae, “while other members of the party are noisily Greek dancing”, to offer a deal: “If we will send a Westminster scholar to the college, he will persuade the tutors to admit some of our borderline cases.”

Thus were (are?) matters of Oxbridge admission settled between the colleges and the great public schools.