The Pitmen Painters, which I review today on Page 7, is a play much concerned with the class structure as it used to be in Britain. Its focus is a group of Northumbrian colliers who took up painting – a hitherto unheard of activity for men of their background – in 1934. In exactly that year, William Golding, later to be one of our most famous novelists, went for interview with Oxford University Appointments Committee in the hope of discovering what he might be fit to do at the end of his (undistinguished) student career at Brasenose College.

The comments of the interviewers, uncovered by his biographer John Carey, reveal the shocking snobbery of Oxford at the time. “A stout fellow – fat faced – Not quite,” wrote one.

‘Not quite’, Prof Carey explains, means in this context ‘Not quite a gentleman.’ “NTS,” reported the other. This was middle-class slang for ‘Not Top Shelf’. He could be a teacher, this advisor suggested, but he was “fit only for day schools” (rather than swankier boarding establishments).

Such attitudes in a city supposedly a cradle of civility and culture help to explain the prickliness, the sense of being an outsider, not one of the elite, which remained with Golding throughout his long life. (They show, too, that the Pitmen Painters were correct in their assessment of what they were up against.) It is odd, perhaps, that Golding should have ‘forgiven’ Oxford to the extent of giving to Brasenose the gold medal he received as a Nobel laureate in literature, and accepting an honorary degree from the University in 1983.

Though the Encaenia proved a happy occasion, he showed his curmudgeonly side in his report of dinner that night in Christ Church: “The Duke of Norfolk made a quite appalling speech which was greeted with servility by the Dean who capped it with a worse one of his own. I have never heard such a load of self-congratulatory claptrap.”

Purely by chance, as it would seem, it was in Oxford that Golding’s one and only play was premiered. This was The Brass Butterfly, a comedy set in Roman times featuring two of the biggest stars of the day, Alastair Sim and George Cole.

The reviewer for the Oxford Mail on February 28, 1958, was Adrian Mitchell, later to make a name for himself as a poet and dramatist. He hailed Golding as “a genius ahead of his time” but went on to complain that the play was long-winded and contained “more promise than achievement”.

Mitchell showed a talent for curmudgeonliness, too, in his attitude to New Theatre latecomers “climbing over knees, buying programmes and clinking their change”. He advised: “If they step over you, just whisper in their ears: ‘Did you turn off the tap?’ Good one!

Mitchell proved right in his assessment of the play, which went on to bomb in London after a few weeks. Its successor at the Strand was The Verdict, by Agatha Christie. Golding is unlikely to have seen it. As Prof Carey tells us in his excellent biography, it was not until 1992, the year before his death, that he read, during a Spanish holiday, “his first, and last, Agatha Christie, deciding that she had no compassion and played with her characters like toys”.