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AN APPRECIATION

FROM The Pelican Record, MARCH 1926

AN APPRECIATION FROM The Pelican Record, MARCH 1926. To all those who knew the College between 1904 and 1924, Thomas Case was the characteristic figure. His head, his walk, his handshake, his laugh, his conversation, all expressed courage, determination, intellectual power. It is almost impossible now even to conceive his many-sidedness: he was a musician, an architect, a poet, a historian, and above all he was a philosopher. Whatever he did, he did it well: whatever he touched, he adorned. Perhaps thoroughness was his most outstanding quality in these days of relaxed effort: 'I wonder that you don't go and get the Act of Parliament,' he would say when you queried one of his statements about law. He always went to the source, and would sit up literally all night reading deeply into abstruse volumes to get the proper facts for his remarks to be made at a College meeting or to discover the proper kind of coping to put on a wall. When he lectured on Ancient History he made a large collection of extracts from Greek Histories-one of the earliest of compendiums of sources, which has since often been imitated. When he lectured on Aristotle he made the best selection of passages from the Organon. When he became interested in Admiral Nelson he read through the whole of Harris Nicolas's great collection of Nelson letters, underlining as was his way every important passage: every page, every paragraph was scored with pencil marks and the margins were filled with his comments.

It is, alas! only one year since the Pelican Record printed a valedictory account of his life at College and of his services to it. Of the many places of education with which he had been associated, every

one was deep in his affections. Rugby, Balliol, Brasenose, Christ Church, Magdalen, Corpus-he was proud of all of them, his great heart could be loyal to each one. Naturally it was Corpus with which he was longest and most intimately associated that had most of his love and thought. He took very few holidays. He was always in and about the College. Neat, well-dressed, invariably with an Academic cap on his head, he would climb the stairs to inspect rooms, to talk to workmen, to plan improvements; or he would show strangers around the College even in the depths of the Long Vacation, always pausing with loving care and amplitude of description in the Library, and pointing out with reverent scrupulousness where the Founder had built, where others had added or taken away, and always coming back, after recording the generations of the College and its builders, again to the Founder, who, in Mr. Case's conversation and description, was visualized as a presiding and beneficent spirit in the walls and quadrangles. The College, living, breathing, carrying on from age to age the work of the Founder, was the object of his perpetual thought and care.

Thomas Case was born on July 14, 1844. His father was a successful business man, a member of the Stock Exchange, who began business in Liverpool and subsequently moved to London. The elder Mr. Case was deeply interested in music, and the young Thomas grew up in the musical, cultivated society of the Victorian Age. To his latest years he had a most remarkable memory and could relate, as if they had happened yesterday, incidents of his early life, and could describe the people whom he had met. His private school was at Weybridge. At Rugby he was known as one of the strongest and most determined characters in the school. He was undoubtedly one of the best all-round athletes in

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