Wilfrid Horace Oldaker (13 June 1901 – 28 September 1978) was a clergyman of the Church of England, classical scholar, author, schoolmaster, Chaplain at Clifton College, Precentor of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School, and head of the Junior School at King's School, Canterbury.
Early life
Born in Wandsworth, the son of Horace Charles Oldaker by his marriage in 1899 to Winifred Chester Hughes, Oldaker had two sisters, Margaret Laetitia, born in 1903, and Nancy Blanche, born in 1908. He was educated at Dulwich College, where he gained a scholarship in 1914, for which he was prepared by the Rev. W. R. M. Leake of Dulwich, and then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was again a scholar, graduating BA in 1924 and being promoted to MA in 1927. At Oxford, he was a Second Lieutenant in the Officers' Training Corps.
His father, born in Treville, Herefordshire, later lived in Thornton Avenue, Streatham, where Oldaker was briefly a curate. His father's parents were Thomas Allies Oldaker, an estate agent originally from Pershore, Worcestershire, and Letitia Capel Pulley, from Hackney. His grandmother was a sister of Sir Joseph Pulley, 1st Baronet (1822–1901), member of parliament for Hereford.
On 21 September 1929, at All Souls, Langham Place, Oldaker officiated at the wedding of his cousin Mary Frances Oldaker Davies, daughter of Captain William Davies, to Geoffrey Gillam, assisted by the Rev. Arthur Buxton.
Early career
After the university, Oldaker became a schoolmaster. In 1924 he got his first job at Rossall School, and in December 1924 his Officers Training Corps commission was transferred to the Rossall School contingent. The next year, he migrated to Worksop College, where he taught from 1925 to 1929. In 1927 he was ordained as a deacon of the Church of England and licensed as a public preacher, and then the next year was ordained as a priest.
In 1926, Oldaker wrote from Worksop to the editor of The Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, praising a music festival he had recently attended in Germany. In November of the same year he resigned his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Worksop College Officers' Training Corps on the grounds of ill health, and until 1929 was active there instead as a scout leader. He left the school in 1929 to take up parish work, and in 1930 was acting Curate of St Leon with All Saints, Streatham, but in 1931 was appointed as Chaplain and assistant schoolmaster at Clifton College, where he remained until 1938.
In October 1936, Oldaker gave a talk to the English Association on "Elizabethan Music, with special reference to the Songs in the Dramas". An article in The Musical Times in December 1937 noted a performance of the Bristol Bach Society, at St Mary's Church House, in which Oldaker had sung solo in "God's time is best" and had also played second flute in Bach's B minor Suite for flute and orchestra.
Writer
Oldaker's first book was a study of The Birds of Aristophanes, printed in 1926 by the Cambridge University Press, including scenes from the play, with his introduction, notes, and a vocabulary.
In 1934, an article by Oldaker, "Greek Fables and Babrius", was published in the Classical Association's journal Greece & Rome, noting that "Probability is against Aesop having written down his own fables." In an article called "Public School Sermons" in July 1935, he recounted the story of a visiting preacher at Harrow School who told the boys that life was a game of cricket, in which there were three wickets, Honour, Truth, and Purity, with Temptation as the bowler. He adds "I do not know whether this is a warning against the use of sporting metaphors in the pulpit, or merely a warning that if used, they should be used correctly."
In 1937, Oldaker's second book, Martial: Selected Easy Epigrams, annotated some epigrams of Martial, with appendices, and was published by Martin Hopkinson & Co.
In "Translating Poetry (A Grumble in Five Languages)", February 1938, he sought to analyse the difficulties of literary translation, commenting that "Language varies from language in so many things besides words." In June 1938, Oldaker published an article on "Public School Religion", addressing two recent pamphlets, "The Parish Church and the Fifth Form", by Anon., and "Against the Shepherds", by "Colin Clout". Oldaker commented "It betrays no hostile spirit to say that the pamphlets are, from their very nature, self-revealing. The authors of both are obviously of much the same type. They are young and progressive... I should doubt whether they have either of them been to one of the larger boarding-schools as boys."