[I]n October 1953 Wyllie suffered a severe mental breakdown. In April 1954 he distributed a series of vituperatively libellous documents to all the OUP Delegates, expressing his bitter conviction that he had been deceived by Sisam and Chapman in their original appointment of Souter as his superior at the Latin Dictionary, in their failure to elevate him in 1939, and in their subsequent treatment of him. On his refusal to retract these documents he was dismissed. The Press made attempts, partly successful, to help both Wyllie and his family by delaying the payments owed them on the loan they had given him to buy his house at no. 42 Portland Road in Oxford, and by other forms of generous domestic support. Subsequently Wyllie 'eked out a living as a schoolmaster', moving first to a barn in his garden (in which he dispensed gin and ribena to visitors), while his wife supported herself and family by taking in lodgers, and later to Guernsey (where he taught at Guernsey Ladies' College). Over the next few years, under the pseudonym 'The Barras Seer', Wyllie issued a stream of pamphlets on such matters as sin, sex, enlightenment, and the devil, printed by himself and copied on his own duplicator.
These included one entitled The Oxford Dictionary Slanders: The Greatest Scandal in the Whole History of Scholarship (1965), which reproduced various open letters to the prime minister, the lord chancellor, and Oxford University's vice-chancellor, detailing the terrible errors of his adversaries Sisam, Chapman, Souter, and others. Earlier, he had written a twelve-book epic poem in which Sisam figured as an anti-Christ, who after pursuing Wyllie himself with fearful malice and hatred, had 'fled to Scilly's Isle' (to which Sisam retired in 1942),
where east Atlantic rolls
who now should oakum tease
he Napier's logs unrolls (Vision of Truth (Oxford, 1958), Book I, p. 22)
- the wholly unjust implication being that the extensive scholarship Sisam began to publish in retirement had all been plagiarized from his early mentor Napier's lecture notes.
Via Farrago.
These included one entitled The Oxford Dictionary Slanders: The Greatest Scandal in the Whole History of Scholarship (1965), which reproduced various open letters to the prime minister, the lord chancellor, and Oxford University's vice-chancellor, detailing the terrible errors of his adversaries Sisam, Chapman, Souter, and others. Earlier, he had written a twelve-book epic poem in which Sisam figured as an anti-Christ, who after pursuing Wyllie himself with fearful malice and hatred, had 'fled to Scilly's Isle' (to which Sisam retired in 1942),
where east Atlantic rolls
who now should oakum tease
he Napier's logs unrolls (Vision of Truth (Oxford, 1958), Book I, p. 22)
- the wholly unjust implication being that the extensive scholarship Sisam began to publish in retirement had all been plagiarized from his early mentor Napier's lecture notes.
Via Farrago.
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