The Man Nobody Knew

In common rooms and dining halls all over Oxford, there had been plenty of guesses, but the mystery remained unsolved. A wealthy Frenchman had given Oxford one of the biggest gifts in its history--$6,000,000 for a new college--but had insisted on remaining anonymous. Who was he? Announcing the gift last fall, Vice Chancellor John Lowe said he knew but wouldn't tell; the mysterious donor could just go on being Monsieur X (TIME, Sept. 27).

But far away from Oxford, a Middle East correspondent for the London Evening Standard had made a guess of his own, cabled it to his paper. The Standard put in a phone call to a villa on the French Riviera. Robust, 70-year-old Antonin Besse, the man the Standard wanted to reach, was not home, but his secretary was. Was the anonymous donor really Monsieur Besse? "Why, that's a secret," blurted the secretary. "M. Besse doesn't want anyone to know."

Sharks & Risk. The Standard broke the news, and other papers picked it up, but they were still short of details. Not even M. Besse's closest friends seemed to know where he had been born. He had gone to the Middle East as a young man, made most of his money in hides, skins, coffee and the operation of a fleet of merchant ships. It was said he had been born a gypsy, that he owned half the city of Aden, the rocky British colony at the edge of the Red Sea. During the war he had been anti-Vichy, had donated -L-10,000 to British war relief.

One man knew a little more. In 1930, on a trip through Africa and the Middle East, Novelist Evelyn Waugh had dined with Besse on the roof of his home in Aden. Waugh had described him (under the pseudonym of M. Leblanc) in When the Going Was Good: "He talked of Abyssinia, where he had heavy business undertakings ... he expressed his contempt for the poetry of Rimbaud . . ." He thrived on risk and had made and lost more than one fortune. He liked shark-infested waters: it made swimming more interesting.

Oxford & Admiration. As Monsieur X, Antonin Besse had explained last fall, in part, why he had given so much to Oxford. No Oxford man himself, he had admired Oxonians as acquaintances and employees, wanted more young men trained as they had been. Besse has not yet explained one further mystery: he sent his own two sons to Cambridge.

Last week Antonin Besse was in Aden and was not talking. Said an employee in his London branch office: "The old man won't like it that his name is out. For 50 years he has worked on the principle that the less people know about him, the less trouble he will have." Oxford authorities felt the same way. They did not have all the cash in hand yet, and as one undergraduate cracked: "They sure don't want to get the old man in a huff and have him take the money back. That would be a tragedy."

For U.S. colleges and universities, wealthy donors, mysterious or otherwise, seemed to be getting scarcer and scarcer. But last week, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology learned that they had not disappeared entirely. Founded in 1900 with a big endowment from Andrew Carnegie, Tech had just received $6,000,000 more from the W. L. (for William Larimer*) and May T. Mellon Foundation. Object: to set up a graduate school of industrial administration, the first of its kind in the U.S.

*80-year-old nephew of the late Andrew W. Mellon.

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