The name of a former Warden of New College, Oxford, has been on everyone’s lips this week following James Naughtie’s unfortunate confusion between the initial letter the surname of James Hunt and that of the Culture ministry he heads. I refer to Dr William Archibald Spooner, who gave his name, rather unwillingly, to this accidental transposition of sounds.

Spoonerisms are examples of what have come to be known technically as ‘metaphasis’, though from what I can see the word does not appear in dictionaries (at any rate in those I possess) and it is not permitted to players of Scrabble.

Lots of clever dicks have been popping up to say that Spooner, who was New College head from 1903 to 1924, didn’t utter Spoonerisms at all and that most of the famous ones were invented. These include: “Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?”, “Kinkering Kongs their titles take”, “At weddings it is kistomary to cuss the bride,” and — surely best known of all — [to a delinquent undergraduate]: “You have tasted a whole worm. You have hissed my mystery lectures. You were fighting a liar in the quadrangle. You will leave by the town drain.”

True enough, these were made up. But to say that Spooner didn’t Spoonerise is to ignore the question of how his reputation for so doing came about.

Over to Miss Rosemary Spooner, one of his seven children (his hostess often at the Warden’s Lodgings) whose lifetime career of public service included many years as an Oxford city councillor.

Shortly before her death in 1976 (when she bequeathed her father’s diaries to the college) she told a journalist that she had never heard him muddle words, but added: “I think he must have done, though, or he would never have got this reputation.”

The same point was made — rather more long-windedly — by Sir William Hayter, Warden of New College from 1958 to 1976, who published a biography of Spooner in 1977.

He said: “Clearly he would not have been chosen as the putative father for such inventions unless he had at some time engendered something similar. There is in fact very little doubt that Spooner did on occasion fall into metaphasis.”

Sir William had considerable respect for his distinguished predecessor, whom he had met at a tea party during his undergraduate days at the college (no spoonerisms were uttered). One of Spooner’s last acts as Warden had been to preside over the election of five scholars from Winchester College, which in those days supplied New College with many of its undergraduates. (The relationship existed through their sharing of the same founder in William of Wykeham.) Spooner had commented: “Fair average scholars, but I do not think more.” One of the quintet was Hayter himself; another John Sparrow, later to become Warden of All Souls.

Amazing as it may seem now, before Spooner’s arrival at New College as a Fellow in 1867, entry had been limited entirely to Winchester men. He personally set three records by being, successively, the college’s first non-Wykehamist Scholar, Fellow and Warden.

If Hayter was unable to supply genuine spoonerisms, he cited many instances of his subject’s other eccentricities of speech.

One of my favourites was his remark to his wife, concerning geographical information received from Julian Huxley: “My dear, Mr Huxley assures me it is no further from the north coast of Spitzbergen to the North Pole than it is from Land’s End to John of Gaunt.”

Sir Charles Oman heard him allude many times at a Political Economy Club meeting to ‘Dr Friend’s child’ when he meant ‘Dr Childe’s friend’. He spoke, too, of J. M. Synge’s play, The Ploughboy of the Western World. He once invited a young don to dinner to meet “that new Fellow” Casson”. The invitee replied: “But, Warden, I am Casson.” “Oh, well,” said Spooner. “Never mind. Come anyway.”