Workers’ Educational Association, and writing his first article, on a ten-day signals camp held over the 1931 summer holiday. By the time Bruce-Mitford was 16 or 17, his studies had been switched from classics to history; "I was not very good at Greek and Latin", he later wrote, despite devoted tutoring by his brother Terence. Around the same time, he came across Samuel Gardner's English Gothic Foliage Sculpture in the school's library, and upon reading it discovered his love of the concrete and visual. In 1933, he was awarded a Baring Scholarship in History to attend Hertford College, Oxford. This was a "surprise", he wrote, "for I never had a head for dates and treaties". But at Oxford Bruce-Mitford "fell in love with the atmosphere and smell of the oldest part of the Library where, under the flat-arched 15th century ceiling, cases displaying illuminated manuscripts were set out". One, the twelfth-century Ashmole Bestiary, open to a folio of a red eagle on a background of gold, so captured his attention that "after some weeks I could stand my ignorance and quall my curiosity no longer", and, "[s]crewing up my courage", asked for permission to see it; he remained absorbed in the work through lunch and until evicted at the end of the day. During school vacations, Bruce-Mitford would take the tram to the British Museum, where he spent time in the Reading Room. He would also walk around the building, listening to guest lecturers speak on the objects, and particularly enjoying hearing about the Chinese paintings and the Royal Gold Cup. In 1936, he took a Second Class in Modern History, and in Michaelmas term began a Bachelor of Letters on "The Development of English Narrative Art in the Fourteenth Century". The research included an investigation of the pigments (particularly "Egyptian blue") used in early illuminated manuscripts. Bruce-Mitford's supervisor was Robin Flower, deputy keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum. The same year, the University Appointments Board recommended Bruce-Mitford for the curatorship of the Castle Museum, writing that he "would do well in a trading or administrative post, but has an exceptional gift for research, a sphere in which he could do work of outstanding merit". Though he never finished the B.Litt., he would obtain a Master of Arts in 1961, and a Doctor of Letters in 1987, both from Hertford College. Career Ashmolean Museum By 1937, Bruce-Mitford had taken