Context
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INovember of 1943, the historian and legendary chronicler of the Southwest, J. Frank Dobie, found himself in a world as far removed from the Texas brush country as one could imagine. During his time as visiting professor of American history at Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in England, Dobie witnessed bleak and harrowing days in World War II Britain.
Cut off from wide-open spaces, bright sun, and his beloved ranch culture, Dobie put pen to paper to write to his close friend and frequent collaborator, artist Tom Lea. The resulting letter offers a rare, humorous, and deeply poignant look at a quintessential regional writer grappling with a vastly different world.
The Story
At its surface, Dobie’s letter is a classic “fish-out-of-water” tale, laced with dry wit and self-deprecation.
Sent from the heart of wartime Britain, his words contrast the historical richness of Cambridge with his own deep hunger for the open spaces of Texas. Teaching British students about America provided him with amusement and worldly experience, and the harsh realities of a country deep in the throes of war.
Dobie detailed the brutal physical toll of the conflict on this small country, yet beneath his complaints about the grim weather and rationing, he found something unexpected: an immense admiration for the British people. He watched them bear daily hardships with quiet, heroic courage and stubborn endurance.
Ultimately, Dobie offers a timeless lesson in how our identity is forged by home, yet tested when we are stripped of it.
Unapologetically rooted in Texas, he found that placing himself in the middle of Britain’s wartime troubles did not diminish his voice, it sharpened it.
Humor and memory can serve as psychological armor against any hardship. No matter how unfamiliar our surroundings become, our internal compass points home.
The letter follows below.
J. Frank Dobie
EMMANUEL COLLEGE
CAMBRIDGE
November 14, 1943
Dear Tom:
Your letter of three weeks ago came through yesterday, and it was like a sudden gust of clean, dry wind off the Texas chaparral blowing right through these damp, stone-muffled cloisters. God knows the atmosphere here is rich with history, but after a while, a man gets an awful hunger for space that doesn’t have a fence or a centuries-old tradition attached to every square inch of mud.
They put me to lecturing here on American history and Southwest folklore to audiences that are wonderfully polite, remarkably attentive, and entirely bewildered by the notion that a country could have a frontier as late as the tail end of the nineteenth century.
One old don asked me quite seriously the other day if the Texas Rangers still routinely used horse-pistols to settle disputes over land boundaries. I told him we usually reserved those for department chairs who tried to alter textbook orders, and he nodded gravely as if that fit right in with his anthropological understanding of our tribe.
The blackouts here are absolute, and the cold gets into your bones in a way that dry Northers never quite manage. There is no central heating worth the name, and I spend half my time chasing small scraps of coal like a miser. Yet, the people have a stubborn courage that you have to respect. They take their watery tea and their meager rations with a kind of quiet endurance that leaves no room for cheap heroics.
Still, I dream daily of bacon that doesn’t taste like preserved whale, coffee that could wake the dead, and the sound of a mockingbird in a live oak rather than these English rooks cawing over the chapel roof. Give my best to the crowd at the ranch, and tell them the coyotes out here don’t know how to sing—they just bark like civilized pessimists.
Yours faithfully – J. Frank Dobie
J. Frank Dobie Papers, box 114, folder 2, (Manuscript Collection MS-1176), Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Why Historify?
Names, dates, and events are merely the skeleton of history—essential for structure, but lacking life. As a former teacher, I’ve seen how story transforms cold facts into a shared human experience. We are natural-born storytellers, and it is through the narrative arc of a life that history becomes not just a subject to study, but a moment to inhabit.
After retiring from the classroom, I had the singular privilege of working in the Texas General Land Office Archives, home to millions of original documents, whose stories influenced my approach to learning history. Their voices have echoed across generations of Texans building bridges to the past. Please join me as we move beyond the facts to uncover the richness of history, one story at a time.
Why Historify?
Names, dates, and events are merely the skeleton of history—essential for structure, but lacking life. As a former teacher, I’ve seen how story transforms cold facts into a shared human experience. We are natural-born storytellers, and it is through the narrative arc of a life that history becomes not just a subject to study, but a moment to inhabit.
After retiring from the classroom, I had the singular privilege of working in the Texas General Land Office Archives, home to millions of original documents, whose stories influenced my approach to learning history. Their voices have echoed across generations of Texans building bridges to the past. Please join me as we move beyond the facts to uncover the richness of history, one story at a time.
