It was Ghislaine Maxwell. We were both at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1980s—she reading History and Modern Languages (I had thought she’d studied English) while I went up to read History, then switched to Geography and the Environment at the same college—but our paths never crossed until one unexpected afternoon in June 1983.
She may have been in the year below me, and as I changed from history, we weren’t going to meet in the faculty. I don’t recall ever seeing her on the college premises; she must have stayed at Headington Hall. Was she even in rooms in her first or second year? I kept well clear of Oxford socialising and alcohol infused antics, especially amongst the public school lot – a group I had once belonged to but loathed to associate with. As an undergraduate, I preferred to spend my time acting and making videos.
Through the Oxford Film Foundation (I was a Director), I’d been invited on a private student tour of Pinewood Studios. Transport was haphazardly arranged, and I found myself in the passenger seat of a white VW Golf driven (and owned by) none other than Ghislaine Maxwell. She seemed bullish and accommodating, adult even. Her voice, hazzarding a guess, was like Deborah Kerr’s, deep with a hint of something aristocratic and foreign.
Before we set off, she detoured via Pergamon Press, Headington, to fill up on her father’s company fuel tab. I never mentioned that my father and hers were business rivals of a kind – they’d both wanted to purchase Waddington’s, apparently.
At Pinewood, a handful of us were taken around vast, yet claustrophobic sets—a Superman stage here, a James Bond pad there, a half-built ancient Roman street somewhere in between. We had tea in the canteen, I think, chatted, and drove back to Oxford before dusk.
Maxwell showed not an iota of interest in film production – she was doing a big favour for a close friend. Ghislaine Maxwell had been my taxi driver; not many people can say that (or would want to).
I never saw her again, though decades later I’d hear her name in quite different contexts. A Balliol friend mentioned that he’d been jealous of her getting a placement at the Daily Mirror during the summer vacation; he hadn’t put her name and Robert Maxwell’s together and was keen to know how he could get such a break. He became a journalist at the FT in due course. Back then, Ghislaine was simply a never-present Balliol contemporary going out of her way to give a group of students a lift.
Will she be in the photo of us on matriculation? I’ve never seen her there and never thought to look. I will use a magnifying glass. As a language student, she must have had a year out – probably my third year.
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