He went on to Oriel College, Oxford, and his verse was published in Oxford Poetry from 1925 to 1928. Needing money during the Great Depression, he taught briefly in Nigeria, under the auspices of that Colonial Government's Education Department. Then he spent time working and travelling in Continental Europe. While in Germany, early in Hitler's reign, he saw an incident which shocked him all his life: starving inmates of a concentration camp being tormented by local inhabitants, who were throwing bread so that it landed only just beyond the captives' reach. As a result of this, he was utterly dismissive of all later German assertions that most people remained ignorant of what was happening within the worst of the camps.
