Matthew Kilburn looks at the Oxford University career of William Russell, whose portrayal of Ian Chesterton in the series’ first two seasons shaped the success of Doctor Who.

“Yes, it all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a, quite a great spirit of adventure, don’t you think?”

The Doctor, The Sensorites: Strangers in Space (20 June 1964)

William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in Doctor Who from 1963 to 1965, died on 3 June 2024, aged 99. I like to think the Doctor underestimated the adventurous spirit of Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, and he would certainly have been mistaken about William Russell, the actor who played the Coal Hill science teacher. Between his planned admission to Oxford in October 1942, and his eventual going down from the university in June 1949, he not only saw war service in the Royal Air Force, but was active in student theatre and journalism, directed at least one play and edited a magazine, and travelled to Iceland on a trawler.

William Russell’s real full name was William Russell Enoch; in Oxford he was known as Russell Enoch, the name with which he began his acting career, and to which he returned professionally in the 1980s. Before Oxford he had attended Fettes College, a boarding school in Edinburgh, and was ‘entered for college’ at Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1942. However, this was in the middle of the Second World War, and Russell Enoch was liable for conscription from the age of eighteen; entry was presumably deferred while Enoch learned which part of the armed forces he would join. When he eventually arrived at Trinity in April 1943 at the start of Trinity Term, it was as a cadet studying the Royal Air Force short course. Clare Hopkins, Trinity College archivist, has pointed out that Enoch isn’t wearing uniform in the freshers’ photograph for that term; perhaps Enoch’s uniform hadn’t arrived. Even so, this is a more casual photograph than the formal matriculation photographs which would mark the start of most post-war university careers, academic dress being markedly absent from this image of serviceman students.

During the Second World War the long vacation was suspended and students on armed forces short courses studied for six months; his course completed, Russell Enoch left Oxford for active service in October 1943. His tutorial record survives on an index card in Trinity College archives, and this followed his military career as well as his academic one. Initially serving in the United Kingdom, he travelled to South Africa for training in February 1944, was commissioned pilot officer in November that year, and returned to the United Kingdom in February 1945, serving in Coastal Command. His RAF career did not end with the Second World War itself; as with many servicemen, demobilization had to wait as the United Kingdom dealt with post-war crises across theatres of the war just ended and in its empire. Russell Enoch spent February to November 1946 in Palestine. He returned home to be demobilized on 13 November 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant.

Russell Enoch was free to take up his suspended place at Oxford, arriving in January 1947 at the start of Hilary Term. He initially studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but abandoned this after two terms in favour of English. According to the obituary in The Guardian, written by Michael Coveney, this change greatly relieved Enoch’s tutor Anthony Crosland, best remembered as a Labour cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. Crosland had himself transferred to PPE from Classics on his return from active service in 1945, gaining a first in PPE and a fellowship at Trinity in little more than a year. Inconstancy could be the mark of great gifts.

Russell Enoch began studying English in October 1947 at the start of Michaelmas Term, the term in which the student magazine The Isis began to report his career in student theatre. The Isis, like much of Oxford student life, had been suspended during the Second World War, but had returned at the very end of Michaelmas 1945. By October 1947 it was re-established as a weekly house journal of the political, literary and theatrical sets at the university, although it had competition (especially from Cherwell, not yet a newspaper). Viewed at this distance the magazine is full of people anxious to impress upon the rest of the university their talents while sitting in judgement upon their peers. Many of the names which follow will be known to those familiar with the British creative industries of the late twentieth century, as well as some who made their careers in other areas.

Selected figures in the student world were profiled as ‘Isis idols’ if men. Women undergraduates had to settle for a smaller feature called ‘Have You Met…’ which faded away after the first few terms. One of the first ‘Have You Met…’ articles in the revived Isis featured Barbara Clegg, then a star of the student stage, especially the Experimental Theatre Club; over thirty years later she would make one contribution to Doctor Who, as a writer, authoring Enlightenment (1983) for Peter Davison’s Doctor. While student actors were self-consciously amateurs at this point, several aimed to make the leap to the professional stage. Timothy Bateson, plucked from student productions to take a colourful supporting role in Cavalcanti’s film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), and already possessed of a stage contract when he took finals, was much feted and much envied; a greater contrast with his Doctor Who role, as the scorned Binro the Heretic in The Ribos Operation (1978) is difficult to imagine.

Russell Enoch’s first notice was in the number of 12 November 1947, when Peter Wildeblood reviewed his appearance in The Idiot, part of the Experimental Theatre Club’s acting competitions; while Wildeblood thought Peter Parker’s performance ‘brilliant’ in the central role, Russell Enoch’s ‘performance of great insight and pathos… succeeded in conveying an impression of feeble-mindedness, without screaming like a banshee, climbing up his own trouser-legs, or filling the stage with a tangle of floating eyes and flashing hair,’ this last a dig at a more established personality in theatrical and literary Oxford, Kenneth Tynan, whose performance choices in another play were apparently easy to predict and after two years very familiar.

Russell Enoch’s next notice showed more appreciation of his talents in his own right. Michael Croft reviewed The Moon in the Yellow River in The Isis of a fortnight later, 26 November 1947. Enoch didn’t appear in this, but was its producer, or in later parlance director. The Moon in the Yellow River, by Denis Johnston, had first been performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1931 and concerns an attempt by the IRA to blow up an electricity station belonging to the Irish Free State government in 1927; one might wonder whether Enoch’s experience amidst the competing ideologies of late-mandate Palestine the year before had some influence on his choice of play. Croft recognized Enoch’s ‘courage’ and ‘eye for detail’ while contrasting him with the ‘more experimental, less adult producers’. I’m not sure how well Croft understood the play, reliant as his review is on generalizations about Irish character, but he was supportive of Enoch despite the production’s failure during the second act, which he blamed on the inadequate comprehension of the actors rather than their producer.

Russell Enoch seems to have been absent from student theatre during the first term of 1948; his tutorial record indicates he sat preliminary examinations in English that term. However, a calendar of forthcoming student productions in The Isis for 28 April 1948 includes his expected appearance as Troilus in the Experimental Theatre Club’s Troilus and Cressida, opposite Evelyn Arengo-Jones as Cressida and directed by Anthony Richardson. Unfortunately the reviewer in The Isis of 9 June 1948, Mickey Hall, was impressed by very few aspects of the production, considering Richardson’s direction aimless and lacking depth, while Russell Enoch’s attempt to ‘forge the character [of Troilus] into a tragic hero’ failed on the inadequacy of the text provided by Shakespeare, though ‘there was an unsophisticated charm about his performance which was very attractive.’

The long vacation of 1948 saw Russell Enoch and Michael Croft travel to Iceland, an experience written up as ‘Bourbon and Black Death’ in The Isis of 20 October 1948. ‘Five days aiming north in a twenty-year-old trawler,’ their piece begins, ‘discussing Dostoievski with the skipper and the Bronte novels with the second mate; then Iceland, glaciers and rock, black and lawless, a wilderness flung out of the ocean.’ ‘Black Death’, Iceland’s ‘favourite drink’, had ‘a kick like Hekla in eruption’. This was to be a working holiday, the pound’s purchasing power in Iceland being a quarter of what it was at home; they were unable to use their RAF experience in the service of the American forces based in Iceland, as they were unattached aliens, and sold tales of Oxford to the Icelandic press for a while before they gained more secure work in a textile factory, eventually spending nine days proper holiday in a bungalow reached through ‘fifteen miles of craters and rock’ before flying home to Prestwick in a Skymaster aircraft, presumably one operated by the United States Air Force. There is perhaps a sting in the telling of the tale: ‘We’d seen a marvellous country, and met some of the best people in the world. Above all, for ten weeks we had been far, far away from you all.’ The self-involved world of Oxford student literature and drama was one the authors knew too well to romanticize.

The journey attracted attention outside Oxford too. The Nottingham Journal of 4 August 1948 reported on the meeting of two West Bridgford students on a trawler bound for Iceland a few weeks before, one being George A. Checklin, studying zoology and geology at Nottingham University, and the other being one Russell Enoch, whose home address was then on Leaside Road in West Bridgford. The report was based on a letter sent from Checklin to his mother, the proud parent presumably then having informed the newspaper. Enoch and Michael ‘Crofts’ were thought by Checklin to intend to hitch-hike on to the United States, a plan which doesn’t appear in their Isis article, but which might have shaped their unsuccessful attempt to find work with the United States Air Force in Iceland. The Oxford duo disappear from the story as while Checklin, like them, began his stay at a Salvation Army hostel (itself run, it turns out, by a sometime Nottingham couple, Major and Mrs Ros), complaining also of the poor purchasing power of the pound, his aim was to join a party of students from Newcastle and visit the Myrdalls Jokull glacier.

The rest of Russell Enoch’s Oxford in 1948 seems to have been dominated by journalism rather than by theatre. In Michaelmas Term, he was co-editor of a rival publication to The Isis, Oxford Viewpoint, his colleague being Basil Saunders. Alan Brien, writing in The Isis of 24 November 1948, thought their second issue one of the best publications he had read; in it Enoch returned to his Iceland visit with a longer account of the stay in the remote bungalow, ‘Kurt’s House’: ‘first-class journalism with just the right mixture of straight description and personal detail.’

The remainder of Russell Enoch’s Oxford career is sketched on the back of his tutorial record card. Clare Hopkins, Trinity College’s archivist, says that the attention to Enoch’s extra-curricular activities is highly unusual and might suggest how highly the senior tutor regarded him. Enoch was an ‘Isis Idol’ in 1949, being recognized by his contemporaries as one of the university’s cultural weather-makers. He graduated BA that year with a third in English (at this point Oxford also awarded fourth class degrees), proceeding MA in 1950 as he was already twenty-one terms from matriculation. The tutorial record notes that he joined the Oxford Playhouse, and while he was certainly there in 1950 the earliest professional notices I can find for him are at Tonbridge Repertory Company in Kent, in December 1949, demonstrating that he could play to audiences at a remove from the intellectual spires.

Russell Enoch adopted the stage name of William Russell in 1954. His career took several paths, including an experiment in film production; he was a young romantic lead in British films in the 1950s, then becoming the star of the colourful ITC series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956). Several television and film roles followed before he took on the younger male co-lead of Doctor Who. Thereafter, he continued to follow his own path: the intellectual character actor and man of letters and the action hero were the same man and drew upon the same appreciation of varied life experience.

The author is grateful to Clare Hopkins, archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, for her help in the preparation of this article. A revised version of this article will appear in issue 50 of The Tides of Time, later in 2024.