C. B. Oldman was notable as the head of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum library from 1948 to 1959 and as a musical bibliographer of great distinction. He was the best English Mozart scholar of his generation.

Cecil Bernard Oldman was born on 2 April 1894 in London, the son of Frederick James Oldman, a builder and contractor of New Cross Road, southeast London, and his wife, Agnes Barnes Nightingale Oldman. He was educated at the City of London School from 1905 to 1913, and then entered Exeter College, Oxford, having won a scholarship. He obtained various college prizes and achieved a first class in Classical Moderations in 1915 and a second class in Literae Humaniores in 1917. The rector of Exeter College paid testimony to Oldman's strength of character, intellectual capacity, wide knowledge of the classics, and considerable powers of literary expression, when Oldman applied for a post in the British...