The History of the University of Oxford [7] 9780199510115

Table of contents :
v. 1. The early Oxford schools / edited by J.I. Catto. --
v. 2. Late medieval Oxford / edited by J.I. Catto and Ralph Evans --
v. 3. The collegiate university / edited by James McConica --
v. 4. Seventeenth century Oxford / edited by Nicholas Tyacke --
v. 5. The eighteenth century / edited by L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell --
v. 6. Nineteenth century Oxford, pt. 1 --
v. 7. Nineteenth-century Oxford, pt. 2 / edited by M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys --
v. 8. The twentieth century / edited by Brian Harrison.

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T H E HI S T O RY O F T H E

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD VOLUME VII

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TH E HISTO RY OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

VOLUME VII

Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 EDITED BY

M. G. BROCK AND M. C. CURTHOYS

clarendon press
oxford

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris SaÄo Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Oxford University Press 2000 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN 0±19±951017±2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt Ltd., Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

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Preface As was explained in the Preface to Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, the two volumes on the years from 1800 to 1914 are not entirely separate from each other. Each part is independently indexed and stands largely by itself; but, while most of the chapters in Part 2 begin where the main narrative of Part 1 ends, namely at or near the passing of the University Tests Act of 1871, a few do not observe this dividing line. Chapter 26 on the University Press, and Chapter 30 on Oxford Architecture, span the whole period, while Chapter 19 on Mathematics takes the account from 1827 to 1900. Similarly in Part 1 Chapters 11 to 14 and 18 to 21 went to 1914, and Chapter 17 to 1902. In all these cases a division would have truncated some themes and entailed duplication. The List of Contents for Part 1 will be found on pp. 877±8. As in Part 1, the footnotes and Index have been arranged in the hope of helping readers to obtain any further information which they may need. The number of people named in this volume (about 1, 700) is too large to allow the provision of biographical footnotes. An alternative method of identi®cation has been adopted, namely, giving dates of birth and death in the Index for most of those mentioned in the text. References in footnotes cannot take the place of a bibliography, if only because they may not mention the secondary work which led the contributor to the primary source cited. The Bibliography of Printed Works relating to the University of Oxford (1968), by E. H. Cordeaux and D. H. Merry, is the essential point of departure for anyone working in this area. It has been supplemented, for publications from 1977 to 1981, by the booklets entitled History of European Universities: Work in Progress, and thereafter by the `Continuing Bibliographies' in the journal History of Universities from volume vii (1988) onwards. The full title of a work is cited for the ®rst mention in a chapter unless it is in the Abbreviations list: where place of publication is omitted it is London, Oxford, or Cambridge. The University has a capital letter where Oxford University is indicated, but not where the word is used as a generic term. The plates have been arranged in a single block to give a compact visual survey of some of the major themes and personalities in the volume. An extended account of the illustrations is offered in the commentary at the front of the book. As the expressions of thanks scattered throughout the volume show, contributors and editors have met with invariable co-operation and goodwill throughout the University and indeed beyond it. They tender their most grateful thanks for all that help. This volume, like its predecessors in the

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series, was made possible by generous funding from the University, the colleges, the University's higher studies and Hulme surplus funds, and the Nuf®eld Foundation. Its editors owe much to Lord Bullock, and to his successors as chairmen of the controlling committee, Sir Anthony Kenny and Sir Keith Thomas. They received wise early advice from Trevor Aston, general editor of this series until his tragically early death in 1985, and admirable administrative support from Ralph Evans until the project of®ce closed. They record with gratitude the importance of the material produced by Mary Heimann during several months of research. This volume has bene®ted from Brian Harrison's work on twentieth-century Oxford, and his help at various stages is gratefully acknowledged. The late Colin Matthew was a constant source of support and inspiration. Both editors owe particular thanks to institutions in which one or other was employed during some of their time as editorsÐto Christ Church, to the New Dictionary of National Biography, to the University of Exeter, to Nuf®eld College, and to the College of St George, Windsor. The editors also record their gratitude to those people who, in administering facilities and resources, went beyond the call of duty in making them availableÐto the library staffs in the Bodleian, the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies, Christ Church, Nuf®eld College, and the Oxford Union Society; and, in archives and libraries where it is not invidious to name a particular individual, to Pauline Adams (Somerville), Sarah Bendall (Merton), Elizabeth Boardman (Brasenose, Oriel, and St Hilda's), Caroline Brown (Rhodes Trust); Christine Butler (Corpus Christi), Julie Courtenay (Lady Margaret Hall), Judith Curthoys (Christ Church), Caroline Dalton (New College), Robin Darwall-Smith (Magdalen and University), Father Davidge and Father Groves (Pusey House), Peter Foden (Oxford University Press), Sister Carolyn Green (The Cherwell Centre, Norham Gardens), Clare Hopkins (Trinity), David Hors®eld (Ruskin College), Jill Hughes (Taylorian), John Jones (Balliol), Elaine Kaye (Mans®eld), John Kaye (Queen's), John Maddicott (Exeter), Martin Maw (Oxford University Press), Fiona Pidduck (Lincoln), Margaret Sarosi (Harris-Manchester), Tony Simcock (Museum of the History of Science), Roberta Staples (Lady Margaret Hall), David Smith (St Anne's), Lorise Topliffe (Exeter), Naomi van Loo (Pembroke), and Nick Watts (Physiology Laboratory); to Ruth Vyse, Margaret Macdonald, and Simon Bailey, successively University Archivists; to Philip Moss, who gave every facility in the University Of®ces; to Clive Payne and Martin Range of the Social Studies Faculty Computing Centre, whose computing expertise was exceeded only by their patience with the inexpert; and to Savile Bradbury (Department of Human Anatomy), Lady Colvin, David Brock, Stephen Harrison (Corpus Christi), Roger Hutchins (Magdalen), Chantal Knowles (Pitt Rivers Museum), John Sanders (Clarendon Laboratory), Ian Scargill (School of Geography), and Oliver Westall (University of Lancaster), who

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helped in locating or identifying material. They are grateful, for permission to use copyright material hitherto unpublished, to the Literary Executors of the late Lord Bonham Carter (H. H. Asquith MSS) and Mrs Priscilla Hodgson (Margot Asquith diaries). They express their thanks to all those who worked with great ef®ciency on the production of this volume, and especially to Cathy Brocklehurst, Judy Godley, Pam Hopes, Margaret Hunt, Beverly Potts, and Marion Rogers; and to Ivon Asquith and Anne Gelling of Oxford University Press. It is impossible to be sure that the acknowledgements here and throughout the volume are complete: to anyone omitted an apology is tendered. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 owes much to many helpers; its faults do not lie with them. We would like to thank all the contributors for their unfailing patience and co-operation. John Simmons generously undertook the task of looking over the entire volume at proof stage. As in Part 1 we are deeply indebted to Eleanor Brock for compiling the Index (with the expert and unstinted help of Mark Pottle); the services of an indexer who is always available to be consulted are hard to overvalue, and have saved the volume from many errors and inconsistencies. Our more general gratitude for our wives' help and forbearance goes far beyond what can be expressed here. The University depicted in this volume may look modern at ®rst glance. By the early 1880s it had shaken off its earlier dependence on the Church of England, and those who staffed it had concerns, such as achieving a balance between teaching and research, which are still recurrent and likely to remain so; but this does not mean that their Oxford resembled today's in either opportunities or constraints. Their independence of governmental decisions may seem enviable; but their present-day successors might not, for instance, relish facing, as they did, a continual shortage of well-quali®ed applicants for many of the undergraduate places available. Some of the problems of their day were almost insoluble and their efforts to grapple with these deserve respect. Oxford, February 2000

Michael Brock and Mark Curthoys

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Contents Plates: list and commentary

xiii

List of ®gures List of tables

xl xli

List of abbreviations

xliii

List of contributors List of Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors

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`A Se c u l a r i z e d Un i v e r s i t y ' ? 1 A `plastic structure'

M. G. Brock

3

2 From the Cleveland Commission to the statutes of 1882

Christopher Harvie

67

3 Religious issues, 1870±1914

Peter Hinchliff

97

A Ne w Co l l e g i at e Pat t e r n 4 The colleges in the new era

M. C. Curthoys

115

5 `Balliol, for example' 6 `Training in simple and religious habits': Keble and its ®rst Warden

John Prest

159

Geoffrey Rowell

171

7 `A Scotch University added to Oxford'? The Non-Collegiate Students

Alan Bullock

193

8 All Souls

J. S. G. Simmons

9 Christ Church J. F. A. Mason Note. The Christ Church Common Room under Dodgson, 1883±1892 Morton N. Cohen 10 `In Oxford but . . . not of Oxford': the women's colleges

209 221 232

Janet Howarth

237

W. H. Walsh

311

Te ac h i n g a n d Sc h o l a r s h i p 11 The zenith of Greats

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12 Classical Studies, 1872±1914 13 Ancient History, 1872±1914

Richard Jenkyns Oswyn Murray

327 333

14 Modern History 15 Jurisprudence

Reba N. Soffer Barry Nicholas

361 385

16 English

D. J. Palmer

397

17 Modern Languages and Linguistics 18 Music

Rebecca Posner S. L. F. Wollenberg

413 429

19 Mathematics 20 `Oxford for Arts': the Natural Sciences, 1880±1914

K. C. Hannabuss

443

Janet Howarth

457

21 The Pitt Rivers Collection Note A. The Medical School under Osler

William R. Chapman Charles Webster

499 504

Philip Morsberger

508

Note B. The Ruskin School

Note C. The pattern of examinations, 1914 M. C. Curthoys

`Th e Mu d d i e d Oa f s at Th e Goa l s '? 22 University and college sport H. S. Jones 23 Oxford and schooling

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517

J. R. de S. Honey and M. C. Curthoys M. C. Curthoys and Janet Howarth

571

Janet Howarth Peter Sutcliffe

599 645

27 `Extension' in all its forms

Anne Ockwell and Harold Pollins

661

28 Oxford and the Empire 29 The Rhodes scholars

Richard Symonds E. T. Williams

689 717

24 Origins and destinations: the social mobility of Oxford men and women

545

`Ox f o r d . . . Re f o r m i n g i t s e l f ' 25 The self-governing University, 1882±1914 26 The Oxford University Press

Th e Un i v e r s i t y Re ac h e s Ou t wa r d s

contents `Ou r Bu i l d i n g s Sh a p e Us ' 30 Oxford architecture, 1800±1914

xi Peter Howell

729

31 The Oxford of Raymond Asquith and Willie Elmhirst 32 The Edwardian reform movement

M. G. Brock Janet Howarth

781 821

33 Epilogue

M. G. Brock

855

Edwa r d i a n Ox f o r d

List of Contents of Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1

877

Index

879

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Plates: List and Commentary between pp. 532 and 533 1. The Marquess of Salisbury, when installed as Chancellor of the University. The Chancellor's pages at his installation (21 and 22 June 1870) were his two eldest boys, aged eight and seven. Although `said to be little pickles' they behaved `on this occasion in a most exemplary manner' (G. Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer (1978), 43). Like his predecessor in the Chancellorship, the Earl of Derby, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who took this photograph, Salisbury was a Christ Church man. Aged forty, he was to be Chancellor for thirty-three years. Oxford's High Churchmen had succeeded in excluding the scientists Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, from his honorary degree list, but he de®ed their protests against two public ®gures whose insuf®ciently private lives hardly met Victorian standards. During the two days he awarded ®fty honorary Doctorates of Civil Law. His opposition to the Universities Tests Act was already doomed to failure, and he soon had little use for a University which had deserted the Church of England. By the end of his life his family were maintaining that it was against etiquette for the Chancellor to visit Oxford. 2.

Benjamin Jowett, 1871, a black chalk drawing by DeÂsire FrancËois LaugeÂe. In October 1870, at the ®rst College Meeting after Jowett had become Master, he had not merely secured the appointment of a committee to revise the college's statutes along the lines described in Chapter 1, but had managed to transfer most of the bursar's functions to the Master. The ®rst decision led to the reforms through which Balliol retained its dominant position for the next twenty years: the second was a folly for which Jowett paid by a breakdown in health. It took a little time for yesterday's insurgent tutor to adjust to the drawbacks of high place. Among the Balliol undergraduates of the early 1870s `the more advanced spirits' regarded the Master `as an extinct volcano', according to H. H. Asquith's later account (S. Koss, Asquith (1976), 5). Outside the college he was still seen by many as a foe of the Church who must not be allowed a place on the Hebdomadal Council. The volume in Jowett's left hand is appropriately titled: his translation of Plato was ®rst published in four volumes in 1871. The drawing came to Balliol in 1922 by bequest from A. V. Dicey, the jurist, who had taken a ®rst in Lit. Hum. at the college in 1858.

3.

Mark Pattison, 1861, as newly elected rector of Lincoln. Gladstone called Pattison's Memoirs (1885) one of the `most tragic and memorable books of the nineteenth century'. Reared as an Evangelical, Pattison became for a time Newman's

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plates: list and commentary disciple, and died a virtual agnostic. A champion of the college tutors in the 1850s, he had turned by the end of the next decade into the foremost critic of the college system. During the 1870s, while he championed the research ideal, he feared that it would not be realized at Oxford without an unattainable change of outlook in both Parliament and the University.

4.

This photograph of William Stubbs comes from an album collected by Arthur Gray Butler, dean and tutor of Oriel, the college of which Stubbs was a fellow as Oxford's Regius Professor of Modern History from 1866. It probably dates from the early years of his tenure of the chair. Stubbs's political skill in that position is analysed in Chapter 1, and his in¯uence on Britain's university history courses in Chapter 14. Oxford's was by no means the only newly devised Modern History School on which his imprint lay. When G. M. Trevelyan embarked on the Cambridge Historical Tripos in 1893 the course was based `on Stubbs and on economic history' (G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography (1949), 12); and Stubbs's students carried his views and methods into the newer universities and university colleges. His style was not that of a dynamic leader. A dull lecturer, he complained privately in the mid-1870s, like other Oxford professors in arts subjects, that the tutors were not sending him enough men. Publicly he expressed his pleasure that his colleagues had de®ed his advice about restricting their teaching to periods earlier than 1650. He would have liked to be the Professor of Ecclesiastical History. His position and achievement were unique: none of his predecessors in the Regius chair could match his professionalism and productivity; none of his successors would have been offered a bishopric.

5.

Thomas Hill Green was the ®rst layman to be elected a fellow of Balliol. His lectures could be so confusing that, when he was thirty-six, Jowett relieved him of some of them for fear of damage to the college in Greats. Oxford philosophy as a professional discipline began with Green; but few of his successors could have written, as he did, that his interest in the subject was `wholly religious' (S. Paget, Scott Holland (1921), 65). Between 1870 and 1914 Oxford was full of men who, while they baulked at the miraculous in Christianity, were steeped in its traditions. Green's achievement was to articulate their aspirations. For Balliol men, as one of them wrote, `Green was an elder brother, in whose society we were ashamed to be sel®sh or mean' (A. G. C. Liddell, Notes from the Life of an Ordinary Mortal (1911), 82). He died in 1882 aged forty-®ve. The posthumous three-volume edition of his works included a reproduction of this engraving by C. W. Sherborn.

6.

This photograph of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was probably taken in May 1856, when he was twenty-four. In the previous year he had been appointed to a mathematical lecturership at Christ Church which he was to hold for twentysix years. He did not take Deacon's Orders in the Church of England until

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December 1861; but, that apart, his life's pattern had been set. When some of his early verses were published his editor asked him to devise a signature: reversing and Latinizing his ®rst two names he signed himself Lewis Carroll. On 26 April 1856 he recorded in his diary that the three small daughters of the new Dean, H. G. Liddell, had become `excellent friends' of his while he had been trying to photograph the Cathedral from the Deanery Garden (Morton Cohen, Lewis Carroll (1995), 60). Six years later, on a river picnic with the three girls, he was to tell them a story which became immortal. It begins with the second in age, Alice, following a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole. 7.

John Ruskin, 1875. Charles Dodgson's photograph of Ruskin was taken in the year when he made over his art collection to the University. He looked back on it as the last of his ®ve years of `effective action in Oxford'. By the end of 1879 the School of Drawing had belied his hopes, and he had come to regard the University as `a mere shop of adulterated knowledge, poisoned to the customer's taste' (Robert Hewison, Ruskin and Oxford (1996), 33). His greatest in¯uence on Oxford and Oxford men came later, however. It sprang less from his views on the University than from his books fulminating against the horrors of industrialization. These helped to inspire the labour movement, as the naming of Ruskin Hall (now Ruskin College) in 1899 was to show. A few years after that Unto This Last (1860) so impressed C. R. Attlee, who had just graduated from University College, that it became the gate through which he `entered the Socialist fold' (K. Harris, Attlee (1982), 22).

8.

Arnold Toynbee, undated photograph. When Arnold Toynbee was thirteen his father, a distinguished and philanthropic aural surgeon, died by an accidental inhalation of chloroform with which he was experimenting. At almost the same time Arnold injured his head in a fall from his pony. His mother could not afford to send him to Rugby School, as had been planned; and because of his injury he spent part of his teens studying on his own. He thus missed the classical grind undergone by his contemporaries, and at Balliol he took a pass degree. His originality of mind had not escaped Jowett, however. He was appointed to teach economics to the college's Indian Civil Service probationers and his fame as a lecturer soon spread beyond Oxford. He died aged thirty in 1883, his book, The Industrial Revolution (a phrase which he minted), being published posthumously. Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel is his memorial.

9.

Cecil Rhodes as an undergraduate. Rhodes matriculated at Oriel College in October 1873, aged twenty, and took his pass BA and MA in December 1881. In his view of the University, as in all else, he combined idealism with earthy commercial acumen. He spoke of Oxford's `compelling in¯uences, her wonderful charm' (J. G. Lockhart and C. M. Woodhouse, Rhodes (1963), 66); but he was careful to be elected to Vincent's and the Bullingdon and to make the right

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plates: list and commentary friends. A chill which he caught in his second term while rowing affected his heart and lungs (the specialist noting `not six months to live'); and in September 1877, after a heart attack, he made a will dedicating his fortune (not yet made) to `the establishment . . . of a secret society the aim . . . whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world' (Lockhart and Woodhouse, 69). No other Oxford pass man has interpreted Aristotle's energeiaÐthe highest activity of the soul concentrated on the highest objectÐmore remarkably, or, in the outcome, with more ample effect.

10.

In 1870 Merton's undergraduates seem to have been quite as unscholarly as this group look. The college allowed them to dally on Pass Moderations for up to two years. Nearly half were Etonians; and a postmaster (scholar) of the time was later unable to recall `among our commoners . . . a single genuine ``reading man''' (John Maude, Memories of Eton and Oxford (Frome 1936), 74). The ride to reform was bumpy. As the reformers soon found, deterring the idler was easier than attracting the serious student. In 1875 the college suffered from `a sadly depleted list of entrants' (E. A. Knox, Reminiscences (1934), 91).

11.

In 1872 the members of Oxford's Convocation, Masters of Arts and Doctors who had kept their names on the books of their colleges or halls and paid the requisite fees, numbered some 4,400. The majority were non-resident and mostly clergymen. The major rail links to Oxford from other parts of Britain were by then in place, and non-residents had little dif®culty in making their votes tell on University decisions. S. P. Hall's sketch shows the arrival of `outvoters' at Oxford railway station on their way to vote in the election of A. P. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, as Select Preacher for Oxford (The Graphic 21 Dec. 1872). A year after the universities' religious tests had been abolished by Parliament, the choice of Dean Stanley for the position, with the Vice-Chancellor's sanction, gave an unmistakeable sign of the Act's liberalizing effect. In 1865, when the likelihood of this nomination ®rst became known, Pusey and Liddon had determined to ®ght it. Since then Stanley's invitation to a leading Unitarian to take Communion in Westminster Abbey had increased their objections to his churchmanship; but in 1872, though they regarded the nomination as `discreditable', they decided on inaction. Successful opposition would merely invest Stanley `with the cheap honours of a petty martyrdom' (Johnston, Liddon (1904), 241), while to fail in an attack on the liberal Vice-Chancellor, Henry Liddell, would `give a new impetus to the barren unspiritual negations' which Stanley represented. The more hot-headed High Churchmen disdained such caution and were defeated in Convocation by 349 votes to 287.

12.

On 31 May 1873 the Graphic devoted its front- page picture to a Union debate on a motion to disestablish and disendow the Church of England. By 1908 (the date of the debate shown in Plate 13 below) only the of®cers and principal speakers

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wore formal dress for debates, but some thirty years earlier casual clothes were not worn in the Union. Sir Charles Oman recorded having seen seventy top hats on the Society's pegs on a Sunday. The ladies were equally well dressed: those familiar with the Union library will appreciate the cramped conditions under which they attended on these occasions. The disestablishment debate, which continued for three evenings and lasted through most of May, characterized the Oxford of the early 1870s. There were no guest speakers. Twenty-one members drawn from eleven colleges and from the Unattached spoke on the motion or the amendments to itÐeight for disestablishment, and thirteen against it. Balliol was the only college to supply more than two speakers or to be represented on both sides. Eight of the speakersÐfour from each sideÐended their undergraduate careers with ®rsts in ®nals. The motion was defeated by 88 votes to 40. The vote, which was taken at 11.30 p.m. on the third evening included a mere fraction of those who had attended, if only because the colleges ®ned any undergraduate returning after 11 p.m.; but there is no reason to think it unrepresentative. Nearly thirty years later an identical motion was lost in a larger, but otherwise uncannily similar, voteÐ191 to 87. In 1873 most Union members were Conservatives; but an outstanding Liberal speaker could make his way. H. H. Asquith, who had been defeated for the presidency in the preceding term, and who spoke for disestablishment on the third evening, was president a year later. 13.

The Illustrated London News employed its `special artist' to draw Mrs Fawcett commending votes for women to the Oxford Union in November 1908. As the ®rst woman ever to speak in the Union she attracted a record attendance: leave had to be given to members to sit on the ¯oor and in the gangways. She recalled (in What I Remember (1924), 196) `the generosity. . . among the young men who gave me so warm a welcome': the debate had gone off `with perfect order and good temper'. Her opponents won by a majority of 31 in a vote of 689. She was assured that the dons who were life members of the Union had turned the scale against the women. The programme for the debate illustrates how far the University was even then from being a wholly secular institution. The president for that term and both of the opening speakers had taken Holy Orders within a few years. The president became a missionary and the anti-suffrage `opener' a suffragan bishop. The women's champion, Ronald Knox (like his opposite number a future president), was to translate the Bible for Roman Catholics when in his sixties and die a member of the Ponti®cal Academy.

14.

Butter®eld's chapel for Balliol College, which was begun in the same year as Scott's at Exeter (see below, Plate 15), proved the less popular of the two. The exterior, in alternate courses of red and yellow stone, represented an experiment in Ruskinian colouring of a kind much derided in Butter®eld's work (Ch. 30, n. 52). `I could never bring myself', Harold Macmillan recorded, `to admire the chapel, so strangely resembling a ham sandwich, with generous slices of ham'.

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Walter Morrison, a Balliol man of an earlier generation, offered the college £20,000 to demolish the chapel and substitute a copy of its predecessor. Fortunately his money was diverted elsewhere. However, the chapel's interior was reconstructed during the inter-war years. 15.

In 1837 J. H. Newman thought Tractarianism stronger among the fellows of Exeter College than anywhere else in Oxford. Nearly twenty years later their chosen architect for a new chapel was George Gilbert Scott who had been in¯uenced by the Oxford Movement and the great French churches. The resulting building was much admired at ®rst; but in 1965 a letter to the Oxford Magazine included the remark: `No one would now wish to repeat the mistake made by Exeter in demolishing their chapel to build a Victorian gothic substitute'. Since then Scott's design has come back into favour. This illustration for the Oxford Almanack for 1861, like the one of Balliol Chapel (Plate 14) which appeared on the Almanack for 1859, was a steel engraving by J. H. le Keux.

16.

Few of Oxford's Victorian buildings escaped controversy or criticism; but William Butter®eld's Keble Chapel, pictured in this early photograph (taken by the Oxford photographer, Henry Taunt), was perhaps the most controversial of all. As Chapters 6 and 31 show, the brickwork, the East End mosaic, and the accommodation for `The Light of the World', were all questioned or criticized. The High Churchmen, who were reluctant about inviting the Archbishop of Canterbury to the opening service, succeeded in `postponing' (and, in the event, preventing) consecration of the building, since that would have brought it under the control of Parliament (p. 187). In April 1876, when the great day came Pusey's sermon was inaudible from his incessant coughing and the loud echo. The `magni®cence' of the Chapel's interior (p. 746) is, however, matched by the view of the exterior when seen from a distance across the University Parks.

17.

Temple Moore's initial design for Pusey House, 1912. When the Pusey Memorial Library (soon known as Pusey House) was founded in 1884 its building in St Giles was fairly small. In 1910, however, it received a substantial bequest from the estate of a Leeds solicitor, J. W. Cudworth, and Temple Moore, whose work was well known in Yorkshire, became its architect (G. K. Brandwood, Temple Moore (1997), 171). He proved an inspired choice. He had been articled to George Gilbert Scott, the younger: Giles Gilbert Scott had later worked in his of®ce. Despite this stance in the centre of the Gothic revival, he followed neither precedent nor restrictive convention, but his own impeccable taste. By 1914 the ®rst part of his design had been built, and the last building to be described in Chapter 30 has proved to be one of the most esteemed.

18.

In 1843 A. W. N. Pugin's Gothic designs for rebuilding the Broad Street front of Balliol College created the divisive dispute described in Chapter 30, and were

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then laid aside. Twenty-three years later, when Hannah Brackenbury had been persuaded to allow some of her gift to the college to be used on this project, the Pugin drawings were shown to Alfred Waterhouse, who produced an admired building, photographed here in 1885 or thereabouts. For this success Benjamin Jowett claimed much credit, little of it deserved. The main contribution of his party in the college had been to humiliate the Master, Robert Scott, by scrimping on the latter's lodgings. 19.

Magdalen's St Swithin's quadrangle, designed by G. F. Bodley and Thomas Garner and built between 1881 and 1885, has a high reputation; but their plan, as executed, entailed the demolition of Pugin's gateway (p. 736), shown on the extreme left in this plate (which shows their 1879 design); and only two of their three ranges were built. When Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was invited, in 1928, to complete the quadrangle he altered the layout on the north side.

20.

This etching by A. Ernest Smith from the Oxford Almanack for 1892 depicts the ®rst, and probably the least successful, of the buildings which T. G. Jackson designed for Hertford College. Henry Boyd, who became principal of the college in 1877, three years after its re-foundation, admired Jackson's work. He was able to interest the Drapers' Company, of which he was Master in 1896± 7, in Oxford's science area. Grants for the Electrical Laboratory and the Radcliffe Science Library resulted. Both buildings were designed by Jackson.

21.

The Robinson Tower of New College, which forms the centre±piece of this photograph from the Oxford Almanack for 1901, commemorates the masterful tutor and bursar of the college whose predictions to the Selborne Commission are given in Chapter 2 (p. 81). On his death friends subscribed some of the money for this last section of the college's buildings on Holywell. This photograph shows most of the range's southern face except for what were originally two tutors' houses, one at each end. The tower formed an essential part of Basil Champneys's design for the later, eastern half of the complex. His range was not as tall as Gilbert Scott's earlier one, so that he needed a dominating feature in the centre to prevent an effect of disproportion between east and west.

22.

In 1876, after ten years of abortive efforts, and the rejection of two designs, T. G. Jackson was commissioned to build the Examination Schools at an estimated cost of £63,884. Like his four fellow-competitors he had been told to keep within £50,000, and had `set to work in Gothic . . . The thing would not come at all', he recorded; `®nally I gave up . . . and started afresh in a sort of Renaissance style, and everything seemed to go smoothly' (Recollections, ed. B. H. Jackson (1950), 134). An elaborate decorative scheme, though never quite completed, helped to raise expenditure to £107,000, exclusive of site costs of £38,000. When the debt had been paid off early in the next century interest

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plates: list and commentary charges had brought the total cost to £180,000. The Non-Collegiate Students' building to the east of the Schools was started in 1886 and brought into use two years later.

23.

S. P. Hall's conversation piece, `We pause for a reply', was originally given the title `Dominus Illuminatio Mea' when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. Although the ®gures are in the dress and style of the 1890s, and the examiners represent a range of late-Victorian donnish types, the artist placed them in the setting of the Old Schools, which had ceased to be used for examinations after 1882, when the new Examination Schools opened in the High Street. The latter were designed primarily to accommodate written examinations, as a contemporary photograph of one of the writing schools laid out with desks and papers shows ( John Prest (ed.), The Illustrated History of Oxford University (1993), 70). But the viva voce continued to be an element in most examinations (see Pt. 1, 349) and even the most self-assured Edwardian undergraduate was reminded of the Day of Judgement as he approached the table of examiners (D. HartDavis (ed.), End of an Era: Letters and Journals of Sir Alan Lascelles 1887±1920 (1988), 56). Hall's `tense piece of storytelling' (K. Garlick, `Portraits with Purpose', Oxford Today Trinity 1997, 22), which may be compared with Pt 1, Plate 8, was an elaboration of a scene in the Schools which the artist had illustrated for the 1871 edition of Tom Brown at Oxford.

24.

The Indian Institute building at the east end of Broad Street was designed by Basil Champneys in his Renaissance style and built, with funds subscribed in India and Britain, during 1882±4 and 1892±6. The old houses on the left of this late nineteenth-century photograph stood where the New Bodleian now stands. A court ruling was obtained in 1956 that the Institute building need not be used for the original purpose, but conversion to new uses presented dif®culties; and three years later the Hebdomadal Council's application to demolish it, and redevelop the site, was accepted in principle by the planning committee of the City Council. Convocation agreed to demolition by 288 votes to 270 in June 1965. In 1972, however, the building was accorded a `Grade II Listing' and the threat to it was averted. The fancy strapwork over the oriels had, however, been removed.

25.

`Eastern Sages' from the series of caricatures published by the Oxford bookseller Thomas Shrimpton, c.1882, shows three leading scholars from the division of Oriental Languages in the Faculty of Arts, created in 1883. On the left, the Assyriologist A. H. Sayce, a pioneer in the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, was a vocal supporter of the movement for the endowment of research. Friedrich Max MuÈller, professor of Comparative Philology and general editor of the series `Sacred Books of the East', is the middle ®gure. To the right, James Legge, appointed to the chair of Chinese on its foundation in 1876, was

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formerly a missionary in Hong Kong and was, as a Congregationalist, the ®rst nonconformist to be appointed to an Oxford chair. He is remembered for his authoritative translations of the Chinese classics and has recently (1998) been commemorated by a memorial in Corpus. 26.

`University Extension', c.1866, was among a series of caricatures commenting on current Oxford topics drawn by S. P. Hall and circulated in photographic copies for undergraduate purchasers. Unlike most of the caricaturists who took Oxford as their subject in the earlier part of the century, Hall was a graduate of the University (Pembroke College; he took a ®rst in Lit. Hum. in 1865) and had a keen sense of the outlook and prejudices of his undergraduate audience. He indicated their likely response to poor students (represented here by an artisan or clerk, approaching the University bare-headed, carrying a bag marked `Parliamentary train', the cheap early-morning trains which railway companies were obliged by Act of Parliament to lay on for workmen) brought to the University by the schemes of the various sub-committees on University Extension. The newcomers would be looked down upon and excluded from social life by `the regular members of the University', of whom the swaggering, cigar-smoking ®gure shown here was an extreme example (S. P. Hall, Descriptive Key to the Oxford Sketches (n.d.), no. 32). This sentiment suggests why the founders of Keble College were at pains to emphasize their intention to maintain a gentlemanly tone (pp. 174±6).

27.

`Ladies Not Admitted.' `Very sorry, Miss Minerva, but perhaps you are not aware that this is a monastic establishment', the caption to this Punch cartoon (21 Mar. 1896, 134) reads. By 1895 all British universities and university colleges except Oxford and Cambridge were admitting women to degrees; and the decisions taken during the ®rst twelve days of March 1896 in both universities against moving in that direction aroused much critical comment. In Oxford some of the women's opponents were more subtle than the cartoonist suggested. Chapter 10 shows that what the women's colleges feared most was, not the refusal of any improvements in status, but that a particular Diploma scheme might be adopted. On 10 March a resolution was put to Congregation under which a woman who had completed her `®nals' successfully, whether for honours or a pass, would receive a Diploma without having to comply with any residence requirement. The margin against this deadly boon was narrowÐAyes 136, Noes 140.

28.

Shrimpton's caricature, `Oxford's Types: Balliol', c.1881, develops Hall's theme in Plate 26, presenting an unsympathetic view of the relative diversi®cation of undergraduate admissions to Balliol which took place during the ®rst decade of Jowett's mastership (described in Chapter 5; see also Balliol College Annual Record, 1997). Shrimpton's series was not accompanied by an explanatory text

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plates: list and commentary but the extremes, from the young swell (on the left) to the mature student (far right), possibly a migrant from the body of Unattached Students (a `tosher'), are clear enough. Between them the cartoonist depicts an urchin-like ®gure (perhaps a cockney from a day school), a Brahmin, a bewhiskered, spectacled ®gure (possibly intended to be one of Balliol's Scots), and a Chinese student (the latter were not at all numerous, but topical after the recent foundation of the Chinese chair). A later, more vicious caricature, published in 1892, depicted Asiatic `Men of Belial, 1992',

29.

`Athletics v. Aesthetics', a print by Henry Stephen (`Hal') Ludlow, a wood engraver whose work appeared in periodicals during the 1880s and 1890s. This example, which hangs in the JCR at Magdalen, offers a darker reworking of the antagonism between aesthetics and athletics, which had been the subject of an earlier Shrimpton caricature in Torpids week, 1881. The latter had Oscar Wilde as its target. Although undated, Ludlow's sketch shares the sentiments of, and may be contemporary with, the hostile skit attacking Wilde and his followers, Aristophanes at Oxford, published in Eights week 1894. The authors, L. S. Amery, F. W. Hirst, and H. A. A. Cruso, denounced `Dorian Gray, Salome, the Yellow Book, and the whole of the erotic, lack-a-daisical, opium-cigarette literature of the day' (p. vi). By presenting the two aesthetes, identi®ed as such by a sun¯ower button-hole, in unhealthy and decadent contrast to the vigorous, straight-backed oarsmen, to whom the young woman in the foreground is revealing her ankle, the artist rather ¯attered the athletes, though he did no more than follow a trend for illustrators to show the latter attracting female admiration (e.g. `Watching the Oxford crew practising at If¯ey', The Queen, 12 Mar. 1892, 403). The aesthetes had their own charms. The daughter of the principal of Jesus recalled Wilde's gallantry on the tow path during Eights week. She was wearing a dress, which she disliked, made of a `silky, woolly mixture of green and white' into which tufts of white were woven: `He did me the honour to admire it and said, ``It is like snow upon a hawthorn bush''' (Mary Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford, and Cambridge (1934), 70).

30.

John Buchan became an Isis `Idol' (28 Jan. 1899, 132±3) when president of the Union. This cartoon, the ®rst in the Isis series, was drawn by his Brasenose friend, B. C. Boulter. The two, who had been on the same college staircase as freshmen, were then in lodgings at 41 High Street. Buchan is shown defending the cellar's contents to commemorate a much-approved stand which he had recently made against the college's drunken rowdies. They had been making life intolerable for the Principal under the impression that he was trying to turn a sporting college towards study. A Scottish son of the manse, Buchan was a model of industry. Already in Who's Who as an author, and the winner of the University's Stanhope and Newdigate prizes, he went on to take a ®rst in Greats. Within three years he had joined `Milner's Kindergarten', the group of

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young men selected to start the reconstruction of South Africa after the Boer War. 31.

`Christ Church', Colin Matthew observed on the occasion of the Gladstone Centenary Commemoration, `played a central part in nurturing a political elite uniquely successful in nineteenth-century European politicsÐthe only elite still in power and recognisably the same in 1920 as in 1820' (`Gladstone and the University of Oxford', OM, n.s. 170 (1999), 3). Many undergraduates at Christ Church could look forward to joining this governing class irrespective of the outcome of their studies at Oxford, and keeping the well-born in order, or encouraging them to scholarly application, represented a perennial challenge to the college's disciplinary resources. This example from the set of prints circulated after the disturbances in Christ Church during 1893±4, described in Chapter 9, shows dinner-suited revellers daubing slogans in Tom Quad in the early hours of 2 December 1893. Their protest was against the refusal of the authorities to waive the normal regulations about college gate hours to enable them to attend a ball at Blenheim Palace. The undergraduate sent down by the Christ Church governing body following this incident was the seventh Earl Beauchamp, who had succeeded to the title and estates on the sudden death of his father (one of the promoters of Keble College) two years earlier. His particular offence was to send `an insolent letter' to Dean Paget (pictured here in nightcap, holding a candle). Beauchamp became a member of the Liberal cabinet (1910±15) and was Chancellor of the University of London, 1929±31. But there were also young noblemen who applied themselves to their books: Lord Hugh Cecil (Univ.) and Viscount St Cyres (Merton) took ®rsts in Modern History in 1891 and 1892; Lord Warkworth (later Earl Percy; Christ Church) did so in Lit. Hum. in 1893.

32.

A lecture-room in Magdalen College, drawn by Ernest Stamp and reproduced in A. D. Godley, Aspects of Modern Oxford (1894). The room illustrated here is on the ground ¯oor of St Swithin's quadrangle which, like other additions to college buildings undertaken in the 1880s, provided additional teaching space to meet the needs of the new system of inter-collegiate lecturing. Popular lectures continued to be held in college halls; the smaller gathering shown here (cf. the catechetical lecture of the 1840s illustrated in Pt 1, Plate 50) may be based on one of Godley's honours lectures on Homer's Iliad and Cicero, which he delivered thrice-weekly at 10 a.m. in Magdalen during the academic year 1892±3. Godley's humorous `Diary of a Don' described the attendance at a ten o'clock lecture to honours men: `Lecture-room pretty full: two or three scholars, with air of superior intelligence: remainder commoners, in attitudes more or less expressive of distracted attention. One man from another college, looking rather de trop' (Ibid. 109). No image has been found of the most important medium of instruction in this period, the `private hour'.

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33.

The Owlets Club, Corpus Christi College, 1891. Founded in 1889 for the study and discussion of English literature (and still ¯ourishing), this club originally met on each Sunday evening during term. Shakespeare was prominent on the menu, but it extended to Marlowe, Byron, and (in translation) Ibsen. The three bearded fellowsÐCharles Plummer, Cuthbert Shields, and Arthur SidgwickÐ are mentioned elsewhere in this volume. The back row includes two young BAs, both Greats men, who became notable scholars: E. K. Chambers (extreme right), Second Secretary, Board of Education, 1921, FBA 1924, KBE 1925, proli®c author, Shakespearian, and editor of English classics; and R. G. C. Proctor (second from left), for whom see B. C. Johnson, Robert Proctor, the `Great Bibliographer' (1985). Chambers continued to publish until his eighties; Proctor died on a Swiss glacier in 1903. `Owlets' is a reference to the owls in the coat of arms of Hugh Oldham, co-founder of the college.

34.

A Trinity College reading party, probably in the Lake District, 1891. This group represents another aspect of the easy relations between dons and undergraduates outside the lecture-room. During vacations tutors commonly took selected groups of pupils for a period of study in a venue suitable for walking or climbing during the afternoons. The party photographed here was led by a young classics fellow H. E. D. Blakiston (seated in centre wearing a black tie, though he was by then ordained). The others were (from left to right): F. W. Hall (holding a golf club), later a classics tutor and President of St John's; Laurence Binyon, the poet; F. D. MacKinnon (standing), later a judge; J. H. Thurs®eld, later a headmaster; and H. P. Plumptre, who entered the Church.

35.

W. A. Spooner, portrayed by `Spy' (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, (21 Apr. 1898) as one of the series, `Men of the Day'. A very small, short-sighted albino, Spooner had overcome these handicaps to be elected (in 1862 and 1866) as the ®rst scholar and fellow of New College from a school other than Winchester. In 1903 he became the ®rst non-Wykehamist Warden since the college's foundation in the late fourteenth century. Oxford men such as Ernest Barker and Roy Harrod, who had known many college heads, thought Spooner the best of all. A slight cerebral dysfunction has given him lasting fame. The best-known `Spoonerisms' are transposed initial sounds, such as the complaintÐpossibly apocryphalÐto an idle undergraduate that he had `tasted a whole worm'. There was also some transposition of ideas. Spooner apparently ended one sermon by remarking that whenever he had referred to Aristotle he had meant St Paul.

36.

Sir William Reynell Anson, drawn by `Spy' for Vanity Fair (13 June 1901) in the series `Statesmen'. When the fellows of All Souls elected Anson as Warden in November 1881 the Law of Contract had already established his distinction as a legal scholar. (The edition of this work published in 1998 was the twentyseventh). `He is', The Times recorded, `a layman, and a Liberal, and . . . under

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forty years of age'. The `Thunderer' predicted correctly that the election would prove `the turning-point between the new and the old regime'; and it listed some factors which helped to explain the support among Conservative fellows for a colleague who had stood as a Liberal in the recent general election. The new Warden was `a baronet . . . the bearer of a famous name, the grandson of a Peninsular hero, and the collateral descendant of one of the best and bravest of England's naval heroes'. The fact that he was a rich and generous bachelor presumably added the ®nal touch to his suitability. Despite his immense services in modernizing All Souls, described in Chapter 8, Anson was not, in any general sense, a radical. He became a Liberal Unionist in 1886, and chairman of the committee which helped to deny degrees to Oxford women ten years later. He held one of the University's parliamentary seats from 1899 until his death, and served under Balfour for three years as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education. When he died early in June 1914 the Prime Minister described him privately as `very cultivated and agreeable [but] a teaching example of the futility of the don in politics' (H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. M. and E. Brock (1982), 82). 37.

The procession to the high table of Corpus Christi in this cartoon consists of Thomas Case, Cuthbert Shields, G. B. Grundy, F. C. S. Schiller, Robinson Ellis, Charles Plummer, Arthur Sidgwick, and J. H. F. Peile. The President of the college is followed by six fellows, with the Assistant Chaplain (and Divinity Lecturer) in the rear. All of those depicted appear in this volume. Peile was a Corpus man who held a University College fellowship. His services were needed in Corpus because Plummer, although a Deacon, did not hold Priest's Orders, and was reluctant to teach for `Divvers Prelim'. The cartoon was drawn in 1905 or 1906 by O. S. Royal-Dawson, a scholar of the college, 1903±7, who died of wounds in 1917. The drawing's titleÐNos miseri et egentes homines (the opening words of the college's Grace)Ðwas, of course, ironic. The eight look neither wretched nor needy.

38.

When Henry John Stephen Smith was nominated as a member of the Selborne Commission in 1877 reference was made in the Commons to his European reputation as a mathematician and to `his conciliatory character [which] made him perhaps the only man in Oxford who was without an enemy'. Dogged by ill-health in youth, he none the less became president of the Union, gained a double ®rst, and won the Ireland Scholarship. He was elected to a fellowship of Balliol in 1849, to the Savilian professorship of Geometry (at thirty-three) in 1860, and to Fellowships of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in 1861. His scholarship, described in Chapter 19, was combined with productive committee service within the University and outside it. Much of the Devonshire Report on Scienti®c Instruction came from his pen. Worn out by the grind of the Selborne Commission he died unmarried in 1883, aged ®fty-six.

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Copies of Boehm's bronze bust, executed in 1883, may be seen in Balliol and Corpus Christi, and in the National Portrait Gallery. 39.

Like W. R. Anson (Plate 36) Henry Francis Pelham came from a well-known whig family and had independent means. Unlike Anson he was a thoroughgoing Liberal. His great services to the study of Roman history and to the University are described in Chapter 13. His researches were seriously hampered by the double cataract which damaged his eyesight from his mid-forties. When a subtle attack on the women's halls was mounted in 1896 (Ch. 10, pp. 267±8, and Plate 27 above), Pelham was their most in¯uential defender. The halls' opponents asked in Congregation what could be endangered by their proposal to grant BA diplomas to women without any residence requirement. `The proposal', Pelham replied, `if it endangered nothing else, endangered the honour and reputation of the University' (The Times, 11 Mar. 1896, 10d). In that crisis the women's halls needed a champion of Pelham's standing. Herkomer, who was Slade Professor from 1885 to 1894, painted Pelham's portrait in front of his Slade class. It was bought for Trinity College by subscription in 1907. This plate is from an engraving by Herkomer himself.

40.

Physiology was examined as a separate branch of the ®nal honour school of Natural Science from 1887. It was one of the new undergraduate disciplines taught almost entirely outside the colleges, and the series of photographs which were taken of its ®nalists is an unusual example of departmental spirit within the collegiate university (though several of the undergraduates sport boaters with college colours). The group pictured here took the Physiology school in June 1894, undergoing two days of written work in the Examination Schools, and two days of practicals in the University Museum, followed by a viva in the Schools. Most of them entered the medical profession. They are accompanied by their teachers: the demonstrators M. S. Pembrey and J. S. Haldane (back row, centre) and beneath them the venerable ®gure of Sir Henry Acland, regius professor of medicine, who looks down upon the man he brought in to lead the new department and who was shortly to succeed him in the regius chair, J. S. Burdon-Sanderson. The affectionate handling of the puppies was perhaps intended as a retort to the anti-vivisectionists (see p. 483).

41.

The School of Geography was established in 1899 and the ®rst examination for the new diploma took place in June 1901, when this group of teachers and candidates was photographed outside the Old Ashmolean building, where the school was initially housed (see I. Scargill, The Oxford School of Geography 1899±1999 (1999)). The teachers were: H. N. Dickson, lecturer in physical geography (back row, left); A. J. Herbertson, lecturer in regional geography (back row, right); and H. J. Mackinder (seated, right), reader in geography and head of the school. Unusually for Oxford teachers of the period, Dickson and

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Herbertson had taken research degrees. The ®rst four students to gain the diploma were (back row, left to right), Revd E. C. Spicer (New), William Stanford (Wadham), William Bisiker (Wadham), and (seated front) Joan B. Reynolds (Society of Oxford Home-Students). 42.

The ®rst students to complete the diploma and certi®cate courses in Anthropology were photographed on the occasion of their practical examination in the upper gallery of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, June 1908. Henry Balfour, curator of the museum, stands behind them (second from left). The students were (left to right): (Sir) Francis Knowles, who became physical anthropologist to the Geological Survey of Canada; Barbara Friere-Marecco, the only one of three to be awarded a distinction (she had taken a ®rst in Classical Mods at Lady Margaret Hall and became a research fellow of Somerville); and J. A. Harley, from Antigua, who had studied at Harvard before coming to Oxford.

43.

The Prince of Wales visited Germany in the Easter and summer vacations of 1913 when an Oxford freshman. Hermann Fiedler, who had been Professor of German since 1907, accompanied the Prince on both occasions. This photograph of them, from Fiedler's own collection, was taken at Saalburg on 22 March 1913. Edward, who thought Fiedler `a jolly old chap', greatly enjoyed driving through the German forests, but was wearied by the ceremonial which visiting his relatives and connections necessarily involved (P. Ziegler, King Edward VIII (1990), 42). In Berlin, however, he would `somehow manage', as he wrote later, `to park the good Professor Fiedler in the hotel after dinner. . . and . . . join a party of friends for a night of dancing not on the Baedeker schedule'. The `parking' process could be drastic. He once escaped by locking Fiedler into the bathroom. To ensure that the incarceration lasted only while the escape was in progress he gave the porter the key, explaining that apparently `the lock of the bathroom had gone wrong' (Duke of Windsor, A King's Story (1949), 99; A Family Album (1960), 48±9). `I don't care much about the Germans', the Prince wrote in his diary after the ®rst visit (Ziegler, 44); but, as the second ended, he planned another for 1914.

44.

Arthur Thomson (front row, left) and his assistants in the lecture theatre of the department of human anatomy, c.1890. In the foreground is the slate table used for demonstrations; the demonstrators' rubber coats hang on the wall to the left. From its opening in 1885 until 1893, the department was accommodated in a brick-built shed, with an iron-roofed extension, behind the University Museum.

45.

This photograph of Harold Brewer Hartley in the Balliol±Trinity laboratory was one of a collection taken during the summer of 1910 of teachers, demonstrators, and recent graduates who remained in Oxford to undertake research or

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help run the laboratory. The most famous image in the series (the surviving examples of which are preserved in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford) is that of the young physicist, H. G. J. Moseley. Under the scheme of co-operation agreed between the college laboratories in 1904, the Balliol±Trinity laboratory specialized in the teaching of physical chemistry. Hartley, science tutor at Balliol since 1901, led a small group of researchers who, in the years up to 1914, produced a `modest ¯ow' of papers on the physico-chemical properties of solutions (J. Jones, Balliol College: A History (2nd edn 1997), 236). The photographer was Hartley's pupil, R. N. Garrod-Thomas, brie¯y (1908±10) a tutor at Balliol before becoming a barrister, returning to chemistry to work on explosives in the Ministry of Munitions during the First World War, after which he made a career in chemical manufacturing. 46.

An undated photograph of Elizabeth Wordsworth, the ®rst Principal of Lady Margaret Hall and founder of St Hugh's Hall, and perhaps the most in¯uential of the early promoters of women's education in Oxford. The popular writer for girls, L. T. Meade, who visited Lady Margaret Hall in 1892, spoke of the advantages for young women of residence in the Hall. `They have not only the advantage of what is meant by that term of the age, the Higher Education of Women, but they have also the deeper advantage which must arise from constant association with a lady of re®nement and culture. Living daily under her roof, it is impossible for any girl to forget that she can never attain to anything better, greater, or richer in life than true womanliness in its all-round sense' (`English girls and their colleges VI. Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's Hall', Lady's Pictorial 9 Jan. 1892, 48±9).

47.

Bertha Johnson was one of the group of dons' wives who promoted women's higher education at Oxford during its earliest phase. As Lady Secretary to the AEW, Mrs Johnson oversaw the teaching arrangements for women students until 1894, when she resigned following a challenge to her authority by Somerville (described on pp. 260±1). Thereafter her particular concern was for the Home-Students, of whom she was Principal, an honorary post. Combining home life with public duties, she set high store by `unpaid public service' (Butler and Prichard, 33).

48.

Agnes Maitland, photographed in her of®ce during the early years of her principalship of Somerville. She was Mrs Johnson's adversary in the contentions of 1893±4. Education was Miss Maitland's livelihoodÐshe had lectured in domestic science at a training school and examined the subject in elementary schoolsÐand she promoted the position of women within the profession. During her principalship (described in P. Adams, Somerville for Women (1996), Ch. 3), Somerville pressed ahead with the appointment of its own tutors, adopted the title of `College', and raised money to build a library.

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49.

The Principal and students of Lady Margaret Hall, May term 1882. To the left of Miss Wordsworth (seated at the centre of the middle row) is Edith Argles, who was later Vice-Principal. Mary Eleanor Benson, who became one of the founders of the Women's University Settlement in Southwark, stands at the left end of the back row; Ella Sykes, who later undertook travels in Persia and Central Asia, is third from left in the back row; her sister, Ethel, who taught in India and became supervisor of the women employees of Lloyd's Bank, is third from right (back); Irene Nichols (centre front row) read English and became a bookbinder; to her left, Elinor Lucas, one of the ®rst women to gain honours in Classical Moderations, became a teacher and worked in the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement.

50.

Madeleine Shaw Lefevre, the ®rst Principal of Somerville, is seated (wearing a hat) in the middle row of this photograph taken in 1887. To her left is Clara Pater, and to her right, Margaret Seward, the tutor in chemistry. Eleanor Grace Powell, Somerville's ®rst tutor in modern history, is seated middle row (second from left). Next to her, at the end of the row, is Elizabeth Hodge, whose achievement of a ®rst in Classical Moderations in 1888 disarmed opposition to the opening of Greats to women. Lilian Faithfull (standing behind Hodge) took a ®rst in the women's examination in English in 1887, some years before an equivalent course of study was available to men; she later became principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College. As well as lawn tennis, the students' recreations included drives in the college's pony trap, soon to be supplanted by the bicycles which proliferated in the following decade.

51.

Annie Moberly, the ®rst Principal of St Hugh's Hall, stands in the back row (second from left) in this photograph taken in May term 1888, when the hall occupied rented accommodation in Norham Road. It includes the ®rst four students to be admitted to the hall, Constance Ashburner (standing behind Miss Moberly) and (front row, from left to right) Charlotte Jourdain, Jessie Emerson, and Grace Parsons, the latter becoming in 1889 the ®rst woman student to sit the Botany honour school (P. Grif®n (ed.), St Hugh's: One Hundred Years of Women's Education in Oxford (1986), 27). Edith Wardale (far right, back row) took a ®rst in modern languages in the following year, and became a tutor of the college.

52.

In 1894, when this photograph of the Principal and students of St Hilda's Hall was taken, the new foundation had not yet been recognized as an independent hall by the AEW (it was treated as a hostel and its members classi®ed as HomeStudents). It was a major achievement of Esther Burrows, the ®rst principal (seated centre, back) to overcome the suspicions of the other principals, and to gain full recognition from the AEW in 1896. She chaperoned the students and concerned herself with their dress. `Mrs Burrows was the Lady of the house, rather than the Principal', one of them recalled (M. E. Rayner, The Centenary

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plates: list and commentary History of St Hilda's College, Oxford (1993), 37). Her daughter, Christine (top right), one of seven former pupils of Cheltenham Ladies' College in the ®rst year's intake of ten students, became modern history tutor and succeeded her mother as Principal in 1910.

53.

`The Ladies' College, Somerville Hall, Oxford' from the Graphic (31 July 1880), illustrates the domestic surroundings of the college in its early years. The print shows (top row): 1. Cottages in the drive; 2. A student's room (based on the room of Mary Ellen Turnbull, one of the ®rst students); 3. View from the lawn tennis ground; (lower row): 4. Approach to the Hall and Entrance; 5. Back view of the Hall from the garden (see Adams, Somerville, xi). The Graphic had previously (16 June 1877) reproduced drawings of Girton and Newnham at Cambridge.

54.

The `white brick' of the house acquired in 1878 when Lady Margaret Hall was founded is visible on the extreme left of this photograph. The extension in red brick and terracotta, designed by Basil Champneys, was completed in 1884, to create what is now `Old Hall' (p. 751). The combined edi®ce, occupied by `bluestockings', soon became known as `the red, white, and blue'. At this stage the Principal, Elizabeth Wordsworth, meant to limit the Hall to twenty-®ve students. Within ten years, however, she had decided on expansion. She did not want Lady Margaret Hall to fall behind Somerville and pressure from applicants was increasing; some students (`the crickets') were being housed temporarily in Crick Road. The Wordsworth building, designed by R. T. Blom®eld and occupied in 1896, brought the Hall's student numbers above ®fty. It was the outcome of bold decisions. An expanded women's college hardly ®tted with the particular Church of England tradition in which the Hall had been founded; the site and building costs had to be met largely from loans (see Plate 55); and the controversies of 1895±6 made the future of women's institutions in Oxford look doubtful (pp. 264±8). Despite this, Blom®eld was encouraged to envisage enlargement of the site and to plan the layout of further buildings. A set of handsome buildings in harmony with each other is the result. In 1914 the dormer windows in Wordsworth were replaced, when the wings were brought into line at second ¯oor level with the centre section; and most of Champneys's east end, as the photograph shows it, disappeared during the 1920s, when Wordsworth and Old Hall were linked to each other by the building named after Eleanor Lodge.

55.

Lady Margaret Hall found raising funds for the Wordsworth building (Plate 54) very dif®cult. An appeal in 1894, though headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and A. J. Balfour, did not bring in much money. As it was impossible to include a dining hall in the building plans, the temporary dining room shown in the photograph was attached to the building's north side. Its interior provided a

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marked contrast to the arrangements in the men's colleges. The Hall's students had ¯owers and table cloths, and (visible on the end wall) an `autotype' of Raphael's Sistine Madonna presented by Mrs Romanes (Brown Book, 1896, 17). Their fare was plain, however, by undergraduate standards; and, unlike their male counterparts, they ate together in their glori®ed hut three times a day. 56.

This photograph shows how Lady Margaret Hall's library was housed from the occupation of R. T. Blom®eld's Talbot building in 1910 until 1961. Talbot is the most striking of the buildings which Blom®eld designed for the Hall; and it formed the centre-piece of the diploma work which he deposited when elected a Royal Academician in 1914 (The Builder, 8 May 1914, Supplement, 8 and Illustration III). It was opened by the University Chancellor, Lord Curzon, in October 1910, a few days before Convocation assented to the creation of a Delegacy for Women Students. By his presence Curzon made amends for his much-resented opposition as an undergraduate more than thirty years earlier to admitting women students to the Union Society's library. Since then the women's colleges had succeeded in building up their libraries which, while designed primarily for their students, went beyond examination syllabuses (Pauline Adams, ```A voice and physiognomy of their own'': the libraries of the Oxford women's colleges', OM n.s. 134 (1996), 6±10). By the early 1920s LMH was already short of book-shelving; but in 1929, when Giles Gilbert Scott had been approached to be the college's architect, Blom®eld wrote to him: `Don't alter my library; you will spoil it if you do' (Richard A. Fellows, Sir Reginald Blom®eld (1985), 87). Blom®eld's inspiration for the library vaulting may have come from Wren, and, in particular, from St James's Church, Piccadilly. He was no slavish imitator of the master, however: steel joists were used for the barrel vaults which produce such a pleasing effect (Note by Stephen Robinson, p. 14: LMHA).

57.

Between 1886 and 1913 students at Somerville were accommodated in two buildings, the old Hall and the West Building. In a deliberate rejection of the model of the men's colleges, Somerville at that time had no central dining hall; members of the two buildings used separate dining-rooms. They also had separate JCRs, the one pictured (in about 1906) being for members of old Hall. The decoration included two pictures (far left and fourth from left) donated in 1884 by John Ruskin, an occasional guest at Miss Shaw-Lefevre's Wednesday afternoon receptions (Adams, Somerville, 112).

58.

By 1913, when this photograph of members of Somerville was taken, the college was on the verge of a decisive expansion with the opening of the Maitland building, which included a dining hall capable of accommodating the whole college and additional student rooms. The relative uniformity of dress worn by these Somerville students, photographed outside the new library, itself suggests

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a departure from the ambience of a country house party encouraged by the college's ®rst principal. Emily Penrose, the principal since 1907, stands in the centre of the middle arch with, to her right (leaning against the arch), the Hon. Alice Bruce, the Vice-Principal, and to her left Mildred Pope, the tutor in Modern Languages. Marya Czaplicka, about to embark on her anthropological ®eldwork in Siberia, stands in the second arch from left (on the other side of the pillar from Alice Bruce). Behind her, on the back row, are four members of the Mutual Admiration Society, Amphilis Middlemore, Dorothy Rowe, Charis Barnett, and Muriel Jaeger (the Society's most famous member, Dorothy L. Sayers, does not appear in this photograph). 59.

The University Boat Club's boathouse was built in 1880 to the designs of one of George Gilbert Scott's architect sons, John Oldrid Scott, at a cost of £3,230 (excluding ®ttings and architect's fees), £2,300 being raised by loans. On 9 January 1881, when almost complete and already housing several eights, it was burned out. The University granted £100 to the rebuilding appeal (pp. 532±3), the Cambridge Boat Club contributing the same amount. The building, which could house some forty boats, was soon in service, and by 1890 the debt on it had been reduced to £1,300. A second destructive ®re (perhaps started accidentally by vagrants) broke out early on 25 September 1999. The losses included many boats and some of the Club's photos and archives. The cost of building repairs `could reach £1 million' (The Times, 27 Sept. 1999, 8d). In terms of retail (as opposed to building) prices this corresponds to about £15,600 in 1881. The foreground of this photograph includes an eight in which the coach has apparently usurped the cox's seat. By the turn of the century it was usual for coaches to operate by cycle from the footpath.

60.

The belief a century ago that teamwork was the secret of success in the Eights represents one of the main themes of Chapter 22. Magdalen's performance in May 1894, at the head of the river for the third year running, suggests that this belief was solidly based. The New College crew, which included four blues and had outperformed Magdalen in practice, moved into second place on the ®rst evening. On the third, a Magdalen man caught a `crab' and stopped the boat after half-a-minute's rowing. A superb performance by the stroke enabled Magdalen to escape their pursuers and stay in the lead. Given con®dence by this feat, they held off New College on the three remaining evenings. At ten stone their stroke, H. B. Cotton, was two stones lighter than his opposite number in New College. Contemporary praises for his pluck and leadership were hardly exaggerated, as the tragic sequel showed. After rowing at bow in four victorious Oxford crews, he caught a chill while coaching during the ¯oods of 1895 and died of pneumonia (R. Hutchins, `Well Rowed Magdalen!' A history of Magdalen College Boat Club 1859±1993 (1993), 20±1).

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61.

A bump in Torpids, 22 February 1910. Christ Church III are shown bumping Trinity II at the entrance to `the Gut', the narrow bend half-way along the racing course. Although ¯ooding was common during February when Torpids were rowed, it seldom affected the towpath and each college expected its undergraduates to run with its crews. Even more than Eights, Torpids demanded grit and `college spirit'. Keeping up with a Torpid did not require champion runners. The crews consisted largely of beginners, and they rowed against a strong stream on ®xed seats in clinker-built boats. In the summer eights these `clinkers', with their overlapping external planks, gave way to `shells' with ¯ush planking and sliding seats. Rowing no. 4 in the Christ Church torpid was a freshman, Eric Parker, from whose album this photograph is taken; he came up to Christ Church from St Bees to read Theology and became a clergyman.

62.

`Cricket in the Parks' by Lancelot Speed, appeared in A. D. Godley's Aspects of Modern Oxford (1894). The lounging air of the onlookers depicted by the artist, himself a recent Cambridge graduate, suggests why critics of athleticism thought that it encouraged `spectatorism', and why advocates of the more gruelling sport of rowing viewed the growing popularity of summer games, lawn tennis in particular, with disfavour. University cricket at Oxford moved from Cowley Marsh to the Parks in May 1881 during the golden age of the amateur sport. It was probably in these practice nets that batsmen were ®rst deceived by the `googly', the off-break delivered from a leg-break spinner's action, invented during his residence at Oriel (1897±1900) by B. J. T. Bosanquet, who is to be distinguished from his near-namesake and distant relative the Idealist philosopher mentioned elsewhere in this volume. In 1999 Oxford University, in partnership with Oxford Brookes University, was designated by the England and Wales Cricket Board one of six new Centres of Cricketing Excellence.

63.

Oxford University Association Football XI, 1892±3. Although the gap between the standards of amateur and professional soccer sides had widened considerably since the University XI won the Football Association cup in March 1874, the team pictured here were still formidable opponents; they defeated Royal Arsenal 4±0 in a match played in the Parks (C. Weir, The History of Oxford University A.F.C. (1998), 22). C. B. Fry is seated second from left; the famous centre-forward and future England captain, G. O. Smith, sits cross-legged at the front; the goalkeeper, G. B. Raikes (in blazer, back row), and full-back, W. J. Oakley (back row, far right) also became England internationals. (Sir) Farquhar Buzzard, later Regius Professor of Medicine and physician to the royal family, is in the back row, far left. One effect of athleticism, which Gladstone deplored during his visit to All Souls in 1890, was `the laxity which allows men to perambulate the streets in ``shorts''' (C. L. R. F [letcher], Mr Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 (1908), 14).

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64.

This photograph of the Varsity rugby football match in the early twentieth century comes from the album of F. N. Tarr (Uppingham and Univ.), who represented Oxford in 1907, 1908, and 1909. The ®xture was played at the Queen's Club in December, when the ground was frequently enveloped in West London fog. The photograph shows the Cambridge pack arriving in force as the grounded Oxford man attempts to feed his scrum-half after the tackle. The shirts worn by both teams differ little from those of the 1990s: Oxford sport a dark blue shirt with a white collar and a distinctive white crown badge, and dark blue shorts. Tarr had to leave the ®eld with a broken collar-bone early in the 1909 match, a famous Oxford victory in which Ronald Poulton, making his debut, scored ®ve tries. An of®cer in the 4th Battalion, the Leicestershire Regiment, Tarr was killed at Ypres on 18 July 1915, two months after Poulton's death in action.

65.

Lady Margaret Hall hockey XI, 1912±13. Back row (from left to right, with schools previously attended): S. G. Bryan-Brown (Laleham, Eastbourne); D. Austin (Highbury and Islington H. S.); M. D. Ward (Queen Margaret's Scarborough); E. T. Calvert (Queen's Coll. Harley Street). Middle row: M. G. Skipworth (Queen Anne's Caversham); D. L. Esdaile (Wycombe Abbey); E. M. Newbolt (St Paul's School for Girls); O. S. Horner (Roedean); E. L. Malleson (Wimbledon H. S.). Front: D. Harvey (Crescent House, Bedford); E. G. Stacey (Winchester School for Girls). Six of the eleven became teachers. The team was expected to be a strong one `but, owing perhaps to lack of matches, has failed to get rid of its old faultÐgood individual play but lack of combination' (Brown Book no. 58, Mar. 1913, 74). Women's hockey in Oxford received a ®llip in March 1912 when the United Hockey Club defeated Cambridge 3±1 in a `hard and fast game' (Ladies' Field, 30 Mar. 1912, 232), Oxford's ®rst victory in the ®fteen years since the inter-varsity women's ®xture had been instituted.

66.

An undergraduate's sitting room in Exeter College, c.1875. The occupant of a `set' of rooms would also have a bedroom and, in some cases, a pantry in which the staircase scout could prepare and clear away meals. Breakfast and lunch would be taken here, and friends might be entertained for dessert after dinner (decanters stand on the table). In the 1870s it was usual for an incoming occupant to purchase the furniture of his predecessor at an agreed valuation; Exeter set an upper limit of £60, the norm being about half that sum. At Exeter the room rental charged in the mid-1870s ranged from £10.10s to £16.16s a year. When photographed, these were the rooms of Basil Nevinson, who became a barrister; his academic cap and gown hang by the door (his cap apparently sitting on a skull). They lack the paraphernalia of athleticismÐoars and team photographsÐwhich adorn many undergraduate rooms in photographs taken at the end of the century.

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67.

Brasenose College Junior Common Room, photographed in 1892. By the time that the new quadrangle was completed at Brasenose in 1887, most colleges had established JCRs and a room was duly provided by the college to accommodate this new undergraduate institution. The trophies on display re¯ect Brasenose's rowing successes at Henley. The room here had not yet degenerated into the shabby and untidy state characteristic of communal areas set aside for undergraduate use.

68.

A bump supper was held in the hall of Merton College on 27 May 1903 to celebrate the four `bumps' (Wadham, Keble, Lincoln, and Worcester) which had enabled the college eight to rise from fourteenth to tenth place on the river. Although it would be an exaggeration, as the college's historians point out, to suggest that by the turn of the twentieth century Merton had been transformed into a `reading college', there is no doubt that academic standards had risen in the generation since the picture in Plate 10 had been taken. The bump supper, presided over by the Warden and fellows, was one of the new corporate occasions which united dons and undergraduates: champagne, speeches, and tobacco, would be followed by a bon®re and ®reworks in the quad. This photograph was evidently taken at an early, decorous stage of the proceedings.

69.

The Churchwardens of University College were photographed in June 1903 when C. R. Attlee (holding the churchwarden pipes) was their president. This was a play-reading society which, like the Corpus Owlets, had Shakespeare as its staple fare. Its members were `reading men' in that all ten in the group were working for honours: in ®nals they secured one ®rst, four seconds, and ®ve thirds. The only scholar in the group, who took a ®rst in Classical Mods and a second in Greats, became a master at Charterhouse, and endowed a scholarship to bring Carthusians to Univ. Cigarettes were not esteemed among Clem Attlee's contemporaries, to whom a cigarette smoker was a man who had not learned how to smoke a pipe. Attlee's pipe was to become a familiar feature of many Labour Party conferences.

70.

By 1887 Oxford, Cambridge, and London universities were all organizing classes in various towns, and it was decided to invite these `extension' students to a summer meeting in one of the universities. The result was the gathering, some 900 strong, in August 1888, which inaugurated a series of such meetings. This photograph of extensionists on the lawn of Balliol College, from the album of the Delegacy, shows the August 1889 meeting, attended by 1050 students (850 women and 200 men). From 1893 Oxford and Cambridge held summer schools on alternate years. After each, many of those attending stayed on for three weeks of supervised private study. By 1900 Liberal and Labour leaders were included among the lecturers. A number of working men and middle-class

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women came to look back on attendance at a summer meeting as a landmark of liberation in their lives. 71.

This photograph shows the Vice-Chancellor (the President of Corpus) walking in procession past Oriel with the Duke of York (later George V). This was a nervous moment. Among the honorands at the back of the 1899 Encaenia procession was Cecil Rhodes. An Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law had been offered in 1892, but he had been unable to come to Oxford for the ceremony. In 1897 a House of Commons Select Committee on the Jameson Raid had referred in their report to `grave breaches of duty' by Rhodes (PP 1897, ix. 20). When, less than two years later, he came to England `to face the music', as he put it, more than ninety professors and fellows, headed by the Master of Balliol and both Proctors, signed and published a protest about the degree. It would have been unprecedented to withdraw the offer; but it was rumoured that a proctorial veto at the Encaenia had been averted only when Kitchener, another of the honorands, had stated his unwillingness to accept an honour refused to Rhodes. The Junior Proctor (H. E. D. Blakiston) was understandably critical of Rhodes. The Raid, by denuding Matabeleland of police, had occasioned a native rising in which the last survivor among his three brothers had been killed. In the event Rhodes was enthusiastically received; but in the following term the Hebdomadal Council decided to put a time limit on offers of the Honorary DCL. In 1925 one of the protesters of 1899 (H. A. L. Fisher) became a trustee of Rhodes's bequest to the University.

72.

In September 1909, after events described in Chapter 27, Arthur Jenkins (whose son became Chancellor of the University in 1987) and twenty-six other Ruskin College students moved out and formed the Central Labour College. Ruskin had housed con¯icting aims from the start. In 1899, shortly before the ®rst students were admitted, one of its founders, Walter Vrooman, announced: `we have no ``isms'' to teach, . . . no party and no creed' (H. Pollins, Ruskin College (1984), 10). This position was not easily sustained when the trustees included outstanding trade union and labour leaders such as Ben Tillett and C. W. Bowerman. By the autumn of 1908 half of the students, with some encouragement from the Principal, saw the University's efforts to forward working-class education as an intention to enfold Ruskin in an upper-class embrace. Their deeply held suspicions should command the historian's respect; but they had perhaps overlooked a truth of which an undergraduate editor, G. D. H. Cole, reminded them in February 1910. Their `best interests are served', he wrote in the Oxford Reformer `not by deliberate instruction in party propaganda, but by fair and unbiased economic education'.

73.

In June 1910 members of the SCRs of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville staged a performance of the ®fteenth-century morality play Everyman in the garden of

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Radcliffe House, Somerville (Fritillary June 1910, 869). Pictured (from left to right) are: Octavia Myers (`Strength'), English tutor at LMH until her marriage; Henrietta Escreet (`Knowledge'), who had read Modern History at Somerville and become a factory inspector; Grace Hadow (`Everyman'), English tutor at LMH, later Principal of the Society of Oxford Home-Students and known for organizing social work through Barnett House; Helen Darbishire (`Good Deeds'), English tutor and later Principal of Somerville; and Evelyn Jamison (`Discretion'), librarian and later history tutor at LMH (H. Deneke, Grace Hadow (1946), 49). During that month the statute creating the Delegacy for Women Students, whose implications for the acceptance of women in the University and for the status of women dons are discussed in Chapter 10 (pp. 269±70, 285), passed Congregation. 74.

The photograph shows the Communication Company (one of®cer and 37 men) of the Of®cers' Training Corps marching past General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien during the annual inspection of the Corps at Headington Hill Park on 23 May 1913. They hold their semaphore staves, their ri¯es being slung. The parade comprised more than a thousand undergraduates, of whom the Prince of Wales was one. In his speech Smith-Dorrien called the Corps `one of the ®nest bodies of young men that he had ever seen'. Anyone who is inclined to disparage this OTC training as unrealistic should consider the judgement of C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, an Oxford historian who had served as an of®cer on the western front in 1915±16. On the Somme in 1916 the British suffered at least three times the of®cer casualties which they in¯icted. `It is astonishing', Cruttwell wrote, `that the supply of suitable of®cers was on the whole well maintained . . . The maintenance of so high a standard . . . was due to two causes. First, to the cadet-corps in the public schools and universities, fostered by Lord Haldane . . . ' (A History of the Great War, 1914±1918 (1934), 277±8). This photograph comes from the album of a member of the Communication Company, E. F. L. Taylor (Felsted and St Edmund Hall), one of the earliest Oxford graduates in Engineering Science (1913), who volunteered in August 1914 and subsequently served as a technical of®cer in the RAF. After the war his engineering knowledge was employed in irrigation projects in Egypt and land reclamation in Greece.

75.

In the Union Committee photograph of May 1914 the middle row (from left to right) consists of Sidney Ball, the senior treasurer; Austen Chamberlain, the term's guest speaker; the president (A. H. M. Wedderburn, see p. 860); Warden Anson of All Souls, one of the University's Unionist MPs; and W. H. Moberly, the senior librarian. The president's father and W. M. Gill, the Society's steward are in the back row. The other nine are undergraduate members of the Committee, three of them (excluding the president) being Balliol men. Of the eleven in the group who were under forty, Gilbert Talbot (back row, extreme left) was killed in 1915. He was a son of the Bishop of Winchester who had earlier been

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the ®rst warden of Keble College. When an inter-denominational religious and rest centre was established later that year at Poperinghe, west of Ypres, it was named after him. Talbot House, or Toc H as it has always been called, soon became known throughout the British sector of the western front and beyond. The survivors collected a DSO, an MC, at least ®ve mentions in despatches, and a variety of war wounds. Three went into politics and ended with peerages (Harold Macmillan, second from left in the front row; Walter Monckton; and H. G. Strauss). One became British Ambassador in Rome (Victor Mallet); and another (Walter Moberly) chaired the University Grants Committee for fourteen years.

ac k n ow l e d g e m e n t s Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the following, who have given permission to reproduce illustrations: Balliol College (by kind permission of the Master and fellows): 2, 8, 28 Bodleian Library: 4 (A.G. Butler album); 25 (MS Top Oxon a. 33, p. 1); 32 (Manning 88152); 62 (Manning 88152); Fig. 10.3 (G. A. Oxon 48416, no. 904); Fig. 10.4a (G. A. Oxon 48416, no. 916); Fig. 10.4b (G. A. Oxon 48416 no 915); Fig. 10.5 (G. A. Oxon 48415 no. 699); Fig. 10.6 (G. A. Oxon 48412, no. 138) Brasenose College (by kind permission of the Principal and fellows); 39, 67 Christ Church (by kind permission of the Governing Body): 6, 11, 12, 26, 31, 35, 36, 61, Fig. 10.1. Fig. 10.2 (photos: M. R. Dudley) Corpus Christi College (by kind permission of the President and fellows): 33, 37, 38 (37, 38 photos: John Gibbons) Department of Human Anatomy: 44 Department of Physiology: 40 Exeter College (by kind permission of the Rector and fellows): 66 Lady Margaret Hall (by kind permission of the Principal and fellows): 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 56, 65 (photos: Thomas-Photos) Lincoln College (by kind permission of the Rector and fellows; photo: John Gibbons): 3 Magdalen College (by kind permission of the President and fellows): 19, 60 (photos: John Gibbons); 29 (by kind permission of the Junior Common Room; photo: John Gibbons) Merton College (by kind permission of the Warden and fellows): 10, 68 (photos: John Gibbons) Museum of the History of Science: 45 Oxford Union Society: 13 (photo: J. Inskip); 27, 30 (photos: M. R. Dudley); 75 (photo: John Bowerman) Oxford University Archives: 70 Oxford University Press: 14, 15, 20, 21 (photos: Dean Ryan) Oxfordshire County Council Photographic Archive, Centre for Oxfordshire Studies: 16, 18, 22, 24, 48, 55, 59, 64, 71, 74 Pembroke College (by kind permission of the Master and fellows): 23 Pitt Rivers Museum: 42

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Princeton University Library. Morris L. Parrish Collection. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: 1, 7 Pusey House (by kind permission of the Principal and Chapter; photo: J. Inskip): 17 Rhodes House Library (by kind permission of the Rhodes Trustees): 9 Ruskin College: 72 St Hilda's College (by kind permission of the Principal and fellows): 52 School of Geography: 41 Somerville College (by kind permission of the Principal and fellows): 50, 53, 57, 58, 73 (photos: Thomas-Photos) Taylor Institution: 43 Trinity College (by kind permission of the President and fellows): 34 University College (by kind permission of the Master and fellows): 69 (photo: John Gibbons)

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Figures 4.1 Numbers of undergraduates (men) in residence in each college and hall: 1842, 1871, 1891, and 1911 10.1 S. P. Hall, `The Natural History Lecture', 1866 10.2 S. P. Hall, `The Ladies' Lecturer', 1866 10.3 An undergraduate cartoonist's view of mixed classes, 1882 10.4 (a) and (b) A caricaturist's fantasies of women students in science and mathematics, c.1880 10.5 `A Student of Somerville Hall gains a Fellowship' 10.6 `The ( John Stuart) Mill-ennium', c.1880 10.7 Oxford students and marriage: women 1881±1979, men 1930±1979 21C.1 Routes to ®nal honours in Lit. Hum., Mathematics, Jurisprudence, Modern History, Theology, and Oriental Studies, 1913/14 21C.2 Routes to ®nal honours in Natural Science, 1913/14 21C.3 Routes to ®nal honours in English, 1913/14 21C.4 Routes to ®nal honours in Modern Languages, 1913/14 21C.5 Principal routes to a Pass degree, 1913/14 23.1 Previous education of men matriculating at Oxford, 1895±8 and 1911±14 23.2 Previous education of men matriculating at Oxford, 1902±5, and at Cambridge 1902±4

123 239 239 248 254 254 255 295 512 513 513 513 514 552 554

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Tables 7.1 Fathers' occupations of Non-Collegiate students admitted 1870±1879, 1891±1910 8.1 Fellows of All Souls College: decennial data, 1850±1914 10.1 Final examinations taken successfully by Oxford and Cambridge college women, 1881±1913 10.2 Principal careers of Oxford women students, 1881±1913 20.1 Natural scientists as a proportion of Oxford graduates, 1855±1914 20.2 Natural Science honours by subject, 1886±1914: men and women 20.3 Careers of Natural Science graduates from seven colleges, 1900±1914: Balliol, Corpus, Exeter, Keble, Magdalen, Merton, St John's 23.A1 The public-schools community and its periphery c.1880±1902 23.A2 Undergraduates matriculating at Oxford and Cambridge in 1818/19 and 1848/9, and undergraduates on the books in 1861 who had attended a `Clarendon' public school 23.A3 Previous education of those matriculating at Oxford, academic years 1895±8, 1902±5, and 1911±14, and those matriculating at Cambridge, 1902±4 23.A4 Leading schools by Oxford admissions, 1895±8, 1911±14 23.A5 Candidates admitted to the examinations of the Oxford Local Examinations Delegacy, the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, and the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, 1860±1910 24.1 Fathers' occupations of Oxford men matriculating in four academic years, 1818/19, 1848/9, 1878/9, 1897/8, and of Oxford women admitted in 1881±3, 1891±3, 1901±3, 1911±13

205 217 282 297 459 463 494 565 566 567 567

568 578

xli

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xlii

page

Abbreviations AA

Ashmolean Library archives

Abbott and Campbell Jowett,

E. Abbott and L. Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (2 vols 1897)

AEW

Association for the Higher Education of Women in Oxford

Alumni

J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1715±1886 (4 vols 1887, 1888). Pagination is continuous through the four volumes.

Arnold, Letters

The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 3 vols to 1870, ed. C. Y. Lang (1996±8)

Atlay, Acland

James Beresford Atlay, Sir Henry Acland, Bart. K.C.B., F.R.S., Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Oxford: a memoir (1903)

BA

bachelor of arts

BAAS

British Association for the Advancement of Science

Baker, Jesus

J. N. L. Baker, Jesus College, Oxford, 1571±1971 (1971)

BCA

Balliol College archives

BCL

bachelor of civil law

BCLP

Balliol College Library Papers

BD

bachelor of divinity

BJHS

British Journal for the History of Science

BL Add. MS

British Library, additional manuscript

B.Litt.

bachelor of letters

BLOIOC

British Library Oriental and India Of®ce Collections

Bloxam, Reg. Magdalen

J. R. Bloxam, A Register of the Presidents, Fellows, Demies, Instructors in Grammar and in Music, Chaplains, Clerks, Choristers, and Other Members of St Mary Magdalen College in the University of Oxford, from the Foundation of the College to the Present Time (7 vols and index 1853±85)

BLPES

British Library of Political and Economic Science

BM

bachelor of medicine

BMFRS

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1954 onward, as continuation of ONFRS)

xliii

xliv

abbreviations

BMJ

British Medical Journal

B.Mus.

bachelor of music

Boase, Reg. Exeter

C. W. Boase, Register of the Rectors, Fellows, and Other Members on the Foundation of Exeter College, Oxford (Registrum Collegii Exoniensis) (OHS xxvii 1894)

Bodl.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Brasenose Monographs

Brasenose College Quatercentenary Monographs (2 vols in 3, OHS lii±liv 1909)

British Assn (1866±7)

`On the Best Means for Promoting Scienti®c Education in Schools', Report by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1867: PP 1867±8 xxviii Pt 2. 218±30; liv. 1±16

Brodrick

G. C. Brodrick, Memories and Impressions (1900)

Bryce Commn

[ James Bryce, later Visc. Bryce, chairman], Royal Commission on Secondary Education; appointed 2 Mar. 1894, report signed 13 Aug. 1895 (PP 1895 xliii. 1±328. Remainder of xliii and whole of xliv±xlix consist of evidence, tables, etc.)

B.Sc.

bachelor of science

Butler and Prichard

R. F. Butler and M. H. Prichard, The Society of Oxford Home-Students: Retrospects and Recollections (printed for private circulation, 1930). Republished as Part 1 (1879±1921) of St Anne's College (private circulation, 1957)

CA

Christ Church archives

Calendar

Oxford University Calendar, 1810± (published annually by the University)

Campbell, Nationalisation

L. Campbell, The Nationalisation of the Old English Universities (1901)

CCC

Corpus Christi College

Clarendon Commn

[George William Frederick Villiers, fourth Earl of Clarendon, chairman] Public Schools Commission; appointed 18 July 1861, report signed 16 Feb. 1864 (PP 1864 xx; evidence xxi)

CLC

Cheltenham Ladies' College

CMS

Church Missionary Society

The Collegiate University

James McConica (ed.), History of the University of Oxford iii: The Collegiate University (1986)

Cordeaux and Merry

E. H. Cordeaux and D. H. Merry, Bibliography of Printed Works relating to the University of Oxford (1968)

abbreviations CSU

Christian Social Union

CUF

Common University Fund

CUL

Cambridge University Library

DCL

doctor of civil law

xlv

DD

doctor of divinity

Derby Papers

Papers of the 14th Earl of Derby (1799±1869), Liverpool Record Of®ce, 920 DER(14). The letters to Lord Derby have not been foliated. Citations from letters by him are taken from copies in letterbooks.

Devonshire Commn

[Duke of Devonshire, chairman], Royal Commission on Scienti®c Instruction and the Advancement of Science; appointed 18 May 1870; eighth (and last) report signed 18 June 1875 (PP 1872 xxv c. 536: ®rst and second reports; 1873 xxviii c. 868, 637: third report; 1874 xxii c. 958±95: evidence)

DM

doctor of medicine

D.Mus.

doctor of music

DNB

Dictionary of National Biography (66 vols 1885±1901, reissued in 22 vols 1908±9). This series, bringing the record to the death of Queen Victoria, 22 Jan. 1901, has been extended to 1990 by further volumes, and by a Missing Persons volume (1993)

ECA

Exeter College archives

Ed. Rev.

Edinburgh Review

Edwardian Youth

L. E. Jones, An Edwardian Youth (1956)

EHR

English Historical Review

The Eighteenth Century

L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds), History of the University of Oxford v: The Eighteenth Century (1986)

Enactments in Parliament

Enactments in Parliament specially concerning the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the Halls and Colleges Therein and the Colleges of Winchester, Eton and Westminster, ed. L. L. Shadwell (4 vols OHS lviii±lxi 1912)

Engel

A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don (1983)

Exam Statutes

The Examination Statutes (Title VI): issued annually

FA

Football Association

Fowler, Corpus

T. Fowler, History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (OHS xxv 1893)

FRCP

Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians

xlvi

abbreviations

Froude, Short Studies

J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (First Series, 1867; Second Series, 1871; Third Series, 1877; Fourth Series, 1883)

FRS

Fellow of the Royal Society

Gazette

Oxford University Gazette (28 Jan. 1870± )

Gibbon, Memoirs

Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (1966)

Gladstone, Diaries

The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols 1968±94) i±ii (1825±39) ed. M. R. D. Foot; iii±iv (1840±54) ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew; v±xiv (1855±96, index) ed. H. C. G. Matthew

GM

Gentleman's Magazine

Goldwin Smith, `Reform'

Goldwin Smith, `Oxford University Reform', Oxford Essays (1858), 265±87

Goldwin Smith, Reorganization

Goldwin Smith, The Reorganization of the University of Oxford (1868)

Green, Lincoln

V. H. H. Green, The Commonwealth of Lincoln College, 1427±1977 (1979)

Green, Works

Works of Thomas Hill Green ed. R. L. Nettleship (3 vols 1888); republished as vols 1±3 in T. H. Green: Collected Works ed. Peter Nicholson (5 vols 1997)

Handbook

The Student's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Oxford (21 edns 1873±1914); from 19th edn (1912) entitled Oxford University Handbook

HCP

Hebdomadal Council papers (printed series Mar. 1882± )

Herald

Oxford University Herald

Historical Register, 1220±1900

The Historical Register of the University of Oxford to Trinity Term 1900 (1900)

HMI

His (or Her) Majesty's Inspector (of Schools)

HSPS

Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences

Huber, English Universities

V. A. Huber, The English Universities, ed. and trans. F. W. Newman (2 vols, 2nd in 2, 1843)

ICS

Indian Civil Service

Jowett, Letters

Letters of Benjamin Jowett ed. E. Abbott and L. Campbell (1899)

KCA

Keble College Archives

LBV

Liddon Bound Volumes; papers collected or transcribed when Liddon was writing the Life of Pusey. These constitute the greater part of the Liddon Papers in Pusey House library.

abbreviations

xlvii

LCA

Lincoln College archives

LDN

J. H. Newman, Letters and Diaries (planned for 31 vols) i±vii (1801±Dec. 1840), ed. I. T. Ker, T. Gornall and G. Tracey (1978±95); xi±xxxi (Oct. 1845±90), ed. C. S. Dessain and T. Gornall (1961±77)

Liddon, Pusey

H. P. Liddon, Life of E. B. Pusey, ed. J. O. Johnston, R. J. Wilson and for vol. iv. W. C. E. Newbolt (4 vols 1893±7). Liddon arranged material for all 4 vols and left a ®rst draft to 1856.

Lit. Hum.

Literae Humaniores (`Greats')

LMH

Lady Margaret Hall

LMHA

Lady Margaret Hall archives

LPL

Lambeth Palace library

LSE

London School of Economics and Political Science

Lyulph Stanley

Edward Lyulph Stanley (later 4th Lord Shef®eld), Oxford University Reform (1869)

Macleane, Pembroke

D. Macleane, History of Pembroke College, Oxford (OHS xxxiii 1897)

Mallet

C. E. Mallet, History of the University of Oxford (3 vols 1924±7, repr. 1968)

Mandell Creighton

Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols 1904)

MCA

Magdalen College archives

MCC

Marylebone Cricket Club

Memories

C. H. O. Daniel (ed.), Our Memories (1888±95)

MNRAS

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astonomical Society

Mozley, Letters

Letters of the Revd. J. B. Mozley, DD, ed. Anne Mozley (1885)

NCA

New College archives

n.d.

no date given

n.p.

no place of publication given

NSS

Natural Science Final Honour School

NST

Natural Sciences Tripos (Cambridge)

NUT

National Union of Teachers

OCA

Oriel College archives

OCL

Oriel College MS letters and other papers acquired before 1932, Oriel College library

OHS

Oxford Historical Society

OM

Oxford Magazine

xlviii

abbreviations

Oman, Memories

Charles (W. C.) Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford (1941)

OMHS

Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

ONFRS

Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society

Ordinances and Statutes (1863)

Ordinances and Statutes framed or approved by the Oxford University Commissioners in pursuance of the Act, 17 and 18 Victoria, Chapter 81 (1863)

OTC

Of®cers' Training Corps

OUA

Oxford University archives

OUAC

Oxford University Athletic Club

OUBC

Oxford University Boat Club

OUCC

Oxford University Cricket Club

OUDS

Oxford University Dramatic Society

OUJSC

Oxford University Junior Scienti®c Club

OUS

Oxford Union Society

Parl. Deb.

Parliamentary Debates. The series is brie¯y denoted, the sign for `Third Series' being `3S'.

Pattison, Memoirs

Mark Pattison, Memoirs, ed. V. H. H. Green (1988; ®rst pubd 1885)

Pattison, Suggestions

M. Pattison, Suggestions on Academical Organisation, with Especial Reference to Oxford (Edinburgh 1868)

PBA

Proceedings of the British Academy

PCA

Pembroke College, Oxford, archives

PHL

Pusey House library

PP

Parliamentary Papers

PRS

Proceedings of the Royal Society

Pt 1

M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), History of the University of Oxford vi: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Pt 1 (1997)

QCA

The Queen's College archives

QJE

Quarterly Journal of Education

Quarterly

Quarterly Review

Quinn and Prest

E. V. Quinn and J. M. Prest (eds), Dear Miss Nightingale. A Selection of Benjamin Jowett's Letters to Florence Nightingale, 1860±1893 (1987)

RCO (1850)

Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University and Colleges of Oxford; appointed 31 Aug. 1850; report signed 27 Apr. 1852; chairman Samuel Hinds, Bishop of Norwich (PP 1852 (1482) xxii), report and evidence

abbreviations

xlix

RCOC (1872)

Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Property and Income of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and of the Colleges and Halls therein; appointed 5 Jan. 1872; report signed 31 July 1874; chairman Duke of Cleveland (PP 1873 xxxvii C. 856 pts 1±3), report and evidence

RCOC (1919)

Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge Universities; appointed 14 Nov. 1919; report signed 1 Mar. 1922; chairman, with speci®c responsibility for Oxford, H. H. Asquith (PP 1922 x Cmd. 1588)

Report and Evidence (1853)

Report and Evidence upon the Recommendations of Her Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of the University of Oxford, presented to the Board of Heads of Houses and Proctors, 1 December 1853 (1853). Unless otherwise stated citations are to the Evidence which is paginated separately from the Report.

Richter

Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (1964)

Robert Elsmere

Mrs Humphry Ward (Mary Augusta Ward), Robert Elsmere (Westmorland edn 2 vols 1911; ®rst pubd 1888)

Ruskin, Works

The Works of John Ruskin ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (39 vols 1903±1912)

SACA

St Anne's College archives

SCA

Somerville College archives

Schools and Universities

Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent ed. R. H. Super (1964; originally published 1868): vol. 4 of Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold ed. Super (11 vols Ann Arbor 1960±77)

SCOC (1867)

Select Committee on the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Education Bill; appointed 26 June 1867; reported 31 July 1867; chairman William Ewart (PP 1867 (497) xiii. 183±560), report (185) and evidence

SCSI (1868)

Select Committee on Scienti®c Instruction; appointed 24 Mar. 1868; reported 15 July 1868; chairman Bernhard Samuelson (PP 1867±8 xv. Report iii±ix; remainder of volume proceedings of committee, evidence given 23 Apr.±3 July 1868)

SC Tests (1870±1)

Select Committee of the House of Lords on University Tests; appointed 14 July 1870, re-appointed 13 Feb.

l

abbreviations 1871; chairman Marquess of Salisbury (PP 1871 ix. 85±676). Evidence given 25 July±4 Aug. 1870; 21 Feb.±21 Mar. 1871. Separate pagination for each year.

Searby

Peter Searby, History of the University of Cambridge, III, 1750±1870 (1997)

Seventeen Lectures

William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects, Delivered at Oxford, 1867±1884 (1886; 3rd edn 1900)

SHiCA

St Hilda's College archives

SHuCA

St Hugh's College archives

SIC (1864)

Schools Inquiry Commission (Endowed Schools); chairman Henry Labouchere, Lord Taunton; appointed 28 Dec. 1864; report signed 2 Dec. 1867; (PP 1867±8 xxvii. This volume is in 17 Parts: Part 1 contains the Report)

SOHS

Society of Oxford Home-Students

Stanley, Arnold

A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold D.D. (1844, 16th edn expanded 2 vols 1898)

Statuta

Statuta et Decreta Universitatis Oxoniensis: issued annually

Statutes (1882)

Statutes made for the University of Oxford, and for the colleges and halls therein, by the University of Oxford Commissioners acting in pursuance of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act, 1877: approved by the Queen in Council (1882)

Stone, `Size and Composition'

L. Stone, `The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580±1910' in L. Stone (ed.), The University in society (2 vols Princeton 1975), vol. i

Stubbs, Letters

The Letters of William Stubbs ed. W. H. Hutton (1904)

SUL

Southampton University library

TCA

Trinity College archives

TCC

Tutorial Classes Committee

TUC

Trades Union Congress

Tutors (1854)

Papers published by the Tutors' Association (1854)

The Twentieth Century

B. H. Harrison (ed.), History of the University of Oxford viii: The Twentieth Century (1994)

UCA

University College archives

UCL

University College London

UJ

Oxford Undergraduate's Journal (31 Jan. 1866±Oct. 1875); Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate's Journal (21 Oct. 1875±30 Nov. 1882); Oxford Review

abbreviations

li

and Undergraduate's Journal (7 Dec. 1882±14 June 1883); Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate's Journal (18 Oct. 1883±4 Dec. 1884) UMCA

Universities' Mission to Central Africa

UOC (1877)

University of Oxford Commission; appointed 10 Aug. 1877; chairman (±1880) Lord Selborne, (1880±) Mountague Bernard (PP 1881 lvi C. 2868), evidence, circulars, etc. Commissioners named in section 4 of the 1877 Act, which received the royal assent on 10 Aug.

UPA

Oxford University Press Archives

V. & A.

Victoria and Albert Museum

VCH Cambs. iii

J. P. C. Roach (ed.), A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely iii (1959)

VCH Oxon. iii

H. E. Salter and M. D. Lobel (eds.), A History of the County of Oxford iii (1954)

VCH Oxon. iv

A. Crossley (ed.), A History of the County of Oxford iv (1979)

Ward, Victorian Oxford

W. R. Ward, Victorian Oxford (1965)

WEA

Workers' Educational Association

page

lii

page

List of Contributors M. G. Brock was Warden of Nuf®eld College, Oxford, 1978±88. Alan Bullock (Lord Bullock) was Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford, 1960± 80. William R. Chapman is Professor and Director, Historic Preservation Program, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Morton Cohen is Professor Emeritus, the City University of New York. M. C. Curthoys is a Research Editor, New Dictionary of National Biography. K. C. Hannabuss is Fellow and Tutor in Mathematics, Balliol College, Oxford. Christopher Harvie is Professor of British and Irish Studies at the Eberhard-Karls University, TuÈbingen, Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde. Peter Hinchliff was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Oxford, from 1992 until his death in 1995. J. R. de S. Honey is Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Botswana. Janet Howarth is Fellow and Tutor in History, St Hilda's College, Oxford. Peter Howell was Senior Lecturer in Classics, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. Richard Jenkyns is Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. H. S. Jones is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Manchester. J.F.A. Mason was Student and Tutor in Modern History, Christ Church, Oxford, 1953±87. Philip Morsberger is William S. Morris Eminent Professor in Art, Augusta State University. Oswyn Murray is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Balliol College, Oxford. Barry Nicholas was Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, 1978±89. Anne Ockwell was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. D. J. Palmer was Professor of English, University of Manchester, 1977±92. He died in 1992. Harold Pollins was a Senior Tutor, Ruskin College, Oxford, 1964±89. Rebecca Posner was Professor of Romance Languages, University of Oxford, 1978± 96. John Prest was Fellow and Tutor in History, Balliol College, Oxford, 1954±95. Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop Suffragan of Basingstoke. J. S. G. Simmons is Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford.

liii

liv

List of Contributors

Reba N. Soffer is Professor Emeritus, California State University, Northridge. Peter Sutcliffe was a Senior Editor, Arts and Reference Division, Oxford University Press until 1987. He died in 1994. Richard Symonds is Senior Research Associate, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. W. H. Walsh was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, 1960±79. He died in 1986. Charles Webster is Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. E. T. Williams was Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, 1952±80. He died in 1995. S. L. F. Wollenberg is Fellow and Tutor in Music, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

page

List of Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors chancellors 1869±1903 1903±07 1907±1925

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury George Joachim Goschen, Viscount Goschen George Nathaniel Curzon, Lord Curzon of Kedleston

vice-chancellors 1870±4 1874±8 1878±82 1882±6 1886±90 1890±4 1894±8 1898±9 1899±1901 1901±04 1904±06 1906±1910 1910±13 1913±17

Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church James Edwards Sewell, Warden of New College Evan Evans, Master of Pembroke Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol James Bellamy, President of St John's Henry Boyd, Principal of Hertford John Richard Magrath, Provost of Queen's Sir William Reynell Anson, Bt., Warden of All Souls Thomas Fowler, President of Corpus David Binning Monro, Provost of Oriel William Walter Merry, Rector of Lincoln Thomas Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen Charles Buller Heberden, Principal of Brasenose Thomas Banks Strong, Dean of Christ Church

lv

page

lvi

page

` A SECULAR IZ E D U N IVERS IT Y ' ?

1

page

2

page

1 A `Plastic Structure' m . g . b ro c k

` b e t w e e n t wo wor lds ' In 1868 F. T. Palgrave saw Oxford as entering a short `plastic period, [one of] those very rare and precious epochs' when `radical changes are possible'.1 Others described the uncertainties of the 1870s in less glowing terms. Mandell Creighton, who had become a fellow of Merton in December 1866, compared his early years there to `life in a house which always has the workmen about it';2 and in 1876 the Archbishop of Canterbury referred in the House of Lords to Oxford's years of `unsettlement'.3 What the Selborne Commission achieved between 1877 and 1882 affected Oxford during the whole period to 1914. This chapter is concerned with the shifting mental climate of the 1870s and the various developments which led to the Commissioners' decisions. A general account of the University during the decade, and of the doings of both the Cleveland and Selborne Commissions, is given in Chapter 2. The arrangements established by the Oxford University Act of 1854 and the Executive Commission had done something to increase the University's educational ef®ciency, but they were incomplete and, in places, defective. Goldwin Smith, one of the Commission's two secretaries, described them as a system `such as no human being would have devised if it had not come into our hands through historical accidents of the most capricious kind. Perhaps,' he added, `not many years will have passed before people will perceive that every sort of shift has been resorted to . . . out of respect for the lingering phantom of college monkery which stands between us and the application of these unequalled endowments to the real uses of the present time.'4 The language was in¯ammatory, the prediction cautious. The perceptions, and 1 Palgrave to Gladstone, 22 Apr. 1868: BL Add. MS 44270, fo 88. Palgrave's Golden Treasury had appeared in 1861. He was Professor of Poetry, 1885±95. 2 Macmillan's Magazine, 34 (June 1876), 187. See also n. 283. 3 Parl. Deb. 9 Mar. 1876, 3S ccxxvii. 1667. For a similar use of the term in the 1881 Bampton Lectures see John Wordsworth, The One Religion (1881), 2. 4 Goldwin Smith, `Reform' (1858), 282. For the Executive Commissioners and their operations, 1854±8, see Pt 1, 699±702.

3

4

`a secularized university'?

the consequent disillusionment, came even more quickly than was usual after a Victorian institution had been reformed.5 The reformers of 1854 had made large concessions to secure the enactment of their measures.6 The crucial issue concerned the nature of the college fellowships which made up the majority of Oxford's senior posts. While these were reduced in number, they still exceeded what was needed to ®ll the tutorships and bursarships; and a proportion in every college might now be held by laymen. Gladstone, the chief author of the 1854 Bill, had foreseen that a body of `idle', non-resident, lay fellows could arouse public criticism. A clerical fellow would probably vacate his fellowship and marry as soon as he obtained a good living and became its incumbent: if he had been nonresident until then, his service as a curate in one of his college's livings might well account for his failure to reside.7 The non-resident lay fellow, by contrast, was probably working in London as a lawyer or journalist, and he could hold his fellowship inde®nitely provided he did not marry, or acquire the kind of substantial `property, pension, or of®ce' which would oblige him to vacate it.8 Thus, while the proportion of non-residents among the fellows actually declined after the reform, the `idle fellow' became a far more visible phenomenon.9 Gladstone had provided in his Bill that fellows who were not working in the University, a college, or a parish (as incumbent or curate), had to reside in Oxford for at least twenty-four weeks a year and hold `a certi®cate of study'.10 This clause, like a number of others affecting the colleges, had been dropped during the Bill's passage through Parliament. In theory, a college in need of a tutor or bursar might call a professional man back to Oxford, but in practice this power could not be exercised. Gladstone had failed to carry his `residence and study' clause because a fellowship had not been seen as a salaried post or a step in an academic career. Even those who meant to work in Oxford were unwilling to differentiate their position from that of the `idle fellows'. Despite the increasingly commercial and meritocratic tone of the age they mostly modelled themselves on the aristocracy, 5

SCOC (1867), Q 3681, (Burrows). Parl. Deb. 15 June 1854, cxxxiv. 213 (Russell). 7 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 192; Report and Evidence (1853), 79 (Pusey); SCOC (1867), Q 3080 (Scott). For the residence requirement when the 1854 Bill was introduced see PP 1854 v. 299±300 (cl. 36) 8 PP 1856 xlvi. 642 (Lincoln Coll.). See Tutors (1854), 128 (F. H. Dickinson) on this problem. For the standard property ordinance see Ordinances and Statutes (1863), 133±4 (Oriel, Ord. 7). 9 Pt 1, 165 (1842); cf. PP 1871 ix. 216±21; Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 11; SCOC (1867), 267 (Roundell); Devonshire Commn., Evidence; Pattison, 15 Nov. 1870, 242. In 1870±1 about half of the fellows were non-resident. In Oct. 1867 Jowett's ®gure for the proportion was `at least 3/4ths': J. M. Prest, `Jowett's Correspondence with Earl Russell in 1867' (Balliol College Record, Supplement 1965), 7. 10 See n. 7 above. For similar proposals see `Jowett's Bill', BL Add. MS 44743, fo 8 (cl. 18, 19) and Tutors (1854), 126. 6

a `plastic structure'

5

and claimed to live like gentlemen who could give up their tutorships without imperilling their fellowships in any way. To Charles Neate of Oriel, writing in 1854, the separation of the fellowship from college duties `leads the undergraduate to respect in his own tutor the spontaneous exercise of an honourable calling . . . [The latter] might live if he liked as an idle gentleman, taking his ease in his college, and borrowing from the shadow of its ancient walls, which are his property, something of dignity in his ease.'11 By the late 1860s various developments had combined to create an alarming shortage of tutors. A turn as a college tutor might not be disagreeable to a clerical fellow while he waited for one of his college's better livings to fall vacant, but, as a post which lacked promotion prospects, it had few attractions for most lay fellows. They had already delayed starting on their careers by running for their fellowships: they could scarcely afford a further delay.12 Matriculations were increasing and the new honour schools of 1850 were complicating the colleges' teaching arrangements.13 The public schools were multiplying to cater for the sons of the burgeoning professional class. A post in one of these offered a capable Oxford tutor the prospect, if not of a headmastership, at least of rising to be a housemaster, and so of securing the income and quarters needed by a married man in return for work which was little more laborious or repetitive than a tutor's.14 As early as 1858 Exeter College had tried to meet its dif®culties by allowing a tutor who married to retain his tutorship while resigning his fellowship.15 The Dean of Christ Church told the Select Committee of 1867: I ®nd it extremely dif®cult to obtain the services of tutors, and every day it becomes more dif®cult . . . Young men of ability are unwilling to stay at the University; and I am obliged to require them in most cases to pledge themselves to tutorial service for a certain time . . . they often seek to escape from it; they seldom stay beyond the time they pledge themselves to.16

Equally serious was the University's failure to attract students from families which were neither af¯uent nor high in the social scale. Gladstone 11 Engel, 65. John Conington had warned against views such as Neate's four years earlier: North British Review, 14 (Nov. 1850), 195. I owe this reference to the kindness of Dr Peter Searby. 12 Tutors (1954), 153 (E. A. Freeman); SCOC (1867) Qs 2407, 2544 (Jowett). For Goldwin Smith's prediction of shortage see Reform (1858), 279. 13 Pt. 1, 481 (Fig. 14.2). 14 Bonamy Price, University Reform (1875), 5. A professorship at a Scottish university or a new university college could also be attractive: W. H. Draper, Sir Nathan Bodington (1912), 45±61. 15 Engel, 107 n. 1. In Nov. 1870 the Rector told the Devonshire Commn. (Qs 4038, 4050) that one of the college's tutors was not a fellow, and that two of its `ablest fellows' had just left `for appointments . . . which offered greater advantage'. 16 SCOC (1867), Q 1177. The limited pledge given to Liddell during one Senior Studentship election is outlined in S. Paget, Scott Holland (1921), 49±50. See also Jowett's `Suggestions for University Reform, 1874' in Campbell, Nationalisation, 197.

6

`a secularized university'?

had relied chie¯y on the creation of halls, whether `private' or af®liated to colleges, where the lifestyle would be modest and the charges low. It was clear by the mid-sixties that the prospect of private halls had been illusory.17 It was equally apparent that freeing the college scholarships from the restrictions which had tied them to particular schools or localities had changed their character. Once they had been subjected to open competition they had gone very largely to boys from the public schools, the reform of the grammar schools having hardly begun.18 While colleges increased the value of their awards to attract the best candidates, it became a general presumption that most college scholars were products of expensive schooling who had no great need of the money. In 1867, for instance, one of them was a marquess's son.19 Once again the impression conveyed was more damaging than the facts warranted. The poor scholar's road to Oxford was very hard and narrow both before and after the 1850s; but the reform process had made his exclusion more obvious.20 It had also operated to increase the age at which scholars reached Oxford. The age limit for scholarships being normally 20, the schools ®lled their scholarship boards by keeping their better pupils in the sixth form as long as parents would allow. The examination reform of 1850, which established new honour courses in natural science, and in law and modern history, had lengthened the Oxford course by requiring a pass in two schools.21 This rule was modi®ed in 1864 when a minimum of a third class in any honour school gave the quali®cation for a BA; but the unity of the system, and the predominance of classics, were preserved (until 1887) in that the ®rst year, at least, had to be spent in surmounting the hurdle of Moderations. The Cambridge course was shorter: in 1870 the majority of Oxford students took four years to graduate.22 17

Parl. Deb. 24 Feb. 1876, ccxxvii. 793 (Salisbury). RCO (1850), Report, 174±5. Compare Goldwin Smith, `Reform' (1858), 276, with Reorganization (1868), 19. `Bat' Price calculated that about a third of the undergraduates came with college scholarships: this took account neither of University scholarships nor of school-leaving and City Company awards: SCOC (1867), Q 2078. On the grammar schools see ibid. Qs 36, 2558, Pattison, Suggestions, 101±2, and pp. 553±5 below. 19 Saturday Review, xxiii (26 Jan. 1867), 109; SCOC (1867), Q 262 (Roundell); Thomas Arnold, The Revival of the Faculties at Oxford (1872), 3±4; Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3868 (Pattison). 20 SCOC (1867), 388±92. Pusey's statement about fewer poor undergraduates was echoed by Mallet iii.352. For the opposite view see Parl. Deb. 9 Mar. 1876, ccxxvii. 1690 (E. of Morley). For an analysis see pp. 578, 584±91 below. 21 Pt 1, 352±3; SCOC (1867) Qs 430 (Roundell), 1265 (Liddell), 2393±5 (Jowett); Goldwin Smith, `Reform' (1858), 277. 22 For the need to shorten the course see Pt 1, 499±500; SCOC (1867) Qs 1251±7, 1265, 1327, 1347±9, 1359 (Liddell), 2454, 2531 (Jowett), 3289, 3317 (Pusey): SCSI (1868) 1097±8 (Playfair), 2651, 2813±14 (Clifton), 8028±30 (Huxley); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3897 (Jowett), 3754±80 (Pattison), Third Report, 647±8; UOC (1877), Qs 2709 (Jowett), 5381±4 (T. C. Baring), pp. 379±80 (Incorporated Law Society, MPs); Parl. Deb. 11 Mar. 1870, cxcix. 1734. The struggle for the 1864 reform is described in Ward, Victorian Oxford, 218±23. 18

a `plastic structure'

7

A boy who was to be trained for a lay profession or for commerce could be equipped for this at his public school. To send him to Oxford meant, apart from the expense, an unacceptably long delay in starting professional training or reaching the bank counter.23 In the industrial world most fathers, if they wanted their sons in the ®rm, never even considered Oxford. They wanted an early start in the of®ce or the works, partly because of their faith in `learning on the job', and partly to prevent their boys from being tempted to regard business as beneath them.24 `We must get out of our heads,' Matthew Arnold warned in 1868, all notion of making a mass of students come and reside three years or even two years or one year or even one month at Oxford and Cambridge, which neither suit their circumstances nor offer them the instruction they want. We must plant faculties in the eight or ten principal seats of population, and let the students follow lectures there from their own homes, or with whatever arrangements for their living they and their parents choose.25

Many Oxford fellows paid little heed. They had inherited an ecclesiastical tradition underpinned by large endowments, and they had the ways of thought of upper-class people in one of the world's richest and most stable countries. The undergraduate syllabus developed at Oxford since the early years of the century was still based largely on Greek and Latin; and it was an article of faith that no other discipline sharpened and enlarged the mind as well as the classics. An education which was the badge of a gentleman suited the aristocracy and the clergy. Fathers of noble or gentle birth were well content to show that their sons had no need to earn their bread by acquiring `useful' information, and, whether from devotion or ambition, an intending ordinand was well advised to study the Greek Testament.26 Ordinands were obliged to delay the start of their careers: no one could take deacon's orders until the age of 23.27 Even for this `clerical' cohort, who constituted some 38 per cent of Oxford's undergraduates in 1870, the length of the course presented problems. Four years at Oxford were a heavy charge on a clergy father, for the style of each college was apt to be set by its wealthiest members. But that fact did nothing to dispel a general impression that Oxford was organized to suit only two groups of peopleÐbishops concerned with the 23 SCOC (1867) Q 3801 (Burrows); UOC (1877) Qs 3415±16: Max MuÈller stressed that in Germany entry to professions depended on successful completion of a university course, but mentioned that the new `stringency' of the Civil Service Exam was changing the situation in Britain. For views from the law and commerce see previous note under UOC (1877). For trends during the 1870s see pp. 63, 589±90 below. 24 SCOC (1867) Qs 170 (Brodie), 266±7 (Roundell), 2077, 2178, 2213±15 (`Bat' Price). 25 Schools and Universities, 322. 26 SCOC (1867), Q 3284, 3320 (Pusey); J. A. Froude, Inaugural Address, St Andrew's, 19 Mar. 1869 (Short Studies, Second Series. (1871), 332); Pt 1, 15. For a discussion of `conspicuous education' see J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe (1977), 134±8. 27 Book of Common Prayer (1662), Preface to the Ordinal.

8

`a secularized university'?

supply of curates, and those who had no need to make their own way in the world. In January 1867 the Provost of Oriel was reported, to the anger of the Saturday Review, as saying that Oxford wanted, not `surgeons or solicitors, but . . . more curates'.28 Ten years later Ray Lankester suggested to the Selborne Commission: `Medical study has ceased in Oxford because the chief power in the University has been in the hands of . . . the clerical profession which has not favoured the progress of any studies which do not lend themselves to a clerical career.'29 Those who had up-to-date knowledge of the German universities were convinced that Oxford had much to learn from them, but E. B. Pusey, the leader of Oxford's Church party, showed that he wanted nothing to do with institutions so prone to question scriptural truth.30 `Outsiders' saw the gentry and the Church as allied in their efforts to keep Oxford as their preserve.31 In June 1865, when the abolition of religious Tests was being debated, G. J. Goschen told the Commons: An Oxford friend said to me, `So you are going to make a manufacturing college of Oxford.' I asked him `How?' `Why, of course,' he said, `by the abolition of Tests.' I think, Sir, this candid friend of mine has let the cat out of the bag. Theological tests are, you observe, valued as social tests.32

During the ®fties and sixties those bent on breaking down the wall which protected the clerical and classical preserve became stronger and more vocal; and the view that school and university education ought not only to improve the mind but provide some knowledge, however fractional, about the culture, institutions, and languages of the modern world, began to gain ground.33 Oxford's reluctance to accept these complaints has been mentioned. Disdain for any university course other than a classical one 28 Saturday Review, xxiii, 12 Jan. 1867, 49. See F. H. Dickinson in Tutors (1854), 116: `those intended for Holy Orders . . . seem likely to be always much the largest class.' 29 UOC (1877), Q 5217. For Henry Acland's view see ibid., Q 3107; Devonshire Commn, July 1870, Q 2950; Pt 1, 576±7. Lankester argued (UOC, Qs 5201±54) that Oxford could maintain `a practical school of medicine', since the Radcliffe In®rmary was as large as some of the hospitals supporting the London medical schools. Lyon Playfair said in 1873 that Edinburgh was conferring more medical degrees than `Oxford, Cambridge, and London . . . taken altogether': Universities in their Relation to Professional Education (Edinburgh, 1873), 25. 30 SCOC (1867), Qs 3324±44. Pusey, who had last visited a German university in 1827, did `not perceive any difference between their then system and now' (Q 3330). 31 For `anti-commercial' attitudes see Tutors (1854), 64; Ruskin, Inaugural, 8 Feb. 1870: Works, xx. 20; Liddon, Jan. 1872: J. O. Johnston, Liddon (1904), 239. 32 Parl. Deb., 14 June 1865, clxxx. 197. John Bright judged the Oxford colleges in 1869 to be `class institutions': W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater (1917), 4±5n. 33 PP 1854±5, xx. 40±1, H. Moseley, 9 Mar. 1854; PP 1864 xx. 40 (Clarendon Commn Report); Essays on the Endowment of Research (1876), 260 (H. Nettleship); SCSI (1868), Q 1105 (Playfair); and Lyon Playfair, Universities, 13; F. W. Farrar, Fortnightly 9 (Mar. 1868), 239±40. For Jowett on modern language study see SCOC (1867), Qs 2444, 2635. For the swing away from classics in Owens College, Manchester, see Joseph Thompson, Owens College (Manchester, 1886), 159, 195, 295, 355.

a `plastic structure'

9

characterized Oxford fellows of all kinds. In 1809 Sydney Smith had written in the Edinburgh Review that modern languages were not merely a useful accomplishment: they could be as exacting and enriching a university study as the classics. Sixty years later another Smith, on many issues one of Oxford's boldest reformers, showed all of his University's snobbery and anti-commercial feeling on this one. `Modern languages,' Goldwin Smith wrote, `do not form a high mental training; they are often possessed in perfection by persons of very low intellectual powers.'34 Mrs Gaskell sided with Sydney Smith. Thornton, the mill-owner in North and South and a `pretty fair classic', asking himself what preparation the classics had been `for such a life as I had to lead', answers: `None at all. Utterly none at all.'35 These defects had given Oxford a reputation which made for a shortage of applicants, despite endowments enabling it to attract about a third of its undergraduates with the `bribe' of a scholarship. The 1867 Select Committee, concerned that undergraduate numbers were still low, asked the Dean of Christ Church about this `very large relative falling off, considering the enormously increased number of men of wealth in the country'. `I can only presume,' the Dean replied, `that they do not value the kind of education which we offer.'36 By the later 1860s criticism of Oxford was reaching a climax. Its colleges, with all their resources, were undertaking at any one time the education of fewer than 2,000 young men;37 and in scholarship the University did not seem to be achieving much even in the ®eld of `classical learning when compared with the universities of Germany'.38 `Our great histories,' the Saturday Review had remarked in 1862, `come, not from university professors, but from a schoolmaster, a country clergyman, a London banker, a cabinet minister.'39 Oxford seemed slow to respond to new opportunities. When Cambridge opened its Local Examinations to girls in 1865, London followed suit, although doing so involved obtaining a supplementary charter, whereas Oxford's Hebdomadal Council lost no time in declining to open the Oxford `locals'. After this refusal Emily Davies decided that the college for girls which she planned should be a `living 34 Pt 1, 13; Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 33. For the same attitude in the schools see W. H. Holden (ed.), The Charterhouse We Knew (1950), 35 (L. Patterson); W. F. Bushell, School Memories (1962), 31. A further glimpse of Goldwin Smith's view is given on p. 415. 35 Ch. 10; in Knutsford edn (1906), 98; (®rst published in book form, 1855). 36 SCOC (1867), Q 1414. Mark Pattison told the Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, that Oxford lacked the teachers needed for `extension' (Qs 3826±7). See also Thorold Rogers, Education in Oxford (1861), 197. 37 The Cleveland Commission's careful calculation gave 1,900 undergraduates: RCOC (1872) I. Abstracts, College Returns iii (5). Earlier estimates had produced lower ®gures: SCOC (1867), Qs 1319, 1410, 3752; Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 48. 38 SCOC (1867), Q 1470, Grant Duff's phrase when questioning W. L. Newman. 39 Saturday Review, xiv, 18 Oct. 1862, 467: the banker was George Grote and the Cabinet Minister Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients was published that year. See also Parl. Deb., 5 June 1867, clxxxvii. 1615; G. Haines, Essays on German In¯uence upon English Education (1969), 97±8.

10

`a secularized university'?

branch of Cambridge'. She resolved to site it at Hitchin, roughly midway between Cambridge and London (whence it was moved to Girton in 1873). In 1866, when Anne Jemima Clough was seeking a lecturer for a group of Ladies' Educational Associations in northern cities, she made enquiries in both Oxford and Cambridge. It was Cambridge which supplied the lecturer. This led to Cambridge Extension Lectures with the Yorkshire College (later Leeds University), and in 1871 to the foundation of what was soon to become Newnham Hall, with Anne Clough as its ®rst Principal.40 Oxford had no equivalent to London's doctorates in literature and science, and no postgraduate science facilities comparable to the best in Germany or the EÂcole Pratique des Hautes EÂtudes in Paris.41 A Balliol man, Grant Duff, in his inaugural lecture in March 1867 as Lord Rector of Aberdeen University, put Oxford far below the German universities, and compared it to `a great steam-hammer, which it had cost £150,000 to put up, employed, month after month, in cracking walnuts'.42 Britain failed to win a decent share of the awards at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.43 `Black Friday' a year earlier had shaken commercial con®dence, and this new shock greatly heightened concern at the country's educational failings.44 People who had believed learning on the job to be the recipe for industrial and commercial success began to have doubts. England was seen to lack an essential ingredient for sustained manufacturing ef®ciency, namely managers and workmen whose education had given them some basic familiarity with scienti®c principles and problems. `Our rule of thumb,' wrote 40 SIC (1864), Pt 1, 557; HCP, 1866±79, 68 (11 Nov. 1867) OUA; R. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (rev. edn 1998, 1st edn 1975), 18±23, 31, 34, 38±40, 44, 53±4, 202 n. 2; C. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? (1995), 14±15. For an enthusiastic report on girls taking the Cambridge `Locals' see The Times, 10 Jan. 1868, 5f. The classes established by Mark Pattison and others in Oxford at the end of 1865, for girls `of 17 and upwards', were commended by the Taunton Commission: SIC, Pt 1, 568±9, Pt 4, Qs 17799±891 (10 May 1866). Oxford opened its `Locals' to girls in 1869: Convocation Register, 1854±71, 493 (9 Dec. 1869) OUA. For the interest in the issue see The Times, 10 Jan 1870, 7d (W. S. Gilbert's play, The Princess), Viscountess Amberley, `The Claims of Women,', Fortnightly Review, 15 (Jan.±June 1871), 95± 110. See also pp. 237±9 below. 41 R. Simpson, How the Ph. D. Came to Britain (1983), 45±9. The London D. Litt. was not a `thesis degree' until 1885. See Devonshire Commn recommendations, Third Report, 1873, 693±5. 42 M. E. Grant Duff, Inaugural (1867), 31, 33. See also Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1872, Q 13571 (Salisbury). 43 15 May 1867, Lyon Playfair to Lord Taunton, PP 1867 xxvi. 266±7, and Journal of the Society of Arts, xv (7 June 1867), 477±8. For early warnings see L. Playfair, Industrial Instruction on the Continent (1852), 7, 32±3; M. Arnold, Cornhill Magazine, xiii (Feb. 1866), 159, 163. Viewing Bismarck's success, Arnold had feared Britain's decline: Arnold, Letters, ii. 465, 472. For Arnold's lack of in¯uence in Oxford see Pt 1, 716±18; for the effect of `Black Friday' Pt 1, 725±6. 44 J. A. Froude (n. 26), 326; Saturday Review, 9 Nov. 1867, xxiv. 602; 27 June 1868, xxv. 844; 15 Aug 1868, xxvi. 223; B. Samuelson to Lord R. Montagu, 16 Nov. 1867, PP 1867±8 liv. 69±124; Parl. Deb. 2 Dec. 1867, cxc. 478±506 (Russell's motion). For a response to it see Saturday Review, 23 Jan. 1868, 140.

a `plastic structure'

11

Matthew Arnold, in his study of continental schools and universities published in 1868, `has cost us dear already, and is probably destined to cost us dearer still.'45 Oxford's stance and performance, and its in¯uence on the country's schools, came under intensive scrutiny. The University was depicted in a series of reports as requiring nothing of those admitted except classical knowledge. There was no entrance examination,46 but those who wanted a degree had to spend the ®rst year of residence in improving the Latin and Greek they had brought from school. Oxford stood accused of two offences because of this concentration on the classics. First, it distorted school syllabuses. Secondly, while it necessarily delayed each undergraduate's start on his career, nothing was done to equip him for it. Thus Oxford was held both to injure school pupils who had little or no prospects of university education, and to waste its resources by failing to provide inexpensive courses which combined a liberal education with utility.47 The Taunton Commission on the endowed grammar schools commented: Science . . . teaching . . . sometimes . . . appears to be prosecuted with success in the lower forms, and then dropped altogether in the highest, simply because other subjects are better rewarded at the universities. We cannot wonder that when it is treated in this way it should be pronounced super®cial and incapable of disciplining the mind.48

Until Oxford instituted a multi-subject entrance examination including a science element, on the lines of London's, and gave more of its scholarships in science, the schools would neither plan to take science seriously nor acquire the university-trained staff who could make such plans realistic. The Taunton Commission made its report recommending the appropriate 45 Schools and Universities, 312. See also Parl. Deb., 2 Apr. 1868, cxci. 700; SCSI (1868), Qs 2676, 2801, 2808 (Clifton); Nature, i (10 Feb. 1870), 375. 46 Pt 1, 33±4, 356±7. For support for an entrance exam see SCOC (1867) Qs 1331 (Liddell), 2220±1 (`Bat' Price), 4442±3 (Perry); Burrows, Quarterly, cxxiv (Apr. 1868), 400±1; Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 36; Lyulph Stanley, 18. Clifton thought `the opinion . . . general' that `science should hold an equal, or at all events a considerable position' in an entrance exam: SCSI (1868), Q 2814. Playfair, who had attended Scottish universities, stressed that the multisubject test for a science student which he speci®ed related to qualifying for a degree and could be taken at any stage: ibid., Q 1098. It included Latin, but `two modern languages' could be substituted for Greek (Q 1097). 47 J. A. Froude (n. 26), 340±2. The Clarendon Commission on the public schools, when recommending the inclusion in syllabuses of science and other modern studies, and the encouragement of `modern options', had remarked that more than half of the pupils did `not go to the universities at all': PP 1864 xx. 39, 63±4. 48 SIC (1864), Report 33±4. The Commission drew attention ((Report 38, n. 1) to the recommendations adopted by the British Association, Sept. 1867. These had been drawn up by a committee which included T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall; they reached the Commons via the Association's President, the Duke of Buccleugh, in Feb. 1868, and appeared twice in Parl. Papers: PP 1867±8 xxviii, Pt ii, First Section, 218±30, liv. 1±16 (for a multi-subject entrance exam and science scholarships see liv. 7). In its Sixth Report (p. 10) the Devonshire Commn recommended that in all General School Exams (and `in any Leaving Exam') `not less than one sixth of the marks be allotted to natural science': PP 1875 xxviii. 74. According to Brodie, schools sometimes applied in vain to Oxford for a science teacher: SCOC (1867), Q 159.

12

`a secularized university'?

reforms in December 1867. Lyon Playfair told the Select Committee on Scienti®c Instruction a few months later that, if those recommendations could only be carried out, `the old traditions of our universities that there is no human culture except by means of Latin and Greek would sink into the errors of history.'49 Until such reforms were put in hand, Robert Lowe warned, the middle class faced a bleak educational choice: either they opted for `the narrow teaching of the so-called ``commercial academies'' or they aped the gentry and went in for a smattering of dead languages'.50 No leading public man, apart possibly from Lowe, wanted the University to move towards becoming a technological institute.51 It was generally held that intending doctors and engineers should complete their training in, or close to, the hospitals and engineering works of the big cities;52 but Lowe was not the engineers' only advocate where the universities were concerned. Mark Pattison wanted every. . . vocation in which intelligence and re®nement are applicable . . . [to] have a corresponding ``Faculty'' . . . in the University, where an appropriate trainingÐnot practical and professional but theoretical and scienti®cÐmight be had. Why should commerce and industry. . . remain under the stigma which the feudal system branded upon them, as base employments?53

Jowett's `chief hope that the cultivation of science would become more general among the students of the University' lay, as he told the Devonshire Commission in 1870, in `the degree in which it was made a preparation for the professions, particularly the medical profession and engineering'.54 Each investigation revealed how far these aspirations diverged from the current position. Oxford had spent large sums on the University Museum; but, according to a British Association report published in March 1868, natural science scholarships accounted for only 3 per cent of those awarded by its colleges.55 Enquiry soon elicited why this ®gure was so low. Classics 49

SCSI (1868), Q 1105. The Times, 24 Jan. 1868, 5 a±d (Lowe to Liverpool Philomathic Society). See Beresford Hope on Lowe's ideal university: Parl. Deb., 1 July 1868, cxciii. 435. 51 In a later speech (The Times, 24 Apr. 1871, 11 b), to the Institution of Civil Engineers, Lowe gave general offence. 52 SCOC (1867), Q 2451 (Jowett); SCSI (1868) Q 2665±8 (Clifton); Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 29; Lyulph Stanley, 21; Devonshire Commn July 1870, Q 3042 (Clifton), 3482 (H. J. S. Smith), Third Report, para. 181. For Acland, see n. 29. 53 Pattison, Suggestions (1868), 267±8. 54 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3897, 3936. Jowett suggested the provision of University scholarships in science to promote this (Qs 3967±9). 55 Ibid. Q 3965, Jowett told the Commn: `More than £100,000 has been appropriated at Oxford during the last 12 years to buildings and endowments for physical science.' See Pt 1, 655, for the cost of the University Museum. The British Association's science scholarship ®gure (PP 1867±8 liv. 7) was probably too low: the Devonshire Commn gave 8% for 1872 (Third Report, 679). Jowett wanted half the scholarships to be given for classics, the other half to other subjects: SCOC (1867), Q 2515. Pusey thought a science scholarship one of the easiest to win: ibid. Q 3371; but Jowett wished to favour science a little in the allocation: Devonshire Commn, Qs 3944±6. 50

a `plastic structure'

13

remained the staple of Oxford teaching: each college still recruited its fellows chie¯y from its own scholars; and college tutorships were unpopular. A college was therefore obliged to keep up its classical awards for fear of being left short of potential classical tutors.56 Questioned by the Devonshire Commission in 1870, the Rector of Exeter said that none of the college's ®fteen fellows elected `under the new ordinances' had `obtained his fellowship on account of his knowledge of natural science', and that it had no science scholars, though free of subject restrictions in both fellowships and scholarships.57 In the same year a plea was made to Oxford, Cambridge, and London on behalf of the endowed grammar schools that Greek should no longer be required from all those working for bachelors' degrees. All three universities rejected it.58 They thus claimed (by no means for the last time) the right to in¯uence the curriculum in the secondary schools. All this tended to bear out T. H. Huxley's remark to the Scienti®c Instruction Committee two years earlier that a young man could `get competent scienti®c teaching' in the ancient universities, but only if he was willing to forgo any of their `higher rewards'.59 Huxley thought these institutions no better at diffusing elementary scienti®c knowledge than at educating science specialists. He had it on high authority that at Oxford `anyone might have taken the highest honours, and yet might never have heard that the earth went round the sun.'60 By the early 1870s these defects were thought to be detracting from national ef®ciency in all its aspects. In 1836 Thomas Arnold had not minded, as he told a friend, if his pupils at Rugby thought `that the sun went round the earth . . . the one thing needful . . . [was] Christian, and moral and political, philosophy.' In 1872 his son, Thomas, produced a pamphlet in which Britain's `breakdown at the Crimea' was attributed to `our superior education failing to illuminate the professions . . . with the light 56 SCOC (1867), Qs 1427±8 (Liddell); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 4069 (J. P. Lightfoot); UOC (1877), Q 4524 (H. B. George). 57 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3982±93: one of the fellows had a science ®rst as well as his ®rst in maths. Lightfoot recognized that the absence of science fellowships hindered school science (Q 4065). Under the Ordinances of the 1850s colleges were supposed to allot fellowships to all the `branches of learning . . . recognized in the exams of the University': SCOC (1867), Qs 19 (Brodie), 263 (Roundell). The 1854 Bill as originally proposed would have been more effective on this: PP 1854 v. 301. For the pull of the classical scholarships see E. Barker, The Father of the Man (1949), 25. 58 PP 1872 xxiv. 60±5: letter from Lord Lyttelton, Chief Commissioner, Endowed Schools. For further details see Ch. 23, n. 29. Matthew Arnold had advocated a matriculation examination about which the public authorities would be consulted: it would include compulsory Greek only for `the faculties of theology and arts': Schools and Universities, 317 n. Pattison told the Devonshire Commn that `for years' he had been urging `upon the University' to drop compulsory Greek; Jowett wished to allow an undergraduate to take classical Mods on arrival in the University: Nov. 1870, Qs 3754, 3897, 3917±23. See also n. 22. 59 SCSI (1868), Q 8027. For some con®rmation of Huxley's view see SC Tests (1870±1), Q 1701: 71 (Ince). 60 SCSI (1868), Q 8009.

14

`a secularized university'?

of scienti®c thought'. All this was contrasted with Prussia's victory in the war against France, which proved `the effectiveness of the German university system'.61 During the later 1860s several of Oxford's leading ®gures became very concerned about a University system which had obvious shortcomings, even if it could be kept from breakdown. `At present,' Benjamin Jowett wrote in 1866, `not a . . . twentieth part of the ability of the country comes to the University.' On this, if on little else, Mark Pattison said much the same: in his Suggestions on Academical Organization (1868) he wrote: `There is a work surely needing to be done for the social and intellectual welfare of [the] country. . . . The universities are better able to do that work than any other extant machinery. . . not as they are, but as they may be made. Will Oxford . . . seize the opportunity to . . . break the bonds that bind her?'62 Any major reforms had clearly to be preceded by an enquiry, such as the Cleveland Commission was soon, to carry out to determine what the colleges' resources actually were; but the remedies for Oxford's under-performance, and the most effective ways of achieving them, were all in dispute. Benjamin Jowett wanted concentration on teaching, Pattison on research and higher study: both were at odds with Oxford's High Church party.63 Almost any reform was liable to harm one interest or another. Increasing the number and value of the college scholarships, when many of those winning them were known not to need this support, harmed the University's reputation; but it was the way by which the weaker colleges secured some talent.64 If the best college tutors were to be prevented from taking teaching posts in the public schools, they must at least be allowed to marry while holding their fellowships;65 but Thorold Rogers thought it essential, now that the coaches were being squeezed out, for the college tutors to live in the colleges and to give tutorials at all hours. `The more married tutors there are,' he warned, `the more likely it is that the scale of the higher teaching will be 61 Thomas Arnold to W. A. Greenhill, 9 May 1836: Stanley, Arnold, ii. 32; Thomas Arnold, the younger, The Revival of the Faculties at Oxford (n. 19), 7±8. For Matthew Arnold's praise of Prussian education see Schools and Universities, 311±12. 62 To Florence Nightingale, 14 Oct. 1866: Quinn and Prest, 109. In Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 377±8, the date is given as 19 Oct., the addressee not being identi®ed; Pattison, Suggestions, 5. Jowett realized that improving Oxford depended partly on improvements to the school system: SCOC (1867), 2520, 2545±59. 63 Cf. Pattison, Suggestions, 153±67 opposing Jowett; Nov. 1870, Devonshire Commn, Q 3977. For the parties see SC Tests (1870±1), Q 3158: 71 (Jowett). 64 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3802 (Pattison). The 1877 Commission set £80 p.a. as the standard for college scholarships: see UOC (1877), Q 2713 (Jowett) and 1882 Statutes. `General principles for. . . adjusting the . . . emoluments of scholars and exhibitioners to their ®nancial circumstances' were not promulgated until the establishment of the Central Scholarship Committee in 1926: see Statute XII. v promoted by the Commissioners under the 1923 Act. 65 SCOC (1867) Qs 64, 72±3 (Brodie), 264 (Roundell), 2502±3 (Jowett); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3976 (Jowett), Third Report, 684.

a `plastic structure'

15

lowered.'66 There were protests at the high cost of `idle' fellowships, and calls for them to be limited to a term of years.67 Jowett, while favouring that limitation, was keen to retain Balliol's in¯uence in the London world. He defended helping a man whose academic studies had delayed him in starting his professional career, and he opposed lessening the total sum spent on `prize fellowships'.68 Most of Oxford's `senior men', according to Pattison, thought that the University's `classical studies would sink' unless `a certain number of prize fellowships [were] bestowed every year'.69 The Times, which numbered an `idle' fellow among its leader writers, pronounced: `College fellowships supply the universities with their motive power, and if . . . these preferments had been depreciated in common repute, the consequences might have been beyond calculation.'70 Beneath all the proposals for reform lay a basic question. Given that it was no longer feasible for the colleges to act as a group of `small universities', was there any way in which they could become ef®cient bodies for undergraduate teaching in all the subjects now being studied at Oxford? Should `several of the smaller colleges . . . be amalgamated'? In the judgement of the committee reporting in 1866 on the proposal for a new college: `the majority of our existing colleges have no prestige of their own whatever.'71 Could colleges combine for purposes of tuition? Most of the honours teaching in science was already conducted by the University. Should the arts subjects go the same way?72 Would so massive a transfer of resources and functions mean that the colleges would cease to be educational bodies? Pattison, who provided the most systematic analysis of Oxford's ills and needs in his Suggestions, wanted each college to specialize in a particular subject; but such bold tampering with the collegiate structure seemed 66 UOC (1877), Q 2871. See also Brodrick, 169; Quinn and Prest, xxviii; Abbott and Campbell, ii. 154. 67 SCOC (1867), Q 3374 (Pusey); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 4054 (J. P. Lightfoot), Nov. 1872, 13573 (Salisbury). 68 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3975, and Jowett's `Suggestions for University Reform, 1874', L. Campbell, Nationalisation, 199. Jowett repeated the view to the Selborne Commission (UOC (1877), Q 2702), although a Cambridge enquiry had suggested that it might be illfounded: Henry Sidgwick, Contemporary Review, xxvii (Apr. 1876), 679±93. For the ways in which Jowett wanted colleges to make savings see UOC (1877), Q 2713±15. 69 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3821. See also ibid. Q 4087 (J. P. Lightfoot). 70 The Times, 31 May 1871, 9c, d. G. C. Brodrick had been a fellow of Merton since 1855 and a Times leader-writer since 1860. 71 SCOC (1867), Q 1177 (Liddell); Lyulph Stanley, 26; Pattison, Memoirs, 114. Jowett was cautious about `fusion', except for `the system of instruction': SCOC (1867), Q 2410. For the discussions between Lincoln and Brasenose, Green, Lincoln, 498±9. The 1866 committee's judgementÐSCOC (1867), 274Ðformed part of a contention that a new college such as the one recommended would soon be `on a level . . . with many of the older colleges'. For the foundation of Keble College see Ch. 6. 72 SCOC (1867) Qs 264 (Roundell), 1179±88 (Liddell), 2195 (`Bat' Price), 3376 (Pusey), 2405 (Jowett, wishing to `attach the scholarships to the University and not to the colleges'); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3840±4 (Pattison); SC Tests (1870±1), Q 586:71 (Appleton).

16

`a secularized university'?

impracticable.73 To turn a University which did not even control its own entrance standards into a centralized teaching organization would be a very large undertaking; and it seemed perverse to transform the colleges just when Johann DoÈllinger, a great university ®gure and Germany's foremost theologian, had said of them: `As I observed their working on the spot, [they] awakened in me feelings of envy, and led me to long for the time when we might again have something of the same kind.'74 By 1870, as Britain's professional class gained in in¯uence, the effects of the reforms initiated by the 1854 Act began to tell. A fair proportion of college fellows had been elected under the `open' system created by the Act and attitudes were changing. Even a tutor who was in orders was by now inclined to see himself more as a university don and less as a clergyman. In 1867 an Act of Parliament ended the regime under which the government of Christ Church had rested solely with the Dean and Canons, and substituted a mixed system which aligned the Senior Students with the fellows of other colleges.75 In the following year Montagu Burrows, who was a strong Tory, denounced the system under which, in tenure and emoluments of their fellowships, the non-resident and the hard-working tutor were on a par with each other. This situation was, he wrote, `almost incredible'.76 By then a handful of colleges were deciding to create a statutory class of fellows who would engage on election to be tutors, and perhaps to make it their career. An applicant for a fellowship in this new category need not be chosen by examination.77 If elected he would not be required to resign should he come into property, and under certain conditions he could be allowed to retain his position on marriage. New College took the lead by adopting these reforms in 1869, and by making provision to increase the pay of tutors and lecturers in March 1871. It had been transformed since the enactment of its 1857±8 Ordinances, none of its fellows elected since that date being obliged to take orders.78 73 Suggestions (1868), 191. Robert Laing made a similar suggestion: Some Dreams of a Constitution-Monger (1876), 7±11. See also Tutors (1854), 119; Quarterly, cxxiv (Apr. 1868), 394±9 [M. Burrows]; Devonshire Commn, Third Report, para. 175. 74 Johann DoÈllinger, Universities Past and Present, a Lecture, trans. C. E. Appleton (1867), 26±7. For J. H. Newman's defence of the college system see Pt 1, ch. 9. 75 E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform (1970), 180±91. 76 Quarterly, cxxiv. 414. See also SCOC (1867) Q 2116 (`Bat' Price), Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 14; Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3800 (Pattison). 77 For the bad effects of fellowship examination papers on scienti®c research see Devonshire Commn, Feb. 1871, Q 5867 (Frankland), May 1872, 10741 (Thomson), Third Report paras. 159, 185±7. For later and more general criticisms, Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, 46 (17 May 1876); UOC (1877), Q 3307 (T. H. Green). 78 H. Rashdall and R. S. Rait, New College (1901), 228; H. B. George, New College, 1856± 1906 (1906), 23±34; John Buxton and Penry Williams (eds), New College (1979), 72±106 (Alan Ryan); NCA 8589, 5±15 (Privy Council approvals 29 Apr. 1869, 24 Mar. 1871). Merton, All Souls, and Wadham were the other colleges which had no `clerical' restrictions in fellowship elections by 1870. In Lincoln fellows obliged to take orders could delay the step for ten years, in

a `plastic structure'

17

By May 1872 Oxford's three oldest collegesÐBalliol, Merton, and UniversityÐhad adopted even wider changes under which, after long service, a tutor could be allowed to retain his fellowship as a pension. These new fellowships went under several names: they were `fellows on the tutorial list' at Balliol, `tutor-fellows' at Merton, and `fellows elected under clause 27(a)'79 at University. All three colleges signalized the extent to which they regarded college tutoring as a layman's profession by reducing the number of their clerical fellows, that is, those who, if not in orders when elected, had to be ordained within a given time.80 Merton's governing body explained to the Privy Council how essential this feature of the changes had become: `Even those who intend to take Holy Orders do not, generally speaking, wish to pledge themselves to do so; and therefore they prefer becoming candidates for a perfectly open fellowship at another college.' This part of the scheme caused trouble. Merton's Visitor was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he held that his of®ce compelled him to veto the college's proposed application to the Privy Council to reduce the number of its clerical fellows.81 After a long legal wrangle the Privy Council ruled in 1871 that a change in a college's ordinances made under the 1854 Act did not require the Visitor's approval.82 Balliol's Visitor, the Bishop of London, had already been advised by the ex-Master against attempting to exercise a veto.83 The impulses driving Oxford's three oldest colleges to make these changes were various. Balliol, which was abolishing compulsory chapel, and gaining a reputation for `in®delity' and academic prowess, produced the most comprehensive reforms of all: tenure of its fellowships where there was no teaching commitment was reduced to seven years, re-election for ®ve-year periods being allowed for `studies . . . likely to produce important results in published writings'.84 In Merton, where there had long been a lay tradition, Exeter for ®fteen years. For married tutors in Merton see L. Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols 1904), i. 87. 79

PP 1873 XXXVII Pt 1 Appendix, xxiv cl. 20 (Balliol), xxix (Merton), xxxvi±vii, cl. 27(a), 34 (University). For Jowett's plans see SCOC (1867), Q 2404. 80 Ibid. xxv cl. 25 (Balliol), xxxiii±iv, schedule (University). For Merton see next note. See also John H. Jones, Balliol (2nd edn 1997, ®rst edn 1988), 212. 81 For text of the Archbishop's letter, 26 June 1866, see SCOC (1867), Q 1434 (Roundell). The Privy Council originally rejected Merton's petition without hearing counsel or giving reasons: ibid. Qs 282±9. See also ibid. Q 2416 (Jowett); Parl. Deb., 1 July 1868, cxciii. 456 (Gathorne Hardy). Trinity had met with a similar refusal from its Visitor, the Bishop of Winchester: J. M. Prest, `Jowett's Correspondence with Earl Russell' (n. 9), 7. 82 The case concerned Cl. 40 of the 1854 Act, in the light of Merton's 46th Ordinance issued by the Executive Commission: PP 1867 lv. 49±53; Parl. Deb., 12 July 1867, clxxxviii. 1439, 16 May 1873, ccxvi. 10±13. 83 John H. Jones (n. 80), 212. Jowett had become Master in 1870, Gladstone having found a haven for Scott as Dean of Rochester: Quinn and Prest, 181. For Jowett's reputation in 1870 with the High Church see pp. 26±7, 31±2, below. 84 PP 1873 xxxvii Pt 1, Appendix, xxiv cl. 21; Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 376. In Balliol's 1882 Statutes the published writings clause was III.12 (ii). For Appleton on compulsory chapel see n. 156.

18

`a secularized university'?

the active tutors had the powerful support of an `idle' fellow, C. S. Roundell, who was a strong Liberal.85 At University College the tutors were managing to consolidate their position before the new Master, G. G. Bradley, lately headmaster of Marlborough, could `learn the ropes'.86 As happened more than once in nineteenth-century Oxford, the reforms pioneered by a few colleges would be adopted later as the general rule.87 In this case there could be no immediate moves to make similar changes, because in 1872 the government announced that fellowship amendments would not be considered by the Privy Council until the Cleveland Commission had reported; but a few years later, the Selborne Commission took what the three colleges had done as a model and inaugurated the system under which `Fellow and Tutor' would become the title for most of Oxford's academic staff members.88 The colleges which reduced the number of fellowships tenable only by ordained men had a strong case on grounds of tutorial ef®ciency. Jowett summarized the experience of years when he wrote in 1880: `It is a bad thing both for the colleges and the clerical profession that the management of colleges should pass into the hands of inferior men because they are clergymen.'89 Tutorial needs, though pressing, were not, however, the only impulse behind the whittling down of clerical fellowships. During the 1860s Oxford experienced a decade of religious doubt. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (November 1859), and the various contributions to Essays and Reviews (1860), reinforced the scepticism which had long been the obverse of much fervent faith, and shook the religious beliefs of many educated people. For Oxford, whose recovery from the Tractarian upheavals was hardly complete, the shock was especially severe.90 The double revelation that the Biblical accounts of creation were belied by the facts, and that, when scrutinized in the style of German scholarship, some of the Bible's many authors showed little of what a modern person could recognize as divine inspiration, caused much confusion. The old University orthodoxy, 85 SCOC (1867), Q 263 (Roundell); G. H. Martin and J. R. L. High®eld, History of Merton College (1997), 307±8. Merton's undergraduates, nearly half of whom were Etonians in 1870, had not been thought studious. By 1875 there was `not a single public school man' in a `sadly depleted list of entrants'. 86 Bradley defended the college tutor system before the Selborne Commission: UOC (1877), Q 2076. For his Mastership see p. 128 below. 87 See Pt 1, 13. 88 See. Salisbury's letter to the Lord President, 10 July 1872 and Ripon's reply, 12 July. House of Lords Sessional Papers 1873 xviii. 65. In 1877 T. H. Green drew the attention of the Selborne Commission to Balliol's arrangements: UOC (1877), Q 3316. 89 To C. S. Roundell, 6 July 1880: Jowett, Letters, 40. 90 Goldwin Smith, Plea for the Abolition of Tests in . . . Oxford (1864), 52±3. For later discussions see G. M. Young, Daylight and Champaign (1937), 107, 172±4; Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. R. J. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (1990). For sceptical works published earlier by two Oxford men, both being brothers of prominent Tractarians, see J. A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (1849) and F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith (1850).

a `plastic structure'

19

under which practically all German philosophical and theological work was held to result from irresponsible speculations, began to crack.91 Some found all this liberating;92 but many, in Oxford as elsewhere, regarded Christian beliefs as the only adequate basis for morality; and for them an atmosphere of doubt was deeply threatening. Darwin's Descent of Man was published in 1871 while the Commune held Paris. The commentator in The TimesÐno High Church organÐwrote: `A man incurs a grave responsibility who, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book.'93 During the years of doubt Matthew Arnold was not alone, especially among Oxonians, in ®nding himself Wandering between two worlds, one dead The other powerless to be born.94

Those who held to the faith were naturally apt, as they looked back, to give these doubts the hues of aggressive unbelief: each agnostic appeared as something of an anti-clerical.95 Edward Talbot recalled, when Bishop of Rochester, that, dining at Merton during the sixties, he had `felt the tone there very uncongenial'.96 E. A. Knox, who had won a scholarship to Corpus in 1865, rose to be Bishop of Manchester. In the 1930s he wrote: `The Oxford to which I went up . . . had passed into the hands of the liberals in the sense that, although most of the fellows were still clergy, the anti-clerical spirit had gained the upper hand.'97 E. L. Hicks, later Bishop of Lincoln, took orders in 1870 while a young fellow of Corpus. His was a lay fellowship, and, as his biographer recorded, `it was so far from carrying with it any obligation to take Orders that he had to expect that some of his friends, Liberals in theology and politics, would regard his acceptance of Orders as a betrayal of the cause of freedom.'98 Preaching the memorial sermon in 1901 after Mandell Creighton's death Scott Holland said: He took his stand for God . . . at the extreme hour of intellectual tension, when the panic roused by the new criticism was at its height, and when the victorious ef®cacy 91 SCOC (1867), Q 3334 (Pusey); Gladstone to Acton, 10 Sept. 1873,: Gladstone, Diaries, viii. 386. J. H. Newman treated Darwin's theories calmly: LDN xxiv.77. 92 Henry Sidgwick, `The Poems and Prose Remains of A. H. Clough', Westminster Review, n s 36 (Oct. 1869), 363±4. 93 The Times, 8 Apr. 1871, 5e. For Darwin's defence see Descent of Man (1922 edn), 937. 94 `Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse' were ®rst published in Fraser's Magazine, Apr. 1855, and then reprinted in 1867 (New Poems), the year in which Arnold vacated Oxford's Poetry Professorship. 95 George, Earl of Pembroke, tried in Roots (1873) to show (p. 175) `what a sceptic really is when stripped of the slanders constantly hurled against him'. Pembroke's younger brother (and heir) was then a Christ Church undergraduate. 96 Mandell Creighton (n. 78), i. 51. One of Merton's fellows, William Sidgwick, took advantage of the 1870 Act (33 and 34 Vict., c. 91) to relinquish his orders. For Brasenose see E. W. Watson, Bishop John Wordsworth (1915), 71. 97 E. A. Knox, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (1934), 65±6, 72; Liddon, Pusey, iv. 221. 98 J. H. Fowler, Edward Lee Hicks (1922), 31.

20

`a secularized university'?

of the scienti®c and critical methods appeared to have swept the ®eld. It is dif®cult for us now to gauge the dismay of that bad hour. At the close of the sixties it seemed to us at Oxford almost incredible that a young don of any intellectual reputation for modernity should be on the Christian side.99

These reminiscences are supported by some contemporary testimony. In 1871, a year after he had taken orders, Creighton told his ®anceÂe how `it was the habit in Oxford to assume that a man who took Orders must be either a fool or a knave';100 and Lord Stanley of Alderley, who `though a Mussulman was an ardent supporter of the Church of England', assured the Lords that, `of the young Oxford men that he had known, every second man was a sceptic.'101 Lord Westbury had no dif®culty in explaining Oxford's anti-clericalism during this period. Its High Church leaders, he told the Lords in 1871, had insisted on maintaining a religious test for MAs; `and now the human mind, rising up against that system, takes its revenge by inculcating a greater amount of liberality in proportion to the fetters you have imposed upon it.'102 For some of the college tutors, with whom Talbot, Hicks, and Creighton had mixed, this attitude was probably reinforced by an academic consideration. Until religious tests for MAs were abolished in 1871 open references to their religious uncertainties could jeopardize their fellowships. In the era of Darwin and T. H. Huxley this seemed an intolerable restraint on a college tutor: it invited imputations against his honesty. How could he safeguard his reputation for integrity as a teacher of philosophy or history while his livelihood was known to depend on his adherence to a particular religious creed? His assurance that his teaching was unaffected by his enforced Anglican stance would be almost worthless: he could not avoid being suspected of having omitted something from his lectures because he had not been free to say it. A lay tutor would stay under that suspicion until the test had been removed. His clerical colleague would stay under it as long as he remained in orders. J. B. Lightfoot, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, took the same view of the position as the fellows of Merton. He explained to the Lords' Select Committee in 1870, when urging abolition of the tests, `a ¯ood of new ideas has been poured in upon the world, and . . . at present . . . young men often do not like to pledge themselves to a very distinct form of religious belief.'103 99 Mandell Creighton, i. 75. When Scott Holland had taken orders in 1872 his tutor, T. H. Green, showed sympathy and understanding, but there was a painful break with his friend and contemporary, R. L. Nettleship: S. Paget, Scott Holland (1921), 65±6, 68. 100 Mandell Creighton, i. 75±6. 101 Parl. Deb., 8 May 1871, ccvi. 369. For Lord Stanley see DNB. Although, as eldest brother of Lyulph Stanley (n. 119 below), he knew some Balliol men, he had lived too long in the East for his testimony to be very reliable. 102 Parl. Deb., ibid. 377. 103 Parl. Deb., 14 July 1870, cciii. 222±3 (Bishop of Exeter); SC Tests (1870±1), Q1076: 70 (Lightfoot).

a `plastic structure'

21

The writings of W. H. Mallock, who took a second in Greats at Balliol in 1874, show how widespread this attitude was among young Oxford men as long as a good proportion of the fellows in every college were in orders. Mallock made his name in The New Republic by guying Oxford's liberals, and his religious stance was traditional.104 His view is re¯ected by a character in an article which he published in 1878. `Of course,' this person says, `we all know that if men don't believe in God . . . they won't take the trouble to behave wellÐand why should they?'105 Yet the hero of The New Republic is neither Pusey nor his lieutenant, Liddon, but Ruskin. The Oxford ®gure whom Mallock admired most was the one who was known, while believing faith to be all-important, to be beset by religious doubts.106 The reforms put in hand between 1867 and 1872 were not con®ned to a handful of colleges. In 1868, as the Liberals triumphed in the general election, their Oxford friends, with Jowett to the fore, pushed the whole University into an important reform by removing the ban on undergraduates living outside the college walls. E. B. Pusey and his followers in the Church party opposed the change on the ground that putting young men, when away from home, in premises where the household probably included girls, invited immorality. The liberals discerned in this attitude what Goldwin Smith called `the tendency to spread moral alarm as the precursor of the confessional'; but, when they pointed to the absence of evidence supporting the Church party's suppositions, Pusey retorted that the authorities had no chance of detecting what went on within a lodging house.107 The lodgings question had been to the fore throughout the discussions on `extension'. It was eventually decided by the fact that, once the private halls had failed, greater use of lodgings looked like the only way in which the University could expand quickly and attract undergraduates from less af¯uent families. In June 1868 Oxford followed Cambridge by allowing residence in lodgings, and by the end of the following year both universities had established bodies of `Unattached students'.108 The rapid initial growth and later fortunes of 104

W. H. Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature (2nd edn 1920), 60±1. Nineteenth-Century, iv (July±Dec. 1878), 301: these were Mallock's own views, Memoirs, 63. Disraeli put similar ones into Lothair's soliloquy: Lothair (®rst published 1870), ed. Vernon Bogdanor (1975), ch. 38. See also n. 137 below. 106 `Herbert' is Ruskin; `Dr. Seydon' is a composite of Pusey and Liddon: Mallock, Memoirs, 64±7. For Ruskin's religious position see Works, xx. 49±51; for his religious practice, J. H. Fowler, Hicks, 42. 107 Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 51; SCOC (1867), Qs 3254, 3292±300, 3386±91, 3401±2 (Pusey). Temple had come to disagree with Pusey on lodgings: Saturday Review, 2 Feb. 1867, xxiii. 133. In this passage, as throughout the chapter, the Liberals are given an initial capital letter only when the reference is to the political party and its members. 108 Convocation Register, OUA, 1854±71, 446, 11 June 1868; SCOC (1867), Qs 265, 270 (Roundell), 2405, 2466 (Jowett), 3123 (D. P. Chase); SCSI (1868), Qs 2736±43 (Clifton); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3869 (Pattison); Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 424. Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, started in this way. For Salisbury's tribute, 24 Feb. 1876, to the excellent conduct of the Unattached see Parl. Deb. ccxxvii. 793. 105

22

`a secularized university'?

what is now St Catherine's College are described in Chapter 7. Jowett, who was establishing a Balliol hall, was not wholly disinterested in sponsoring greater use of lodgings.109 He told his mother in 1869 that the lodgings statute would enable students `to come to Balliol instead of going to other colleges. If we had a little more money,' he added, `we could absorb the University.'110 There was, however, another obstacle to the high ef®ciency of Balliol or any other college, which even Jowett could not remove by his own efforts. During the proceedings of the 1867 Select Committee on `extension', Henry Fawcett was questioning C. S. Roundell on the probable effect of allowing `unattached students' to Oxford. `Are you of the opinion,' he asked, `that you will never get the proper number of men at the universities that they ought to educate unless all religious tests are abolished?' `That,' Roundell answered, `is my ®rm and unalterable conviction.'

`a n u n di spu t ed r ig h t to t e ac h . . . in ® de l it y' The seven-year agitation to abolish the religious test attached to the Oxford MA is described in the ®nal pages of Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1.111 The result of the 1868 election put the eventual success of the campaign beyond doubt. Oxford's liberals were far stronger at Westminster than on their home ground, and strongest of all on a Parliamentary issue where Nonconformist support was guaranteed. On the other hand, Gladstone and his colleagues did not want yet another struggle with the Tories led by Lord Salisbury in the Lords. Some degree of concession therefore seemed possible; and there was an opening for it because the test, once seen as a bastion against Dissenters, was now defended as one against agnosticism and in®delity. There were no fears about a few Nonconformist fellows in Oxford's colleges. The test could be taken by Wesleyans and members of the Established Church of Scotland; and the leaders of the other denominations were notoriously severe on ministers or trainees who deviated in doctrine or harboured doubts.112 The Wesleyans had to back the abolitionists, but they 109 The hall was for `exhibitioners' who had done well in `Oxford Locals' (see pp. 560, 568 below) and could not otherwise have paid for a University course. It was sited in St Giles where the Mathematical Institute now stands, and was initially in T. H. Green's charge: Green, Works, III. cvii. For an early mention of the plan see Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 213. 110 Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 432±3. See also SCOC (1867) Q 2389 (Jowett); Lyulph Stanley, 16. 111 The religious test for the BA had been abolished in 1854. At Corpus Christi in 1869 a Unitarian (C. P. Scott) gained a ®rst in Lit. Hum., and a practising Jew (F. D. Schloss) won a scholarship: J. L. Hammond, C. P. Scott (1934), 12±24, D. M. Lewis, The Jews of Oxford (1992), 22±3. Roman Catholics were forbidden by the hierarchy to study at Oxford until 1896: see p. 104 below. In Cambridge Nonconformists had been granted MAs since 1856, but for them the title did not confer membership of the senate or of the parliamentary constituency: 19 and 20 Vict. c. 88. 112 See SC Tests (1870±1), Q 2280: 71 (Leighton); Pt 1, 11. For Pusey's attempt to persuade the Wesleyan Conference to defend the test see The Times, 15 Aug. 1868, 10e; 17 Aug. 6f, 7a; 20

a `plastic structure'

23

made no secret of their misgivings. The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine saw, as `the drawback' to abolition, `that it will not only give greater facilities for the development of evangelical Nonconformity in the national universities, but also for the audacity of Rationalism, and the scheming of Popery, the two great enemies of truth.'113 Lord Salisbury was understood, as Charles Roundell wrote to his cousin Roundell Palmer in July 1870, `to seek protection, not for the Church, but for Christianity'. When Roundell put forward a compromise proposal on this basis, however, it was rejected.114 The clue to Salisbury's tactics is that he was chie¯y concerned, not about this attack, but about the next, namely the expected Liberal assault on Oxford's clerical fellowships.115 Maintaining those was far more important than the test to the Church party's position. Taking an MA involved signing a declaration, which from 1868 stated simply that the doctrine of the Church of England was `agreeable to the Word of God';116 but some of Oxford's teachers never signed. A private tutor did not need an MA: B. C. Brodie, who was an agnostic, did not take his until he had held the Aldrichian Professorship of Chemistry for ®ve years; and James Bryce, who was a determined Scottish `voluntaryist', never took one, although in 1870 he had become a DCL and the Regius Professor of Civil Law.117 Those who signed could claim great latitude; Newman had shown in 1840 how ¯exibly the Thirty-Nine Articles might be interpreted. The differences between the Church of England and other denominations seemed little, if any, greater than those between one Anglican and another.118 An extremely scrupulous Aug. 9c; 21 Aug. 4d; 22 Aug. 6f, 7a, e, 10b, c; Liddon, Pusey, iv. 201±2. For the dismissal of Samuel Davidson from the Professorship of Biblical Literature in Lancashire Independent College for heterodoxy see Quinn and Prest, 90±1. Another Independent college (New College, St John's Wood) had expelled three students for a similar offence, one of them being William Hale White, who gave an account in The Early Life of Mark Rutherford (1913), 63±9. See also W. R. Ward, Early Victorian Methodism (1976), 420±2. The Duke of Richmond led the Conservative opposition in the Lords at this time; but, as Oxford's Chancellor, Salisbury had an obvious claim to lead on this question. 113 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1870, 654. For the misgivings of a prominent Roman Catholic, a friend of J. H. Newman, see Parl. Deb. 13 July 1864, clxxvi. 1405±7 (William Monsell). 114 C. S. Roundell to Roundell Palmer, 21 July 1870: LPL MS Selborne 1864 fo 62. For an instance of press comment on the `arti®cial barriers to their teaching' maintained by Oxford and Cambridge see The Times, 12 May 1870, 9c. 115 Quinn and Prest, 222; SCOC (1867), Q 2404 (Jowett); Parl. Deb. 10 Feb. 1871, cciv. 148 (Gladstone); [M. Arnold], Pall Mall Gazette, 30 Nov. 1871, 10. 116 Formula adapted from the Clerical Subscription Act, 1865, (28 and 29 Vict. c. 122); Ward, Victorian Oxford, 254. 117 SC Tests (1870±1), Q 3218: 71 (Jowett); Saturday Review, xxv, 7 Mar. 1868, 305; his wish to speak in Congregation or Convocation probably explains Brodie's eventual compliance (see p. 451 below); H. A. L. Fisher, Bryce (2 vols, 1927), i. 38. Bryce had also been a fellow of Oriel since 1862, where Ordinance 40 required him to `conform to the Liturgy of the Church of England'. 118 Pt 1, 240±4; Parl. Deb., 10 Apr. 1845, lxxix. 404 (W. D. Christie); Goldwin Smith, Reform (1858), 272, Reorganization (1868), 60, E. A. Knox, Reminiscences (1934), 66; SCOC (1867), Q 2462 (Jowett); SC Tests (1870±1), Qs 289, 345: 70 (D. P. Chase).

24

`a secularized university'?

aspirant might wreck his chances by refusing to sign: all others could ®nd grounds for their signatures. So conscientious a man as T. H. Green was said to have defended his by explaining that `one kiss did not make a marriage.'119 The clerical fellowships question, by contrast, was very substantial. In 1871 rather more than half of Oxford's fellows were clergymen or prospective clergymen;120 and more than half of the lay fellows were non-resident. In the group most in¯uential with the undergraduatesÐthe college heads, deans, and tutorsÐthe Church's position was even stronger. Except at Merton the heads were all clergymen, as were many of the hundred-odd college tutors.121 Unlike complete abolition of the tests, however, decimating the clerical fellowships might be achieved without the direct intervention of Parliament. Salisbury could not afford to demoralize the Conservative peers by a surrender, embodying what he called `a merely nominal compromise', on the one issue where the parliamentary struggle was sure to be decisive.122 He chose to ®ght on two points: the abolition Bill must not apply to the heads, who must remain in orders, and tutors and lecturers must declare that, while holding one of these of®ces, they would `not teach any opinion opposed to the teaching and Divine authority of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament'.123 His tactics had drawbacks. The tutors' formula, though far less objectionable than the one it replaced, attracted much mockery;124 and the longer the abolition proposals were delayed the more comprehensive they became. By the time the Bill was before the Commons in 1871 Gladstone's supporters had become so impatient that an amendment to abolish clerical fellowships received the support of more than half of 119

Parl. Deb., 23 May 1870, cci. 1250 (Denman); SC Tests (1870±1), Q 3165: 71 (Jowett); sixteen Cambridge `high wranglers' were said to have been excluded from fellowships by the test, 1860±9: ibid. 567, Appendix A. In 1869 two resignations from fellowships on conscientious grounds caused a stirÐHenry Sidgwick at Trinity, Cambridge, and Lyulph Stanley at Balliol. For T. H. Green see A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences (1923), 103, and W. A. Knight, Memoir of John Nichol (Glasgow, 1896), 141. 120 Lyulph Stanley, 6±7. Stanley counted 174 clerical and 178 lay fellows in the 1869 Calendar. He added that including `embryo clergymen' with the `clericals' would have made them a majority. The Bishop of Exeter said that half the fellows were clerical `in all the colleges': Parl. Deb., 14 July 1870, cciii. 225. 121 See the comprehensive return PP 1871. ix. 216±21. This gives for each college (except All Souls which was late with its return): total number of fellows, number (a) holding college of®ces, (b) `habitually absent', (c) `in, or moving to, Holy Orders or Divinity Degrees'. For college tutors' numbers see Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 3790 (Pattison); Engel 288, 292. Oxford fellows' numbers, 1815±1912, are given in Pt 1, 408 (Table 12.11). 122 Pt 1, 729. 123 Salisbury to Roundell Palmer, 31 July 1870: LPL MS Selborne 1864, fo 68; SC Tests (1870± 1), 2nd Report, 595. For High Church criticism of the proposed declaration see Ward, Victorian Oxford, 261. 124 The Times, 9 May 1871, 10a. The proposed declaration was, however, similar to the one made under the Acts of 1853 and 1859 by the principals and holders of lay chairs in the Scottish universities, for which see n. 146 below.

a `plastic structure'

25

them. He had a majority of only twenty-two against it even with Conservative help.125 But by obtaining a Select Committee on the Bill, with all the delay which this entailed, Salisbury gained one important advantage: he turned the spotlight onto the feature of Oxford teaching which he, and many others, distrusted most. Liddon had put his ®nger on this feature in 1868: `The question,' he wrote to a friend, `is whether the sons of Christian parents are . . . to be made over to in®del teachers of . . . philosophy, with an undisputed legal right to teach them in®delity.' To Liddon and his friends it was a `profoundly Christian truth that education without religion is worse than barbarism'.126 They noted how the philosophy papers in Greats had changed, and they condemned as `in®del' a course which, dealing with the deepest philosophical questions, had come during the last ®fteen years to do so in a way which was not speci®cally Christian. In 1830, when permission was given for candidates' answers to be `illustrated occasionally by the writings of the moderns', the Noetics, led by R. D. Hampden, brought Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (®rst published in 1736) into the Lit. Hum. syllabus. They regarded Butler as the foremost demonstrator of the reasonableness of revealed religion. During the Tractarian aftermath, however, and still more when Oxford felt the ®rst impact of Darwin, Butler fell into disfavour. Gladstone, foreseeing the trend, is said to have declared in 1853 that dropping the Analogy from Lit. Hum. would be worse than the loss of four colleges. In 1854, however, a liberal board of examiners which included Pattison moved it to the `recommended' list. Fairly soon it had become an option which hardly anyone took. `It is not excluded,' D. P. Chase told the Lords' Committee in 1870, `but, being an optional subject, it is one that has been discouraged.' Oxford's liberals thought a work of Christian apologetics out of place in the Greats list. They stressed that `moral philosophy, as . . . at present taught in Oxford' was `totally disjoined from religious questions'.127 In 1865 Jowett saw his own undergraduate years, when `we were fed upon Bp. Butler and Aristotle's Ethics', as a time when `almost all teaching leant towards doctrines of authority.' Gladstone was left yearning for Butler's era. `Oh, that this age knew,' he wrote in 1873, `the treasure it possesses in him, 125

Parl. Deb., 20 Feb. 1871, cciv. 509±22. Liddon to W. Bright, 28 Dec. 1868, to C. T. Redington, 24 Jan. 1872: J. O. Johnston (n. 31), 133, 240. The Tests Select Committee heard a similar view from a Cambridge fellow: SC Tests (1870±1), Q 593: 70 (Perowne). Cf. T. H. Green, 1872: S. Paget, Scott Holland (1921), 66. 127 Pt 1, 73, 75, 210, 536; Jane Garnett, `Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist', Joseph Butler's Moral and Religious Thought: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Christopher Cunliffe (1992), 63±96; Mozley, Letters, 222±3; Pattison, Memoirs, 77: Pattison was an examiner in 1853±4 and 1870±1; SC Tests (1870±1), Q 376:70 (Chase), 550:71 (Appleton), 1990:71 (Woollcombe). Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement (1988), 338±40, is helpful; but Pattison's 1854 examinership has been transposed to 1864. 126

26

`a secularized university'?

and neglects.'128 To High Churchmen an honours course which excluded Butler, and included John Stuart Mill's Logic, despite all Pusey's efforts to dislodge it, was an education in in®delity.129 In 1868 Burrows told readers of the Quarterly that Greats men were exposed `to a very probable overthrow of their faith and morals'.130 Jowett's part in Essays and Reviews (1860) had not been forgotten. His message had been condemned then by the entire bench of bishops and, almost as directly, by 11,000 of the Anglican clergy: his in¯uence, and that of his college, were regarded by many Churchmen as malign.131 In 1871 Charles Neate told the Lords' Committee: `if the Convocation . . . had been suf®ciently enlightened as to what was going on, they would have . . . rather encouraged classical and historical learning than . . . philosophical.' Before the Selborne Commission six years later Neate was more explicit. Lately, he said, `philosophy unhappily. . . has acquired very much more of a speculative character, so that the University can teach people only how to speculate and not what they are to think'; and in a pamphlet of that year he wrote: Our students have been led or driven away from the fair and fertile ®elds of ancient literature to batten upon that most barren of all moors . . . the Republic of Plato, and the adjacent bottomless bogs of German philosophy.132

These criticisms and suspicions were not con®ned to elderly Oxford fellows. There was a widespread belief that the only hope for Christianity in Oxford would be to keep Jowett's Balliol philosophers in quarantine. Edmond Warre, an in¯uential Eton master, told Liddon in December 1867 that he thought `the proposed union of Balliol and New College for lecturing purposes most disastrous'.133 His fears were echoed among Churchmen of all varieties and in both political parties. The Earl of Harrowby, the leading Evangelical on the Lords' Select Committee about the Tests Bill, was at one with the Committee's High Church originator and chairman concerning what had happened to Greats.134 In an open letter to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Thomas Acland, then a Liberal MP, deplored the `unsettled and unset128 Quinn and Prest, 70; Garnett, `Bishop Butler', 63. Butler's place in philosophy syllabuses, c. 1919, is discussed ibid. 94±5. For the inclusion of the Analogy in Oxford's Theology honours syllabus after 1870 see p. 98 below. 129 Lyulph Stanley, 11±12. 130 [M. Burrows], Quarterly, ccxxiv (Apr. 1868), 405. 131 Pt 1, 708; Pusey to Keble, 24 July 1862: I. Ellis, Seven against Christ (Leiden 1980), 182; Quinn and Prest, 64; Parl. Deb., 13 June 1870, cci. 1951±2 (Hicks-Beach), 4 June 1877, ccxxxiv. 1284 (J. G. Talbot). 132 SC Tests (1870±1), Q 1159:71; UOC (1877), Q. 4498. See also Charles Neate, The Universities' Reform Bill (1877), 7. 133 23 Dec. 1867: Liddon Diaries, PHL. See Macmillan's Magazine, 21 (Dec. 1869), 189±90 [C. A. Fyffe], for a scornful comment. 134 SC Tests (1870±1), Qs 640±3: 71 (Harrowby questioning Appleton).

a `plastic structure'

27

tling' theories propagated in Greats. Gladstone's condemnation was equally emphatic.135 These were all experienced parliamentarians, eminently capable of distancing themselves from Pusey and Liddon.136 As the University's Chancellor, Salisbury was particularly well placed to recognize the current trends in Oxford. He regarded any concession to the religious doubts of the day as extremely dangerous. In an article on the tests published in 1865 he had warned: `The world has not yet seen . . . a society in which [Christian] dogmas . . . have lost their hold upon all classes and both sexes, and which yet retained its morality, or even its civilization, through two or three generations.' This fear was unusual at that date only in the stark clarity with which Salisbury stated it. Unbelievers had been among those who saw morality as depending on belief. `I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife,' wrote Voltaire, `to believe in God: then I shall be robbed and cuckolded less often.' A great change in the intellectual climate has made Salisbury's view look to many in Britain today almost as eccentric as Voltaire's. `I love religious faith,' writes Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, `breathe it like the air itself, and long ago chose to dedicate my life to it; but morality is something wider and more universal than spirituality, and it would be neither helpful nor true to argue that in order to be good one has to ``believe''.'137 Salisbury regarded a young man's Oxford years as a time of particular peril. In his view undergraduates were too immature to be exposed to a wide range of philosophical opinions: such unsettling exposure was apt to leave them with the impression that none of the theories and beliefs about man and his universe was of great validity or importance. Like Harrowby, he thought that an undergraduate course ought to be an extension of school work. He appealed to what he saw as a widespread conviction among English parents that education which was `not scriptural' was `worse than no education at all': the School Board elections of 1870 showed this, he said, to be the prevalent attitude.138 When Matthew Arnold criticized Oxford for being a mere `haut lyceÂe', he described the University, not so much as it actually was for the honours man, but as Salisbury wanted it to be.139 135 T. D. Acland, The Discouragement of Elementary Mathematics . . . Letter to the ViceChancellor (1867), 10. Quoted critically by Pattison, Suggestions, 302±3; approvingly by Beresford Hope, Parl. Deb., 1 July 1868, cxciii. 439. For Gladstone, see p. 41 below. 136 Salisbury's relations with Pusey had not been close: Liddon, Pusey, iv. 198±200. See also n. 153 below. 137 Quarterly, cxviii (July 1865), 207. See the Appeal against abolition of the Tests by Oxford heads and fellows: `The battle is for Christian faith and Christian morals': The Times, 3 Mar. 1868, 4e. Cf. W. Berkley, `The Church and the Universities', Essays on Church Policy (1868), ed. W. L. Clay, 131±6; SCSI (1868), Q 8018 (Huxley); Quinn and Prest, 225 (Lowe); Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (1997), 240±1 (where the quotation from Voltaire is included). 138 Parl. Deb., 8 May, 13 June 1871, ccvi. 346, 347±8, 1965 (Salisbury); SC Tests (1870±1), Q 2268:71 (Leighton). 139 Schools and Universities, 319. See also Pt 1, 20; Lyulph Stanley, 4; Macmillan's Magazine, 33 (Feb. 1876), 339. For German suggestions that Oxford was `a great Gymnasium' see

28

`a secularized university'?

Mark Pattison had made no attempt to allay these alarms. In his Suggestions he wrote: I think the fears of the Catholic party, whether within or without the National Establishment, are substantially well founded . . . It is the school of classics (Lit. Hum.) only, and speci®cally the philosophical subjects which have developed themselves within that school, which alarm the Church party. This the party must conquer, or be content to see . . . all the minds of any promise that pass through Oxford hopelessly lost to them.

Pattison added that the clerical assault on Greats might well be successful.140 His views, as Burrows remarked in the Quarterly, were not conspicuous for internal consistency. He approved of Greats as a weapon against the Church party. Otherwise it was part of the cramming and examining machinery which he despised.141 Two years later Charles Appleton, who was his leading Oxford disciple, repeated the message still more starkly. Like his master he had little interest in safeguarding Greats as it stood. With the incautious candour of a man of 29 he told the Lords' Select Committee on the Tests: I think it is quite impossible for any man to throw himself into the system of education for the ®nal classical school at Oxford at . . . present . . . without having the whole edi®ce of belief shaken to the very foundation. At the same time, the agencies which are brought to bear upon him, the philosophical ideas and modes of criticism, not only destroy but ultimately reconstruct belief . . . The upsetting of his beliefs, and the entire loosening of them from all moorings, is an inevitable consequence of the system of education which now exists in Oxford.

It could be disastrous, Appleton stressed, if the test was put to a man `just . . . when he is beginning to reconstruct the edi®ce of belief naturally out of the ruins which had been undermined'.142 It was futile and wrong, he added, to try to curb the student's curiosity: all kinds of philosophical books and articles were available to honours men whether or not college tutors recommended them, and, as some of the greatest Christian ®gures had contended, no man could be ®rm in his faith unless he had confronted doubt in many forms. `What is very commonly mistaken for a prevalence of in®delity,' he explained in The Times, `is partly the normal action of the T. Arnold, the younger (n. 19), 28. For G. Saintsbury's protest see his Matthew Arnold (1899), 118±19. Despite the dif®culty of much of the work for Oxford honours, the phrases were used to denote a university devoted to ®rst-degree teaching rather than higher study: Pattison, Suggestions, 127; E. A. Freeman to Bryce, 17 Apr. 1883, Bodl. MS Bryce 7, fo 92. 140 Pattison, Suggestions, 298±9. Quoted in Commons: Parl. Deb., 1 July 1868, cxciii. 438 (Beresford Hope); [C. A. Fyffe], `Study and Opinion at Oxford' (n. 133), Macmillan's Magazine, 21 (Dec. 1869), 189. For Pattison's view of the Roman Catholic Church see his Sermons (1885), 190±1, 223±6. His own changing religious pattern is described by Duncan Nimmo in Religion and Humanism: Studies in Church History 17, ed. Keith Robbins (1981), 311±24. 141 Quarterly, cxxiv (Apr. 1868), 397. 142 SC Tests (1870±1), Qs 490, 527:71. Cf. Qs. 3041, 3182:71 (Jowett). Salisbury quoted Appleton's remarks in the Lords: Parl. Deb., 8 May 1871, ccvi. 344±5.

a `plastic structure'

29

higher education, and much more the disturbance of such normal operation by the intervention of a de®nite test at a particular time.'143 Salisbury never had much chance of a large enough majority in the Lords to persuade the government to amend the Universities Tests Bill in substance.144 His argument hardly applied either to Cambridge or to the majority of Oxford undergraduates. Those reading seriously for good honours in Greats were a select band in a University where less than half would take honours of any kind, some 30 per cent being unlikely even to achieve a degree;145 and, even after the Select Committee's revelations, many potential University parents would remain unaware of what shocks might await their sons in Oxford. But Salisbury's long, losing struggle did not result wholly from tactical calculations or miscalculations. Although, like many others, he made his diehard stand on a symbolic rather than a substantive issue, the principle involved was a basic one which virtually precluded compromise. The liberal doctrine had been stated by Mill in his St Andrews inaugural lecture in 1867: A university ought to be a place of free speculation . . . The old English universities . . . are doing better work than they have done within human memory. . . Whereas they formerly seemed to exist mainly for the repression of independent thought, . . . they are now the great foci of free and manly enquiry, to the higher and professional classes, south of the Tweed . . . A modest deference, at least provisional, to the united authority of the specially instructed, is becoming in a youthful and imperfectly formed mind; but when there is no united authority, when the specially instructed are so divided and scattered that almost any opinion can boast of some high authority, and no opinion whatever can claim all; . . . then . . . keep, at all risks, your minds open: do not barter away your freedom of thought.146

The praise which the University received from Mill at St Andrews was much more objectionable to Salisbury and Pusey than Grant Duff's criticisms of Oxford at Aberdeen a month later. In the chapter of Physics and Politics 143

The Times, 15 May 1871, 6f (Appleton's letter). Kimberley, the main Liberal speaker, who had taken a ®rst in classics in 1847, spoke as if Greats had not changed since then. He had been in¯uenced by Mansel, then Oxford's leading High Church philosopher: Parl. Deb., ccvi. 349. See also ibid. 380 (Airlie), 382 (Bishop of Manchester). 145 Pt 1, 360 (Fig. 11.1). For Cambridge see SC Tests (1870±1), Qs 668, 771±2:70 (Perowne). 146 1 Feb. 1867 (®rst published 1867): J. S. Mill, Collected Works, xxi (1984), ed. J. M. Robson, 250. John Tyndall's message, a year or two later, to London University students was similar: J. Tyndall, Fragments of Science (6th edn, 2 vols 1879; 1st edn 1871), ii. 98±9. Under Acts of 1853 and 1859 principals and professors in the Scottish universities were required to declare that they would not exercise their `functions . . . to the prejudice or subversion of the Church of Scotland': 16 and 17 Vict. c. 89; 22 and 23 Vict. c. 24. The staff of King's College, London, were subject to a religious test until 1903 when it was abolished except for staff in the Theology Department: Local Acts 3 Edward VII c. 92. The provisions of the 1853 and 1859 Acts were repealed by the Universities (Scotland) Act, 1889 (52 and 53 Vict. c. 55), section 17. Thereafter the theology professors and the principal of St Mary's College, St Andrews, were the only staff members in the Scottish universities who remained subject to a test. 144

30

`a secularized university'?

which ®rst appeared in January 1872 Walter Bagehot's message resembled Mill's. `Since Luther's time,' he wrote, `there has been a conviction more or less rooted, that a man may by an intellectual process think out a religion for himself.'147 As a Magdalen fellow had pointed out in 1864, to Oxford's Church party Christianity was a dogmatic system which had to be received as it stood, whereas to the liberals it represented the most important area of exploration and investigation.148 The gulf between these two viewpoints was deep. Roundell was con®dent that `liberty of thought' did not `bring about . . . unbelief'. `That the doubts and perplexities of the time should ®nd their place at Oxford is a necessity,' he wrote in July 1870. It was, however, his ®rm conviction `that the great majority' in the University were `truly religious, or at least open to, or rather yearning after, religion'.149 To Salisbury and Liddon this was not Christian faith. For the Balliol philosophy tutors there was no frontier in a University beyond which `liberty of thought' ceased to apply. In so far as abolition of the tests in 1871 entailed acceptance of this position it represented a decisive point in the University's history. Some supporters of the tests spoke or wrote as if undergraduates should be kept away from any subject in which, in Charles Neate's phrase, they could not be taught `what they were to think'. In the 1840s William Whewell, then Master of Trinity, Cambridge, had seen chemistry as the scene of a shifting struggle between contending theorists, and had wished to exclude it from undergraduate study on that ground. His view was countered by Sir Robert Peel, who told Prince Albert that nothing was more important for an undergraduate than to know the `history of error and the slow process by which it was corrected, to hear of . . . the points on which learned men differ, as well as those on which they are agreed'.150 Whewell's view appeared in crude forms in the Oxford of the sixties. One of the many persons who could be summoned to Convocation to oppose a liberal innovation was said to have con®ded his intention of voting against `that damned intellect';151 and in 1866 C. L. Dodgson (`Lewis Carroll') had written ironically of the liberals' hopes in Oxford: `Then intellect's proud ¯ag shall be unfurled.'152 That was not Salisbury's position. On many sub147 W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872): Collected Works, ed. N. St John Stevas, vii (1974), 117. This essay was ®rst published in Fortnightly Review, 1 Jan. 1872. See also n. 236. 148 The Revd H. R. Bramley, An Answer to Professor Goldwin Smith's Plea for the Abolition of Tests (1864), 34±5, 41, 50. 149 SC Tests (1870±1), Q 1489: 71; Roundell to Roundell Palmer, 21 July 1870: LPL MS Selborne 1864, fos 63±4. 150 Peel to Prince Albert, 27 Oct. 1847: Theodore Martin, Prince Consort (5 vols 1875±80), ii. 118. 151 Lyulph Stanley, 5. 152 Charles Dodgson's anonymous parody of Goldwin Smith's pamphlet, `The Elections to the Hebdomadal Council: a Letter to the Revd. C. W. Sandford' (1866): The Oxford Pamph-

a `plastic structure'

31

jects he was as favourable to the principle of `free thought' as Peel had been. His strong scienti®c interests had led him to enrage Pusey by attempting to include the agnostic, John Tyndall, in the honorary degree list for his installation as Chancellor;153 but for him, when the instruction of undergraduates touched in some way on Christian faith, another principle applied. He accepted the axiom which Pusey had stated at the time of the ®rst reform: `The object of a university course is not simply or mainly to cultivate the intellect'; Christian faith required, in the undergraduate as in the schoolboy, `the prostration of the human understanding before the revelation of God'.154 Pattison and Appleton thus differed from Salisbury, Harrowby, and Liddon in seeing a basic difference between school and university. `Catholic schools there may be,' Pattison wrote; `but a Catholic university there cannot be.'155 The opponents of the tests held that the undeviating inculcation of Christianity had to be left to home and school. Once a boy reached the university that approach was mistaken in principle, and probably counter-productive in practice. An undergraduate needed in their view the freedom to choose among possible religious guides, and so `to think out a religion for himself'. To Appleton it was an essential feature of Greats that the element of `moral philosophy' in it should be `totally disjoined from religious questions'. Parents who supposed that a university course could be no more than a prolongation of school were deluding themselves. Compulsory attendance in the college chapel was apt, in Appleton's view, to operate against Christian faith.156 While the defenders of the tests were right to see themselves as being at issue with the Balliol tutors on a basic question, they misunderstood what was happening in Greats. Salisbury and his followers naturally made all they could of Pattison's anti-clerical tone, and some of them may not have realized that Pattison had ceased to be an important ®gure in Greats. Even Jowett, who had played the chief part in bringing the modern philosophers into the course, and putting Plato on a level with Aristotle, was not in full control of his own creation. To his disquiet, and Pattison's anger, his followers were dethroning Mill. The new philosophical guide was Hegel, lets . . . of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, ed. E. Wakeling (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 48. For Dodgson's fame as Lewis Carroll see p. 225. 153 Quinn and Prest, 187. Tyndall became an Hon. DCL in 1873. For his religious views see his remarks (n. 146), ii. 202±3. 154 Collegiate and Professorial Teaching and Discipline (1854), 215, 73. This view had been prevalent among Cambridge Evangelicals, as among Oxford's High Churchmen: Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen (1984 edn), 155±6. Salisbury, unlike Gladstone, had no reverence for Greats. He had taken the pass course and had been awarded an `honorary fourth' for his mathematics: Pt 1, 367. 155 Pattison, Suggestions, 301. Salisbury's phrasing is revealing: `tutors . . . and . . . pupils': Parl. Deb., 8 May 1871, ccvi. 347. 156 SC Tests (1870±1), Qs 550, 597, 638±41:71 (Appleton). For the view that most parents of undergraduates were more realistic on this than the High Church admitted see W. Berkley (n. 137), 131±6.

32

`a secularized university'?

who, as Jowett told the Lords' Select Committee, `was, or believed himself to be, a conservative both in religion and politics'.157 Moreover, to represent Jowett as an anti-clerical caricatured him: he was essentially a clergyman, though an eccentric one. While Pusey sought to guard the traditional basis for morality, Jowett strove to establish a new one. His attempt to persuade his fellow Churchmen to help in this task by modernizing their religious ideas had been an alarming failure. Scorched by his experiences over Essays and Reviews, he had abandoned any direct assault on the literal interpretation of the Bible and had adopted an indirect approach, based on the study not of any modern, but of an ancient philosopher. This would be particularly suitable for Oxford with its pervasive classical tradition. Here was the sophisticated approach to faith and morals which a Balliol honours man might be thought to need. As F. M. Turner has explained, `what . . . some persons could achieve on the grounds of traditional Christian teachings and the scriptures, Jowett attempted to sustain through an appeal to the idealism of Plato.'158 Jowett's dif®culties in turning Plato into a model of this kind were immense. The process both cut across his proclaimed aim of interpreting the Dialogues according to the conditions of Plato's day, rather than by the nineteenth century's moral standards,159 and involved reversing impressions prevalent in Oxford. In 1868 Montagu Burrows contrasted `the Christian system' for universities with `the intellectual model . . . such as we ®nd it in the mind of Plato'. While Gladstone was convinced that the other subjects studied in Universities should be `ancillary' to classics, he was not in favour of allowing Plato to displace the Gospels. `The place,' he had told the Clarendon Commission, `of Aristotle and Plato in Christian education is not arbitrary, nor in principle mutable.'160 Plato's works spanned a long life at the end of which he would have been among the ®rst to hand Socrates the hemlock; and these later views were not the only ones which would be unacceptable to Victorian Britain if given great prominence.161 When the 157 Ibid. Q 3042:71 (Jowett); but Appleton thought `Hegel's Logic . . . one of the most revolutionary instruments . . . ever invented' (ibid. Q506:71). Hegel's views have been interpreted in many different ways: Peter Singer, Hegel (1983), 40, 44, 84. Pattison referred in a review, 2 Dec. 1876, to `the measly spiritualism of a pseudo-Hegelianism': Academy, x. 533. For Jowett's stance see Richter, 152±4. J. M. Wilson, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, 1846±74, came to be seen as `the last of the Oxford Utilitarians': J. H. Fowler (n. 98), 39±40. For the signi®cance of this see Ch. 11 below. 158 F. M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (1993), 352. See B. Jowett, Plato, Republic (3rd edn 1888), ccxxxi; Jowett to L. Campbell, 23 June 1884: Abbott and Campbell, ii. 268. For Mrs Humphry Ward's view see A Writer's Recollections (1918), 129±31; for a recent critique P. Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (1987). 159 See p. 61 below. Jowett had tutored Alexander Grant, whose Ethics (2 vols 1857±8) represented one of the ®rst commentaries to approach Aristotle `historically' and not as a `model': F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1994 edn), 340±50. 160 Quarterly, cxxiv (Apr. 1868), 393; PP 1864 xx. 294±5 (App. F, 42±3). 161 G. Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (3 vols 1865), iii. 409±12.

a `plastic structure'

33

Oxford graduates of the 1860s experienced the intoxicating liberation produced by abolition of the test this last fact led to startling results.

` t h e d e m o r a l i z i n g mo r a l i z e r ' Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873, provided the initial shock. The author was a Brasenose tutor, the holder of a lay fellowship there. His gospel combined Darwinism with the romantic attitudes of the Pre-Raphaelites.162 He wrote in his concluding chapter: A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen . . . by the ®nest senses? . . . To burn always with this hard, gemlike ¯ame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion . . . or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange ¯owers, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us . . . is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening . . . The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacri®ce of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract morality we have not identi®ed with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.163

Like some other passages in the book this had already been in print for some years;164 but anonymous publication in a London review was one thing, a book announced as the work of a tutor and the senior dean of Brasenose quite another;165 and it would have been hard to state a doctrine which contradicted more directly the Biblical teaching of every British school and college. One of Pater's colleagues at Brasenose had lately married a granddaughter of Thomas Arnold.166 Forty-®ve years later Mrs Humphry Ward recalled `very clearly the effect' of The Renaissance `and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it, of its entire aloofness . . . from the Christian tradition . . . It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford . . . There was a cry of ``Neo-Paganism''.'167 For the guardians of the Church of England's position in Oxford to have remained silent before such a challenge would have gone against all precedent or prediction. John Wordsworth, the tutor next in standing to Pater at Brasenose (and later Bishop of Salisbury), made an immediate private protest, though conceding: 162 G. C. Monsman, Walter Pater (1977), [10]. For the echo of Alexander Grant's Hegelian interpretation of Aristotle's energeia see F. M. Turner, Greek Heritage, 350±5. 163 1873 edn, 210±12. For the 1877 edition the title was changed to: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 164 In the concluding part of `Poems by William Morris': Westminster Review, n s 34 (Oct. 1868), 300±12. Pater had originally aired his ideas in an undergraduate society, the Old Mortality: G. C. Monsman, Studies in Philology, 67 (Chapel Hill, NC 1970), 371; Pt 1, xxv. 165 As John Wordsworth at once told Pater: E. W. Watson (n. 96), 90. 166 Thomas Humphry Ward, fellow of Brasenose, 1869, married Mary Augusta Arnold, April 1872. Resigning his fellowship on marrying, he remained a tutor of the college. 167 Mrs Humphry Ward (n. 158), 120.

34

`a secularized university'?

`You may take your stand on your right under the University Tests Act to teach and publish whatever you please.'168 W. W. Capes of Queen's, once one of Pater's tutors and by now a Select Preacher, condemned the new doctrine in a St Mary's sermon;169 and in April 1875 the Bishop of Oxford followed suit in his Charge to the diocesan clergy.170 The older liberals were no better pleased: Jowett called Pater `the demoralizing moralizer'.171 The new gospel was also proclaimed in a commentary on the classics. The ®rst series of Studies in the Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds appeared in the same year as Pater's Renaissance. Symonds, a former pupil and friend of Jowett who lived abroad for his health, wrote glowingly of the `phallic ecstasy' which characterized the comedies of Aristophanes, and about such features of Greek sculpture as `the frank sexuality of Silenus and Priapus'. Far more shocking than this, however, were the references by Symonds and Pater to homosexuality in Greek works.172 In the chapter on Winckelmann in the Renaissance Pater wrote: The modern most often meets Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato into a world no longer pagan, based upon the conception of a spiritual life. But the element of af®nity which he presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by that group of brilliant youths . . . still uninfected by any spiritual sickness, ®nding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely life.

Pater quoted Winckelmann's remark: those `moved little or not at all by the beauty of men seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art'.173 Years later Ingram Bywater commended this chapter to a German friend as `a very remarkable piece of work'. He added that in 1873 `a certain sympathy with a certain aspect of Greek life' noticeable in it had not been `con®ned' to Pater.174 168 John Wordsworth to Pater, 17 Mar. 1873: Pater, Letters, ed. Lawrence Evans (1970), (12)±14. Evans rejects the bracketed phrase in E. W. Watson (n. 96), 89±91. Wordsworth had vacated his fellowship on marrying and taking a prebend in Lincoln Cathedral, where his father had lately become the Bishop. For his later, guarded condemnation of Pater's `Hellenism' see his ®rst Bampton Lecture: The One Religion (1881), 12. 169 UJ, 27 Nov. 1873. 170 [J. F. Mackarness], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford . . . 20 Apr. 1875 (1875), 15±16. A Merton graduate, he had been a fellow of Exeter, 1844±6. He was answered, and reassured, by William Ince, Religion in the University of Oxford (1875). 171 William Sharp, `Some Personal Reminiscences of Walter Pater', Atlantic Monthly, 74 (Dec. 1894), 811. As an undergraduate Pater had been coached for a term by Jowett: E. Gosse, Contemporary Review, 66 (Dec. 1894), 799. 172 J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), 240±1, 243±4, 412±13. 173 Pater, Renaissance (1873), 151, 162. First published, unsigned, Westminster Review, n s 31 (Jan. 1867), 80±110. Cf. Matthew Arnold, `Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment', Cornhill, ix (Apr. 1864), 422±35, repr. Essays in Criticism, First Series (1865), with `Christian' in title changed to `Medieval'. 174 W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater (n. 32), 79. The term `homosexuality' did not enter general English usage until the 1890s.

a `plastic structure'

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Throughout the Victorian era the various Oxford authorities resorted to banishment, permanent or temporary, when they came to know of homosexual practices. In the spring of 1861 the Reverend Dr John Barrow, the ®rst High Church Principal of St Edmund Hall for some years, was accused of misconduct with a second-year commoner of the Hall, and admitted the offence. A few weeks later he sent his `Deed of Resignation' from Boulogne.175 Some lesser punishment might well follow on detection of possible (or probable) homosexual intentions. In 1862 a scholar of Corpus, who was a friend of Symonds, suffered expulsion, and retreated to New Inn Hall, for showing undue interest in the choirboys at Christ Church and Magdalen. Angered at being forbidden entry to Magdalen Chapel, he sent to that college's fellows extracts from poems and letters he had received from Symonds, whom they had just elected to a fellowship. After investigation the governing body exonerated Symonds; but his reputation in Magdalen was blighted.176 Dramatic performances in which undergraduates took women's parts were banned in 1871 in the aftermath of a court case much reported in the London press.177 The homosexual inclinations in ancient Greece at which Pater hinted had come squarely under the general condemnation. One of Gladstone's reasons for commending the study of Homer was that the Homeric world had escaped `those shameless lusts which [later] formed the incredible and indelible disgrace of Greece'.178 During his lectures as Slade Professor of Fine Art early in 1870 Ruskin referred to `certain . . . singular states of inferior passion which . . . arrested the ethical as well as the formative progress of the Greek mind'179 in the ®fth and fourth centuries b c . Two years later he said: The mere admiration of physical beauty in the body, and the arts which sought its expression, not only conduced greatly to the fall of Greece, but were the cause of errors and crimes . . . which must for ever sadden our happiest thoughts of her, and have rendered her example almost useless to the future.180

Both lecture courses were published immediately. 175

J. N. D. Kelly, St Edmund Hall (1989), 81±3. 24 Nov. 1862, Samuel Brooke's diary: CCC archives D 498/3; P. Grosskurth, J. A. Symonds (1964), 58±69; Memoirs of J. A. Symonds, ed. P. Grosskurth (1984), 117±32. Jowett remained Symonds's friend: Quinn and Prest, 284±5, 303±4. 177 J. G. Adderley, The Fight for the Drama at Oxford (1888), 11±12; Humphrey Carpenter, OUDS (1985), 13±14. When Jowett, as Vice-Chancellor in 1883, allowed public performances, he restricted them to Shakespeare, the female roles being played by lady amateurs. 178 Lecture, 3 Nov. 1865: Gleanings, vii (1879), 62. See also Gladstone's chapter, Oxford Essays (1857), 4. 179 Lecture iii, 23 Feb. 1870: Ruskin, Works, xx. 91. Not many undergraduates seem to have attended Ruskin's earlier lecture courses: J. H. Fowler (n. 98), 43. 180 Lecture viii, 2 Mar. 1872: Ruskin, Works, xxii. 235±6. For Ruskin's view of the Pater± Symonds school, ibid. xxv. 122±3. 176

36

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C. O. MuÈller's History of the Doric Race had been published, in an English translation, in 1830; but no Oxford scholar had followed MuÈller in dealing neutrally with this classical theme; and there seems no reason to suppose that, until Pater wrote, Oxford's classical and speci®cally `Grecian' bias had made it particularly suspect in the matter of male friendships. While the University had harboured its share of `shameless lusts', it had not been notorious for doing so. In so far as it had come under particular suspicions, Barrow's case exempli®ed them. They were centred, not so much on a stronghold of the classics, as on an all-male institution where the High Church was especially in¯uential.181 Such practices were associated by repute more with boarding schools than with Oxford; and in the university world Cambridge seems to have incurred reproach during the 1850s as much as Oxford. In October 1850 The Times gave much space to a scandal at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and the ancillary institution at Carshalton which sent 14-year-olds to it. In 1851 a Times reviewer, criticizing `the tone of . . . amatory tenderness' in Tennyson's In Memoriam, suggested that this was particularly objectionable when the friendship had been between two Cambridge men; and Barrow's departure from St Edmund Hall caused far less stir than the resignation eighteen months earlier, amid damaging rumours, of Charles Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow and previously a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge.182 Jowett, and other Platonists in Oxford and elsewhere, seem not to have realized what an impact Plato's artistry could have on a boy still in his teens who had been denied friendship with girls, and had encountered sexual desire only in the sordid doings of his school. They did not know that when, one evening in the holidays, the 17-year-old J. A. Symonds had read the Phaedrus and Symposium in a translation of Plato's Dialogues, he had been given a new view of his own inclinations in an intoxicating vision of homosexual love.183 181 For Evangelical and Nonconformist suspicions see Charles Kingsley, Letters and Memories, ed. F. Kingsley (2 vols 1877), i. 249±50; J. H. Rigg, Oxford High Anglicanism . . . (1895), 14, 32±3, 115, 125. For modern comments see David Hilliard, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), 181±210; E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (1968), 108; O. Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1990), 214±46. 182 The Times, 1 Oct. 1850, 4d, e; 11 Oct., 4e, f, 5c, d; 12 Oct., 5b; 28 Nov. 1851, 8b (review of fourth edition); P. Grosskurth (n. 176), 30±41. The Bishop of Oxford was told the Vaughan story at a dinner party: H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love (1970), 112. The passages about Eric and the older boy, Upton, in F. W. Farrar's immensely successful school story, Eric, or Little by Little (1858), while far from explicit, were not hard to interpret. Many readers would have known how Upton might do `great harm' (p. 83). For an attachment between a Rugby master (Arthur Sidgwick) and a boy which did not come to light see P. Grosskurth (n. 176), 108±9, 115. For an earlier Oxford scandal of this categoryÐthe resignation in 1826, and subsequent residence abroad, of Richard Heber (1773±1833), one of the University's MPsÐsee Arnold Hunt, `A Study in Bibliomania: Charles Henry Hartshorne and Richard Heber, Part 2', Book Collector, 42 (1993), 185±212. 183 P. Grosskurth, ibid. 34.

a `plastic structure'

37

It was realized, however, that the increasing importance of Plato in Greats posed problems of interpretation. Homosexual attitudes not only had a prominent place in several of Plato's Dialogues, but formed a feature of his educational and philosophical systems.184 George Grote, who was unaffected by the inhibitions of the clergy, had been speci®c about this. In a threevolume study published in 1865 he wrote: The Phaedrus and Symposium have . . . the theory of Eros as the indispensable, initiatory, stimulus to philosophy. The spectacle of a beautiful youth is considered necessary to set light to various elements in the mind.185

The Oxford tradition had been to explain away the objectionable passages. Thus William Sewell, in his Introduction to the Dialogues (1841), argued that Plato's object, where some passages in the Phaedrus were concerned, must have resembled that of the father mentioned by Addison who took his son to `haunts of vice' to produce an aversion to them.186 Jowett took a rather similar line thirty years later in his introduction to the Symposium. He suggested that Socrates, by resisting the temptation which Alcibiades personi®ed, had been presented as `a sort of saint'.187 After Grote had been at work such explanations were not very convincing and Pater's chapter on Winckelmann made them look implausible. Pater's in¯uence was damaged early in 1874 when a passionate friendship which he had formed with a Balliol undergraduate came to light.188 Jowett `rusticated' the undergraduate, and he may have made the affair known to Pater's Brasenose colleagues whose turn it was to elect a proctor. Pater was passed over for the proctorship, although, as the senior fellow eligible, he would normally have had a claim on it. Studies in the Renaissance was, however, in¯uential enough to induce Jowett to expand some of his explanatory passages about the Dialogues. In his second edition, published in 1875, he wrote of the Phaedrus that, to understand Plato We must make abstraction of morality and of the Greek manner of regarding the relation of the sexes. In this, as in his other discussions about love, what Plato says of the loves of men must be transferred to the loves of women before we can attach any 184 See, for instance, Republic, iii. 403 a±c, vi. 490a, b; in Desmond Lee's translation (2nd edn 1974; 1st edn 1955), 164±5, 284. 185 G. Grote (n. 161), ii. 223±4. See also Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978), 13, 164±5. 186 W. Sewell, Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato (1841), 99±100. W. H. Thompson, Master of Trinity, Cambridge, had treated the Phaedrus similarly, 1868: F. M. Turner, Greek Heritage(n. 159), 424. 187 The Dialogues of Plato, Translated (4 vols 1871), i. 486. 188 B. A. Inman, `Estrangement and Connection . . . ', Pater in the 1990s, ed. L. Brake and I. Small (Greensborough, NC, 1991), 8±9. The letters cited there had not been studied in detail when R. Ellmann, Wilde (1987) and Walter Pater: a Life Remembered, ed. R. M. Seiler (1987), were published.

38

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serious meaning to his words. Had he lived in our times, he would have made the transposition himself.189

A new comment on the Symposium ran: There were some, doubtless, to whom the love of a fair mind was the noblest form of friendship . . . and the friendship of man with man seemed nobler than the love of woman, because altogether separated from the bodily appetites.190

Such passages were countered in the second series of Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets which appeared in 1876. In this Symonds followed a book by the Reverend J. P. Mahaffy of Trinity College, Dublin, which had appeared two years earlier, and maintained that `in Greece . . . even paiderastia had its honourable aspects.'191 By now both the older liberals and the iconoclasts had become targets for satire by their juniors. From June to December 1876 a London periodical, Belgravia, carried a parody of a Platonic discussion, The New Republic, in which Pater was ridiculed along with Jowett and others.192 The precious absurdities of the ®rst, and the efforts of the second to combine Christian doctrine with Hellenism, presented a large target. The parodist, W. H. Mallock, has already been mentioned. His articles were published in book form in March 1877 and proved a considerable success.193 In the same month the Vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, R. St J. Tyrwhitt, reviewed Symonds's Greek Poets and some of Matthew Arnold's works, including Culture and Anarchy, in the Contemporary Review. Tyrwhitt repudiated the Athens of Plato as any kind of model for modern Britain. Asserting that `we strive against slavery and . . . contend for purity of sexual relation,' he quoted a passage from Jowett's commentary on the Epistles regarding the `rank corruption' of the Greek cities known to St Paul. Pater and Symonds had given Hellenism a bad name.194 A vacancy in Oxford's poetry professorship was imminent, so that Tyrwhitt was virtually challenging Jowett to ensure that neither Symonds nor Pater was nominated as a candidate for the chair. Pater had presented himself 189 B. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (2nd edn 5 vols 1875), ii. 88±9. For Jowett's discussion of these questions with Symonds, 1889, see J. A. Symonds, Letters, ed. H. M. Schueller and R. L. Peters (3 vols 1967±9, Detroit), iii. 345±7, 365. 190 Ibid. ii. 20. See also Jowett's Balliol sermon, 1873, on `Friendship': B. Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, ed. W. H. Fremantle (1901), 338±40. 191 J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, Second Series (1876), 384; J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), 305±15. 192 Pater is `Mr Rose', Jowett `Dr Jenkinson'. 193 The New Republic, ed. John Lucas (Leicester, 1975). 194 `The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature', Contemporary Review, xxix. 565. Tyrwhitt's quotation is from Jowett, Epistles . . . Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans (2 vols 1859), ii. 76±7. `Chaloner', the Oscar Wilde character in Rhoda Broughton, Second Thoughts (2 vols 1880), talks the language of Arnoldian Hellenism: he yearns (i. 21) for a life `more saturated with sweetness and light'.

a `plastic structure'

39

as a candidate in 1876, but had withdrawn in the face of bitter opposition.195 On 3 May 1877, the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates' Journal condemned enjoying moments `simply for those moments' sake', and announced `there is a man's work for us to do.'196 When nomination day came on 21 May a Balliol Scot of 1840 vintage and unimpeachable respectability, Principal J. C. Shairp of St Andrews, was the only candidate.197 The second edition of Pater's Renaissance was published three days later. Something was conceded to the household of faith, the concluding chapter being omitted and the anti-Christian tone of the essay on Winckelmann softened.198 The passage on Abelard contained a new comment, however, about `the merely professional, of®cial hireling ministers' of the established system. Where `shameless lusts' were concerned no concession was made. A tale inserted in the Abelard essay told of the intense love between two French knights: in this one killed his infant children in order to cure the other's leprosy with their blood, whereupon both infants were miraculously restored to life.199 By the later 1870s some parents with Oxford aspirations and connections were becoming disquieted by reports about the teaching and tone of Greats. It could easily be represented as the honour school of agnosticism.200 Oscar Wilde, who had a ®rst in Greats in 1878, was commiserating two years later with a friend who had missed one. `A second is perhaps,' he wrote, `for a man of culture a sweeter atmosphere than the chilly Caucasus of an atheistical ®rst.'201 There were also doubts about teaching undergraduates too much about the sexual habits characteristic of ancient Athens. Abolition of the test was designed, by opening Oxford to the whole nation, to produce a heightened responsiveness to national needs and aspirations; yet the most striking of its immediate effects had been to provoke a bout of `aestheticism', one feature of which alienated most British people at least as thoroughly as any doctrine propounded by Oxford's High Churchmen. Britain's manufacturers and traders, such as those who crowded the Bradford wool exchange, may have been grasping on week-days, but it was not `any exquisite passion' 195 Academy, xi (24 Feb. 1877), 160. For the impression given by Pater in Oxford see Ellmann (n. 188), 81 (Mark Pattison's diary, 5 May 1878). 196 Ellmann, ibid. 76 n. 197 William Knight, Principal Shairp and His Friends (1888), 336±7. This was the only professorship for which the Selborne Commission retained election by Convocation. 198 Pater's explanation for omitting the Conclusion appeared in 1910 edn, 233, n. 1. It had been re-inserted in 3rd edn, 1888. For wording changes see The Renaissance, ed. D. L. Hill (University of California Press, 1980), 449. 199 Ibid. 302. In 1877 edn, for comment on Abelard's opponents, see p. 7, for Amis and Amile, see pp. 8±16. 200 See Robert Elsmere, i. 55 (the Archdeacon and Mrs Seaton). 201 [c. 4 Dec. 1880] Wilde to Rennell Rodd: More Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. R. Hart-Davis (1985), 34. Wilde greatly admired Pater's Renaissance: see his review, Speaker, i (22 Mar. 1890), 319; W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1955 edn), 130.

40

`a secularized university'?

at which they chie¯y grasped. Nor was maintaining that kind of ecstasy recommended to them in their Nonconformist chapels on Sundays. Ephemeral as the Oxford aesthetes were, in their alienation from the national mainstream they proved to be a portent. To laicize Oxford and set it free was to make it the home of a new group, ®rst identi®ed in the 1870sÐ the intellectuals. They would soon rival, and even displace, the Londonbased `men of letters'.202 A salient feature of the modern university was coming into full view. The salaried academic, viewing the world from his layman's cloister, would have his own ideas about how to serve his countrymen. Unlike the early Victorian `man of letters' he did not depend on their favour (and a rapid pen) for his bread, and his every inclination was to question and criticize some at least of their attitudes and aims. The universities had long been engaged in condemning the `commercialism' and `materialism' of Britain. Laicizing them, far from changing all this, was adding to its resonance, since it no longer formed part of the sermon expected of any clergyman. Huxley was not much more of a commercially minded `materialist' than the Oxford clerics whom he opposed. The British Association committee which he dominated reported in 1867 that there were ®ve reasons for making science part of a school's liberal education: only the last of these was connected, even remotely, with material affairs: it concerned the effect of scienti®c knowledge on `the present position and future progress of civilization'.203 Between the quinquennium starting in 1875 and that starting in 1880 the honours awarded in Greats rose by less than 4 per cent.204 In a novel published in 1880 R. St J. Tyrwhitt returned to the charge and expressed some of the parental fears about that school. He wrote of an earlier day in which it had not been `a common practice to unsettle all a young fellow's notions at once for the fun of the thing'. In those times `vice . . . did not glide about with the polite hiss of modern days. There was coarse talk in certain sets, who had not yet been cultured into Hellenism . . . but, on the other hand, decency was considered decent.'205 One of the novel's characters expressed great distrust of those tutors who, when they had managed to unsettle `lads' minds', thought their methods gratifyingly Socratic.206 As Tyrwhitt pointed out, the parents who wanted an Oxford course which would not shake their sons' faith need have no truck with Greats 202 T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (1982). P. G. Hamerton's book, The Intellectual Life (1873), heralded the change. He was a friend of C. E. Appleton. In 1888 Murray's Oxford English Dictionary recognized `intellectual' as a noun. 203 T. W. Heyck, Transformation, 103; SIC (1864), Pt 2, 219. For this report see n. 48 above. See also, for Cambridge, Caroline Slemmer (later Lady Jebb) to her sister, 16 Oct. 1870: M. R. Bobbitt, Life and Letters of Lady Jebb (1960), 63. 204 Pt 1, 370. 205 R. St J. Tyrwhitt, Hugh Heron, Ch. Ch. (1880), 51, 54. 206 Ibid. 166.

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philosophy. They had an alternative to handÐthe new honours school of Modern History.207

` t h e m o s t t h o ro u g h ly re l i g i o u s t r a i n i n g ' `Almost all men in Oxford who are under religious in¯uences,' Appleton told the Lords Select Committee in February 1871, `go in for the Law and Modern History School, rather than for the Classical School.'208 Although Appleton was speaking only twenty years after Law and Modern History had become an independent honour school, the intentions of leading Churchmen in both parties suggest that his remark was not without foundation. None of Salisbury's three Oxford-educated sons read Greats, while two took honours in Modern History. One, Lord Hugh Cecil, gained a ®rst in that school,209 as did Herbert Gladstone and William Waldegrave Palmer (later second Earl of Selborne). In December 1875 W. E. Gladstone wrote to the Regius Professor of Modern History: The thorough, as opposed to the merely picturesque, study of history is a noble, invigorating, manly study, essentially political and judicial, ®tted for, and indispensable to, a free country. . . It is the truly historical treatment of Christianity, and of all the religious experience of mankind, which . . . will supply under God effectual bulwarks against the rash and violent unbelief, under the honourable titles of physical and metaphysical science, rushing in upon us.210

Gladstone added seven months later, in renewing his congratulations to Stubbs: `I am under a painful impression that the Oxford of our day has for the time damaged the great ®nal examination in the Classical School.'211 In October 1876 Herbert learned that his father doubted whether Greats deserved `nowadays' to be called the school of `more humane letters'.212 The honour school which Gladstone had commended had taken a little time to gain respectability. The course in law and modern history had been devised in the late 1840s primarily for men who could hardly be expected to achieve classical honours. In their pamphlet of 1848 A. P. Stanley and Jowett had pleaded: `The stupidest undergraduate in a Livy lecture will brighten . . . if you speak to him of the revolution in France.'213 W. L. Newman, who taught 207

Ibid. 43. SC Tests (1870±1), Q 572: 71. 209 Viscount Cranborne, a second in Modern History, 1884, Lord Robert Cecil, a second in Jurisprudence, 1886. 210 27 Dec. 1875: Stubbs, Letters, 147±8. 211 Ibid. 148. 212 C. E. Mallet, Herbert Gladstone (1932), 58. 213 [A. P. Stanley and B. Jowett], Suggestions for an Improvement of the Examination Statute (1848), 12. 208

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in the combined school, told the Select Committee in July 1867 that, as success in it did `not lead to great emoluments, the class of men who read for it . . . usually. . . would be pass men but for that school'.214 When it was launched the school had been viewed with suspicion. Fears were expressed that the offer of this easy option might tempt some able undergraduates from other subjects `where a severer discipline was required' towards modern controversies and contemporary speculations;215 and the Royal Commissioners of 1850 had echoed the widely held view that the studies of ancient and of modern history should have been united in a single course.216 In 1857 a public rebuke to the History examiners by the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors was reported in The Times: they were held to have exceeded their powers in de®ning what was required of candidates.217 The Regius Professors of Modern History from 1841 to 1866 did little to improve the standing of their subject. Thomas Arnold, who was chie¯y an ancient historian, died in 1842 after holding the chair for approximately a year; J. A. Cramer, another ancient historian, owed his tenure largely to Peel's determination to keep the Tractarians out of any preferment;218 H. H. Vaughan, though a compelling lecturer, refused to reside in Oxford;219 while Goldwin Smith invited controversy by his partisanship and was dubbed by Disraeli `an itinerant spouter of stale sedition . . . a wild man of the cloister'.220 After he had resigned from the chair Goldwin Smith confessed that he could not think Modern History `a suf®ciently solid and systematic subject to constitute by itself the substance of an academical education, or a title to the highest honours'.221 Britain was not a country whose leaders 214

SCOC (1867), Q 1439. See also UOC (1877), Q 4524 (H. B. George). The Fourth School [1849]: Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 65 (179); Guardian, 28 Nov. 1849, 776b. For Stubbs's awareness of the danger of laxity see Seventeen Lectures, 53. 216 T. Arnold, Misc. Works (1845), 349, 396±9; Guardian, 28 Feb. 1849, 142b; RCO (1850), report, 103±4; W. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education, and University Reform (2nd edn 1853) 782 n; M. Burrows, Inaugural Lecture [1862], 10; SC Tests (1870±1), Q 756: 71 (Liddon); E. A. Freeman, Thoughts on the Study of History (1849), 26±7, Comparative Politics (1873), 296±339, 499 n. 34; W. Stubbs to Freeman, 8 Mar. 1885: Stubbs, Letters, 264; Seventeen Lectures, 47. Mark Pattison in Oxford Essays, i (1855), 295, favoured the scheme in principle, but thought `the time . . . not ripe' for it. Ancient History is (in 1998±9) a compulsory element in Manchester University's Single Honours History Course at Level 1. 217 W. R. W. Stephens, E. A. Freeman (2 vols 1895), i. 216±19. 218 BL Add. MSS 40498 fos 217±18; 40512 fos 55±60, 40554 fos 386±92, 40556 fos 373±8. For Cramer as an ancient historian see Pt 1, 522±3. Edward Cardwell (1787±1861) had been Peel's ®rst choice in 1842 (above, fo 392). For Cramer and Cardwell on the Tractarians see Pt 1, 226, 246±7. 219 E. G. W. Bill, University Reform in Nineteenth-Century Oxford . . . Henry Halford Vaughan (1973), ch. 14. Vaughan's non-residence was said to have been the cause of the second history chair: Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 22. 220 Charles Oman, On the Writing of History (1939), 233. See also Westminster Review, n s 20 (Oct. 1861), 295±8 (F. Harrison). For advice about appointing Goldwin Smith see E. Cardwell (the elder) to Derby, 12 Mar. 1858: Derby Papers, 123. 221 Reorganization (1868), 28. 215

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were moved to encourage historical study in order to create a sense of nationhood and mitigate memories of disunion or defeat.222 In 1866, however, the University's Chancellor, Lord Derby, then Prime Minister of a minority government, did his University and the subject the best possible turn. He appointed William Stubbs to the Regius professorship.223 Stubbs's distinction as a historian and his record in the chair are analysed in Chapter 14. The notes which follow here are concerned solely with the qualities and aptitudes which made him the ideal history professor for those Church people in the 1870s, whether Oxford fellows or the parents of prospective Oxford undergraduates, who yearned for an honours course which would not `unsettle' most of those taking it. He was a High Churchman and future bishop who did `not believe that a Dissenter could write a history of England', spoke of Pusey as `the master', and referred to Charles I's execution as `the tragedy of the royal martyr . . . the sealing of the crown of England to the faith of the Church'.224 In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor he called `the study of modern history. . . next to theology itself, and only next in so far as theology rests on a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious training that the mind can receive'. The subject was `coextensive, in its ®eld of view, in its habits of criticism, in the persons of its most famous students, with ecclesiastical history': the two subjects were `twin sisters, so much alike that there [was] no distinguishing between them'.225 Stubbs would have liked to hold the ecclesiastical history chair;226 yet this Tory High Churchmanship did not make him a Conservative partisan. His aim, he said, was not `to make men whigs or tories, but to . . . make the whigs good, wise, sensible whigs, and the tories good, wise, sensible tories'.227 It was the other history professor, Montagu Burrows, who was interrogated during the bribery investigation in 1880 which followed the Conservative victory in the Oxford City by-election.228 Commenting on the ®nal passage in Stubbs's inaugural lecture, a young Liberal historian, J. R. Green, wrote that it gave `the old simple lesson that the world's history led up to God, that modern history was but the broadening of His Light in Christ . . . This was my clue to history onceÐI am afraid I have lost it without gaining another.' That was the comment of a 222 Peter Mandler, `Against ``Englishness'': English, Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850±1940', Trans. R. Histl. Society, 6th ser. vii (1997), 161. 223 N. J. Williams, Bull. Inst. Historical Research, xxxiii (May 1960), 121±5; Bryce to Freeman, 2 Dec. 1865, 24 June 1866: Bodl., Bryce MSS 9, fos 82, 101±2; Quinn and Prest, 99. 224 Stubbs to Freeman, 3 Nov. 1859: Bodl. MS Eng misc. e. 148, fo 44; Stubbs, Letters, 21, 135. See Saturday Review, xiv, 18 Oct. 1862, 467: `Puritanism is not, and cannot be, the religion of scholars.' Ch. 9 n. 41 provides a view from Christ Church of Stubbs as a historian. 225 Delivered 7 Feb. 1867: W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, 10. 226 Stubbs, Letters, 127. Mansel resigned from the chair on becoming Dean of St Paul's. 227 Lecture, 17 May 1876: Seventeen Lectures, 35; Stubbs, Letters, 135; Acton, 15, 29 Aug., 12 Nov. 1884: Letters of Acton to Mary Gladstone, ed. H. Paul (1904), 191±2, 196. 228 Pt 1, 469.

44

`a secularized university'?

clergyman turning 30 who was developing `doubts':229 at least one older Liberal had no such reservations, as Gladstone's approval shows. Stubbs shared Gladstone's dislike of Palmerstonian bombast and Disraelian jingoism.230 He was far too aware of England's German origins and of his debt to German scholarship to be a narrow nationalist.231 A great whig historian of an earlier generation, Henry Hallam, had judged `the long and uninterruptedly increasing prosperity of England' to be `the most beautiful phenomenon in the history of mankind'.232 Among people nurtured in such views, if not in those of Mr Podsnap, Stubbs's statements were thought to be reassuring rather than complacent. His reverence for the established order had its limits: he spoke openly about the legislative folly of which a House of Commons with a Tory majority was capable. He was just young enough to have escaped the worst of the Tractarian controversies.233 Thus his views were as popular outside Oxford, where High Churchmen were a minority in the Church, as they were within it. In every aspect of his personality and conduct Stubbs conveyed the impression that, while he could not be classed as a reactionary diehard, he was eminently `safe'. He did not challenge the supremacy of classics.234 He never lectured on a period later than 1648 because it was `not desirable to exercise the minds of young men, old enough to have strong political feelings, not old enough to exercise a calm historical judgement, on periods teeming with the very same in¯uences as those which are at work at this moment'.235 The Middle Ages, which had reminded Thomas Arnold of a `noisome cavern', were home ground for Stubbs. He was able, while avoiding modern controversies, to suggest continuities: to the undergraduates of the 1870s the medieval parliaments which he described were not wholly unlike the one in which the 1866 and 1867 Reform Bills had been debated. It was not until the Reform measures of 1884±5 divided most of the country into single-member constituences, where `one-vote-one-value' superseded the representation of communities, that the line of electoral continuity was broken.236 229

176.

230

J. R. Green to E. A. Freeman, 12 Feb. 1867: Letters of J. R. Green, ed. L. Stephen (1901),

Stubbs, Letters, 173, 175, 178, 184. W. Stubbs, Constitutional History (3 vols 1874±8), I.11; Seventeen Lectures, 43. 232 Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818), ii. 127. 233 N. 218 above. J. H. Newman knew how controversial was the Tractarian interpretation of recent English history: to Charles Anderson, 24 Jan. 1836, LDN, v. 212±13. 234 Seventeen Lectures, 39, 45. For the same view from an Oxford historian more than 30 years later see C. R. L. Fletcher, An Introductory History of England, I (1907), v±vi. 235 J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981), 98±9; Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, 33±4. For his fears about history teaching in schools, ibid. 53. 236 Stanley, Arnold, ii. 239; P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism (1978), 156±86. In his second reading speech on the 1866 Reform Bill, 27 Apr., Disraeli suggested that electoral changes should conform to `the original scheme' of the Plantagenets: Parl. Deb. clxxxiii. 97. Bagehot praised Stubbs and Freeman for helping to train `the English political intellect': see n. 147. 231

a `plastic structure'

45

Stubbs, who had been a servitor at Christ Church, was no old-fashioned chronicler of the great.237 For him, constitutional history dealt in interpretations `that are voiceless to those who have only listened to the trumpet of fame. The world's heroes are no heroes to it, and it has an equitable consideration to give to many whom the verdict of ignorant posterity and the condemning sentence of events have consigned to obscurity or reproach.'238 His feat in leading the poll for the professorial seats in the 1872 Hebdomadal Council elections, after only six years in Oxford, speaks for itself.239 He moved, though cautiously, with the times. During a review of his ®rst ten years in the chair he expressed his relief that some at least of his colleagues had not shared all of his fears about putting modern periods into the syllabus. `It is well,' he said, `that no misgivings of mine should have acted so as to leave the treatment of modern history in this respect inadequate.' In 1884, when he gave his `last statutory public lecture', he urged that S. R. Gardiner should be `claimed for Oxford', although Gardiner had been a deacon of the Irvingite Church for ®fteen years and showed no sign of con®ning his teaching and research to the ®rst half of the seventeenth century.240 During the quinquennium when the honours awarded in Greats rose by less than 4 per cent, those awarded in modern history rose by more than 35 per cent.241 The quality of the history intake was still low: the Selborne Commission was told in 1877 that to impose a modern language requirement would halve the School's numbers.242 The new school had other weaknesses, as Chapter 14 shows, and their persistence may have owed something to tendencies which Stubbs had encouraged. But Stubbs and the other Oxford historians of the time took every chance which the fears of the Church party had given them. The modern historians did not owe their enhanced status solely to Stubbs's popularity and prestige. By pioneering the inter-collegiate lecturing system they impressed the Selborne Commission and made a signi®cant contribution to Oxford's academic development. By 1870 the tuition system erected in the opening decades of the century was creaking under the weight of the new honours schools, the division of the classical course into `Mods' and Greats, and the arrival of the `Unattached students' (`toshers'), the ®rst of 237 Gaisford, though recognizing Stubbs's merits, would not make an ex-servitor a Student of the House: Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts (1982), 85. 238 W. Stubbs, Constitutional History, I. iii. Cf. E. A. Freeman's views, as analysed in J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent (1981), Ch. 8. 239 The three elected were: Stubbs, 110 votes; Mountague Bernard (Liberal High Churchman) 100; Pusey 90. Jowett secured 85 votes. 240 8 May 1884: Seventeen Lectures, 435. For Gardiner at All Souls see p. 218. 241 Pt 1, 370. 242 UOC (1877), Q 827 (Burrows). A foreign language was almost essential for high honours: ibid. Qs 1415±16 (R. Laing).

46

`a secularized university'?

whom had matriculated in 1868. Some tutors were allowing undergraduates from other colleges to attend their lectures. When someone attended from `beyond the walls' it was a toss-up whether the lecturer would be paid by him, or by his college, or not at all.243 Efforts to end this anarchy by agreements between colleges were meeting with varying success;244 the objections to an arrangement in Greats between Balliol and New College have been mentioned. Provost Hawkins objected to Oriel men being `exposed to . . . lecturers who may be clever teachers but unsound, and . . . Unbelievers'.245 Some of the groupings looked ¯uid and impermanent. What made the historians' arrangements unique was that they created a single, stable, comprehensive system. In 1877 C. W. Boase of Exeter told the Selborne Commission that the inter-collegiate lecturing system in modern history applied to every college `except Worcester, Hertford, and the Unattached; but any member of those three bodies may join any course of lectures by paying a sovereign. Practically, it is the whole University.'246 The history tutors and lecturers had every inducement to co-operate with each other. They were a small band struggling to establish their school.247 Their course was too new for past practice to sti¯e experiment and impede economy of effort.248 Unlike the Greats tutors they could not rely on most of their undergraduates choosing to study what were acknowledged to be `the best periods'. In some parts of the syllabus their lectures had to cover a range of options.249 While the Regius Professor's exemplary scholarship inspired them to rise to this challenge, professorial lectures offered no sort of threat to their programme. Years later Creighton wrote: With Stubbs began the scienti®c pursuit of modern history, as he impressed his views upon us younger men. We worked out among us a scheme of lectures covering the whole ®eld . . . The needs of the scheme threw upon me the ecclesiastical, and especially the papal, history, which no one else took. 243

SCOC (1867), Q 2115 (`Bat' Price). Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 21, and see his prediction, `Reform' (1858), 282; Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3798, 3887 (Pattison), 3953±5 (Jowett), 4003±4 (Lightfoot); UOC (1877), Qs 1997 (Thurs®eld, and list p. 398), 2086 (Bradley), 3627 (Salwey), 3794±818 (Papillon), 3882, 3901, 3911 (Capes); p. 453 below (mathematics). 245 Engel, 86. 246 UOC (1877), Q 1253. See also Qs 1329±40 (R. Laing), 4505±16 (H. B. George). 247 UOC (1877), Q 1274 (Boase). C. H. Robarts (Macmillan's Mazagine, 33, Feb. 1876, 335) thought that history and law had gained little from the Ordinance instructing All Souls to concentrate on those subjects; UOC (1877), Q 5501 (C. H. Robarts). According to H. B. George there were ten `college lecturers' in history in 1877: they covered `all the colleges except two': ibid. Q 4520; Seventeen Lectures, 37. 248 The new Theology School quickly started an inter-collegiate scheme: E. W. Watson (n. 96), 95. 249 Arnold, Misc. Works (1845), 396±7; SCOC (1867), Q 2440 (Jowett). Pattison commended the `options' system in modern history: Oxford Essays i (1855), 302. By 1998, 67 papers, plus an essay, were listed for Modern History ®nals, 96 for Greats: OM, Michaelmas Term 1998, 2nd week, 9, 4th week, 14. 244

a `plastic structure'

47

Stubbs's `lectures were hopelessly dull,' an undergraduate historian recorded in old age. `Burrows was more lively, but his politics were in advance of his historical attainments.'250 Exactly how this modern history system was established is a little unclear, since the information about its origins comes partly from one of its chief architects, Robert Laing. By 1878 overwork and unrequited love for Alice Liddell had driven Laing into a serious mental breakdown, from which he never made a full recovery; and some of his statements about the adoption of the system need to be treated with reserve.251 In February 1868 Mandell Creighton, Merton's history tutor, was authorized by his college to take part in a small inter-collegiate lecturing scheme. His collaborators in the neighbouring colleges were Laing, who was elected to a fellowship of Corpus in that year and soon became the history lecturer of ®ve other colleges, Edward Talbot of Christ Church, and an Oriel fellow who lectured in law. A History Tutors' Association was formed in 1869, its members holding a termly meeting to arrange the following term's lectures. `Soon,' Laing wrote, `the other colleges asked leave to come in. So did the professors, whose lectures were almost deserted.'252 Few as the history tutors were, they exerted, from the newness and nature of their school, a remarkable in¯uence on the treatment of their subject. As they supplied most of the history examiners they could do much to determine what was to be taught.253 The history professors complained in private but accepted the change.254 Replying to a committee of the Hebdomadal Council in December 1873, Burrows acknowledged defeat: The professors . . . appear to be limited to . . . catching what stray men the tutors are willing to send them . . . It would be undesirable to add to the number of men holding the present position of professors . . . So long as the collegiate and tutorial system is maintained, along with a system of public examinations, it would be dif®cult to devise any better arrangement.255 250

Mandell Creighton, i. 61; Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional (1986), 24; M. Burrows, Autobiography (1908), 216; E. A. Knox, Reminiscences (n. 97), 79. See UOC (1877), Qs 1228±30 (Stubbs: for his letter to the Commrs, 27 Oct. 1877, see ibid. p. 75). 251 Oman, Memories, 199, 227±30. Laing's notebooks were bought by the Friends of the Bodleian, 1996: MSS Don. e. 185±9. For his later life see pp. 808±9 below. 252 Mandell Creighton, i. 60; Bodl. MSS Don. e. 186 fo 46; Reply on staf®ng requirements of Mod. History Board of Studies to the Letter of the Vice-Chancellor, 10 May 1873, and Report (1877), 52±4, 91 (the Reply had been published earlier: Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 80 124 (24) and 296 (13)); UOC (1877), Qs 1337±9, 1350, 1394±5 (R. Laing), 4505 (H. B. George). 253 P. R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education (Manchester, 1986), 22 (H. H. Vaughan, Jan. 1850). 254 Stubbs, Letters, 264, 270. The name concealed in the letter, 8 Mar. 1885, to Freeman is that of J. F. Bright: Stubbs MSS Bodl. Eng. Misc. e. 148 fos 272±3. See also Seventeen Lectures, 35±6; Oman, Memories, 105. For complaints in other subjects about tutors not co-operating with professors see SCOC (1867), Qs 116±20 (Brodie). Stubbs would have disliked an organizational role: Seventeen Lectures, 443. 255 Reply (n. 252 above), 56±7. For Burrows's support for the collegiate system see SCOC (1867), Q 3683, for Stubbs's public comments (1876), Seventeen Lectures, 36. In 1877, as in 1867,

48

`a secularized university'?

This development undermined the case for a great transfer of functions from the colleges to the University and put the college tutors into a commanding position. They had never been attracted by the prospect of increased University control over teaching. That might bring them under an unwelcome degree of professorial direction; besides, their strength lay in college governing bodies rather than in the Hebdomadal Council or Congregation. They were ceasing to be a body of transients waiting for rectories or public-school masterships: the changes pioneered by Balliol, University, and Merton had increased their cohesion.256 The one weakness in their position had been the suspicion that a teaching body owned and controlled by the colleges could no longer do an effective job. The history tutors had erased that suspicion.257 The Selborne Commission had only to convert the historians' arrangements into a statutory system, and to ensure that it applied to all honour schools, and, as far as the immediate future was concerned, the problem of each college behaving as a `small university' would be solved.258 Jowett soon saw the implications of the historians' achievement. In 1867 he had told the Select Committee that he favoured freedom and competition among tutors and regarded the private tutors as a valuable part of the system. While he did not wish `entirely to do away' with `the system of tutors in the colleges', he did wish `to diminish it very much'. The college tutor, according to Jowett's scheme, would provide his group of undergraduates with advice and guidance. They would then be free to seek, and pay for, whatever tuition they needed; and professors, college tutors, and private tutors would be free to compete, or co-operate, with each other in supplying this tuition.259 Ten years later Jowett's doctrine was very different. In his evidence to the Selborne Commission he accepted the college tutors' dominance, noting that professorial dif®culties had been `increased in some measure by. . . the inter-collegiate system'. The problem, as Jowett had come to perceive it by 1877, was to mitigate the professors' isolation. His solution was to `place the professor or reader in a college and get him to work as much as he could with the associated college tutors'.260 professorial complaints were not con®ned to modern history, UOC, Qs 3385±6, 3396, 3452 (F. Max MuÈller). For later plans which were expected to favour professorial in¯uence see Pt 1, 367. 256

Charles Neate, The Universities' Reform Bill (1877), 4. Although J. F. Bright was candid about the defects of the modern history system: UOC (1877), Q 1322. 258 E. S. Talbot's evidence in 1877 illustrates the college tutor's central position: UOC (1877), Q 4167. Bonamy Price, arguing for University control of teaching, realized that the undergraduate needed not only a teacher, but a `friend', and suggested (following T. Fowler) a `ViceHead' occupying a house within the college: Bonamy Price, Oxford Reform (1875), 25. See also Lyulph Stanley, 15±16. 259 Qs 2404, 2486±95, 2679±87. For professors who were also college and/or private tutors see Qs 27, 76 (Brodie). 260 UOC (1877), Q2664 (Jowett); 2564±70 (A. Robinson). 257

a `plastic structure'

49

Inter-collegiate lecturing ended the old-fashioned, catechetical `college lecture' (which in modern terms resembled less a lecture than a `class'). As H. B. George, New College's history tutor, told the Selborne Commission: `One can have a catechetical lecture with one's own pupils, men who all know one another more or less, and who all know the lecturer, but if . . . you have to lecture to twenty men with twelve or thirteen colleges represented . . . it is useless to attempt it, and all the lectures, therefore, become practically professorial.'261 The catechetical lecture, being based on the translation and study of a text, had never been suitable for all modern history teaching; but the change went deeper than this. The spokesman for one of the Greats groups was asked by the same Commission about the duplications which were a feature of its lecture list. Three ethics lectures were being delivered at the same hour although the group included only eight colleges.262 It would have been possible for those three lecturers to ensure that most of those attending had studied the passages being discussed; and each of them might have been able to set his class written papers and to look over the work produced. A lecturer dealing with a compulsory history paper, with an audience drawn from every college, could not possibly operate like that: the number attending might well exceed anything that most professors had ever experienced.263 There was thus a price to be paid for the historians' success, as Jowett quickly saw. Because the people attending a lecture came from nearly every college they were not treated as `a class', even when, as in H. B. George's example, they numbered no more than twenty.264 Although the `college lecture' owed its decline partly to inter-collegiate lecturing, it was being superseded by an equally important and related development, the rise of the private hour or tutorial. The process by which tutorials became the college tutor's principal means of tuition is described in Chapter 4. The trend began in the later sixties to some degree in response to student demand.265 Soon every undergraduate reading for honours sought individual advice from his college tutor on how to choose his options and bene®t from the lectures available, and, more generally, on devising a strategy suited to his capacities. Above all, tutors had to ensure that the honours man understood the concepts which he was trying to handle. This was no longer an occasional problem, soluble by visits to a coach over a brief period: it applied to the whole course. The student needed to have his work checked and corrected, and his ideas sorted out, week by week, in sessions when he 261 Q 4510. For earlier comments on `professorial lectures' see SCOC (1867), 1178 (Liddell), 2477±84 (Jowett), 3306, 3313 (Pusey). 262 Qs 1882±6, 1997 (Thurs®eld). 263 For attendances at professors' lectures see PP 1876 lix. 331±50 and p. 94 below. 264 Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 155. See also UOC (1877), Q 2564 (A. Robinson). 265 In 1867 Burrows thought that inter-collegiate lecturing would increase the private tutor's importance; he had been one himself: SCOC (1867), Q 3695, 3709.

50

`a secularized university'?

was alone with his tutor, so that he could be criticized without being humiliated. No group of undergraduates knew this better than those studying for honours in law and modern history, since they suffered from a shortage of college tutors. In an Oxford where many tutors were laymen, and religious tests had receded into a memory, there was no longer a suspicion that a private hour might become an occasion for proselytizing.266 The new system of long-serving college tutors, inter-collegiate lecturing, and private hours, though much scrutinized, was hard to assess, if only because the tutors' situation varied from subject to subject and changed with every year. Nearly all tutors were liable by now to spend many hours in tutorials; but, in modern history at least, their lecturing duties were no longer likely to fall outside their chosen or allotted ®eld of study: their freedom to specialize had been increased. In private hours the tutor dealt with a wide range of topics; but in those his task was to help his undergraduates to make proper use of their knowledge, rather than to display his own. Charles Neate blamed the tutors' determination to dominate the new lecturing system for adding needlessly to their burdens. They were, he wrote, `treating the professors as an over-anxious rector. . . treats his curate, whom he will never allow to preach to a good congregation'.267 To Bonamy Price, Drummond Professor of Political Economy, the arrangements could be commended only as a step towards a take-over of the colleges' teaching functions by the University. As it stood, the system tended `to consume the whole time of the tutors in communicating to their pupils the knowledge which they acquired in reading for honours when they were undergraduates'. It must result in `a very great diminution of the moral pressure upon the tutors to improve themselves'; once lecturing was on an inter-collegiate basis a college's reputation no longer rested on its tutors' effectiveness in the lecture-room.268 Thorold Rogers, Price's predecessor in the chair, was equally disparaging. The members of `the colleges', he told the Selborne Commission, `almost always constitute the examiners of the University; . . . it is an extremely vicious system . . . The college tutors audit their own accounts.'269 Others realized that college tutors operated under judgement as much as ever: the change was that their reputations rested now on their skill, not in lecturing, but in the private hours during what a witness to the 266 For earlier attitudes see Pt 1, 60±1, 237; Goldwin Smith, `Reform' (1858), 266. For the decline of the private tutor see UOC (1877), Q 991 (T. E. Holland), Q 4512 (H. B. George); Engel, 39±41. Salwey, defending the college tutor system (ibid. Qs 3355, 3359), mentioned Unattached students in modern history who migrated to Christ Church `to obtain the special attention that they desired, . . . afterwards obtaining high honours'. Burrows (SCOC (1867), Q 3691) attributed modern history's defects in `pass work' to shortage of college tutors; and see his Reply [to the Vice-Chancellor's Letter, n. 252 above] (1873, 1877), 57. 267 The Universities' Reform Bill (1877), 2. 268 Bonamy Price (n. 258), 11. See his testimony to the Selborne Commission: UOC (1877), Q 2046. 269 Q 2870. See also Robert Lowe, The Times, 6 Dec. 1871, 3f.

a `plastic structure'

51

Selborne Commission called the process of intellectual midwifery.270 Nor was the examining system as `vicious' as it might look. In testing the undergraduates' work the tutors were examining each other. A body of tutors critical of each other, all of whom had themselves taken high honours, would be unlikely to lower the honours standard; and if it was pushed too high some sharp-eyed statistician, such as Charles Dodgson, would soon draw attention to the anomaly.271 Few denied that the system was effective within narrow limits. Even Thorold Rogers admitted to the Commission: `If the college tutor is perpetually looking after the undergraduates, the teaching . . . always interpreted by his abilities, is likely to be as good as he can make it.'272 The trouble, as some thought, was that, although the tutors seemed to control the honours examination system, they were in fact enslaved by it. Neate, speaking for the older generation, deplored a servitude under which the most eligible colleges did their best to squeeze out the pass men.273 Thomas Fowler, one of the younger professors, told the Selborne Commission: The colleges are, in fact, so many rival schools, the main object of which is to beat one another in the competition for the classes. Hence the teaching is subordinated to the examinations, instead of the examinations to the teaching. The aim of the undergraduate is not so much to acquire a knowledge of his subject as to gain a place in the class list. And the object of the tutor is not so much to teach as to gain a class for his college.274

J. F. Bright, the history tutor of University College, and soon to be its Master, summarized the Commission's problem in his evidence to it. `Looking upon the University merely as a place of education,' he said, `the college system is the most ef®cient by far'; but it was `very injurious to learning', since the tutor had to be `occupied for many hours a day. . . with individual pupils'. The University ought somehow to aim at both effective teaching and high scholarship: `the great question is whether the two can possibly be harmonized.'275

` a p ro p e r b o dy o f un i v e r s i t y t e ac h e r s ' ? Most of the Selborne Commission's decisions, as they are recounted in the next chapter, will cause no surprise to a reader of this one. The Commissioners 270

UOC (1877), Q 3355: H. Salwey gave the phrase in Greek. See Dodgson's open letter to the Vice-Chancellor, 18 Apr. 1877, and his letter to the Guardian, 2 Feb. 1882, and circulated paper, 9 Feb.; all three papers concerned anomalies in Responsions lists: The Oxford Pamphlets . . . of C. L. Dodgson (n. 152), 127±35. See also Pt 1, 359. 272 Q 2872. 273 UOC (1877), Q 4453. 274 Ibid. Q 1531. 275 Ibid. Qs 1289±92. No two cases of `academic frustration' were (or are) the same. In retiring to a Merton living in Northumberland, 1875, Mandell Creighton sought both time for 271

52

`a secularized university'?

took note of the `tutorial fellowships' pioneered by a handful of colleges, and of inter-collegiate lecturing in modern history, and applied these innovations generally throughout Oxford. Inter-collegiate lecture lists became the province of the new Faculty Boards: prize (henceforward `ordinary') fellowships were limited to a seven-year tenure at £200 a year; and colleges were to contribute according to their wealth to a Common University Fund.276 Professorial pay was raised and made more adequate and uniform, and the number of professorships and readerships rose from 40 in 1876 to 63 ten years later.277 The college tutors thus gained slightly in promotion prospects and the new college statutes brought some relaxation for them in celibacy rules. There was no fundamental alteration in the balance of power.278 The colleges, and their tutors in particular, remained in complete control of the arts subjects, and retained a signi®cant in¯uence in science. The impact, ®nancial and psychological, of the agricultural depression on some of the colleges is analysed in Chapter 12 of Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1. It operated to frustrate the Commissioners' scheme for University readerships; but even if there had been no such dif®culties from 1879 onwards, a massive operation putting nearly all teaching into the hands of academics appointed and paid by the University would not have been recommended, still less put into effect.279 Such a transfer would have been unacceptable to the great majority whether in the House of Commons or in Oxford.280 As Mark Pattison admitted to the Commissioners when outlining a radical change in the Oxford system to them: `To come before you with this complaint is to ask you to lay your hands on our heads and convey to us a new spirit, the spirit study and parochial experience. In Mrs Humphry Ward's Lady Connie (1916), a Reader in Classics is kept from scholarship by hours as long as any tutor's. Being a family man, he has to supplement his basic income by taking as much outside work as he can secure. Lady Connie is set in the later 1880s. 276

Statutes (1882), 14±17, 67±91. Most ordinary fellows had rent-free rooms, if resident, and free dinner at the common table, as well as £200 p.a. In Clause 16 of the 1877 Act, conferring powers on the Selborne Commission, the ®rst three sub-clauses concern the establishment of a Common University Fund. 277 G. V. Haines, Essays on German In¯uence upon English Education and Science, 1850± 1919 (1969), 106; UOC (1877), Q 1271 (Boase). 278 See Stubbs's comparison between his position and that of a professor in a German university: Seventeen Lectures, 439. The 1882 college statutes show considerable variations on celibacy. Two restrictions on married tutorial fellows predominate: (a) a minimum number must live in college in term to keep discipline, (b) seven years to be served before marriage. 279 Green, Lincoln, 474; Engel, 245±6. 280 See, for instance, Parl. Deb. 12 June 1876, ccxxix. 1735±6 (Lord F. Hervey), 1747 (Lowe), 1748 (Newdegate), 1750 (Dilke); Ward, Victorian Oxford, 297±8. Salisbury was more enlightened about scienti®c research needs than most of his party in Parliament: Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1872, Qs 13, 587±8; Parl. Deb. 24 Feb. 1876, ccxxvii. 801. The same was true of Gladstone in classics, though his concern that the universities should support the British School at Athens was no doubt reinforced by unwillingness to make a Treasury grant: Gladstone, Diaries, 1883, x. 403, 448, 465.

a `plastic structure'

53

of the pursuit of science and learning.'281 The minimal contributions from colleges to University which the Commissioners devised bore hardly any resemblance to such a transfer. To prevent any suggestion that they might be condoning idleness they gave the professors substantial lecturing stints;282 but, as Creighton had pointed out a few years earlier, despite this, as long as the system remained unchanged, additional arts professorships simply represented a nod towards `the endowment of research'.283 The tutors `are . . . still for professorships, and wish them to be well endowed', Charles Neate had written, `as places of ultimate retreat and provision for themselves.'284 Inevitably the Commission's moderate solutions aroused scorn in Oxford from both radicals and supporters of the status quo. In the Academy of 11 June 1881, the vehicle of the group encouraging the endowment of research, A. H. Sayce wrote: The Commissioners betray no consciousness of the claims of research upon the University; the ideal at which they have aimed throughout is a vast examining machine, managed by persons whose incomes are nicely adjusted to the amount of cramming they have to perform . . . All the evils which ®rst stirred up the agitation for reform have been simply intensi®ed and made permanent.285

The criticisms of the younger progressives are discussed in the next chapter. To Bryce in 1883 the Commissioners had `starved' the Common University Fund. `Under the existing Oxford system,' he wrote, `as reconstructed by the Commission, the college teaching must necessarily dwarf and paralyze that of the University, without being able to effect what might be effected by a proper body of university teachers.'286 To G. C. Brodrick, by contrast, the settlement `was essentially socialisticÐthe spoliation of the colleges'.287 The Commissioners would not have been thought fair had they failed to displease both Bryce and Brodrick. There was no inducement to follow the programme of the group advocating the endowment of research when the latter's `Association for the Organization of Academical Study' had broken up in disarray after a few months. Compliance with Brodrick's views would have been equally impracticable: avoiding the transfer of any resources from 281

UOC (1877), Q 4115. See also Pattison, Suggestions, 33, 134±5, 210. For Stubbs's resentment at this see Seventeen Lectures, 437±9. 283 `The Endowment of Research', Macmillan's Magazine, 34 (June 1876), 186±92. Signed. 284 `The Universities' Reform Bill', 4. 285 xix, 11 June 1881, 433. See also Sayce in Essays on the Endowment of Research, ed. C. E. Appleton and others (1876). 286 `The Future of the English Universities', Fortnightly Review, 39 (Mar. 1883), 389, 401. See also Bryce, `An Ideal University', Contemporary Review, xlv (Jan.±June 1884), 836±56 and pp. 92±3 below; Bonamy Price (n. 258), 11±19. 287 Brodrick, 169. For Jowett predicting how colleges would react see Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3958±61. 282

54

`a secularized university'?

colleges to the University would have involved the Commission in disregarding the provisions of the 1877 Act.288 The complaints from Sayce and Bryce were more substantial than Brodrick's; but the champions of endowing research exaggerated in their laments. Any effective organization of the system, even one which leant heavily towards teaching, was likely to help them in the longer run. The tension between teaching and research needs was endemic in the Oxford created by the 1882 statutes, as it is in every university today, and those statutes tilted the balance sharply towards teaching; but, given the tutors' power, and the fact that fairly soon most of them would be laymen who saw university work as their career, the risk of each becoming no more than a teaching drudge, or coach, was not high. It may have been regrettable that A. L. Smith and Sidney Ball published relatively little, but neither resembled a drudging coach. Nor were the future tutors likely to be greatly inferior to `a proper body of university teachers'. Colleges soon found in senior scholarships a more economical means than `prize' fellowships of giving potential tutors postgraduate training: a year or two of study on the Continent became a favoured prelude to a tutorship. The struggles between the various groups, and the concern to curtail tutorial drudgery, while maintaining teaching standards and collegiate and tutorial independence, are recurrent themes in this volume.289 Like other minorities ®ghting for recognition, Mark Pattison and his followers were not given to nicely balanced assessments. When a Commissioner put it to Pattison in 1877 that the tutorial alternatives were a college tutor or a cramming coach, the latter refused to see a signi®cant difference in attitudes between the two.290 No doubt it was true, in 1877 as later, that undergraduates hoped for examination coaching from their tutors; but to equate a college of®cer, responsible for a student's studies and welfare over three or four years, with a coach whom a student had engaged for a term before his ®nals, verged on absurdity. Bryce gave no weight to the fact that, in ®rst-degree teaching, quali®cations are not everything. While the person elected to a college's tutorial fellowship might not have the best possible quali®cations to teach a given subject, he would have a deep interest in the progress of the undergraduates assigned to him and close control over their 288 Diderik Roll-Hansen, `The Academy, 1869±79': Anglistica, viii (Copenhagen, 1957), 78±81; see n. 276 above. The Asquith Commn took Brodrick's complaint seriously: RCOC (1919), 23. 289 Engel, 259±60, 269±80; H. A. L. Fisher, History of Europe (one-volume edn 1936), 1063. Research developments to 1914 are discussed in pp. 614±22 below. For Curzon's defence of prize fellowships see p. 835. For contemporaries' views about the achievement of Sidney Ball and A. L. Smith see O.H. Ball, Sidney Ball (1923), 225 and C. R. L. F[letcher] in Mary F. Smith, A. L. Smith (1928), 312. For an assessment of Smith's published work see p. 375 below. 290 UOC (1877), Qs 4146, 4150. Cf. Pattison's more balanced judgement on this in evidence to the 1850 Commn: RCO (1850), 434. Jowett aimed to keep down cramming `indirectly by the character of the University exams': SCOC (1867), Q 2698.

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work.291 Pattison's criticisms of the collegiate Oxford which he had once extolled were countered by Goldwin Smith's second thoughts. Goldwin told the Commissioners in 1877 that his experiences since leaving Oxford had given him an increased respect for the college system. `I think we suffer,' he said, `from the want of it in America . . . The intimate personal relations between tutor and pupil in a good college are very valuable things.' These opposed views illustrate the paradox of the institution which had emerged from this second reform. The colleges made the University dif®cult to organize and slow to respond to new demands: they also gave their undergraduates an experience which was both more enjoyable and more formative than anything available from a centralized university less amply endowed.292 The losses of the Church party were of a different order: they faced annihilation and could see no future for themselves in Oxford. Under the new statutes clerical fellowships were reduced, in general, to the numbers needed for conducting services in the college chapels and giving instruction in divinity.293 Preaching in June 1882, as the settlement was about to come into effect, Liddon compared `the young Colonial Churches' to the one in Oxford. `The time may arrive,' he said, `when Cape Town, or Calcutta, or Melbourne, or Colombo, or Zanzibar may. . . mean for the Church of Christ what Oxford has meant for her in bygone days.'294 This comment showed once again how far Oxford's High Churchmen were from the Church's mainstream. Archbishop Tait, though mortally ill, replied to Liddon in Macmillan's Magazine. `I do not myself believe,' he wrote, `that Oxford is really given up to the free-thinking which this master in Israel dreads . . . Many hold that amongst Oxford undergraduates there is at the present moment more real religion, shown in a quiet, practical way, than was to be found forty years ago.'295 Introducing his Bill setting up the Commission in March 1876 Salisbury had said: `I entertain a hope that the clerical fellowships will be 291

SCSI (1868), Q 2701 (Clifton); Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Q 4073 (Lightfoot). RCO (1850), 429±36; UOC (1877), Qs 1731±2; Macmillan's Magazine, 33 (Feb. 1876), 327 n. 2. For Goldwin Smith's view of the value of `emulation' between colleges see Reorganization (1868), 13. See also H. S. Jones, `Student Life and Sociability, 1860±1930: Comparative Re¯ections', History of Universities, xiv. (1995±6), 225±46. 293 W. W. Jackson to J. A. Godley, 3, 27 June 1880: BL Add. MSS 44464 fos 200±3, 44465 fos 32±4. The draft statutes for eleven colleges had been published by the end of 1880: Guardian 8, 15, 22, 29 December 1880 (Supplements). 294 Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, Second Series (4th edn 1887), 369. The ®rst edition had gone only to 1879. Liddon had protested anonymously in Church Quarterly Review, xii (Apr. 1881), 201±42. He retired from his professorship in 1882. The Bishop of Lincoln (Christopher Wordsworth) preached with equal gloom in Cambridge: The Future of our Universities (1882), 24±5. See Owen Chadwick, Victorian Church (2 vols 1966±70), ii. 448. 295 `Thoughts Suggested by Mr [Thomas] Mozley's Oxford Reminiscences', Macmillan's Magazine, 46 (Oct. 1882), 418±19. Liddon enlarged on his view in the preface to Sermons, ix±xv. 292

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maintained.'296 What had happened? The Liberals' return to of®ce in 1880 had made a difference, as the next chapter makes clear; but the election returns are only part of the explanation. Salisbury told John Wordsworth in November 1880 that the Commons' debates on the Bill three years earlier had convinced him of the impossibility of maintaining the number of clerical fellowships.297 The Commissioners were responding to the fact that during the last ten or ®fteen years Oxford's tutors had ceased to re¯ect clerical views and had become pre-eminently a teaching body. The tone was now set by the lay contingent who opposed any restriction likely to impede their college's teaching ef®ciency. When Gladstone spoke in 1877 against restricting a proportion of fellowships to clerics he showed that he understood what was happening. Clerical fellowships, he told the Commons, were in danger of `losing caste': although the governing bodies of public schools all insisted on a Christian education, none of them imposed a clerical restriction on assistant masterships. Gladstone realized that in Oxford colleges, as in those schools, effective teaching was the aim.298 If a clergyman did not head the applicants' list in teaching ability and intellectual standing there would be a strong wish to appoint a layman. The argument used against the tests had inevitably been revived for use against clerical fellowships. `In a scienti®c age and . . . a scienti®c society,' R. W. Macan told the Commissioners, `theologians committed in early life, and more or less all their lives long, to the pursuit, not of truth, but of reasons for established . . . beliefs authoritatively given, cannot permanently command assent or con®dence as theoretical teachers.'299 Salisbury imagined colleges like Balliol to be heading the attack on the Church of England. One of his main concerns had long been the damage which could be done by a single college if unbelievers of various kinds should secure a majority on its governing body. He did not realize how the trend towards the new-style tutor was altering views in every college. The laicizing process was hardly rapid: nearly a third of college fellows were in holy orders in 1890 and nearly a ®fth in 1912; but the change was greater than this would suggest. Unlike the clerical fellows of an earlier day, these ordained tutors of the eighties and nineties thought of themselves primarily, not as clergymen, but as academics. No more than a small fraction of them left Oxford for Church careers.300 The days when Oxford had been 296 Parl. Deb., 9 Mar. 1876, ccxxvii. 1699. The 1877 Act forbade an increase in clerical fellowships: 40 and 41 Vict. c. 48, clause 59. 297 E. W. Watson (n. 96), 116. 298 Parl. Deb. 4 June 1877, ccxxxiv. 1261±4. For the debate and vote see p. 79 below. 299 UOC (1877), Q 4658. For Macan see n. 309 below. 300 Parl. Deb., 14 July 1870, cciii. 209. By a misprint in Engel, Appendix I (p. 286) the percentage in holy orders, 1881±1900, is given as 69, whereas it should be 31. This has led to a corresponding error on p. 263. For the in¯uence of `religious lay tutors' in the 1880s and 1890s see p. 105 below.

a `plastic structure'

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a staunch and in¯uential defender of the Church of England were at an end. Croke Robinson of New College had become Oxford's ®rst Roman Catholic fellow on his conversion in 1872: he rose to be a monsignor and domestic prelate to the Pope. Charles Appleton had liked to worship with the Roman Catholics, while T. H. Green's ideas were to be as in¯uential with the London Ethical Society as with the High Church Lux Mundi Group and the Christian Social Union (1889).301 The various religious views prevalent in the University, as they are depicted in Chapter 3, were soon simply a re¯ection of those held in the English professional class. The Oxford InterCollegiate Christian Union was formed, on an inter-denominational basis, in 1879, and this led to a role in the Student Christian Movement.302 A University staffed largely by laymen, in which the Church of England had lost much of its former in¯uence, was not necessarily one of diminished religious activity. `It would be generally admitted,' W. W. Jackson wrote, in or around 1914, `that there is more . . . religious life in the colleges than there was thirty or forty years ago.' By then, however, there could be no denying that the object proclaimed by the tests' opponents in the later sixties had been achieved: there had resulted, to a large degree, an `unsectarian, undenominational culture in the national universities'.303 None of the Church party's efforts to maintain their position did them any good. Keeping T. H. Green out of White's professorship of Moral Philosophy in 1874 by pushing John Eaton into it proved a ®asco.304 John Wordsworth's open letter to C. S. Roundell in 1880 describing the clerical fellowships as `bene®ces in the possession of the Church of England' was scarcely conciliatory.305 In 1882 D. B. Monro, an eminent classicist and a Presbyterian, was not prevented from becoming Provost of Oriel;306 and Salisbury's attempt to upset one of the Commissioners' statutes and make Greats once again `a training in ancient language and literature' failed in the Lords.307 A few weeks earlier the Bishop of Lincoln had used his position as Lincoln College's Visitor to have its new statutes rejected in the Lords; but 301 Alan Ryan (n. 78), 88; D. Roll-Hansen (n. 288), 74; Richter, 118±29; pp. 109±10 below. Appleton had died, 1 Feb. 1879, aged 37. For Croke Robinson's fears in 1872 see The Times, 18 Apr. 1914, 10d. When Green was invited (Oct. 1875) to be Treasurer of the Church of England Temperance Society he wondered whether its `chiefs' knew `how questionable a churchman' he was: Notes made by Mrs Green for R. L. Nettleship's Memoir: BCLP Green Papers, I.d.10. For the London Ethical Society (formed 1886, dissolved 1897) see G. Spiller, The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (1934), ch. 1. 302 Tissington Tatlow, Story of the SCM (1933), 6. For the SCM in Oxford to 1914, see pp. 108±9 below; after 1914, The Twentieth Century, 311±13. 303 W. W. Jackson (n. 32), 84; SCOC (1867), Q 2585 (Jowett replying to Beresford Hope); Lyulph Stanley, 4. 304 Richter, 149±50. 305 5 Nov. 1880, in published version, p. 9. 306 Goschen's amendment, allowing the severance of the Rochester Canonry from the Provostship was accepted without a division: Parl. Deb., 14 June 1877, ccxxxiv. 1802. 307 Parl. Deb., 20 July 1882, cclxxii. 1055±71; Quinn and Prest, 283±4.

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by that he merely subjected the college to prolonged inconvenience.308 Pusey's last victory, when he persuaded Christ Church to remove R. W. Macan from his studentship for publishing an unacceptable Hibbert Trust essay on the Resurrection, proved a pyrrhic one: Macan was elected to a fellowship of University two years later, where, by an irony, the undergraduates included Salisbury's third son, Lord Robert Cecil.309 When the parsons came by rail in 1883 to reject the distinguished Congregationalist, R. F. Horton, as an examiner in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion (`rudders'), they simply advertised Convocation's destructive defects, and showed yet again that Oxford's High Churchmen were out of touch with most of their countrymen, and, indeed, with much of their own Church.310 As clerical in¯uence declined in Oxford, so did anti-clericalism.311 In women's higher education and university settlements the Church party and those of looser religious allegiance simply distanced themselves from each other: so the plan to found Lady Margaret Hall immediately stimulated the creation of Somerville, and in East London Toynbee Hall was quickly followed by Oxford House.312 Pattison was the last Oxford worthy to deplore T. H. Green's idealist philosophy on the ground that with its arrival neo-tory sacerdotalism had acquired an innocent professorial cover.313 Jowett's dislike of Green's views seems to have stemmed less from religious grounds than from the fear that they were too complex to maximize Balliol's chances with the examiners.314 T. H. Green's generation came to terms with the possibility that they might have to organize their moral ideas without the help of orthodox religious beliefs. They underwent, in Mrs Humphry Ward's phrase, `that dissociation of the moral judgement from a special series of 308

Green, Lincoln, 500±3. The dates given for college statutes are those of parliamentary approval, not those of sealing. 309 The Trust, which had published the essay in 1877, was Unitarian in ¯avour. See also Macan's evidence to the Commission, 1877: n. 299 above. For the impression given by Pusey in old age see Robert Elsmere, i. 133. In 1916 Macan, as Master, showed no favour to one of University's undergraduate atheists: E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons (1977), 44±5. 310 Pt 1, 357. R. F. Horton, Autobiography (1917), 57±60; Jowett's `Notes on Church Reform, 1874': Jowett, Letters, 41. On such issues as `confession' Pusey was at odds with Tait, the bishops, Salisbury, and Harrowby: The Times, 5 Jan 1867, 8e; Parl. Deb., 14 June 1877, ccxxxiv. 1745±8, 1752±3; Liddon, Pusey, iv. 262. 311 E. W. Watson (n. 96), 121; Robert Elsmere, i. 67±8 (`another turn of the tide'). For this novel see n. 313 and p. 95 below. 312 See pp. 245±7, 670±4 below. 313 Pattison, Memoirs, 92. The rationalist squire in Robert Elsmere, ii. 378±9, held Pattison's view. Mrs Ward had known Pattison. Her unacknowledged `model' for some features of the novel's hero was J. R. Green (n. 229 above). She dedicated it to the memory of T. H. Green and Laura Lyttelton, and, many years later, de®ned the extent to which he had been depicted in `Mr Grey': preface, I. xli. For an assessment of T. H. Green as a philosopher see Ch. 11. 314 Richter, 137±57; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 235±6. For Green's religious views see his letter, 6 Oct. 1872, to Henry Scott Holland: S. Paget, Scott Holland (1921), 65±8; T. H. Green, Works, III, lxxxvi±cvii (Nettleship's `Memoir').

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religious formulae which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of our day'.315 Nurtured in what were still households of faith, but becoming unsure whether Lazarus would receive his reward in a `next world', some of them concentrated with all the vigour of their evangelical forebears on trying to improve his lot in this one.316 T. H. Green might be unorthodox in religion; but in®delity was not a term which could be used of him with any justice. `It was his profound Evangelical heart,' Scott Holland wrote of him, `which made all that he taught us intellectually become spiritual and religious in its effect.'317 Green's successors took his philosophical professionalism a stage further, and gradually the agonizing over religious doubts fell away. Mrs Humphry Ward's account of those agonies had formed the theme of her most successful novel, Robert Elsmere (1888); but when she returned to it in The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), the sales for which her publishers had hoped were nowhere near realized.318 For this relief from the uncertainties of T. H. Green's day the academic grove paid a price. The more perceptive of the next generation came to see that, as the doubts had declined, so had some of the high achievement and intense social concern characteristic of the doubters. `Why,' asked J. M. Keynes in 1944, `can an age only be great if it believes, or at least is bred up in believing, what is preposterous?'319 The excitement aroused by abolition of the test soon subsided. How far Pater's brief ascendancy increased the incidence of homosexual inclinations and practices in Oxford must remain uncertain, if only because of the change in sensibilities during our century: we are not reliable in interpreting the records of male friendships among the Victorians.320 For a short time Oxford's `aestheticism' generated much smoke: this is not convincing evidence that it enlarged the ®re. Wilde was not an active homosexual at Oxford:321 315 Robert Elsmere, ii. 472; [Julia Wedgwood], `The Moral In¯uence of George Eliot', Contemporary Review, xxxix (Feb. 1881), 183; F. W. H. Myers, Essays Modern (1883), 268±9. 316 J. Morley, Gladstone (1903), iii. 471; Bryce to A. V. Dicey, 14 Nov. 1913: Bodl. Bryce. MSS 4 fos 59±60; Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926), 143; Edwardian Youth, 248. Mrs Humphry Ward was struck (A Writer's Recollections n. 158, 133±4) by J. H. Newman not having known whether Britain had `too many drink-shops' or too few: J. H. N. to his brother Francis, `End Oct. 1867': LDN, xxiii. 363. Cf. John Percival's sermon, Trinity College (c.1885): O. F. Christie, Clifton School Days (1930), 23±4. See also pp. 109±10, 241±2, 641±2 below. Thomas Chalmers, and other natural theologians, had assumed `the balancing of moral accounts in the hereafter': Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (n. 158), 110. 317 H. Scott Holland, A Bundle of Memories (1915), 145. 318 John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (1990), 315±17. 319 Obituary, Mary Paley Marshall (1850±1944): Economic Journal, 54 (June±Sept. 1944), 270. Keynes's father, John Neville Keynes (1852±1949), had been `bred up' in the same tradition as Mrs Marshall. 320 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980), 287±8. It was heterosexual improprieties which caused successive Proctors most worry during the 1870s: Pt 1, 280±1. For Pusey's concern over these see n. 107 above. 321 Ellmann (n. 188), 259, 261; Green, Lincoln, 494 (Pattison's diary, 2 May 1881). In Rhoda Broughton (n. 194), it is the girl who is advised not to take tea with Chaloner (Wilde).

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Pater never seems to have been one at all.322 He made his peace with the Church when Marius the Epicurean was published in 1885. ```Aestheticism'' was a very ephemeral movement here, as elsewhere,' an Oriel tutor wrote in the later 1880s; `just now Oxford . . . is in a far sterner mood, girding itself to try to ®nd an answer to the problems of democracy and socialism.'323 The prophetic books for that Oxford, both posthumously published, were Arnold Toynbee's strikingly titled Industrial Revolution and T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics. `It is no time,' Green had written in the latter, `to enjoy the pleasures of eye and ear.'324 By blessing Darwinism in his 1884 Bampton Lectures Frederick Temple provided an of®cial con®rmation that Oxford men, in discussing the Christian faith, could be expected to take the scienti®c developments of the last twenty-®ve years into account.325 That position was taken by a prelate who was soon to be Bishop of London (and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury); but Temple had once contributed to Essays and Reviews. More striking perhaps is a private statement made two years earlier by the Christ Church don who had written so contemptuously in the 1860s about Oxford's liberals and `intellect's proud ¯ag'. In 1882 C. L. Dodgson wrote: I am a member of the English Church, and have taken Deacon's Orders. My dear father was . . . a `High Churchman', and I naturally adopted those views, but have always felt repelled by the yet higher development called `Ritualism' . . . I doubt if I am fully a `High Churchman' now. . . More and more, as I read of the Christian religion, as Christ preached it, I stand amazed at the forms men have given to it, and the ®ctitious barriers they have built up between themselves and their brethren.326

Greats recovered quickly from the attacks on `in®del teaching'. Between 1880±4 and 1885±9 honours awarded in it rose more than twice as fast as those in History. By 1884 even J. W. Burgon, who was an intemperate and outspoken High Churchman, had realized that its hold on Oxford's best honours men could not be broken. He therefore made a last-ditch attempt to stop the contamination spreading among the women in the two new Halls, Somerville and Lady Margaret. In a sermon preached in Oxford that year he held up as models `our modest mothers in their sweet innocence of . . . a 322 Pater, ed. R. M. Seiler (Calgary, 1987), xxx; R. Dellamora, Masculine Desire (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 148±9; A. C. Benson, Pater (1906), 25±6, 188. Jowett congratulated Pater on Plato and Platonism (1893): Benson, Pater, 54. 323 The Revd Arthur Gray Butler (1831±1909), contributing to William Knight (n. 197), 336 n. 1. 324 Toynbee died, Mar. 1883, The Industrial Revolution being published by his widow (memoir by Jowett) in 1884; T. H. Green died, Mar. 1882, Prolegomena to Ethics (quotation from pp. 291±2), ed. A. C. Bradley, being published in 1883. 325 The Relations between Religion and Science (1885). 326 Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll (1995), 374. See also L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal (1877), 63.

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creedless Philosophy'.327 Stubbs left for the bishopric of Chester in the same year: his successors in the Regius Chair were far from being bishops in embryo. By the end of the 1880s two of the originators of the inter-collegiate lecturing in modern history had also been marked out for bishoprics: they too differed from later history tutors and lecturers.328 Lord Braye told the Pope in April 1883 that fears about Roman Catholic students being corrupted by Oxford had been exaggerated. `Only a fraction of undergraduates,' he said, `attended the lectures of modernists, or went near Balliol.' The majority wanted only to pass their exams `or spent their time in sport'.329 Two years later the Jesuit Father who edited The Month wrote that at Oxford `the abolition of Tests, [and] the admission of all forms of Dissent, Judaism, [and] Paganism, tend to establish that sort of truce which men are almost compelled to make who differ in ®rst principles.'330 By then Oxford had found a place for views of many kinds. Types of Ethical Theory by the leading Unitarian, James Martineau, was published in 1885. It included a dissection of Plato's ideal rulers calculated to dissuade even Jowett's most fervent disciples from modelling themselves on Platonic `guardians'. `To the preconceived perfection of the whole social organism,' Martineau wrote, in describing the `guardian's' life, `everything is to give way,Ðnot the interests only of the individual, but his character; and, to be a patriot, he must . . . become . . . the liar, the assassin, nay, the stock-breeder, of his country.'331 Three years later Martineau received Oxford's Honorary DCL with Jowett's approval. As it seemed in the end to Evelyn Abbott and Florence Nightingale, Jowett had seen `more in Plato than was really there'.332 It is dif®cult in the face of the successful reforms of the `plastic period' to remember the limits of their effect. The largest factor in controlling the Universities' development between 1871 and 1914 was not the reforms, but the process described in Chapter 23, whereby most of the professional class took to sending their sons to `public schools', whether of the boarding or day-boy variety. By 1900 some three-®fths of Oxford undergraduates came from these schools, which were no longer quite on the model created by Thomas Arnold and admired by Salisbury and Harrowby. Arnold had wanted boys to mature quickly: they were to leave school knowing their 327

Greats by 23.3%, History by 11%: Pt 1, Table 11.A1; J. W. Burgon, To Educate Young Women like Young Men and with Young Men,Ða Thing Inexpedient and Immodest, sermon, New College, 8 June 1884 (1884), 19. Burgon wished to prevent the statute, adopted on 29 Apr. 1884 (see pp. 256±7 below), from being extended to Greats. For his sermon see also pp. 252±3 below. 328 Mandell Creighton, Bishop of Peterborough 1891, London 1897; E. S. Talbot, Bishop of Rochester 1895, Southwark 1905, Winchester 1911. 329 Lord Braye, Fewness of My Days (1927), 269; V. A. McClelland, English Roman Catholics and Higher Education, 1830±1903 (1973), 337. Lord Braye had joined the Roman Church in 1870, four years after entering Christ Church as an undergraduate. 330 The editor was Richard Clarke: McClelland, ibid. 355. 331 James Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (2 vols 1885), i. 106±7. 332 Quinn and Prest, xxxiv, 309.

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public duty as Christians and commanding the inner discipline to ful®l it. Fifty years later the aims had been adapted. The more intellectual pedagogues now stayed in Oxford, while most of those who ran the public schools had deserted Evangelicalism and absorbed Darwin's message. To this generation of schoolmasters `boyishness' seemed natural and not to be discouraged. Team games were cultivated: piety had lost any attraction; and the `swot' had become a despised ®gure.333 The various effects on the University of this change are described in Chapter 22. It was one factor working against any dramatic rise in intellectual standards among Oxford's commoners. Family sizes had fallen among professional people; but, even so, the costs of boarding school with the University to follow represented a large burden. The colleges took care not to offend a leading school; and most of them could not afford to turn away respectable applicants whose parents could pay and who might reach degree standard.334 These were the basic determinants of the Oxford depicted in this volume. Nevertheless, the adjustments achieved during Palgrave's `plastic period', limited though they were, transformed the University. By 1880 an Oxford honours graduate who had boarded at a public school had been subjected to two powerful agencies in the creation of a united upper class. Britain's rulers had shown once again their talent for dealing with social change by assimilation. The college system put Oxford's tutors into a position to mould various future members of their country's eÂlite. Tutorial in¯uence was often enhanced by being exercised unconsciously. In 1893 even Balliol modi®ed the Jowett tradition, and made a gesture towards research, by electing Caird to the mastership.335 In the reaction against yesterday's clerical Oxford very few tutors pressed doctrines on their undergraduates.336 Yet in one way or another they left their mark on those who led late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Some Greats tutors were Idealists in the strictly philosophical sense; but T. H. Green's followers were spread over many subjects. They all saw measures of social reform as steps towards a moral and spiritual ideal.337 They were as hostile to `materialism' as their clerical predecessors had been. 333 John Tosh, `The Making of Masculinities', The Men's Share?, ed. A. V. John and C. Eustance (1997), 47±8. 334 See pp. 124±5, 792±3, 857±8 below. 335 J. W. Mackail, Strachan-Davidson (1925), 54. For a general discussion of the theme see Reba Soffer, `The Modern University and National Values, 1850±1930', Historical Research, 60 (1987), 166±87. 336 In R. L. Nettleship, Balliol philosophy tutor, 1872±1892, who edited T. H. Green's papers, reluctance to dogmatize reached an extreme point. `I remember,' H. H. Asquith wrote, `a strenuous Scotch undergraduate . . . saying to him . . . ``Mr. Nettleship, don't you think it is the duty of a tutor of this college to make up his mind?''': H. H. Asquith to Margot Tennant, 10 Aug. 1891, Bold MS. Eng. c. 6685, fo. 45. 337 Jose Harris, `Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870±1940: an Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy', Past and Present, 135 (1992), 116±41.

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Early in Plato's Republic the aged Cephalus says that, having enough for his needs and obligations, he is content with less wealth than his grandfather once had.338 Plato's late Victorian admirers, like Plato himself, thought that a commendable attitude. They were doubtful about any study which might smack of avarice. The reforms mentioned at the start of this chapter helped to give Oxford an infusion of fresh blood. One of the early `toshers' was a 27-year-old Canadian, G. R. Parkin, who will be encountered again in Chapter 29.339 His maiden speech in the Union impressed two of its best-known Balliol membersÐa Nonconformist from the City of London School, H. H. Asquith, and Alfred Milner, who was half-German and had been educated largely at TuÈbingen. All three became Union of®cers, Asquith and Milner both reaching the presidency although their Liberalism was the creed of a minority.340 Milner later recalled the `exciting atmosphere' and `stirring life' of the Oxford he had known as an undergraduate. `One felt oneself,' Parkin wrote, `in the midst of currents of thought which were in¯uencing the world wherever the English language was spoken.'341 This change to a more open Oxford, and one of higher standing, was re¯ected in popular novelsÐsigni®cant indicators, for all their absurdities. The college tutor ceased to be depicted as a classical pedant heading towards a rectory and became a dashing ®gure. In Christ Church Days (1867) Mr Courtenay, `the tutor and Censor', is pious and conscientious, but at least one of his undergraduates needs, besides his help, that of `three coaches' (for Greek, Latin, and Euclid respectively).342 Fifteen years later Herman Merivale painted Faucit of Balliol in very different colours. Faucit's academic prowess is matched by marvellous performances on the river. He is reckoned `the best lecturer and the jolliest don in the place, and as good a fellow with the men of other colleges as he is with his own'. His `magni®cent energy' is part of a `strong, sweet nature . . . Pupils of his could never fail to catch the infection.'343 338

Republic, i. 330 b. See John Willison, Sir George Parkin (1929), 31±2. H. H. Asquith (Earl of Oxford), Memories and Re¯ections (2 vols 1928), i. 20. Jowett thought the undergraduates at the Union's Jubilee banquet (22 Oct. 1873) `fearfully High Church and Conservative': Quinn and Prest, 248. See Verbatim Report: Bodl. Gough Adds Oxon 88 124.26. Another Nonconformist, R. F. Horton (n. 310 above), became Union President in 1877. 341 E. Wrench, Milner (1958), 41. See also the quotation in Basil Williams's article on Milner in the DNB. Willison (n. 339), 28 (Parkin's narrative). 342 [The Revd Frederick Arnold], Christ Church Days (2 vols 1867), i. 100, 125, 246. Winwood Reade, Liberty Hall, Oxon (1860) gives a very hostile view of the University: Mortimer Proctor, English University Novel (1957), 3. 343 Faucit of Balliol (3rd edn, 3 vols 1882), i. 16, 95. In 1867 two fellows (Mandell Creighton and T. L. Papillon) rowed in the Merton eight: Mandell Creighton (n. 78), i.52. Even in Tyrwhitt's High Church novel, 1880 (see nn. 205±7), the tutors represent `a new sort of don to appear in ®ction': Mortimer Proctor (n. 342), 122±3. Dons were to be depicted favourably for 339 340

64

`a secularized university'?

Clearly the Oxford of the 1882 statutes faced problems which did not ®t with Merivale's story. When the college tutors had been laicized and given Oxford careers, few of them were likely to be young enough at any one time to exhibit prowess on the river.344 A recognition that the Selborne Commission worked effectively carries no implication that once the new statutes had been adopted Oxford's better-advertised defects had all been removed. Any feature of the system which was acceptable to a majority in Parliament or in Oxford was left undisturbed.345 The authors of the 1854 reform had intended to con®ne Congregation to those engaged in academic teaching or study, since all other MAs could make their views felt through Convocation. A successful Conservative amendment had, however, given Congregation votes to virtually all the clergy of the Oxford parishes.346 By the Commissioners' time the agitation to oust these voters had died down. Conservatives did not want a change which would reduce the Church's in¯uence and some Liberal MPs had shown that they were not anxious for a legislative body consisting entirely of academics; so Congregation was not restricted to the academics until 1912, and even then the rights of the existing non-academic members were safeguarded.347 The most damaging of the University's de®ciencies from a modern viewpoint hardly came within the Commissioners' remit, since eliminating it did not depend on the exercise of their powers. The pressure on Oxford by 1870 to establish a multi-subject entrance exam with a science component was not effective. The resulting distortion of the schooling pattern away from science and modern studies, and towards premature specialization in classics, was serious and long-lasting. Between 1850 and 1914 a series of worthies stretching from the Prince Consort to Gore, Percival, and Curzon tried to counter this distortion.348 None succeeded; indeed, as the reform of the grammar schools gathered pace, the malign effects of Oxford's `compulsory Greek' several decades. In Horace Bleackley's Une Culotte (1894) a don rescues two foolish girls who have disguised themselves as young men: Proctor, 73±4. 344 UOC (1877), Q 2078 (Bradley). See the comparison, in ages of college tutors, between 1874 and 1900 in Engel 294. 345 See the Commission's Statement, 26 Apr. 1878. Transfer to the University of `the whole, or the chief part of the teaching work now done by the colleges' is ruled out in Section I A: Gazette, viii. 341±4. 346 PP 1854, v. 294 (cl. 16); Parl. Deb., 11 May 1854, cxxxiii. 190±200; 17 and 18 Vict. c. 81, cl. 16; SCOC (1867), Qs 296, 301, 303 (Roundell), 1175 (Liddell), 1552±60 (W. L. Newman), 2411 (Jowett), 3077 (Scott); Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 10. 347 Parl. Deb. 9 Mar. 1876, ccxxvii. 1689, 1700; 3 May 1877, ccxxxiv. 285±96; 4 June 1877, ibid. 1240±2; The Twentieth Century, 27, 31. 348 N. Ball, `Education for Life: Plans for Wellington College', Journal of Educational Administration and History, Jan. 1980, 18±24; D. Newsome, History of Wellington College (1959), 75; J. A. Froude (n. 26), 335±42; Parl. Deb., 24 Feb. 1876, ccxxvii. 803 (Duke of Devonshire). For the Edwardian reformers, and effective pressure on Oxford by Eton in 1914, see pp. 564, 630±1, 836±7, 857±8 below.

a `plastic structure'

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and preponderance of classical scholarships may have actually increased, despite all the countervailing efforts of London, Manchester, and the new university colleges to exploit the opening which Oxonian intransigence had given them.349 The injury seems to have been more serious for the schools than for Oxford itself. As Chapter 20 shows, the University's comparatively stiff requirement in Greek (which endured until 1920) constituted only one element in the complex reasons for Cambridge's lead in science by the turn of the century. There were, as always, excuses for Oxford in the entrance examination issue. As the weaker colleges feared that any such obstacle to entrance might impede them from ®lling their rooms, it was dif®cult for the Hebdomadal Council to do more in the 1870s than support the new Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, while the stronger colleges increased the pressure on their men to take Responsions before they came up.350 Beneath such reasons for inaction lay the fundamental one: the culture of Oxford was ®xed in a rigid classical mould. It took a man of exceptional imagination and ability to break through that mould. Arnold Toynbee achieved this; but he might not have done so had his health and family circumstances allowed him to reach the classical sixth of a public school.351 As some abortive proceedings in 1879±80 showed, the years of extolling the classics as the essential educational instrument had been all too effective. The offer to drop compulsory Greek for scientists, while retaining it for all others, was rejected. To the Wayn¯ete Professor of Chemistry this looked like a scheme designed to brand a scientist `to all the world [as] a man who had received an illiberal education'.352 In this view he had the support of the President of the Royal Society, a Balliol star of the 1840s. Jowett's statements to the Devonshire and Selborne Commissions about his wish to see engineering studied in Oxford do not seem to have been reechoed in his private letters. In September 1874 he told Lewis Campbell: `We have the battle of the classics always to ®ght against the aesthetic and scienti®c tendencies of the age.' Ten years later, when he was Vice-Chancellor, he repeated: `All those . . . entrusted with the care of ancient studies have a hard battle to ®ght against the physical sciences which are everywhere 349 W. H. G. Armytage, Civic Universities (1955), 219±22; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 290. Manchester achieved university status in 1880. Oxford was not the only offender; the Prince Consort's plans for Wellington College were frustrated by a Cambridge classic, E. W. Benson: David Williams, Genesis and Exodus (1979), 17. For the `classical side's' syllabus at Dulwich College, c.1882±92, see G. E. Moore's `Autobiography': The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schlipp (3rd edn 1968), 5. Moore wrote in 1942. 350 See pt. 1, 356±7 below. 351 When he was 13 he suffered a head injury and his father died soon afterwards: A. Kadish, Apostle Arnold (Durham, NC 1986), 13±14. 352 The Times, 23 May 1879, 9d, e, 10e (William Odling). For the continuing saga see pp. 630±1, 837 below.

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encroaching.'353 The alarms of the later 1860s about scienti®c and technological training led to developments of the greatest importance in British higher education; but their impact was smaller in Oxford than almost anywhere else. The University was more than thirty years behind Cambridge in founding a chair in engineering.354 `Jowett's Greats', the course depicted in Chapter 11 which formed the apex of his system, deserved its fame. Salisbury's criticisms of it have long been forgotten, but a very different one may still be advanced. This is that the embryo politicians, civil servants, and professional men of the 1870s would have bene®ted from some systematic instruction about the world in which they hoped to operate. The Union debates and the rest of the `informal curriculum' gave them something, and they would pick up a good deal during their political or of®cial apprenticeships; but despite this the overwhelming strength of Oxford's classical tradition and the fear of contemporary studies had left them with gaps in their equipment.355 To have modernized Greats philosophy was not enough. From April 1908 to December 1916 one of the leading Greats men from Jowett's prime was Britain's Prime Minister. In mental equipment few statesmen have equalled H. H. Asquith; but he might have been even more impressive had he known as much about his own country, and the others with which he dealt, as he did about the Greece of the ®fth and fourth centuries b c . That theme must be left for the last chapter of this volume. 353 Devonshire Commn, Nov. 1870, Qs 3897, 3936, 3970; UOC (1877), Q 2640. Cf. Jowett, Letters, 190; Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 268; R. L. Archer, Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century (1966; ®rst edn 1921), 42. 354 See pp. 476±9 below. The Cambridge chair was founded in 1875. For Oxford's in¯uence during the 1870s on higher technological education in Britain see Eric Ashby, Technology and the Academics (1958), 62±6. For the university colleges, 1867±98, see W. H. G. Armytage, Civic Universities (1955), ch. 10. 355 Looking back, Asquith recalled (Memories n.340, i. 8±9) that he had learned something of Britain's `modern political history' in the Guildhall Library during his years at the City of London School; but the long historical passage in his Inaugural as Lord Rector of Glasgow University, 11 Jan. 1907, concerns the age of Hadrian.

page

2 From the Cleveland Commission to the Statutes of 1882 c h r i s to p h e r h a rv i e

t h e c l e v e l and com m is s ion With the passing of the Universities Tests Act in 1871, Gladstone's involvement in the politics of Oxford diminished. Attempts by dons, Liberal and Conservative alike, to involve him in the outcome of the Royal Commission into University and college ®nances, which he had set up in October of that year under the Duke of Cleveland, awoke little response.1 Demitting the Liberal leadership on 13 January 1875, almost a year after his government fell on 17 February 1874, Gladstone became preoccupied with his Homeric studies; further stimulated by Schliemann's excavations in Asia Minor, he issued the results of his researches throughout 1876 in the Contemporary Review. Shortly, more urgent news from that quarter was to reactivate his political energies in the Eastern Question agitation. Although he intervened in the Oxford and Cambridge Bill debates in 1877, speaking in favour of Goschen's amendment to remove clerical restrictions on fellowshipsÐthis was narrowly lost, 138 to 147Ðthe fate of Oxford was now marginal to his interests. Gladstone's place was taken by the Chancellor, the Marquess of Salisbury, a ®gure akin to him in Churchmanship and high seriousness, and viewed by Conservatives and Liberals with much the same mixture of con®dence and apprehension. He was the choice of the right in 1869, true, but as a `reading' man, known to be interested in natural science, he had the con®dence of some senior Liberals to whom Gladstone had always seemed baf¯ing and unreliable. Yet, while Gladstone had followed his own line in University affairs, hesitating until the last moment to take tests abolition under the government's wing, Salisbury was a Conservative party man, and was expected to behave as such. This contrast was re¯ected in the correspondence of the two men. Where Gladstone was constantly being adjured to take a principled position on some piece of legislation or theological controversy, the realities of Conservative politics show through most of Salisbury's letters 1

C. S. Roundell to Gladstone, 4 Sept. 1874, BL Add. MS 44444 fo. 243.

67

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`a secularized university'?

from Oxford correspondents dealing with University affairs. Osborne Gordon, his old tutor, wants a Westminster canonry; Montagu Burrows, Chichele Professor of History and the strong man of Oxford Toryism, wants a Foreign Of®ce post for his modestly quali®ed son.2 Six years later Osborne Gordon complains of `the late government taking no notice of me' despite his service on the Selborne Commission, and so on.3 Perhaps as a result of his membership, while still Lord Cranborne MP, of Ewart's Select Committee in 1867, Salisbury had de®nite views on a University reform which would stabilize the system and restrain the growth of the atheistic liberalism which he feared, or the sort of ideas ventilated by the Reform Essayists of 1867; but he was checked by his party at the University. Realizing that it had lost the main battle, Oxford Toryism soon became more concerned to protect and enjoy the clerical patronage that remained than to sustain Salisbury's intelligent but not always consistent strategy. `We have really nothing of our Collegiate system round which we can rally,' Edward Woollcombe wrote to him from Balliol in 1871, `and upon which we can build in time to come.'4 Yet such expressions of despair overestimated the Liberal triumph. The winners had their problems, in that the solution of the tests issue, around which all their energies had been concentrated, opened up a range of organizational and pedagogical problems on which Liberal unity could not be maintained and Liberal expertise was lacking. Numbers of undergraduates were rising: 400 had matriculated in 1860, 500 in 1870, boosted by the new class of Unattached students. By 1877 there were 300 of these.5 But was the undergraduate body the right one? `We are now obliged to keep ourselves full', Bartholomew Price of Pembroke had told the Ewart Committee in 1867, `and sometimes we are obliged to take almost idiots', while Thomas Fowler of Lincoln remarked that it would require a very wide extension of the term indeed to say that a passman acquired an education at all.6 This was while the demand for higher education in provincial cities and for middle-class women was energetically being voiced, and even acted upon, with Balliol, now at last with Jowett de jure as well as de facto its Master, making its ®rst grants to Bristol in 1872.7 Charles Roundell had told Ewart's Committee that he guessed the combined income of University and colleges to be in the region of £500,000 plus per year, and 2 Osborne Gordon to Salisbury, 26 Jan. 1875, Burrows to Salisbury, 23 July 1879; Salisbury MSS, Hat®eld House. 3 Osborne Gordon to Salisbury, 29 Aug. 1881, Salisbury MSS. For this complaint see also n. 105 below. 4 Woollcombe to Salisbury, 5 June 1871, Salisbury MSS. For Essays on Reform (1867), see Pt 1, 726±7. 5 UOC (1877), Q. 2577. See pp 197±8. 6 SCOC (1867), Qs 2217 (Price); 2319 (Fowler). 7 Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 61.

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that much of this growing revenue was going on prize fellowships. Merton's fellowships, having fallen by six to eighteen after the 1854 Commission, were now back to twenty-four. He took that to be `typical . . . of what is going on in other colleges', and, moreover, argued that the solution of using fellowships to promote new studies would be `a dead letter'.8 Although Cranborne (as Salisbury was then) voted with the Conservative and `clerical Liberal' majority on the committee against a further enquiry into college income, these two points were not lost on him.9 It was evident as early as 1868 that the Liberals' unity was wearing thin. In that year Roundell and the Oxford reformers had wanted a bill carrying, besides the abolition of tests, various detailed measures affecting college and University governmentÐthe more drastic among them being buoyed up by Mark Pattison's Suggestions on Academical Organisation, which had just appeared. They were sharply brought to heel by Henry Fawcett, who was both the leading Cambridge Liberal and, since 1865, a radical MP. Such a measure, he argued, would detract from the main campaign against the tests. But in 1871 the position was reversed. Just after tests abolition was ®nally carried Gladstone promised a ®nancial enquiry, and Fawcett presented a Cambridge petition against it: such a step would be `productive of much delay and postpone unnecessarily the full consideration of these reforms to which such an enquiry could only be regarded as a preliminary'. Instead, the petitioners demanded an executive commission `with power, in conjunction with the University and the several colleges, to frame statutes for those bodies'.10 Fawcett's motives were twofold: ®rst, to get reform through before the Gladstone government (already looking shaky, not least because of his own agitational efforts) collapsed, second, to interdict the pressure which was building up among his erstwhile allies for a fundamental shift towards University organization and a teaching and researching professoriate.11 Coleridge advised Gladstone that a ®nancial inquiry would have to precede an executive commission, but that he might `empower the commission which is to inquire into the ®nances to make recommendations also as to their application'.12 Legislation would be needed to end College Visitors' vetoes on statute reform and to alter the terms of trusts and closed scholarships, but it would be necessary to gauge the dimensions of the ®nancial situation before any successful alteration in the university±college balance could be made. Sir Benjamin Brodie had told the Ewart Committee that, in relation to enlarging and remunerating the professoriate, `not above one half' 8 9 10 11 12

SCOC (1867), Qs 262, 263. Ibid. viii (proceedings of 31 July 1867). Petition, n.d., enclosed in BL Add. MS 44138, J. D. Coleridge to Gladstone, 11 Dec. 1871. See Leslie Stephen, The Life of Henry Fawcett (1885), 114±15. Coleridge to Gladstone, 11 Dec. 1871, BL Add. MS 44138 fos 126±7.

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of what had been provided for in the ordinances of the 1854 executive commission had been achieved.13 The implication was that other reform proposals, not backed up by accurate information, would share the same fate. In the event the new Commission was so heavily weighted in favour of expertise in landownership and ®nance that detailed inquiry into university government was ruled out, at least in the case of Oxford. The chairman, Cleveland (Eton and Oriel), was an elderly, obscure Duke who owned 100,000 acres in nine counties. He was ¯anked by the twentieth Baron Clinton (Eton and Christ Church) and Lord Frederick Cavendish MP (Trinity, Cambridge), younger son of the Duke of Devonshire and husband of Mrs Gladstone's niece. John Strutt (Trinity, Cambridge) was also a substantial landowner, although a distinguished scientist, while Kirkman Hodgson MP, a wealthy banker, had never been to university. There were only two academics, W. H. Bateson of St John's, Cambridge, and `Bat' Price. All, except Clinton and Strutt, were Liberals. The Cleveland Commission was appointed by the Home Secretary, Henry Austin Bruce, on 5 January 1872. Roundell was its secretary and two months later he sent from its London of®ce a circular of enquiry to the ViceChancellor and heads of houses, who had already promised Gladstone full co-operation the previous autumn. The intention behind the circular was to examine property, the charges on it, and the uses to which the pro®ts were put. The ®rst eighteen questions covered external income, inquiring as to property owned and the actual and prospective income from it, the charges to which it was subject, and prospective liabilities. The remaining seven covered internal income from room rents, entrance and graduation fees, annual dues, pro®ts of kitchens, caution funds, and so on. Further letters despatched in March and April covered more detailed aspects of income and payments of professors, and also the halls and the University Press. 1871 was to be used as the test year.14 Apart from its questionnaires, the Commission seems to have conducted most of its business in conclave (although it received evidence from Cambridge relative to speci®c projects of academic reform) and spent most of its time trying to reconstruct college ®nancial accounts on a comprehensive and comparable basis, the landowners presumably double-checking the real property and the two academics the internal income. From a letter of Cleveland's written in 1876 Price seems to have played the leading role in Oxford: `It is to yourself,' the Duke wrote, `that the Commission was indebted for any success in its efforts.'15 The ubiquitous and energetic `Bat', known to millions of children through Lewis Carroll's `Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, / How I wonder what you're at,' had already been 13 14 15

SCOC (1867), Q. 15. RCOC (1872), Pt 2, iii±vii, xi, xiii±xiv; and see above Pt 1, Ch. 12. Cleveland to Price, 7 June 1876: Bartholomew Price MSS, PCA.

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Secretary to the Press Delegates for some years, and was more likely than anyone else in Oxford to bring an element of order into college accounts, `He ought to have been a businessman,' wrote a Pembroke colleague. `He would have built up a huge concern and died a millionaire.'16 College accounts had always been idiosyncratic as to internal income, and were even more tortuous as regards external income. The latter was largely derived from rents on agricultural land which, if linked to prices, ought to have gone up by 25 per cent since the reforms of the 1850s. College property had traditionally been held on `bene®cial leases', granted in a ¯at-rate arrangement, usually for seven years, and topped up by `®nes' at renewal, these latter being equivalent to something like two years' annual value. But there had been a great change since the 1850s and about half was now held on a rackÐor commercialÐrent.17 This was more advantageous to the college in the long term, but in the interim the fellows had to be compensated for the absence of income from ®nes, so money was borrowed for this purpose as well as to improve the estates. The combination of old bene®cial leases, new rack-rent leases, and loan charges created potential confusion. This was overcome by estimating all such `external' income on what the corporate lands held in 1871 would get if rack-rented, less the associated loan-charges: an annual sum of around £260,000. If this brought some logic into the situation, it also underestimated external income from sources other than agricultural land, such as property development (admittedly calculated at only £22,000 in 1871, plus a further £4,700 from house property owned by college trust funds).18 Internal income revealed further problems. The contribution which it made varied greatly from college to college: in Exeter it provided 67 per cent of total disposable income. When the full picture was seen considerable disparities seemed to emerge between what some colleges received from all sources and the service they gave their undergraduates.19 When Cleveland reported in October 1874, Charles Stuart Parker (Balliol) and George Brodrick (Merton) punched the message home, respectively in the Social Science Association and in The Times. Two colleges were credited by the Commission with identical numbers of undergraduates; yet, when external income was added to internal, Christ Church, at £49,000, was shown as enjoying six times the income of Balliol at £8,000: If the work done during recent years by the latter college can be accomplished on so moderate an income, it is too obvious that, however well the estates of the ®rst named college are managed, the revenue from them must, in some way, be misapplied.20 16 17 18 19 20

`Oxford Memories', p. 8, John Mitchinson MSS, PCA. Pt 1, 377±90. Ibid. 379±83, 417, 429. Ibid. 392±3, 414. The Times, 7 Oct. 1874, 9d (second leader).

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The result was an explosive and embarrassing set-to. On 15 October Godfrey Faussett, the Treasurer of Christ Church, protested that the Commission had calculated Christ Church's internal income as gross and Balliol's as net, and had failed to point out that the House's gross income was liable to charges which had nothing to do with the University, such as the cost of running the Deanery (£13,250) and the Canons. If these were taken into account, its income fell from £49,000 to £12,000.21 No sooner had Roundell replied, referring sceptics to the abstracts of college accounts in the Evidence, rather than to the synopses in the Report, than he was assaulted by L. J. Lee, the Bursar of New College, the one college which had refused to ®ll up the Commission's questionnaire. Meanwhile Faussett asked if the tables could not be so constructed as to ful®l the ordinary conditions of a synopsis, why should they have been compiled at all? The relative ef®ciency, not to say conscientiousness, of the College bodies in administering the funds entrusted to them has been called in question, and impressions as mischievous as they are unjust have been fostered in the public mind.22

W. Baillie-Skene, the Estates Bursar of All Souls, then accused the Commission of overestimating the college's annual disbursements to its fellows. Roundell replied brusquely that relations with New College had been broken off because of Lee's `discourteous tone' and Baillie-Skene's All Souls ®gures had been `illegible': `And yet he has the temerity to bring against the members of a public Commission a charge of breach of duty for nonpublication of this slipshod, blurred and hastily jotted scrawl.'23 After another assault from Faussett, Roundell rested his case: The work of the Commission will stand or fall according as it stands the test of a fair and fully informed criticism. The Commissioners, I feel assured, will be content to leave their work to the mature judgement of the two Universities, and especially to that of the College Bursars, to none of whom were they more indebted than Mr Faussett himself.24

But this only brought a broadside from eleven Bursars, more than half the Oxford total. Liberal and Conservative alike, from the socialistic C. J. Faulkner, William Morris's partner, at University, to the ultra-Tory Washbourne West at Lincoln, they stated, in condemnation, `that important portions of the Report are inaccurate and likely to mislead, and that they will not stand ``the test of a fair and fully-informed criticism'''.25 Then, on 21 21

Ibid. 15 Oct. 1874, 11c. Ibid., 22 Oct., 5f; 26 Oct. 1874, 6f. 23 Ibid., 10 Nov. 6f; 13 Nov. 1874, 5c. For Lee's attitude see J. Buxton and P. Williams (eds), New College (1979), 90. 24 The Times 2 Dec. 1874, 7e. 25 Ibid. 16 Dec. 1874, 9f. 22

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December, G. G. Bradley, the Liberal Master of University, in a sense summed up. He was ¯attering about Roundell's `unfailing courtesy and promptitude' but he pointed out for instance that, in the Report, University's payments to its fellows were given as £270 per annum `exclusive of allowance for rooms'. When the College had vetted the draft this rubric had not been present, rooms being included in the £270 per annum.26 This was enough. Roundell may have let things slide from being distracted by getting married, and building a large country house in Sussex (Oeborne, near Haslemere), a venture which at least indicated a faith in agricultural incomes. The Cleveland report, articulated by him, sounded closer to ideology than statistics, and perhaps the most persistent of the University Liberals of the 1860s left the scene for six years. No one stepped in to defend Roundell, despite an appeal to Cleveland and, through him, Price; which suggests that 1874 may have been a year when Oxford, like the country as a whole, lost patience with Liberalism in general, and the `young monkeys at Balliol' in particular.27 In February 1874 the Conservatives gained real power for the ®rst time in thirty-three years, and ripples of this Liberal setback reached Oxford. In August, despite vehement Liberal protests, the `clerical' college of Hertford received statutory recognition; and in October, when the Cleveland Report was published, the Liberals were faced with the prospect of a reform sponsored by a Conservative government.28

l o r d s a l i s b u ry le g i s l at e s In Easter Term 1873, over a year before Cleveland reported, the Hebdomadal Council, which had now a fairly secure 11 to 9 Liberal majority, created a Committee `to consider the questions connected with the extension and better endowment of the Professoriate'.29 The six Boards of Studies created by the Council to supervise the new honours syllabus were questioned about staf®ng requirements, and their replies were circulated in May 1874. In Michaelmas Term 1874, after Cleveland, the Colleges were asked how much they were prepared to contribute towards this, with generally negative results; but early in 1875 an estimate of requirements for new University buildings and restorations was presented to Council, a report being published on 8 June. Finally, in 1876±7 when a Commission was imminent, further enquiries were made so that all University needs for new posts, professorial salary increases, and buildings might be listed, the outcome 26

Ibid. 21 Dec. 1874, 6f. Cleveland to Price (enclosing Cleveland to Roundell) 18 Dec. 1874, Price MSS; and see Freeman to Bryce, 20 Oct. 1867, Bryce MSS, Bodleian Library. 28 See pp. 117±19 below. Convocation voted for the Hertford College Bill (2 June 1874) by 122 votes to 31. 29 Statement of the Requirements of the University adopted by the Hebdomadal Council on the 19th of March 1877 (1877), 2±4. This passage gives a convenient summary of the successive developments from 1873 to 1877. 27

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being published on 24 April 1877. It was estimated that capital expenditure of £109,300 would be required, in addition to some fourteen professors and eighteen readers. Even excluding demonstrators and lecturers, this promised an annual expenditure of not less than £15,600. Despite the evident reluctance of the colleges to contribute, the resulting annual charges of around £20,000, although huge in comparison with University revenues of only £32,000, seemed minimal when set against college revenues which (even allowing for Cleveland's mistakes) gave £30,543 to heads of houses and £101,171 to 332 college fellows (or an average of £305 per annum).30 In faraway Toronto, Goldwin Smith read Cleveland and regretted that Gladstone had not got a move on and legislated in the previous session; in Oxford, Jowett was guiltily relieved that the Liberals were no longer in power.31 Too much interest in college landowning practices might have served as a red rag to the radical bull, not to speak of his old friend Robert Lowe, who had strong views about endowmentsÐ`throw them awayÐanywhereÐinto the sea!' Yet Jowett must have viewed with some concern Cleveland's impact on the University's Chancellor, now Secretary of State for India. Salisbury had always been beleaguered in Oxford; now, although he was yoked to a premier he distrusted, he could command a parliamentary majority. What would he do?32 Apprehensive about this but armed with some notion of University requirements, the Liberals made the ®rst move. In January 1875 Dean Liddell of Christ Church was roused and chaired a meeting of thirteen Liberals, including Jowett, `Bat' Price, Henry Acland, and Henry SmithÐ though not Pattison. Smith had been a member of the Devonshire Commission on Scienti®c Instruction since 1870, and was in great part responsible for its survey of the universities.33 He could at least be reassuring to some degree about Salisbury, who had been very positive about research in his evidence to Devonshire, but Salisbury was leery about committing himself: `I think myself it is quite possible that we shall propose to legislate,' he wrote to Acland, `[but] any interference at the instance of one party only would be fatal to the peace of the University.'34 Less than six weeks later a coalition of twenty-three Tories and High Churchmen (some of whom, like H. P. Liddon and Warden Talbot of Keble, were Gladstonians in national politics) petitioned in favour of such traditional Liberal aims as an enlarged professoriate, better salaries for University teachers, and more money for research. 30

See RCOC (1872), Report, 34. Goldwin Smith to Gladstone, 20 Oct. 1874, BL Add. MS 44303 fo. 194; Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 121. 32 Lowe quoted by James Bryce in `An Ideal University', Contemporary Review, xlv (June 1884), 843. For Salisbury's evidence to the Devonshire Commn see Ch. 1 nn. 67, 280. 33 See Ch. 1, n. 280. The Third Devonshire Report, on universities, was signed on 1 Aug. 1873, the Eighth, and last, on 18 June 1875. 34 Salisbury to Acland, 3 Feb. 1875, Bodl. MS Acland d. 74, fos 46±7. 31

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But they also requested more scholarships for `poor students', limitations on the powers of colleges to change their statutes (Balliol had done so, quite drastically, in 1871), the retention of clerical fellowships, and reductions in the number of non-resident fellows.35 There was no possibility of legislation in 1875. Cleveland had reported far too late in 1874 and parliamentary time was occupied by complex tradeunion and local government bills. But legislation was urgently needed. The troubles of the late 1860s outlined in the last chapter had not gone away. Bonamy Price, Professor of Political Economy, wrote in a pamphlet that `on every side a University career is dwarfening in comparison with the brilliant prospects held out by the endless pursuits spread through the national life.' The true purpose of university life, `the promotion of Research', was being eroded by tutoring for the examination mill.36 His discontent was echoed by a much younger man, Nathan Bodington of Lincoln, who wrote to his father in 1876: `what will come out of the crucible of university reform no one can tell: something I trust which will make the work here a career for life, not a mere temporary affair. Everyone just now seems to be trying to get away from Oxford.'37 A major reason for this urgency was the sheer drudgery of preparing students for examinations. This was wearing down potentially talented scholars like Richard Lewis Nettleship of Balliol and causing others to quit university teaching for masterships at public schools, which were much more highly paid and where the prospect of their own `house' positively encouraged them to get married.38 In May 1875, early in the long saga summarized in Chapter 28, the colonial administrator Sir Bartle Frere told Acland that it was `most disastrousÐI was almost saying disgracefulÐto all parties concerned that it should be so dif®cult for a man to enter the Indian Civil Service without sacri®cing his university career'.39 Such pressures encouraged both liberals and clericals, and by the end of the 1875 session it was apparent that a Bill was imminent. Salisbury cleared his Bill with the Cabinet on 25 January 1876 and on 24 February it was read for the ®rst time in the Lords.40 As drafted it came much closer to the proposals of the Oxford Conservatives than to those of Liddell's Liberals. The 1854 Commissioners had operated to a tight remit prescribed by Parliament. The 1876 Commissioners would have a far greater degree of autonomy in making statutes both for the University and for the colleges. Although colleges were to be given eighteen months in which to 35 Copy of Petition dated 17 Mar. 1875, Salisbury MSS. For Balliol's statutes see above pp. 17±18. 36 Bonamy Price, Oxford Reform (1875), 5. 37 W. H. Draper, Sir Nathan Bodington (1912), 47. 38 Engel, 128. 39 Bartle Frere to H. W. Acland, 12 May 1875, quoted in Atlay, Acland, 359±60. 40 The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, 1866±92, ed. Nancy E. Johnson (1981), p. 260 (entry for 25 Jan. 1876) and see Parl. Deb. 3S cclxxvii. 791±806.

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modify their statutes before the Commissioners would step in, it was obvious that the last word rested with whatever formulae for college government the Commissioners decided to apply, and that the overall approach involved the colleges yielding some ground to the University.41 After a poorly attended Second Reading on 9 March, when the `burden of discussion' was borne, according to Earl Granville, by Oxford's ®rst-class honours men, the Liberals held ®re until the identity of the Commissioners would be revealed, which Salisbury promised to do on 27 March.42 The Commissioners were as Conservative as could be equated with `balance'. The Chairman was certainly a Liberal, Lord Selborne, the previous Lord Chancellor, but he shared Gladstone's Anglo-Catholicism and had, as Roundell Palmer, proved even more reluctant than his master to come to terms with Liberal Oxford in the 1860s. Salisbury virtually blackmailed him into his position: The changes to be made do not involve any political doctrineÐat least they need not and ought not to do so. But each side will suspect the other of trying to work the Commission for its own bene®t . . . If you refuse, I know not where to look. I shall be compelled to take some Chairman with strongly marked `proclivities' and coming from us that leaning must be on the Tory side.43

Of the others, Mountague Bernard, the Chichele Professor of International Law, was another Liberal High Churchman, while Sir Henry Maine, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, was only nominally a Liberal. Mr Justice Grove had the almost unique distinction of being a famous chemist and physicist as well as a lawyer. Lord Redesdale and Matthew White Ridley MP were Tories, as were the two Secretaries, T. Vere Bayne and the Public Orator T. F. Dallin. The last regarded himself as being acceptable to `the other side'.44 De®nitely unacceptable was J. W. Burgon, an energetic High Church propagandist (whose line on Petra, `a rose-red city, half as old as time', remains the only thing out of an Oxford prize poem that anyone can remember). C. H. O. Daniel, then Bursar of Worcester, wrote to the Chancellor that he did not think `Dr Burgon's friendsÐI have myself the pleasure of his acquaintanceÐwould claim for him the quality of temperate judgement.'45 Burgon was a disastrous choice, as prejudiced against Liberal Oxford as it was against him. It re¯ected a certain naõÈvete on the Chancellor's part to have got as far as nominating him. Nevertheless Salisbury got the full slate carried (60 to 30) on 31 March, defeated an amendment of Granville's which would have come close to abolishing clerical fellowships (57 to 40), 41

Ibid. 1700. Hardy, Diary, 267 (entry for 23 Mar.). 43 Salisbury to Selborne, 8 Mar. 1876, Selborne MSS 1866 fos 201±2, LPL. 44 Dallin to Salisbury, 14 Feb. 1876, Salisbury MSS. 45 Daniel to Salisbury, 31 Mar. 1876, Salisbury MSS. Both Burgon and Daniel were in holy orders. 42

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and defended clerical headships, 55 to 44.46 The bill passed the Lords on 5 May, and three days later Gathorne Hardy introduced it in the Commons, where on 16 May it was joined by a cognate measure for Cambridge, with a much more acceptable list of Commissioners.47 The Commons debate must have brought much satisfaction to Salisbury as he sat in the Peers' Gallery. The Conservatives had only to keep quiet and watch the opposition tear itself apart. Robert Lowe assaulted endowments, and Sir Charles Dilke, George Goschen, and Sir William Harcourt, from left, right, and centre of the Liberals, defended prize fellowships and poured scorn on the endowment of research and professorial instruction, while Mountstuart Grant Duff, well-meaning but lightweight, played into the hands of the philistines by quoting Max MuÈller to the effect that `no less than seven additional professorships would be needed to form a real school of Comparative Philology.' The Commons con®rmed the Commissioners, Burgon et al.48 More worrying was the fact that the Bill had not been given priority and not enough time remained for the Committee stage. It was withdrawn on 31 July. By this date some of the lines on which the Commission would have to work were reasonably clear. The question of clerical restrictions on fellowships was bound to prove very controversial. By contrast, there would be general support in both Oxford and Westminster for reducing the colleges' expenditure on items such as prize fellowships. That would allow enough to be extracted from them to prevent a breakdown in those services which could be provided only by the University itself. This process would not entail weakening the powerful position of the fellows who also held college tutorships; and, as the proceedings since January 1873 showed, it would arouse little objection from either the Liberals or the Church interest.49 To go beyond this, and take honours teaching away from the colleges, would be both politically and organizationally impracticable. The small band who yearned for such a radical development were able and articulate; but a Commission with the will and authority to enforce a massive transfer of funds, or to turn the colleges (on Pattison's plan) into specialized departments, was hardly on the cards; and there were as many radical plans as radicals.50 Their common feature was an invitation to the forthcoming 46 A `clerical fellowship' denoted in the 1870s not one actually held, but one which had to be held, by a clergyman. The Archbishop of Canterbury and ®ve bishops had voted for allowing the possibility of lay heads of colleges, and on 2 May Salisbury yielded to this: Parl. Deb. ccxxviii. 1950. 47 Parl. Deb. ccxxix. 101±2; 204; 774. For the Bill as it reached the Commons see PP 1876 vii. 511±26. 48 Parl. Deb. ccxxix. 1713±1750. 49 Ibid. ccxxviii. 796±7 (Salisbury) 50 See, for example, R. Laing, Some Dreams of a Constitution-monger: A Paper on University and College Reforms (1876).

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Commissioners to march into at least one of the surrounding mine®elds. Not all of the radical Utopias were forward-looking. Thomas Fowler wanted (as the Commission soon learned) to lessen the grind of honours examinations by forbidding tutors to take tutorials: they were to revert to the functions ful®lled by their predecessors `thirty or thirty-®ve years ago'.51 While some Liberal commentators therefore wished to extend Salisbury's plans drastically, they did not dismiss his Bill out of hand. James Bryce, Regius Professor of Civil Law, wrote in the Fortnightly Review that it was `a creditable instance of the willingness of English statesmen to accept accomplished facts and treat them as a point of departure of further reforms'.52 But he insisted that the adumbration of plans for the University ought to take precedence: `For till it is settled what shall be the number, the duties, the emoluments of the University teachers . . . it would be impossible to determine how many tutors or lecturers are wanted in each college.'53 This could be accomplished by a brief preliminary enquiry lasting for six months and involving about twenty sittings, producing a report which could serve as an agenda for the executive commission. Salisbury consulted on the details of the Bill with the Hebdomadal Council and the colleges, whose prevailing lineÐfar more conservative than Bryce'sÐwas for purely collegiate reforms to be carried out without reference to the University (thirteen out of twenty colleges), and for laicization of headships to be included in the remit of the Commissioners (which gained the support of twelve). There was also a general feeling that the expected duration of the Commission was too long.54 Salisbury was also able to resolve another problem: Burgon. In defence of his collegiate ideal, Burgon had launched a series of charges against lodging-house keepers, accusing them of employing servant girls with dubious backgrounds who would corrupt undergraduates. Regarding the Oxford Commission as needing `strength without expansion', Gathorne Hardy wrote to Salisbury suggesting tactfully that Burgon be dropped. Burgon went, though not quietly.55 Combined with the Cambridge measure, Hardy reintroduced the Bill in the Commons on 10 February 1877. The Second Reading on 20 February was `a scrambling talk' but the Bill got through to Committee, with a modi®ed list of Commissioners. Salisbury replaced Maine, who had gone to Cambridge as Master of Trinity Hall, by Henry Smith of Corpus, Professor of Geometry and a more reputable Liberal, and Burgon by President 51

UOC (1877), Q. 1531. James Bryce, `A Few Words on the Oxford University Bill', Fortnightly Review, xix (1 May 1876), 771. 53 Ibid. 773. 54 Memos in University Correspondence, 1877, Salisbury MSS. 55 Hardy, Diary, 298 (entry for 29 Nov. 1876). The Liberals had wanted to substitute `Bat' Price for Burgon: Goschen to Price, 5 May [1876], Price MSS, PCA. 52

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Bellamy of St John's. This promised a good hearing for the claims of science, given Justice Grove's interests and Smith's membership of the Devonshire Commission. There were continual troubles for Hardy in Committee: these ranged from Liberal suspicions that their opponents, in de®ance of a pledge previously given by Salisbury, might try to reintroduce tests for fellowships, to Arthur Balfour forwarding feminist ideas on behalf of his sister Eleanor and her husband Henry Sidgwick.56 On 4 JuneÐ`the House was small and the Opposition whip strong'Ðthe Liberals counterattacked and came near to winning on the abolition of clerical fellowships. Looking more formidable than in 1876, they now had the support of Gladstone, and the narrowness of the vote, 147 to 138, was applauded as a sign of Liberal recovery.57

the selborne commission The Bill became law on 10 August 1877. It authorized the Commissioners to make statutes `enabling or requiring the . . . colleges . . . to make contributions out of their revenues for University purposes, regard being ®rst had to the wants of the several colleges in themselves for educational and other collegiate purposes'. The Hebdomadal Council's anticipatory `Statement of Requirements', published in April and mentioned above,58 provided the agenda when on 22 October the Commissioners held the ®rst of eleven meetings in the Clarendon Hotel at Oxford to interview assorted notables about the requirements of the University: their ®rst steps on a road which was to prove gruellingly hard. Salisbury had assured Selborne that the work was unlikely to be too heavy and that he would have Maine as an ef®cient legal deputy.59 Selborne did not get his deputy, and the Commission's activities were punishing. There were 15 meetings in what was left of 1877, 34 in 1878, 49 in 1879, 88 in 1880, and 37 in 1881. By the end of 1883 Smith, Dallin, and Bernard were dead, and the `overwork and lack of exercise' cited to explain Smith's death at 57 probably owed much to his Commission commitments.60 Redesdale, albeit 81, died in 1886. Ridley and Bellamy, who were less punctilious in their attendance, lived on for years. At the initial sessions the dons who were interviewed, and those who communicated by letter, repeated a good deal of the evidence given to Ewart 56 Hardy, Diary, 307 (entry for 20 Feb. 1877). Leonard Courtney had tried to obtain access to university exams, and licences for medical practice, for women. Balfour tried to gain them degrees. Parl. Deb. 3 May, 17 May 1877, ccxxxiv. 296±303, 1128±30. 57 Hardy, Diary, 324 (entry for 5 June 1877); Parl. Deb. 4 June 1877, ccxxxiv. 1270. Sect. 59 of the Act was inserted in response to Liberal suspicions about Tests. For Gladstone's argument on 4 June see p. 56 above. 58 See n. 29 above. 59 Salisbury to Selborne, 8 Mar. 1876, Selborne MSS 1866 fo. 202, LPL. 60 C. H. Pearson, `Biographical Sketch' in W. L. Glaisher (ed.), The Collected Mathematical Papers of H. J. S. Smith, (1894), vol. 1, p. xxx. Cf. the Franks Commission which met on 189 days between 28 Apr. 1964 and 26 Mar. 1966; but its members were all resident in Oxford.

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a decade earlier.61 They were, however, more divided than at that time between `university' and `college' partisans. There were fewer complaints than in 1867 about the ineducable passman; private tuition was claimed to have died out; but there was more concern that, in order to `socialize' the undergraduates, too much was being conceded to athletics and the examination mill. According to James Bryce, `Our examination system has quite outrun its original purpose, and is now exericising a pernicious in¯uence on teaching and study.'62 Thomas Fowler echoed him and quoted the German authority, Dr Wiese: Twenty-®ve years ago I found at Oxford much more undisturbed devotion to study, and a real interest in the subjects; at present, go where you like, you will ®nd few men belonging to the University who are not actively or passively engaged in some examination.63

Both agreed that the solution required a professor-based organization, and that the professors were currently very ill-provided for. College lectures were scheduled at prime times and professors' lectures had to be squeezed into awkward hours (where they competed with each other or the claims of the pitch and the river).64 Their of®ces were inadequate, their administrative duties excessive.65 The remedy suggested was compulsory attendance at professors' lectures and an examining role, and the development of an intermediate range of personnel at the reader or research professor level, who could painlessly be attached to existing colleges. This arrangement would yield salaries of £800±£900 a year, enough, given an interesting and less strenuous job, to be an alternative to £1,500 a year as a housemaster at a public school.66 Benjamin Jowett took a predictably different line. He was not against professorships, indeed he thought up three new ones in Classics,67 but he implied that the case for research had been oversold: `there are very few persons quali®ed for carrying it on, and therefore not much money would be required for it.'68 To him the two main problems were to extend the University's reach far beyond Oxford, and to create an alternative career structure for those who used to teach and then go into the Church. For the ®rst: 61 UOC (1877), Pt 1, minutes of evidence (witnesses appearing in person) 23 Oct. 1877 to 25 Feb. 1878, 1±373; supplementary evidence and appendix (written submissions), 374±403; Pt II, certain circulars (replies to questions circulated by the Commissioners), 1±187. The Commission heard many more witnesses than the Ewart Committee. For a notable reversal by Jowett, see p. 48 above. 62 UOC (1877), Q. 1519. 63 Ibid. Q. 1527. 64 Ibid. Q. 1544. 65 Ibid. Qs 1473, 1545. 66 Ibid. Q. 1563. See also Engel, 179±88, for the various plans for readerships. 67 Ibid. Q. 2677. 68 Ibid. Q. 2653.

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`We ought not to allow a great movement to slip entirely out of our hands, and become what I may call a mechanics' institute movement, instead of a real extension of such an education as the University would wish to see given.'69 For the second, he saw the reader as being a superior sort of college tutor, with some University responsibilities, a career structure, and the prospect of a pension. The con¯ict between the positions exempli®ed respectively by Fowler and Jowett was exacerbated by the competition for funding. This tension was lessened by the performance of Alfred Robinson, as Bursar the strong man of a half-reformed New College. He believed that Cleveland had seriously underestimated the likely increase in agricultural rents. They would rise by over £100,000 p.a. by 1900, instead of 1912, as Cleveland had anticipated.70 (This had some basis. Dunbabin shows that college income did in fact rise by 22 per cent between 1871 and 1883).71 If the University's income was managed as well as that of the colleges, Robinson insisted, it should be able to attain all its goals in regard to buildings, professors, etc., without despoiling them. Nevertheless he was prepared to be generous and envisage college funding of more University teaching and a greater role for professors in the colleges, as well as on examining boards and in the University.72 The Commission's formulation of the reforms to be undertaken was published in the Oxford University Gazette on 26 April 1878. This began with a declaration in favour of `the extension and proper endowment of the professoriate', and of many professors becoming, `by virtue of their of®ces, members of the governing bodies of the colleges to which they belong, or from the funds of which their emoluments are derived or augmented'. The Commissioners added, however, that they were `unable to adopt the views of those who would desire to transfer to the University the whole, or the chief part, of the teaching work now done by the colleges'. They recommended, apart from increased stipends for many existing chairs, eight new chairs and nine readerships.73 Pensions, Unattached students, research, extra-mural teaching, and examinations for secondary-school pupils were tidied into an alarmingly comprehensive category E. It was obvious that the colleges were going to be handled with great tact, and their claims as teaching institutions and even as suppliers of prize fellowships respected; but these fellowships were to be made terminable. Taxation for University purposes, and speci®cally for the University readerships, was envisaged as claiming not more than 1.5 per cent of annual college revenue.74 69 70 71 72 73 74

Ibid, Q. 2646. Ibid. Q. 2531. Pt 1, 401 (Table 12.9). Ibid. Qs 2544, 2564. Gazette, 26 Apr. 1878, viii. 341±4. Ibid. 343±4.

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No sooner had the Commissioners returned to their of®ce at No. 5 Craig's Court, off Whitehall, than Grove (who had not attended a single session) resigned. Salisbury plucked Osborne Gordon, once a ®gure of some importance in the Tutors' Association, out of rural obscurity to succeed him. The Commission emerged from time to time for an excursion to Oxford or (innovatively) for joint sessions with their Cambridge colleagues, where they discussed fellowships, married fellows, clerical fellows, and scholarships.75 The bulk of its business would deal with the colleges. By sections 8±10 of the Oxford University Act, their statutes were to be discussed and ®nalized by a joint body of Commissioners and fellows. Colleges were granted until 31 December 1878 to submit `resolutions' for revised statutes for consideration by the Commissioners. Thereafter new statutes would be drawn up by a group consisting of a minimum of four Commissioners, plus two or three members of the governing body, referred to as commissioners but not able to outvote their of®cial counterparts.76 While waiting for college resolutions, the ®rst of which would, of course, act as precedents for subsequent statute drafting, the Commissioners intended to consider whatever proposals for University organization and activities were submitted to them, subject to the fact that, where funding was concerned, they would be able to act only when they had an overall view of the college position. Proposals and memorials soon started to come in. On 20 March 1878 140 Liberal MPs, with Gladstone's support, had sent a memorial in favour of a shorter period of residence, as something which could ease the doubts and purses of middle-class parents, and correspondents pressed for an opinion with regard to the vexed question of medical education.77 In July Merton put forward a scheme for a chair in English Language and Literature, and later in that month Wadham became the ®rst college to submit the resolutions for its new statutes. They were approved by the Commissioners on 8 August. Wadham moved early perhaps because it was a liberal college. Warden Grif®ths was a Liberal and the majority of the fellows seem to have been similarly inclined (the college showed an overall majority for H. J. S. Smith in the Burgess election of November 1878).78 Although Balliol submitted its actual statutes in early March 1879, and consideration of these was brisk, they had already been amended in 1871. Wadham may well have been 75 Oxford University Commissioners under the Act of 1877, Minutes of Meetings, 7 Nov. 1878, 2 July 1879. OUA WP 17/15±16. Gordon was another who hardly outlived the Commission (d. 1883). 76 An Act to make Further Provision respecting the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 40 and 41 Vict. c. 48, sections 8±10. 77 Commissioners' Minutes, 20 Mar. 1878. See Pt 1, 576±8. 78 Minutes, 10, 25 July, and 8 Aug. 1878. Like New College, All Souls, and Merton (see p. 16 above), Wadham had been left by the ®rst reform with no obligation to elect clerical fellows.

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foregrounded by the Commissioners as an example of what a full-scale revision entailed.79 The Wadham draft statutes were considered, the three college commissioners being present, on four days between 21 February and 5 March 1880. They ran to thirty pages and consisted of sixteen clauses. The ®rst seven dealt with the Foundation and its membership: I vested the constitution in the Warden and Fellows, II and III speci®ed the quali®cations, mode of election, and income of each of these, IV applied such criteria to Scholars, V related to (optional) Divine Service, and VI and VII to the Of®cers and Government, powers to make by-laws, and required majorities. The next ®ve concerned ®nance: VIII dealt with trusts founded before 1837, IX with current funds for tuition, exhibitions, pensions, etc., X with the University chair (Experimental Philosophy) which Wadham undertook to ®nance, XI with the building fund, and XII with the management of estates and property. The next four clauses covered the provisions by which the foregoing could be abrogated: XIII through the Visitor, XIV through the University, and XV through the college (i.e. in regard to suspending fellowships). Clause XVI repealed all the existing statutes. The fate of the headship, which at Wadham had £1,400 settled on it, was symbolic of the course taken by an otherwise rather conservative body of Commissioners. What had been, save at Merton, a prosperous clerical bene®ce (it could still pay £1,000 to £1,800 a year, not much less than a Cabinet Minister) was laicized but not given any educational or research function.80 This happened in all colleges save (for obvious reasons) Christ Church, whose dean was also dean of the Cathedral, and Pembroke, which was too poor to lose the associated canonry at Gloucester. The fellowship question was more contentious. Wadham had fourteen in 1878; these were to be reduced to ten and could be further reduced to eight. This would leave ®ve or six `Of®cial Fellows' and three `Ordinary Fellows'. All members of the `New Foundation' would receive a ®xed fellowship stipend of £200 a year, plus rooms and a 2s 6d daily allowance towards Common Table. This replaced a ¯uctuating dividend on college income (which in 1878 varied between £350 at Lincoln and £200 at Pembroke). The Of®cial Fellows would have tenure beyond seven years because of their University or college duties.81 The `Ordinary'Ðci-devant prizeÐfellows were denied this longer tenure; they could be elected only after the fellows on the old foundation had died off; in 1886 there were still ®ve of these left, aged between 50 and 70, so effectively prize fellows could no longer be elected.82 The issue of 79 Minutes, 12 Mar. 1879. The revision of Balliol's statutes was completed on 26 Oct. 1880, subject to `further consideration of certain reserved clauses' if necessary. 80 Statutes (1882), 661±4; Commissioners' Minutes for 25 July. 81 Statutes (1882), 664±70. 82 List from Calendar, 1886.

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`a secularized university'?

scholarships saw practically a complete victory for the conservatives, and for the system established by the 1854 Commission, against the Pattisonian line that they should be used to endow research. There was to be an `Exhibition fund', to support undergraduates `in need', and a new pensions fund, largely supplied through the sale of advowsons.83 (Pensions of £250±£300 were to be awarded to Of®cial Fellows after twenty-®ve years' service as lecturer, tutor, or bursar).84 Such new funds were supplemented by a speci®c tuition fund, to pay the Of®cial Fellows who held tutorships of the college their tutorial stipends; and a building fund. Pending the completion of a formal system of University contributions, an annual supplement of £200 would go to the Professor of Experimental Philosophy as well as his fellowship.85 In this way a broadly comparable system of accountancy would replace the annual cake which the fellows (as co-proprietors, resembling pre-1835 borough councillors rather than anything to do with education) had cut for themselves. The Wadham statutes may have served as a paradigm because they were relatively straightforward and the college was very small (sixteenth out of twenty in terms of both income and student numbers).86 Matters got much more complicated when the number of fellows was far out of proportion to student needs (as with Magdalen and New College), when a large number of scholarships were tied to a nation or region with a mind of its own (as with Jesus and Queen's), and when considerable revenue surpluses might possibly accrue for University purposes.87 By late 1880 the Commissioners were locked in a complex lawsuit with the Welsh parties to the Meyricke bequest which funded scholarships at Jesus, an issue which played a notable part in stimulating Welsh academic nationalism. The legal action continued after Jesus's statutes were approved, on 29 November 1880, and indeed outlasted the Commissioners themselves.88 The lawsuit was handed over, with the rest of the Commission's legal business, to the Treasury Solicitor.89 The younger Jesus dons mutinously continued, albeit in Welsh, the Mazzinian radicalism of the 1860s from which their seniors were generally in retreat. After the beginning of 1879 the Commission's activities shifted into a different and, as matters turned out, a dif®cult stage. Consideration of resolutions and drafts of college statutes continued. There could be a long interval between consideration of draft statutes and communication of the ®nal version to the Privy Council. In Balliol's case, for instance, the statutes 83 Commissioners' Minutes, 2 Aug. 1878. For Wadham's business with the Commissioners after 5 Mar. 1880, see Minutes 17, 21 Apr., 8 Dec. 1880, 30, 31 Mar. 1881. 84 Statutes (1882), 681. 85 Ibid. Qs 679±80; 682; 682±3. 86 Financial Returns of University of Oxford, cited in Whitaker's Almanack, 1880. 87 See Commissioners' Minutes, 31 Oct. 1879 et seq. 88 See also Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics (Cardiff, 1966), 47±9. 89 Minutes, 8 July 1881.

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®rst considered between 1 and 12 March 1879 were not sent forward until 28 April 1881.90 Other colleges managed these processes at variable speeds. Not all were like Pembroke, for whose last, brisk `revision day' (after earlier consideration on the 6, 12, and 13 March 1880) the Commission recorded in the minutes of 9 March 1881: `Two of the Commissioners representing Pembroke College, Prof. Barth. Price and Mr Barton, attended, and the revision of the Statutes of that College was begun and brought to an end, subject if necessary to the further revision of certain clauses.'91 Two problems were involved in this period. The ®rst stemmed from the requirement, contained in Clause 31 of the Act, that all college statutes containing `provisions relative to the University' would go to the Hebdomadal Council, at which forum the possible level of college contributions for University purposes would be determined. Connected with this was the second element, the elucidation of resources liable for such purposes within collegiate income. Both proved contentious, particularly since agricultural incomes were now falling. J. R. Magrath's history of Queen's makes patent the sharp clashes between the Commissioners and the college representatives, who included himself, over property valuations, fellowships, and scholarships, which dragged on from March 1879 to July 1881.92 The background to this was concern about the agricultural dif®culties encountered by 1880. Although, as J. P. D. Dunbabin points out, these were not as catastrophic as many believed at the time, they destroyed the climate of con®dence. By January 1881 ®fteen colleges, in the shape of their commissioners, were pressing for discussions about their burden, which fell exclusively on external income.93 Moreover, among the more Liberal element in the University there can have been little inducement for urging the Commissioners towards a quick settlement. By late 1878, the more political dons realized what Gathorne Hardy already feared in 1877. `Possibly,' he wrote after the Universities Bill's Second Reading, `our decadence is beginning.'94 The laurels Disraeli (by now Lord Beacons®eld) won at Berlin in 1878 withered in the following year in Afghanistan and South Africa; shortly Gladstone would be addressing tens of thousands of enthusiastic Scots. The Liberals were coming back, and with them such academic MPs as Bryce, Thorold Rogers, C. S. Parker, and Roundell, who would make it their business to check whatever gains the Church party might have made, and insist on such reforms as a drastic reduction in clerical fellowships. It was also likely that Selborne would go back on the Woolsack, and thus enable the Commission to be shifted to 90 91 92 93 94

Minutes, 12 Mar. 1879; 28 Apr. 1881. See n. 79 above. Minutes, 9 Mar. 1881. J. R. Magrath, The Queen's College (2 vols 1921), ii. 199±202. Pt 1, 401±9. Hardy, Diary, 309 (entry for 2 Mar. 1877).

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a more Liberal position before it came to consider the statutes for professors and examinations. Parliament was dissolved on 24 March 1880, and by the time that Gladstone's triumph in Midlothian was announced on 5 April 1880 the general election had given the Liberals a majority. The last meeting Selborne chaired was on 29 April, and on 28 September he formally resigned, the new member named a month later being G. G. Bradley, the Liberal Master of University.95 This change in personnel had a direct effect on the constitutions of the more conservative colleges, such as Magdalen, St John's, and Christ Church, whose draft statutes envisaged a number of clerical fellowships. On 5 July 1880 Roundell presented a petition against these, signed by 131 residents, including six heads of houses, ®fteen professors, and seventy-two fellows, and went on, with Bryce, to move their total abolition in the Commons.96 Although they did not succeed in carrying their resolutions, its terms were conveyed to the Commission which, by a majority of only one, cut the clerical quota at Magdalen down to two, at St John's to two, and at Christ Church to three.97 The Commissioners were by that date well into the consideration of University development and its funding. On 23 June 1880 the issues of Unattached students, a visitatorial board, public teaching, and the professoriate had been tabled, and the resulting draft statutes were laid before the Hebdomadal Council by November. The Council's response was critical, particularly of the stress on teaching rather than research in professors' duties and of the vagueness about ®nance for the new facilities. This indicated a con®dence in its ability to in¯uence the Commissioners and, indeed, the ®nal settlement re¯ected many of the University's recommendations.98 This was hammered out between 13 January 1881, when the issue of `taxation of colleges' was ®rst considered, and 10 February, when the business moved on to the Visitatorial Board, the proposed Faculty Boards, and University readers.99 By 3 March statutes for all these had been revised and sent to the Hebdomadal Council, although in the meantime `taxation' had modulated to `College Contributions for University purposes' to be paid into a new Common University Fund.100 These were to be assessed on net revenue. A basic 2 per cent levy would be payable by all colleges from 1 January 1883. From 1885 a graduated income tax would also take effect by instalments over ®fteen years, colleges with £5,000 (such as Trinity, Lincoln, 95

Minutes, 29 Apr.; 5, 27 Oct. 1880. Parl. Deb. 9 July 1880, ccliv. 102; Campbell, Nationalisation, 211. At Christ Church not fellowships, but Studentships. 97 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 312. 98 Minutes, 23 June 1880; Gazette, 17 Dec. 1880, xi. 68±70; 173±6. 99 Minutes, 13 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1881. 100 Minutes, 24 Feb., 3 Mar. 1881. 96

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Balliol, University, Oriel) per year eventually paying £100; those with £15,000 (Queen's, St John's, Merton) paying £1,000, and two with £24,000 (Christ Church, Magdalen) paying £4,000. Out of these contributions would come resources for the professoriate, and for research and laboratory facilities, freeing the University's existing funds for a building programme.101 It had, however, become evident by 1879 that agricultural depression was falsifying Alfred Robinson's con®dent forecasts. The new chairman, Mountague Bernard, was unable to estimate likely available income, given the decline in rents and continuing loan charges.102 Cash payments by the colleges to the University probably represented between 7 and 8 per cent of its general revenue account income in 1884 and 16 per cent in 1913; but total college payments for `University purposes'Ðmostly to professors and the like in ful®lment of the college taxation schemeÐwere signi®cantly larger, the equivalent of 39 per cent and 54 per cent of this general revenue, though (being directly made) they mostly bypassed the University's accounts. Their increase did, at least, far outweigh the decline in revenue from the Press.103 Arthur Engel, in his study of the profession of tutor in Oxford, From Clergyman to Don, writes that `The Commission of 1877 took as its primary task the reallocation of endowment income to establish an academic profession for college tutors.'104 This judgement seems to distort the priorities as they were conceived and proclaimed at the time. While he is right to dismiss the `Endowment of Research' party as inconsistent, inept, and unin¯uential, it is dif®cult to attribute consistency to the Commissioners, and easier to see them pushed off course by circumstances. In particular, the replacement of Grove by Osborne Gordon, a Conservative and a highly respected former Oxford tutor, may well have shifted the Commissioners away from the natural sciences, and the sort of endowment they would have required, towards the traditional college system. Yet the outcome was scarcely satisfactory to Gordon, who wrote bitterly to Salisbury that `I was taken out of my place, and under the circumstances, I cannot help feeling that I have been marked down for contempt.'105 Some contemporary observers at least thought the Commissioners' decisions incoherent. As two college tutors wrote anonymously in an open letter in December 1880: `The Commissioners are with one hand creating a system of University teaching, which implies . . . that the collegiate instruction of undergraduates is a very subordinate element in the work of a university; with the other they sanction the 101

40 and 41 Vict. c 48, sect. 16 (1); Statutes (1882), 110. Mountague Bernard, A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone on the Statutes of the University of Oxford Commission (1882), 13. 103 Pt 1, Appendix 12.1, 432±5. 104 Engel, 200. 105 Osborne Gordon to Salisbury, 29 Aug. 1881, Salisbury MSS. 102

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establishment of a collegiate organization on a scale which nothing but the absence of all other teaching could justify.'106 It is perhaps more satisfactory to see the Commission as caught up in a political situation which none of the parties involved could hope to control. In this case, as in so many others, intentions cannot be inferred from effects. The Liberals, who were now in a majority in most of the colleges, were very suspicious of at least one aspect of its ostensibly non-interventionist policy. Jowett criticized it in 1879 for letting each college `do as they liked' about clerical fellowships, and `settle the matter by a chance majority'. He saw this as dividing the University into clerical and anti-clerical colleges. `When the colleges are nearly divided,' he added, `the Commission appears to throw its weight into the clerical side.'107 Jowett and the clerical conservatives had University extension in common, when the term `extension' is used in its older and wider sense, and on that basis, by 1877, they had reached a sort of modus vivendi. Jowett wanted a rationalization of endowments to enable colleges to acquire indigent but intelligent young men to leaven his aristocratic clients.108 The conservatives could claim that, if they had not held the University, they were still entrenched in some wealthy colleges, and had added Hertford and the large new foundation of Keble, by 1881 the third largest college in the University.109 The consequence was that the University element in the Commission's activities was pushed to the back of the timetable, and was ®nally undertaken against a depressing background of falling rents. The resulting statutes, on Faculty Boards, professors, and Examination Boards, seem to have been cursorily drafted and and redrafted. The Faculty Boards were made responsible for lecture timetabling and elections of delegates to examining boards and the Common University Fund, but little more. The professors were committed to a schedule of forty-two public lectures a year, regardless of the nature of their subject. This combined the worst features of the Scottish system (though too few undergraduates ever turned up to cause the uproar which frequently occurred in Edinburgh or Glasgow) with the continuation of professorial impotence. Students were not compelled to attend professorial lectures, as Edward Freeman found when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History in 1884.110 Hensley Henson, the founder in the same year of the in¯uential Stubbs Society, had never actually attended any of Stubbs's lectures.111 Through the creation of committees to nominate 106 [H. F. Pelham and W. W. Jackson], A Few Words on the Proposals of the Oxford University Commission, by Two College Tutors (1880). 107 Quoted in Campbell, Nationalisation, 211: date not given. 108 See Peter Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (1987), 146. For the changing connotations of `extension' see Ch. 1 n. 108 above. 109 Calendar 1881; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 266±7. 110 W. R. W. Stephens, Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, (2 vols 1895), ii. 278ff. 111 Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson (1983), 28.

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examiners, an issue on which much of the University thought that the Commission had exerted powers which were ultra vires, the professors gained a slightly greater say in the curriculum, but the weight of in¯uence still rested with the college tutors.112 The Commissioners' one attempt to turn the professoriate into a really signi®cant element in the University's teaching proved abortive. By the terms of draft statutes promulgated on 2 November 1880 each professor had to be `ready to give private instruction to such students . . . attending his lectures who might desire to receive it . . . and . . . to test [their] knowledge'. These tutorials were to be given without charge to students of the college (if any) supporting the costs of the chair. For other tutorials he might charge a fee to be ®xed by University statute. At the end of each term he was to examine those who had attended his lectures; and college heads would have the right to require a report from him on their students' performances in this new examination. The Faculty Board was given authority to vet his lectures and a new Visitatorial Board was to be established and empowered to `admonish' him if he defaulted on any of these duties and to deprive him of of®ce if the default should be serious.113 The resulting outcry was immediate and general. Oxford's professors, The Times thundered on 9 November, `are to be . . . subjected to restrictions which the humblest privatdocent in a German university would repudiate as fatal alike to his independence and self-respect'.114 The professors were outraged, and seventy-four college tutors, signing a memorial, wanted it made clear that it was `not part of a professor's statutable duty to give separate instruction to individuals'.115 In their comments sent to the Commission on 14 December the Hebdomadal Council echoed these objections and produced redrafting suggestions. The Commissioners retreated: their new draft, published on 8 March 1881, followed the Council's line. A professor was now merely required `to give to students attending his ordinary lectures assistance . . . by advice, by informal instruction, by occasional or periodical examination, and otherwise, as he might judge . . . expedient'. The Faculty Board was restricted to making `recommendations' about a professor's lectures.116 The Commissioners escaped humiliation by securing their new system of nominating committees for examiners. Here the diehards gave con¯icting messages. Many Oxford residents saw the old system, whereby the ViceChancellor and Proctors made the nominations, as a safeguard for the rights 112 See `Case and Opinion concerning Nomination of Examiners' in Gazette, 10 June 1881, xi. 510±11. 113 Gazette, 2 Nov. 1880, xi. 68±73. 114 The Times, 9 Nov. 1880, 9c. 115 Ibid. 8 Dec., 6c±d. 116 Gazette, 17 Dec. 1880, xi. 173±6; 8 Mar. 1881, xi. 286±95.

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of colleges. Oblivious of the newer subjects, they argued that the old system had helped in creating the renown of Greats.117 Salisbury's position was the reverse of this. He wanted the Faculty Board to be kept out of nominating to save Greats from still further immersion in in®del philosophy.118 When the Commission had ®nished its work Mountague Bernard explained to the Premier: `A professoriate at Oxford works under some peculiar disadvantages, from which, while the colleges exist, it can never be entirely free.'119

the secular university? In May 1880 John Henry Newman alighted from the broad-gauge train at Oxford's Great Western Station and made a triumphal return to the university he had once convulsed. One of his former High Church followers, the Reverend Frederick Meyrick, commented: At dinner his health was given by Professor Bryce who congratulated Newman on having brought about a state of theological liberalism or indifferentism in Oxford, the one thing which from the beginning of his life to its end he abhorred . . . It was his own enemies, whom he had fought aÁ outrance, and whose principles he hated now from the bottom of his heart, who ¯ocked round him as their champion, and thanked him for what he had done in demolishing the power of the Church of England in Oxford.120

Oxford was now de®nitely `lost to the Church of England'. The clerical fellows who had given it its character were reduced to a beleaguered, ageing minority. Yet did the victory rest with such energetic, secularizing dons as Professor Bryce, now approaching middle age butÐat lastÐoccupying a safe Liberal seat since the April general election? Another revenant from the 1840s, Principal Shairp of St Andrews, one of the Arnoldian Broad Churchmen who had fought Newman and his followers, noted that not Liberalism but `aestheticism was just now rife in Oxford.'121 It was at this stage dif®cult to avoid Oscar Wilde, but his style was derived from the lectures of Ruskin as Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1869, which found a place for catholicism in a way unacceptable to veteran Liberals. The Rector of Lincoln felt himself under attack both from this `socialism and sacerdotalism' and from the Selborne Commission, which after the failure of his initiatives, he did his best to ignore: `I only served to give a decent appearance to the light-handed proceedings of the Commission who treated me and our college with 117

N. 112 above and Petition to Privy Council, Sect. 30: Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 80 c.107(76). Ch. 1, n. 307 above. 119 Bernard, Letter to Gladstone, 24. 120 Frederick Meyrick, Memories (1905), 26. For an earlier expression of liberal admiration for Newman see Goldwin Smith, Plea for the Abolition of Tests (1864), 56n. 121 William Knight, Principal Shairp and his Friends (1888), 336. For Shairp's election to the Professorship of Poetry see pp. 38±9 above. 118

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supreme contempt, taking at the same time all they could squeeze out of us for their claptrap professors.'122 Pattison was to die of cancer in 1884, visited on his deathbed by the Cardinal, but there was no conversion. His last testament, the Memoirs dictated to his niece, was to provide Oxford rationalism's pendant to the Apologia: the record of a pilgrimage into doubt. The last irony was that his wife, Emilia Francis, locked to the ageing scholar in circumstances so painful they were said to have inspired Dorothea Casaubon's predicament in George Eliot's Middlemarch, went on to marry her apparently platonic companion, Sir Charles Dilke MP, the most vociferous critic of `endowment of research' in the debates of 1876.123 A heroic age seemed to have come to an end in the early 1880s. Pusey died in 1882; now Pattison was gone. That religious issues remained important was shown by the University Press publication of the Revised Version of the New Testament in May 1881, which `Bat' Price made into the publishing event of the centuryÐa million copies were despatched on publication day, 17 May. At the end of the decade, in 1889, Oxford Idealist philosophy was wedded to the social commitment of the revived High Church in Lux Mundi. But religion was no longer institutionally central to the life of Oxford. Liddon saw rightly that the reassurance from Tait cited in the last chapter did not meet this point. In another twenty-®ve years, he gloomed to his old opponent Max MuÈller, `the Church, already a very feeble and discredited force in the University, will be literally nowhere.'124 What faith now ruled? Three deaths in the early part of the decade seemed to indicate another terminus. In 1882 T. H. Green died; in the following year his young disciple, Arnold Toynbee, and the hard-working committee man Henry Smith. `It does indeed seem as if all that was characteristic and great in Oxford were dying out, and there were nothing to take its place,' Green's biographer R. L. Nettleship wrote to Bryce in 1883, thanking him for a donation to Smith's memorial fund.125 Benjamin Jowett, who had become Vice-Chancellor by rotation in 1882, had the task of commemorating pupils whose radical energies mightÐhad they been given the chanceÐhave gravely embarrassed him. Oxford's commemoration took the explicit form of an engagement in the task of social reconciliation, given urgency by revelations of the dangerous situation in the East End of London by Andrew Mearns and Samuel Barnett in 1883. The result was the founding of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel in 1884: if the movement to establish the Museum in the Parks three decades earlier had been Oxford's attempt to come to terms with the revolution in the natural sciences, Toynbee Hall, was to provide a much 122

Quoted in Green, Lincoln, 474; his evidence is in UOC (1877), 255±9. LDN xxx. 282±93. See also John Sparrow, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (1967), 9ff. 124 Liddon to Max MuÈller, 21 Dec. 1882, Max MuÈller MSS, Bodl. MS Eng. c. 2806/1 fo. 88. 125 R. L. Nettleship to Bryce, 2 Mar. 1883, Bodl. MS Bryce 110 fo. 105. 123

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more ef®cient laboratory for its involvement in democratic politics and collective reform.126 Where the young Alfred Milner went, William Beveridge and Clement Attlee would in due course follow, but this solution to Oxford's political problems still left the question of the content of Oxford education open, and far from satisfactory. The middle path taken by the Selborne Commissioners on the academic issues did not arouse the enthusiasm of a Balliol philosophy tutor still in his thirties who, besides being devoted to T. H. Green's memory, was the younger brother of a leading `Endower of Research'. R. L. Nettleship's letter to Bryce went on: I have just been reading your article on the universities in the Fortnightly. You have expressed very much of what I feel, and what I believe a good many people here feel, as well as outsiders. I am alternately inspired by the thought of our magni®cent opportunities and crushed by the weight of our otiose traditions. Whenever one tries to move a hand, one seems to be hampered by innumerable threads, each contemptible in itself but collectively as strong as iron. I feel the evils, they strike one in the face at every turnÐbut living in the midst of them, and almost on them, it is very hard to get a point of departure from which to attack them. A few of us are trying to bring about a little personal cooperation in teaching. Combination by colleges is almost a failure but individuals might do something, and unless they do do something we shall have the worst results of the college systems strengthened and intensi®ed.127

Bryce had tried, in several addresses and articles, to go back to basics and establish a number of propositions about the role of universities in a democracy, something brought home to him by his research for The American Commonwealth, which was to appear in 1888. In the USA the universities were one of the most potent and bene®cient agencies in developing the intellectual life of the nation, making it by far the most generally cultivated and active-minded community of the modern world, in enabling it to work, on the whole successfully, a very democratic system of local institutions.128

But if this function was accepted, it implied de®ning the university de novo, as a body of persons teaching the highest knowledge, that knowledge which is of most worth to man, either because it deals with their highest interests, appeals to their noblest feelings, evokes their ®nest powers, or because it is at the root of their practical achievements, forms the basis of their control of Nature, supplies the 126 See Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (1984), 4ff, and pp. 670±4 below. 127 R. L. Nettleship to Bryce, 2 Mar. 1883, MS Bryce 110 fos 105±6. For Bryce's Fortnightly article see p. 53 above. Nettleship's attitude to inter-collegiate schemes was more characteristic of a Greats tutor than of a modern historian. 128 James Bryce, `An Ideal University', Contemporary Review, xlv (June 1884), 846.

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explanations of the phenomena of their own life, guides them in the path of moral and social advancement . . . Every branch of knowledge which can be treated in a scienti®c manner, reduced to order and expounded as a body of correlated principles is proper for a university.129

Oxford had only begun, during the 1870s, to measure up to this, with passmen being chased away from the more progressive colleges, such as Balliol, Corpus, New, and University. The generation matriculating in the mid-sixties had brought an important change. From the time that they quali®ed for their degrees those taking honours outnumbered the pass degree men decisively.130 Numbers matriculating had gone up by a third, and there had been some innovation as regards the subjects taken by the reading men. Yet the `arts' subjectsÐGreats, jurisprudence, modern history, and theologyÐcontinued to account for 86.4 per cent of all honours awarded in 1880, a situation which ®gures like Jowett could be expected to defend with unyielding tenacity.131 In 1870 the Hebdomadal Council, now with a Liberal majority, abandoned the last vestige of the system under which Lit. Hum. had to be combined with another subject to give the quali®cation for a degree. From 1872 there were honours schools in Greats, Modern History, Law, Theology, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. Effectively this con®rmed the domination of the humanities. The Boards of Studies had been made up of the relevant professors and an equivalent number of college tutors. These had settled such matters as prescribed books and special subjects, but had not nominated the examiners.132 The Selborne Commission took this cryptofaculty organization and converted it into four actual (but in terms of undergraduate numbers, grossly unequal) facultiesÐTheology, Law, Natural Science, and Arts. Examiners were to be nominated on an honour schools basis by a committee consisting of the Vice-Chancellor, the two Proctors (the trio who had traditionally exercised this power), and three members elected by the Faculty Boards. This induced Salisbury (now out of ministerial of®ce) to rally the Conservatives in the Lords in 1882 for a ®nal protest. Revealing the fears about Greats which have already been outlined, he argued that the change would transfer power from the colleges to the professoriate, but failed to overturn the new statute by thirteen votes.133 In the event the in¯uence of the professors was so indirect, and the faculty structure so remote from the actuality of Oxford studies (with the Faculty of 129

Ibid. 839. Pt 1, 360 (Fig. 11.1). For a complicating factor in the calculation see ibid. 352±3. Some of the matriculation increase came from the unattached (non-collegiate) students, who tended until 1882 to perform less strongly than the members of most colleges. 131 See pp. 65±6 above. 132 C. H. Firth, The Faculties and their Powers (1909), 6. 133 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 309; p. 57 above. 130

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Arts containing nearly two-thirds of the Honours candidates) that the new nominating procedure brought no great change. Lord Francis Hervey, a Tory MP, asked for a return in 1876, showing when professors lectured and what audiences they got. The results were at best mediocre. The stars were Acland and Ruskin, who could draw a hundred or more, chie¯y `the bonnets'Ð female audiencesÐwhom the latter affected to despise; the divines of Christ Church averaged 45, the lawyers 30, the classicists 21, and the scientists 18. The rest gained negligible audiences.134 `The inde®nite extension of the professoriate', might not have had all the consequences Hervey had predictedÐ` . . . a number of luxurious residences, children in perambulators wheeled about in the Parks, picnics in Bagley Wood, carriages, champagne, and the abandonment of celibacy and of culture'.135 The modest extension of the professoriate actually achieved was no more effective than had been expected. In the early 1870s Salisbury had been able to present the Oxford Greats tutor to his party as a Positivistic radical bogeyman, a variant of the `wild man of the cloister' whom his chief had sketched in Lothair, and who was generally supposed to be Goldwin Smith.136 Episodes such as the compulsory Greek deÂbaÃcle in 1880, mentioned in the last chapter (p. 65), countered the Salisburian caricatures and the efforts of romantic novelists, and restored an image of tetchy conservatism, more than con®rmed by the split in the Liberal ranks over Gladstone's policy of Irish Home Rule in 1886. That made Goldwin Smith himself a ®re-eating Unionist, like most of his donnish contemporaries, only more so.137 By the late 1880s the tutors would be seen as harassed, greying men who had settled down to a rota of prodding undergraduates through the necessary exercises for the BA, making sure their energies were kept hygenically exhausted in college sports, and their debts within reason.138 Informal progress was still possible, but had shifted away from the University mainstream, towards issues like extension, social work, and women's education. In the last case voluntary efforts, supported not only by Liberals but by High Churchmen, had steadily developed during the 1870s, to the stage where two Halls, Somerville and Lady Margaret, were opened at the beginning of Michaelmas Term, 1879. At one level this development was bound to happen, as the new generation of secular dons married and raised families in the Gothic Revival villas which began to spread along the Woodstock and Banbury RoadsÐmuch to the bene®t of St John's. At another, the competition from 1884 between bright female stu134

See PP 1876 lix. 331±50. Parl. Deb. 12 June 1876, ccxxix. 1735. For this debate see p. 77 above. 136 Parl. Deb. cciii. 196±232; and see Charles Oman, On the Writing of History (1939), 233, and Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (1870; ed. V. Bogdanor 1975), 77, 379. 137 See C. T. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (1976), ch. 9. 138 On `teaching drudgery', see Engel, 269±72, and pp. 359±60 below. 135

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dents and the undistinguished mass of Oxford men might have led to invidious comparisons being made. The fact that women could not matriculate, so that Oxford honours results were published separately for women and men, all classes being listed in alphabetical and not merit order, allowed male amour propre to be preserved.139 On 24 February 1888 there was published, in an edition of only 500 copies, a novel by one of the young dons' wives who had played a central role in setting up Somerville Hall. Mary Augusta Ward, granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, ®rst secretary to Somerville and one of that harem of young women who had, rather unhealthily, hovered around the Pattison meÂnage, wrote Robert Elsmere to commemorate the theological struggles of the generation which had died with Green and Pattison. `A tremendous book' was the verdict of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, on the eve of his own unexpected death.140 Gladstone joined in with a lengthy and penetrating review in the Nineteenth Century in May, regretting the fact that Mrs Ward had so stacked the cards in favour of Elsmere's rationalist religion that `a great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, cannot ®nd an articulate word to say in its defence.'141 By the end of the year sales in Britain were running at 4,000 a month, while 200,000 had been sold in the United States in the ®rst year of (largely pirated) publication.142 But to Henry Sidgwick, struggling against the ebbing of the reform tide at Cambridge, the book was a study of the past, not a forecast for the future.143 It was a matter for ironic re¯ection that American homesteaders were, for the sum of four cents, treated to an account of the battle of belief in midVictorian Oxford, by an intelligent and dynamic woman whose sex disquali®ed her from taking part in the life of the University.144 Yet those homesteaders, had they persevered with Mrs Ward's less than alluring prose, would probably have acquired more knowledge of Oxford's intellectual life than ever came the way of the mass of undergraduates, the sons of `Verdant Green', the fathers of the `good eggs' of Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, trampling across muddy football pitches, or sweating along the Isis in the darkening cold of a November afternoon, before sherry and dinner in Hall. The voice of the schoolmasterÐor the dominieÐmight have been heard in the land, but the young barbarians were still at play. 139

Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford (1960), chs 2±4. See also pp. 257±8, 265. Basil Willey, `How Robert Elsmere struck some contemporaries' in Essays and Studies (1957), 56; John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (1990). 141 Willey, 64; Nineteenth-Century, xxiii. 769. Mrs Ward had been obliged to cut most of Elsmere's defence of his Anglicanism: Sutherland, 121. 142 Ibid. 57; and see William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward's `Robert Elsmere' (Leicester University Press, 1976), esp. ch. 4. 143 Henry Sidgwick, diary-letter to J. A. Symonds, 6 Aug. 1888, Sidgwick MSS, Trinity College, Cambridge. 144 Appendix B of Victorian Heretic, 121±2, details the sales of Robert Elsmere, without con®rming Willey's four-cents story, but records of pirated editions are inevitably incomplete. 140

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page

3 Religious Issues, 1870±1914 peter hinchliff In the 1860s and 1870s `catholic' and `liberal' Anglicanism in Oxford had been represented by Edward Bouverie Pusey and Benjamin Jowett respectively, on opposing sides of virtually every religious issue which disturbed the university. Each was, in his own way, a frightening opponent.1 Pusey was always absolutely unyielding on any point where the truth, once delivered to the Saints, was at issue. Jowett, though a reluctant religious disputant, was an equally determined ®ghter for the truth arrived at by free enquiry. Pusey died in the autumn of 1882 and was succeeded as Professor of Hebrew by S. R. Driver, a moderate critical scholar. Admired and loved though Pusey had been, he was a survival from an earlier generation and his death removed a powerful conservative force. That Jowett became ViceChancellor almost as Pusey died might have meant the triumph of liberal theology in Oxford, but the of®ce seems to have diverted his attention to other matters. Frederick Temple's Bampton Lectures on science and religion, which made Darwin's hypothesis respectable in the Church of England,2 were delivered in 1884 yet the biography of Jowett by Abbott and Campbell contains no reference to them. One gets the impression that much of the heat had gone out of the old controversies. The creation of a theology school had been one of them. As early as March 1848 Jowett and A. P. Stanley had published, but anonymously, a pamphlet which argued that any projected reform of the University should include the creation of such a school.3 They pleaded, in a phrase which Jowett was later to make notorious in Essays and Reviews, for a syllabus that would treat the Bible `like any other book' and thus revitalize theology. But Pusey was opposed to any such proposal: theology was too sacred to be studied simply academically. He objected not only to the critical study of the Bible but also 1

108. 2

A. Livesley, `Regius Professor of Hebrew', in P. Butler (ed.), Pusey Rediscovered (1983),

O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II (1970), 23. Suggestions for an Improvement of the Examination Statute, and see Campbell, Nationalisation, 74. 3

97

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to the history of dogma, since the existence of such a subject seemed to imply that the faith had not been unchanged through the ages.4 In the 1860s, however, they had both shifted their positions. Pusey still regarded Jowett as an embarrassing heretic.5 But the liberals were losing ground and he was con®dent that the supremacy of conservatives would ensure that teaching and examining would be in the hands of the orthodox. So he began to support the introduction of a theology school and it was Jowett's turn to argue that theology was too sacred a subject for examination.6 To Jowett, therefore, the creation of the school in 1870 had seemed to be a defeat, as his treatment of theology in his own college indicates. In the very year of Pusey's death he appointed W. H. Fremantle as chaplain and theology tutor at Balliol. Fremantle, a solemn and not always perceptive man, was an ardent admirer and former pupil of the Master's. He had turned down preferment elsewhere at Jowett's insistence, but his attempts to develop theology in the college were consistently snubbed.7 Though Fremantle never understood this, Jowett was sulking. He had appointed a liberal tutor to ensure that Balliol men should not be taught Tractarian theology. But he was also determined not to acknowledge publicly the existence of the school. It was only natural that, in its earliest phase, the school should re¯ect the conservatism of its creators. The emphasis was on knowledge of the subjectmatter of all the Pauline epistles as well as the four Gospels and Acts and of four books of the Old Testament. The other subjects were dogmatics (in 1873 the texts were the catechetical lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem, Irenaeus Adversus Haereses, III, the Articles, and the ®rst two books of the seventeenth-century Bishop Bull's Defensio Fidei Nicaenae); the history of the early Church; apologetics (Butler's Analogy, Tertullian's Apologia, and Book I of Hooker); liturgy (including the Book of Common Prayer as well as the ancient liturgies); and textual criticism. But for candidates not desiring `high honours' the examiners indicated that they would be content with much less than this.8 Most of the candidates in the honour school were Anglican ordination candidates: the information in the theology section of the University's handbook is clearly aimed at such men.9 The changed relationship between the University and the Church was the cause of this preponderance. Before the reforms, mere attendance at Oxford had been regarded as suf®cient formal training for clergymen if followed by a course of theological reading prescribed and tested by the bishop's examining chaplains. Now the theology 4

I. Ellis, `Pusey and University Reform', in Butler, Pusey Rediscovered, 300. BL Add. MS 44281, fos 218ff., Pusey to Gladstone, e.g. 13 Oct. 1869, fo 362. 6 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 250ff. 7 Recollections of Dean Fremantle, chie¯y by himself, edited by the Master of the Temple (1921), 102ff. 8 Handbook (1873), 156ff. 9 Handbook (1891), 186ff; Handbook (1913), 161f. 5

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degree was regarded as a vocational quali®cation. At the same time the proportion of ordinands who had taken other schools was declining and colleges such as Keble with a signi®cant number of men reading theology were making good the general de®ciency. This is not to say that an Oxford degree in theology was very highly regarded. Bishops were more and more inclined to insist on a period at theological college and a publication which, though written by senior members, has something of the ¯avour of the modern Alternative Prospectus, claimed that: If a man has the faintest chance of obtaining a moderate class in Classics or Mathematics, he had better leave Theology alone, for the greater prestige and practical value of a class in Classics or Mathematics is well worth the slight extra work it will entail. The average man who takes up Theology aims at a Third Class, and generally gets it with a very moderate amount of work, perhaps an average of three or four hours a day.10

Statistics suggest that this advice would have been worth heeding. Of the eleven future Anglican bishops who read theology at Oxford in the 1880s, only two were to be English diocesans and one of those (Swayne of Lincoln) had a second in Greats before getting a ®rst in theology. The other nine became English suffragans or colonial, American, Scottish, or Welsh bishops. But no less than eight future diocesans at Oxford in the same decade (including Lang, William Temple, and Hensley Henson), did not read theology but took some other school (usually Greats or history). It is also the case that a surprisingly high number of Oxford theology graduates of the period obtained thirdsÐthough it has to be said that, in order to get a ®rst or second one had to have mastered Hebrew as well as Greek.11 The poor quality of the candidates is further suggested by the fact that in the summer of 1895 about 40 per cent of those reading theology failed the examination.12 In the early days the examination placed the same stress on factual knowledge as the statutes. A favourite question asked what urim and thummim were and how they were used. Candidates were asked to write about the geography of Palestine, the design and contents of Solomon's temple, and even `The private life and arrangements of St Paul during his journeys.'13 Apart from an occasional question which admitted doubt as to whether Paul had written the Epistle to the Hebrews, `higher' critical issues were ignored. 10 A. M. M. Stedman, Oxford: Its Life and Schools (1887), 335. The section on the theology school was written by `M', the only contributor not identi®ed in the preliminary pages of the book. 11 Stedman, Oxford, 335 12 H. Legge, `The Religion of the Undergraduate', Nineteenth Century, xxxviii (Nov. 1895), 861. 13 Examination papers of the Honour School of Theology, Trinity Term 1873, New Testament II, question 4.

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Such issues ®rst made an appearance in the apologetics paper and candidates were expected to refute the theories of the critics. In the examination set in Michaelmas Term 1874 no fewer than three questions required a knowledge of the arguments advanced by Dr W. H. Mill against a `mythical' interpretation of the Gospels. In the Trinity Term of the following year there was for the ®rst time a question about the relationship between the synoptic Gospels, and in 1879 a question in the Old Testament paper asked for the arguments for and against the Mosaic authorship of Exodus. Otherwise it was simply assumed that the Bible was to be understood in the most literal sense and that doctrine had been unaffected by historical development. Pusey's con®dence in the conservatives' ability to control the appointment of examiners seems to have been justi®ed in these years. In 1875 the examiners were Thomas Espin, Edmund Ffoulkes, John Nutt, and George Rawlinson. The ®rst two had been fellows of colleges twenty years before but Espin had become warden of the Queen's College in Birmingham and rector of Wallasey. Ffoulkes was rector of Wiggington and shortly to become vicar of the University Church. They were both therefore among the usually conservative non-resident clergy whom reformers thought to exercise far too much power in the University. (Ffoulkes had actually become a Roman Catholic in 1855 and had only recently been readmitted to the Church of England). Nutt, sub-librarian of the Bodleian, was primarily appointed to examine in the language papers. Rawlinson, the Professor of Ancient History, had delivered the Bampton Lectures of 1859 (the year of Darwin's Origin of Species and the year before Essays and Reviews) on the `truth of the Scripture records'. The impression of conservatism conveyed by the Schools' questions is therefore likely to re¯ect accurately the examiners' beliefs. It is less easy to classify the examiners of later years in terms of the conservative and liberal parties of the Church as those had been during the 1860s and 1870s. In 1882 the examiners were the eccentric but critical Old Testament scholar, T. K. Cheyne; the non-resident Edward Bernard; and the High Churchman, John Wordsworth, about to become the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture. Wordsworth had produced a critical edition of the Vulgate but was very conservative in his approach to higher criticism. Nevertheless in this year candidates were invited to discuss whether the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse were by the same author,14 though they were also expected to be able to `disprove the proposition that a miracle is unworthy of God'.15 In the autumn examination of the same year they were asked to `deal with' objections to the Pauline authorship of certain 14 Examination papers of the Honour School of Theology, Trinity Term 1882, Apologetica II, question 1. 15 Ibid., Apologetica III, question 9.

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epistles. But the question speci®cally excluded consideration of Hebrews and the Pastoral Epistles as though their non-Pauline provenance were conceded.16 In 1892, when Charles Bigg (whose 1886 Bampton Lectures on the Christian Platonists of Alexandria by no means treated patristic theology as unchanging) was an examiner, one is not surprised to ®nd candidates asked whether they detected an `Alexandrine in¯uence' in the Epistle to the Hebrews. But in the previous year, when Bigg had also been an examiner together with John Nutt again and Liddon's biographer J. O. Johnston, a variety of critical questions had been asked. Candidates were expected to be able to argue `the most probable theory of the relation of St Mark to St Matthew and St Luke'.17 And there was even a question on Acts which seems to assume a knowledge of the theories of F. C. Baur, published ®fty years earlier.18 Oxford theology might be said to be moving cautiously into the nineteenth century. In 1892 Bigg and Johnston, with Francis Woods, the vicar of Chalfont St Peter (who had a ®rst in theology in 1873) authorized a very daring question on the criteria to be used in determining the date of a psalm. The conservatism of some examiners was no longer a guarantee that critical questions would not be raised: mere passage of time seems to have made such issues respectable. In 1889, of course, Lux Mundi19 had been published, not exactly a sign of diminishing con¯ict between liberals and conservatives but an indication that the battle lines no longer coincided with party divisions. The obvious signi®cance of the volume was that it was an attempt by a group of young Oxford Anglo-Catholics to combine traditional orthodoxy with critical scholarship. The way they attempted to do this was less obvious but even more signi®cant: the IncarnationÐthe classic Christian statement of the relationship of the human to the divineÐwas the key concept which they hoped would enable them to reconcile two quite different views of theological truth. Tractarians had held that it was given in revelation with divine authority: liberals maintained that, like all truth, it was a proper subject for critical enquiry. The contributors to Lux Mundi believed they could justify a position which recognized the validity of human reason and maintained the divinely guaranteed truths of the catholic faith. Charles Gore contributed an essay on `The Holy Spirit and Inspiration' which attracted most hostile attention and, in a sense, diverted it from the more fundamental issue. Though his approach was one of almost in®nite 16 Examination papers of the Honour School of Theology, Michaelmas Term 1882, Apologetica II, question 4. 17 Examination papers of the Honour School of Theology, Trinity Term 1891, St Mark and St John, question 4. 18 Ibid. Acts of the Apostles, question 3. 19 C. Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889).

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caution, his essay raised the question of critical Biblical scholarship. He argued that the Biblical records might contain factual errors (because the inspiration of the writers did not consist in a miraculous communication to them of the facts as they originally happened), but that they were, in a general way, `really historical' and that it was the spiritual truth they contained which was important. Therefore he could accept what was said by the moderate critics about much of the Old Testament, though he was more conservative about the New. Older Tractarians such as H. P. Liddon, the spiritual heir and successor of Pusey, regarded the volume as a kind of treason. Gore bore the brunt of the attack which was conducted in public,20 was deeply hurt by it, and considered resigning the principalship of Pusey House.21 But he was not prepared to yield.22 Pressure from the guardians of the Tractarian tradition did not shake the determination of younger men to adopt some of the beliefs of the liberals. Jowett, whose pupil Gore had been, was somewhat dismissive of the volume, but he acknowledged that it displayed a new and friendlier attitude to liberalism.23 In some theological circles far more advanced work was being done. The Oxford Society of Historical TheologyÐ`historical' was intended to declare that there were to be no dogmatic preconditionsÐprovided a critical but sympathetic audience where those who are now recognized as important ®gures in the history of modern theology and Biblical scholarship were able to try out their ideas.24 There are also reminders in the society's records that new kinds of theological `liberalism' had begun to emerge, notably that which concerned itself with religion rather than Christian theology. Max MuÈller, for whom the chair of Comparative Philology had been created in 1868 after his failure to become Professor of Sanskrit eight years earlier, was president of the society in 1893/4. His presidential address argued that a properly historical theology ought to concern itself with all sacred writings of whatever reli20

e.g. Liddon in the Spectator, 5 April 1890. G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore (1935), 102ff. and 112ff. He was, however, prepared to make certain corrigenda (actually minor modi®cations of his argument) which were reported in a variety of newspapers, e.g. the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, 23 April 1890. 23 Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 378 24 Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology: e.g. Hastings Rashdall, `A Note on Medieval theology', 26 May 1892; F. C. Conybeare, `A Newly Found Paulician Prayer Book and Catechism', 26 Nov. 1896; W. R. Inge, `Permanent In¯uence of NeoPlatonism on Christianity', 2 Dec. 1897; George Buchanan Gray, `The Hebrew Ecclesiasticus', 11 Mar. 1897; Kirsopp Lake, `Notes on a Recent Visit to Mount Athos and on Some Manuscripts There', 26 Oct. 1899; G. H. Box, `Jewish Antecedents of the Eucharist', 23 May 1901; F. C. Burkitt, `The Origin of the New Testament Peshitta', 7 Feb. 1902; R. H. Charles, `History of the Interpretation of the New Testament Apocalypse', 5 Nov. 1908; B. H. Streeter, `Special Characteristics of Q and the Synoptic Gospels', 28 Jan. 1909; and D. C. Simpson, `Literary and Religious Af®nities of the Book of Tobit', 30 Nov. 1911. 21 22

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gion.25 Three years later Edward Caird, the new Master of Balliol, devoted his presidential lecture to the question which had been left open by Jowett and the earlier liberalsÐif the New Testament is not an absolutely reliable historical account of Christ's life, in what sense can Christianity be a matter of `following Christ'? Caird attempted to use the methods for the `scienti®c' study of religions set out in his Gifford Lectures, in which he had argued that it was neither in its most primitive beginnings nor in its most developed form, but in its continuously developing life, that one was to look for the essence of a religion.26 The Unitarian Manchester College, which moved to Oxford in October 1889 and of which CairdÐthough himself a lay member of the Church of ScotlandÐbecame Visitor, was important in the development of this new approach, `combining the broadest liberality with the most distinguished scholarship'.27 There, in 1905, L. R. Farnell (fellow of Exeter and Rector from 1913 to 1928) delivered the Hibbert Lectures on the anthropological study of religion.28 And Farnell with Estlin Carpenter (a regular contributor to the Oxford Society of Historical Theology) were the organizing secretaries when the Third International Congress of the History of Religions met in Oxford in September 1908. This appears to have provided the opportunity for an exchange of ideas between anthropologists, archaeologists, philologists, Orientalists, and theologians: theology was ceasing to be a protected discipline.29 Many of the leading Oxford theologians were not Anglicans and the Free Church presence in the university as a whole was growing steadily. By 1882 there were estimated to be some 200 Nonconformist undergraduates and a handful of dons.30 At that date R. F. Horton, a Congregationalist and the leading Free Church personality in Oxford, provided pastoral care for Nonconformists who would otherwise have been dependent on Evangelical Anglican clergymen, and there was indeed some fear that there might be 25

Ibid. F. Max MuÈller, `On the Proper Use of Holy Scriptures', 3 Nov. 1893. Ibid. E. Caird, `Christianity and the Historical Christ', 22 Oct. 1896 and cf. E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion (2 vols, Glasgow, 1893), esp. I, 42. 27 The phrase quoted is taken from a statement of the reasons for the move to Oxford. For the early history of the college see V. D. Davis, A History of Manchester College (1932), esp. 188; Truth, Liberty, Religion: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred years of Manchester College, ed. Barbara Smith (1986). The buildings were opened, and the chapel dedicated, on 18±19 Oct. 1893. For the previous four years the college had been housed in no. 90 High Street. 28 `Oxford Notes', Athenaeum, no. 4039 (25 March 1905), 370. Farnell also gave a second series of Hibbert Lectures in 1911 on `The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion'. 29 Ibid. no. 4233 (12 Dec. 1908), 761. The contributor of the notes, R. R. Marrett, was an anthropologist and close associate of Farnell's. 30 A. Peel and J. A. R. Marriott, Robert Forman Horton (1937), 104; E. Kaye, Mans®eld College, Oxford. Its Origin, History, and Signi®cance (1996), 51n, considers that James Bryce's estimate of 100 (in the Nonconformist and Independent, 19 Apr. 1883) was probably a more accurate ®gure. 26

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many conversions to Anglicanism.31 By the turn of the century, however, numbers had grown to about 500 and a signi®cant group of Rhodes Scholars were among them.32 By this time fears of Anglican proselytizing had diminished and Nonconformists felt that they were able to play a full part in college life (though many were Non-Collegiate students). Mans®eld College, which moved to Oxford in 1886 and whose new buildings were consecrated in 1889, provided them with a centre and the Sunday morning service there was `a kind of Nonconformist parallel to the of®cial university sermon at St Mary's'.33 In some cases men were positively encouraged by their colleges to enter the Free Church ministry34 and Free Churchmen had been reading theology for some time. By 1891 the handbook had found it worthwhile mentioning Manchester and Mans®eld, along with Anglican theological colleges, as places where teaching was provided.35 And by 1904 it could be pointed out that, of 58 ®rsts in the previous 17 examinations in the Theology honour school, 9 had been taken by Nonconformists.36 In spite of the abolition of religious tests the hierarchy forbade Roman Catholics to enter Oxford until 1896, though there were always some who ignored the ban.37 Many bishops felt that the University had become a dangerously secular place: a Catholic college or even a separate university seemed preferable. But by 1883 there were ten Roman Catholic undergraduates and by 1895 a majority of bishops was prepared to allow what was already happening. Permission was, at ®rst, grudging and accompanied by warnings about the dangers. A house was acquired for the chaplaincy and Father Kennard appointed chaplain. By 1908 some sixty Roman Catholic undergraduates were scattered among the colleges, and were `distinctly recognised as a factor in the university life.'38 In the same year the Jesuits opened a private hall, followed three years later by the Benedictines. Originally established by personal licences issued to individuals, both these institutions became permanent private halls in 1918. Another signi®cant consequence of Oxford reforms affected college chaplains. When virtually all fellows had been clergymen, one of them had been responsible for what actually happened in chapel. Pastoral care of under31 R. K. EvansÐquoting T. H. GreenÐ`The Present Religious and Ecclesiastical Situation in Oxford', Mans®eld College Magazine, VII (Dec. 1910), 55. For the circumstances in which Horton left Oxford in Jan. 1884 see p. 58. 32 Ibid. 56. 33 Ibid. 72. For the 1889 ceremonies see Mans®eld College: Its Origin and Opening (1890). 34 H. W. Horwill, `Religious Life at Oxford', Methodist Review, 86 (Jan. Feb. 1904), 70. 35 Handbook (1891), 191. 36 W. C. Allen, The Clergy and the Honour School of Theology (1904), 4. 37 According to the future Cardinal Manning a dozen Roman Catholics were up at Oxford between 1854 and 1863. (I am indebted for this and other information about Roman Catholics at Oxford to information supplied by Dom Alberic Stacpoole, OSB, published as `The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford', New Blackfriars, 67 (1986), 221ff.) 38 D. O. Hunter-Blair, `Oxford As It Is', Catholic University Bulletin, XIV (1908), 636.

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graduates was the duty of the tutorsÐalso, of course, usually clergymen. In cases in which laymen could be appointed to tutorial of®ce it was natural that they should assume the spiritual duties associated with it. Thus Arthur Hugh Clough, fellow of Oriel from 1841, held a tutorship in that college where the tutorial relationship was especially strongly developed. But he resigned in 1848 because he could not reconcile his religious doubts with tenure of the of®ce.39 Even after the reforms of the 1850s there were some notable lay tutors who continued to function in the old style. In Jowett's Balliol, for instance, it was said to be possible `for a tutor without taking Orders to be virtually a minister of religion'.40 The Act of 1871 which abolished religious tests for MAs required colleges to provide religious instruction and the daily recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer in chapel. Within the next decade fewer fellows were clergymen and the growth in the number of honour schools meant that it was normal for a fellow to be elected in order to be a tutor in a particular subject. There were well known `religious lay tutors' in the 1880s and 1890s but their religious in¯uence was extrinsic and accidental.41 Quite apart, then, from any requirement in college statutes, it was necessary to appoint a clergyman to perform the liturgical duties of chaplain and to make him responsible for the pastoral and spiritual care of the undergraduates, previously shared among the tutors. After the passage of the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Act of 1877, Commissioners examining college statutes with the general intention of reducing the number of fellows required to be ordained had nevertheless to ensure that the provisions of the 1871 Act could be ful®lled. They solicited and received a great many con¯icting opinions on how the freeing of fellowships should be combined with the maintenance of chapel services and religious instruction. Information they received about what was actually being done at the time reveals a transitional phase. In some colleges (University, Oriel, Brasenose, and Jesus) the liturgical functions were shared by those fellows who happened to be in holy orders, an echo of the old system. In those colleges (Christ Church, New College, and Magdalen) where there were more elaborate services there were teams of chaplains who were not fellows. Exeter and Pembroke each had one fellow speci®cally designated as chaplain: St John's and Trinity each had two (at Trinity the second chaplain was Gore). At Corpus, Wadham, and Worcester the chaplain was a fellow 39 P. G. Scott, `A. H. Clough: A Case Study in Victorian Doubt', in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Studies in Church History, 9, 1972), 387. 40 Campbell, Nationalisation, 131. 41 `Let those who knew them remember Sir John Conroy or Mr H. O. Wakeman, and thank God' (`Religion in Oxford', Church Quarterly Review, lv (Oct. 1902), 15). Conroy was one of the very ®rst tutors in natural sciences at Balliol and a man of Tractarian churchmanship. Wakeman was bursar and then tutor of Keble and a historian with a particular interest in the Church of England. Both had been undergraduates at Christ Church.

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and was assisted by a non-fellow, foreshadowing the later practice of appointing a young clergyman speci®cally for pastoral work. (But at Queen's and Merton it was the other way round and the junior chaplain was a fellow, though the senior was not.)42 The statutes drawn up by the Commissioners in 1882 provided speci®cally that every college should have at least one clerical fellow who would be responsible for the conduct of services and for religious instruction. A certain amount of variety was maintained in college appointments. Sometimes, as in Fremantle's case, the chaplain might also be tutor in theology, but it gradually seems to have been accepted that his chief function was pastoral care of the undergraduates. When Jowett invited Cosmo Gordon Lang to succeed Fremantle in 1893, he described the job as that of making `young men as good as young men can be made'.43 The resultant class of young fellows whose purpose in life was to be `clergymen in colleges' was not universally welcomed. There were still those who feared lest `lay tutors should cease to consider themselves to have moral and spiritual care of all their pupils, and should leave this most vital part of their business to their ordained colleague or colleagues'.44 It is not easy to assess the religious condition of the University at the turn of the century. William Temple, attempting to do so as a young don at Queen's, wrote, The people of whom a man sees most in Oxford are of course those who are to some extent akin to him mentally or spiritually: it is only their views that he hears either frequently or candidly expressed . . . what is said here will not, I hope, be positively false, but it will certainly be inadequate and will be equivalent to falsehood if treated as a full account of its subject.45

A similar problem exists for anyone trying to reconstruct the picture a century later: memoirs and biographies are often selective and subjective if not deliberately apologetic. It seems, however, that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, college religion left much to be desired. Chapel services are described as `simply disgraceful' and clerical dons as `utterly indifferent to the spiritual welfare of men under their care'.46 And even one of the more objective observers described chapel services as dull and formal and unlikely to satisfy the soul of the religiously minded undergraduate.47 This impression is con®rmed by 42 Certain Circulars addressed by the Commissioners to the University and Colleges: Answers to Circular No. 9ÐCollege Of®ce Holders in 1878, UOC (1877), Part II, 91±102. 43 J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1949), 101. 44 `Religion in Oxford' (n.41), 15. 45 W. Temple, `The Religion of the Undergraduate', Oxford and Cambridge Review, no. 1 (June 1907), 45. 46 Legge, 266±7. 47 R. W. Gent, `The Religious Life', in Stedman, 145.

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a young Frenchman's account of a year spent as an undergraduate: he found it quite unnecessary to mention the college chapel at all. Those aspects of Oxford religion which seemed to him worth remarking upon were open-air evangelistic preaching in St Giles,48 `Christian socialism',49 and, above all, the University Sermon which plainly excited him.50 By the early twentieth century, when the new system had had time to establish itself, college religion was less open to criticism though it appears that very little religious instruction was provided, in or out of chapel.51 The University Sermon seems also to have lost its popularity, undergraduate fashion preferring the evening sermon in the University Church.52 Most signi®cant, perhaps, was the growth of what might be described as sectarianism, though in a loose sense of that term. Religious observances in unreformed Oxford, however formal and dull, had been acts of the University or the colleges. Reformed Oxford retained some remnants of these, but religion had become the private business of individuals. Just as Free Churchmen and Roman Catholics attended their own places of worship, so parish churches in the city, whether Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical, drew support from undergraduates which largely depended on the reputation of the clergymen concernedÐLang at St Mary's, for instance, the future Bishop Chavasse at St Peter-le-Bailey, or A. W. M. Christopher at St Aldate's. The strength of the parties is dif®cult to estimate, though in the early part of the twentieth century there seems to have been a growth in the in¯uence of liberal Evangelicals at the expense of Anglo-Catholics.53 `Dr Pusey's Library', later `The Pusey House', was founded in 1884 to promote (Anglo-Catholic) theological study and Christian life and Gore, its ®rst Principal, was an in¯uential ®gure in Oxford. Wycliffe Hall, which had opened in 1877, already served something of the same purpose for Evangelicals.54 It provided a residence for graduates who intended to be ordained but also served a wider range of undergraduates, particularly after the appointment of Chavasse as Principal. St Stephen's House too, which was 48

J. Bardoux, Memories of Oxford, trans. W. R. Barker (1899), 73. Ibid. 23f. 50 `The preacher often turned towards the seats kept for the undergraduates, where they were gathered together, looking like a body of happy young priests' (ibid. 86). Though the sermon itself, preached by Bishop Percival of Hereford, does not seem particularly exciting in the printed version (see L1. J. M. Bebb (ed.), Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (1901), 351ff.) Gent's account of religious life in Oxford also describes university sermons in glowing termsÐ`the whole audience is ®xed in hushed and rapt attention' (Stedman, 149). 51 `Religion in Oxford' (n.41), 5ff. 52 Ibid. 7 and Temple, 47. 53 `Clerical Changes in Oxford', The Guardian, 18 April 1906. The author curiously attributes this in large part to the founding of Pusey House. 54 R. B. Girdlestone, Four Years' Work at Wycliffe Hall, pamphlet dated 1882, p. 1, and also another (undated) pamphlet by the same author, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford: Its Nature and Objects. 49

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also founded to train graduate ordinands, had considerable in¯uence in the University generally, especially through W. R. Inge at the turn of the century. Cuddesdon, the oldest of Oxford theological colleges,55 was too far removed to be a centre of this kind, though it had many links with the University and its staff were part of the Oxford theological scene. Since it was now the case that the undergraduate `need not come to chapel unless he likes, and very many of his contemporaries come at any rate very seldom',56 college congregations also consisted of those who chose to be there. It was easier, no doubt, to go to chapel than elsewhereÐand some did bothÐbut essentially all forms of religion in Oxford became voluntarist groupings of more or less like-minded individuals. To attract undergraduates the clergy, including college chaplains,57 had to provide an effective ministry: religious societies for Roman Catholics, Free Churchmen, and different kinds of Anglicans came into existence as various interests competed for undergraduate support. Oxford religion in the period seems to have exhibited an attitude which was paradoxically both optimistic and eirenical. Though commentators frequently congratulate themselves on the fact that religion had survived both `Darwinism' and secularization,58 the chief threat was perceived as coming not from `liberals', nor from rival parties within the Church of England, from dissenters or even Roman Catholics, but from agnosticism or indifferentism.59 Again and again commentators of the period say that undergraduates who have doubts, have doubts about the fundamentals of belief.60 All this provided a good reason for growing friendliness between different kinds of Christians. By the end of the nineteenth century the Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union, supported by Nonconformists and Evangelical Anglicans, was a committed, compact, but not very in¯uential61 society. In 1896 the High Church, even less effective, Church Union had been founded by Lang.62 About ten years later all the most active members of each of these societies joined the other,63 a manoeuvre promoted by the ecumenical Student Chris55 For the early history of the college see O. Chadwick, The Founding of Cuddesdon (1954)Ð the ®nal chapter contains some brief references to the period considered here. 56 Temple, 46. 57 See e.g. S. Charteris, `Religion in Oxford: an interview with the Rev. W. H. Hutton', Treasury, 8 (Mar. 1907), 530ff. for a description of what a college chaplain provided. 58 e.g. Stedman, 142 and 155. 59 Legge, 264 and see Bardoux, 105. 60 e.g. `Religion in Oxford' (n.41), 4 and Temple, 54. 61 Temple, 49. A great many sources agree that the Evangelicals, though ardent and devoted, were for that very reason rather apart from the generality of undergraduatesÐsee e.g. `Religion in Oxford', 13 and Stedman, 151f. 62 Temple, 49 and `Religion in Oxford', 13f. 63 E. A. Burroughs, `Oxford and Evangelicalism in Relation to the Crisis in the Church', Churchman, 6 (Oct. 1911), 763.

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tian Movement, which OICCU had previously represented in Oxford. The new Oxford SCM, though much larger and more in¯uential than the old OICCU, did not satisfy leading Evangelicals in the university.64 The union could not last. The strongest unifying factor was a widespread enthusiasm for implementing the social implications of Christianity. This derived from the teaching of T. H. Green, widely recognized as the greatest single religious in¯uence in Oxford in the second half of the nineteenth century.65 Green had been an undergraduate at Balliol, where Jowett had introduced him to the thought of Hegel, though Jowett was as disapproving of the thoroughgoing way Green took up metaphysics as he was proud of the fact that Balliol provided the opportunity for Green to work out his somewhat unorthodox religious views without having to resign his fellowship.66 The British Idealist school of philosophy, founded by Green and his close friend, associate, and former pupil Edward Caird (who was eventually to succeed Jowett at Balliol), is often described as `Hegelian'; but Green and Caird themselves were always insistent that the proper approach was to begin with Kant and to proceed from there along lines, parallel to but not identical with Hegel's metaphysics.67 They transformed Kant's epistemologyÐthe mind has the inherent capacity to impose structure on phenomenaÐinto a metaphysicÐall existence is structured because it is the product of the eternal mind. This metaphysic enabled them to advance what seemed to that generation an impressive defence of an immanentist and panentheistic theism, arguing that the universe is God's self-expression.68 But the Idealists tended also to divest Christianity of its historical roots and turn the `events' of the Gospel into `eternal truths', so that the Incarnation became the belief that God and man are one, and the Resurrection the belief that true life comes from death to self. This had the advantage, from their viewpoint, of making Christianity no longer vulnerable to historical criticism. And Green ceased altogether to believe in the miraculous, which in his view meant believing that the divine `reveals itself in annulling the order in which it is implied'.69 But the way the divine became actual in history was, for Green, at least partly a matter of moral social action by individuals, so that religion acted as a link between his metaphysics and his politics. He was the ®rst modern 64

Ibid. 754f. `Religion in Oxford', 1; Temple, 54: Stedman, 156; C. C. J. Webb, `Re¯exions on the Changes in Theological Outlook within the Writer's Recollection', Abstract of the Proceedings of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology (1938/39), 37ff. and esp. 41f. 66 Both these points are implied in Jowett's memorial address on Green's death, published in B. Jowett, Sermons: Biographical and Miscellaneous, ed. W. H. Fremantle (1899), 210ff. 67 See e.g. E. Caird in A. Seth and R. B. Haldane (eds), Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883), 5. 68 P. Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (1987), 175ff. 69 Green, Works iii. 128. 65

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Oxford don to immerse himself in local civic politics: that was an expression of his deepest beliefs.70 But there is a paradoxical feature of Green's religious in¯uence, that the very aspects of his thought which seemed to him all to spring from a single and coherent system, were borrowed by others in an eclectic way. There were those who accepted his political and social concerns but not their religious basis. There were those, like the contributors to Lux Mundi, who were immensely encouraged by his defence of theism but would not follow him in rejecting miracles or the historicity of the gospels. Gore, the editor of Lux Mundi, was among Green's disciples in political affairs, and gave encouragement, as an in¯uential senior member of the University, to the Christian Social Union. The young French undergraduate previously quoted said that what his friends feared most was the growth of `Christian Socialism':71 certainly a large number of both senior and junior members belonged to the Christian Social Union, worked with settlements in London like Toynbee Hall, Oxford House, or the Oxford Medical Mission, or supported the Workers' Educational Association. Oxford theology, however, had begun to be less in¯uenced by Green and the Idealists (who had treated religious ideas as universal and constant) and to emphasize the particularity of ®rst-century Christianity and its eschatology.72 By the end of the Edwardian era the faculty seems to have accepted completely the liberal critical approach. In the 1911 examination such questions as `What is the bearing of the Prologue and Epilogue upon the argument of the Book of Job?'73 or `Consider the sources and historical value of the narratives of the Nativity'74 demonstrate this very clearly. And the latest trend in Oxford theology was represented by the statement candidates were asked to consider, `In the series Q, Mark, Matthew, there is a steady development in the direction of emphasizing, making more de®nite and even creating, sayings of our Lord of the catastrophic Apocalyptic type.'75 Though there had been pressure for some time for theology to be treated like any other discipline, the original character of the school was still represented by two restrictions: examiners had to be clergymen of the Church of England and so did candidates for the BD and DD degrees. In 1894 the Theology Faculty Board proposed new regulations to raise the academic standard of the BD. When the proposal came before the Hebdomadal Council `liberals' proposed that the clerical restriction on candidates 70 See D. M. Mackinnon, `Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists', Journal of Religious Studies, 20 (1983), 134ff; Pt 1, 466. 71 Bardoux, 23. 72 Webb, 46. 73 Examination papers of the Honour School of Theology, 1911, Old Testament II, question 6. 74 Ibid. New Testament: Life and Teaching of Our Lord, question 1. 75 Ibid. New Testament: General, question 1.

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be removed also. The faculty board preferred to drop the matter. Almost ten years later, in November 1903, Council received a petition from members of Congregation arguing that the other restriction (on the appointment of examiners in the Theology honour school) should be removed. In spite of the inevitable counter-petition, a statute to effect the change was passed by Congregation in February 1904 but defeated in Convocation by 676 votes to 278.76 Again there was a pause of nearly a decade, but in January 1912 the theology professors and the Dean of Christ Church (T. B. Strong), headed by Scott Holland, the Regius Professor, formally asked Council for the abolition of both restrictions. Statutes were passed by Congregation, with a small dissentient vote in each case, but overwhelmingly rejected by Convocation.77 These controversies reveal the variety of attitudes covered by the term `liberal'. The desire of some, that theology should simply be studied as an academic subject, was re¯ected in the faculty board's proposal that theologia should cease to be described as sacra. The higher degrees were `to be awarded as a test of scienti®c knowledge only' and the University was no longer to act for the Church in requiring a formal profession of belief in a particular view of revelation.78 Others were simply concerned that Nonconformists should not be excluded any longer, hence a successful amendment in Congregation on 28 January 1913 that the BD thesis should be on some subject of Christian theology. And the divisions cut across the old liberal and conservative party lines. Thus Scott Holland (who was an AngloCatholic, had been a contributor to Lux Mundi, and became more conservative as he grew older) supported the change but A. C. Headlam (a leading New Testament scholar and himself a future Regius Professor, Bishop of Gloucester, and ecumenist) opposed the proposal, arguing that theology ought to be a training for the ministry of a particular Church and that the way to include Nonconformists was to have two theology schools.79 The same variety among liberals can be perceived in Foundations, another volume of Oxford essays designed to relate Christianity to contemporary thinking, which appeared in 1912.80 Most of the contributors belonged in the tradition of liberal Anglo-Catholicism. William Temple did not, though he had begun to be much in¯uenced by Gore.81 The editor (B. H. Streeter) was most obviously the odd man out, less concerned with restating traditional 76

See Gazette, xxxiv (1 Mar. and 17 May 1904), 394, 593. Gazette, xliii (5 Mar. and 30 Apr. 1913), 553, 708. The voting ®gures in Convocation were 860 to 434 in the case of the examiners and 763 to 334 in the case of divinity degrees. 78 Theological Degrees and School: Reply from the Board of the Faculty of Theology to Hebdomadal Council, 24 October 1912, HCP 93 (1912), 121±2. 79 A. C. Headlam, `Degrees in Divinity', Church Quarterly Review, LXXVI (July 1913), 364ff. 80 B. H. Streeter (ed.), Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (1912): satirized by Ronald Knox, in `Absolute and Abitofhell' in OM, 28 Nov. 1912, 110±11. 81 See e.g. F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, (1948), esp. 488. 77

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beliefs and much more in¯uenced by the new eschatological emphasis in theology. Streeter's own essay on the historic Christ owed much to Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus and was sceptical about the possibility of reconstructing an accurate account of the Jesus of history. The introductory chapter describing `The Modern Situation' was written by Neville Talbot, junior dean of Balliol, not himself a product of the Jowett/Green school but fairly typical of the Christian socialist, Anglo-Catholic tradition. Self-consciously post-Victorian, he argued that all belief in the inevitability of progress had collapsed and that the world was a much less secure place than it had seemed in Green's day.82 But most of the contributors, including Temple, whose essay on the divinity of Christ was still strongly in¯uenced by Idealism, strove to recapture something of the optimism as well as the immanentism of the older generation. There was an obvious dissonance between this and Talbot's pessimistic insistence upon the morbidity of contemporary society, and nothing in the book suggests that Oxford theology was equipped to understand the destructive war that was about to break out. 82

Foundations, 8.

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4 The Colleges in the New Era m . c . c u r t h oy s * If the rise of the undergraduate college was originally consolidated in Tudor Oxford,1 its revival was achieved during the late nineteenth century. At the centre of this renewal was the tutorial system which, as refashioned in the decades after 1860, strengthened the collegiate ideal of undergraduate education. Not only did the colleges demonstrate their ef®ciency as teaching institutions, preparing students for degrees, but they reinforced the claims of a residential university to provide a training in `character'. Many of the developments discussed in this chapter had close parallels in Cambridge,2 and it was during this period that the colleges of both universities came to be seen as standing at the apex of a reorganized educational system in England. They drew a substantial proportion of their students from the public schools, which underwent a similar process of renovation. To the Executive Commissioners who set about remodelling the Oxford colleges after the passage of the 1854 Act, the key to reform lay in creating properly constituted governing bodies. As these bodies became puri®ed by the effect of open elections to fellowships, it was hoped that public spirit would displace the vested interests which had previously discredited the colleges in the eyes of educational reformers. By 1858 most of the colleges had received new ordinances, modifying and adding to the statutes laid down in preceding centuries by their founders.3 A standard clause laid down that the head and fellows of each college were to hold at least two stated general * I am extremely grateful to the following college archivists for their help: Elizabeth Boardman (Brasenose); Christine Butler (Corpus); Judith Curthoys (Christ Church); Caroline Dalton (New College); Robin Darwall-Smith (Magdalen and University); and Clare Hopkins (Trinity). I also wish to thank Brian Harrison for his valuable comments on an early draft. My principal debt is to Michael Brock for his suggestions, encouragement, and guidance throughout the preparation of this chapter. 1

The Collegiate University, esp. ch. 1. See C. N. L. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iv, 1870±1990 (1993). I should like to thank Professor Brooke for his suggestions on a preliminary version of this chapter. 3 St John's, which held out against the Executive Commissioners, did not receive its new ordinance until 1861. Three colleges, Corpus, Exeter, and Lincoln, had voluntarily drawn up new codes of statutes in advance of the Commissioners and these came into effect in 1855. The rest were sealed in 1857 or early in 1858. 2

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meetings a year, where decisions were to be made by simple majority of those present, and `any statute, rule, or usage' which had previously prevented any matters being brought before the governing body was to be void.4 At Magdalen the president's veto, which had enabled Dr Routh to fend off change, was abolished, while at Brasenose the distinction between senior and junior fellows, reserving many powers to the former, was removed, placing them all in a position of equality in college meetings.5 The resident fellows of Trinity who had drawn up a detailed plan in 1853 to reform the educational practice of their college and had been rebuked by the president for their presumption, now had the opportunity to bring their schemes to fruition. At a series of stated meetings during the winter of 1857±8, they carried through new regulations for the chapel, the library, the buttery, tuition, and residence.6 Their zeal was matched by other governing bodies who, within the space of a generation, reconstructed the college system. Constitutional change, which had called the new governing bodies into being, eroded many local peculiarities. The long-term process by which the colleges were `levelled up', often in response to the example of Balliol (see Chapter 5), was well advanced by 1900, even though the ®nancial resources of some were squeezed by the agricultural depression.7 Having functioned for three centuries without statutes, Christ Church was, after 1858, `in a state of Heraclitean ¯ux',8 receiving two ordinances and a set of statutes in the course of twenty-®ve years. How the House adapted to these interventions, which threatened, as one of the Students on the old foundation apprehended, to `degrade Christ Church to the level of a College', is described in Chapter 9.9 Over a century after its establishment on the site of an existing hall, Worcester's full collegiate standing was ®nally acknowledged by admission in 1858 to the cycle for electing proctors. Its `ancient celebrity' as Oxford's Botany Bay had, to J. W. Burgon's regret, already been lost by the coming of the railway: Worcester was now the ®rst college, rather than the last, to be reached by the traveller to Oxford.10 Lincoln alone was shielded from a second phase of statute reform in 1882, when each college received a new code prepared within a common format, hastening the tendency towards formal convergence.11 The 4 Ordinances and Statutes (1863), 40±1. An exception was Christ Church, where the Dean and Canons retained ultimate power until 1867. 5 VCH Oxon. iii. 200, 213. 6 Trinity College Order Book, 1852±1884, TCA A. 4, 105±6, 112±13, 117. For the earlier scheme, addressed to the Visitor, see Papers relating to Bishop Sumner's Visitation, 1853, TCA Statutes B. 7 G. C. Richards, An Oxonian Looks Back (privately printed, 1960), 1; on the effect of depression on college ®nances see Pt I, 401±8. 8 J. Foster, Oxford Men and their Colleges (1893), 394. 9 E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform 1850±1867 (1970), 173. 10 H. Shaw, The Arms of the Colleges of Oxford (1855). 11 Green, Lincoln, 500±3. The new foundations of Hertford and Keble were also unaffected by the commissioners.

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apparently anomalous position of All Souls as a college which had virtually no undergraduates was preserved (see Chapter 8), and it played an increasingly important role as a point of contact between the academic world and public life. Within Oxford it represented the sole example of an attempt to associate a college with a faculty on the lines proposed by Mark Pattison, though its association with law and modern history was not as exclusive as Pattison's schemes envisaged. All Souls provided a possible model for accommodating natural science within the collegiate system. The idea of allocating a college to the sciences came before the Royal Commission on Scienti®c Instruction in the early 1870s, but was rejected in its report on Oxford, largely drafted by Henry Smith, which argued that science `should rather be regarded as running through the whole of human knowledge', and that `it would be better both for science and for learning that they should be intermingled together in the different colleges.'12 Seizing a college for the bene®t of science was, anyway, reckoned to be too revolutionary a proposal to be practical, though Robert Laing identi®ed Wadham, on account of its historic association with the Royal Society and its proximity to the University Museum, as appropriate for the purpose.13 The wider aspirations expressed in the commission's report meant, however, that science never in this period enjoyed the particular encouragement from college endowments which All Souls offered to the study of modern history and jurisprudence, and was dependent upon whatever share of resources individual colleges chose to devote to it. After 1860 two new colleges came into being. Keble College, founded by public subscription to provide an inexpensive university education on de®nite Church of England principles, was incorporated in 1870 (see Chapter 6). Four years later Hertford College, which had been defunct since 1805, was revived following the dissolution of Magdalen Hall whose site and trust property Hertford acquired.14 It owed much to the shrewdness, ambition, and instinct for fund-raising of Richard Michell, Magdalen Hall's last principal and long-standing adversary of Mark Pattison. Seeing that the days of the independent, unendowed halls were numbered, Michell began in 1873 to raise money to cover the legal costs of transmuting the hall into a college.15 Lack of endowment had brought about the demise of the original Hertford College, but the fortuitous appearance of a benefactor, T. C. Baring, a partner in the merchant bank and a Member of Parliament, ensured that the new foundation received a full complement of fellowships and scholar12

Devonshire Commn 3rd Report, lii±liii. R. Laing, Some Dreams of a Constitution-Monger (1876), 7. 14 Gazette, v (2 June 1874), 208. 15 C. R. Cruttwell, `The New Foundation, 1874±5', Hertford College Magazine, 21 (Apr. 1932), 57±61. R. Michell, Orationes Creweianae, ed. E. B. Michell (1878), appendix C, 175±7, indicates some tension as between the claims of Michell or Baring to be regarded as the `founder' of Hertford. 13

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ships. Unlike the Keble subscription, which was ploughed into buildings, Baring's money funded personnel, though on terms which had previously (February 1874) caused his old college, Brasenose, to decline the offer of his bounty.16 `A staunch Conservative and strong Churchman', who was a muni®cent supporter of church building in his home county of Essex,17 Baring stipulated that the bene®t of his gift should be restricted to members of the Church of England, a limitation which was criticized when the Hertford College Act (1874) was debated in Parliament, and unsuccessfully challenged in the courts by the Cambridge Nonconformist A. I. Tillyard. The ruling of the Court of Appeal in 1878 showed that the 1871 Act repealing university tests did not prevent the future endowment of colleges limited to particular denominations.18 Lord Salisbury, the Visitor of the new foundation, welcomed the evidence both that `the race of Great Founders is not extinct: and that the modern Church of England is able to show one of the greatest', though Baring himself shunned publicity.19 By 1881 eighteen fellowships and thirty scholarships had been created, batches of stock amounting to over £100,000 having been transferred by Baring for the purpose. At ®rst, Hertford necessarily re¯ected Magdalen Hall's moderately Evangelical tone when Michell (admittedly only `an elderly and passive evangelical in¯uence')20 and Robert Gandell, the Arabist, joined its governing body. In exercising the right, which he had made a condition of his gift, to nominate the ®rst holders of fellowships, Baring (the son of an Evangelical bishop) showed a preference for Low Churchmen. But intent that the college should not be limited to any particular party within the Church of England, he nominated men identi®ed with both wings of the Church, including the Low Churchman F. H. Jeune, the future judge, who handled the legal matters involved in its constitution, and J. H. Maude, a Tractarian, who taught classics. A fondness for whist, port, and cigars distanced Henry Boyd, the principal who presided over the college during its formative years, from abstainers among the younger fellows, and identi®ed him with the tastes of Oxford's older clerical establishment, but he actively supported Low-Church causes such as Wycliffe Hall.21 Purely classical scholars also predominated among the early fellowship. Rendering ancient writers into 16

Vice-Principal's Register, 5 Feb. 1874, Brasenose College Archives. The Times, 8 April 1891 (supplementary obituary). I am grateful to Dr John Orbell, archivist of ING Barings, for biographical references to Baring. 18 S. G. Hamilton, Hertford College (1903), 141±6; Hertford College Act, 1874, in Enactments in Parliament iv. 43; the college's statutes were con®rmed by the Visitor, Lord Salisbury, in February, 1875, PP 1875 lxviii. 234; VCH Oxon iii. 314; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 266±7. 19 Salisbury to F. H. Jeune, 3 Feb. 1875, Hertford College Archives 3/1/1/128, cited in A. Lawes, `A catalogue of the archives of Hertford College, Oxford' (typescript 1985). 20 J. S. Reynolds, The Evangelicals at Oxford 1735±1871 (1975), pt 2, 6. 21 UJ 2 Feb. 1882, 195; ibid. 16 Feb. 1882, 234 for Boyd's presence at one of Canon Christopher's missionary breakfasts. H. G. Mullinger, Arthur Burroughs: A Memoir (1936), 19; Richards, An Oxonian, 7. 17

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English verse was Baring's recreation, but he may have had a larger purpose. At a time when the philosophical content of Greats was alarming conservatives (see Chapter 1), he might have wished to reinforce the old course of study, narrowly con®ned to the classical languages. His in¯uence was conservative in almost every sense, and the college which he endowed was not associated with innovation. By contrast, Keble which, after its buildings were erected, had to pay its own way, pioneered new developments in collegiate education and enthusiastically embraced the extended curriculum of honour schools. The absorption of Magdalen Hall heralded the disappearance of all but one of the independent halls. During the 1850s and 1860s they had enjoyed something of a resurgence by reducing the costs of residence at a time when the colleges as a whole had done little to address this long-standing problem. But their historic decline appeared inexorable; D. P. Chase, Principal of St Mary Hall since 1857, acknowledged that no one who could gain admission to a college would chose to go to a hall.22 Under-endowment prevented the halls offering scholarships to raise their academic standards, while after the introduction of lodgings, and the foundation of Keble, they ceased to offer the cheapest means of residence. Accordingly the Selborne Commission provided for their eventual incorporation within the existing colleges, who thereby acquired additional undergraduate accommodation. Merton speedily annexed St Alban Hall, removing a long-standing source of irritation: the hall, whose premises adjoined Merton, had traditionally harboured `under the very shadow of our own Warden's lodgings' reprobates excluded from the college for disciplinary reasons.23 New Inn Hall fell into Balliol's hands after the death of its principal in 188724Ðcontemporaries were entertained by the prospect of the reputedly none too studious members of the `Tap' being suddenly subjected to the rigours of Balliol's academic disciplineÐand St Mary Hall was absorbed by Oriel on Chase's death in 1902. In 1903 St Edmund Hall's days as an independent entity also seemed numbered, since the anticipated retirement of the Principal, Edward Moore, opened the way for the partial union with Queen's provided for in the Act of 1877. But Congregation threw out Provost Magrath's rash attempt to effect a complete take-over by Queen's. Oxford opinion, it was reported, had `come round to the view that the extinction of small Societies is not in itself desirable',25 though it was not until 1913 that St Edmund Hall's right to self-determination, supported by the Chancellor, Curzon, was ®nally con®rmed. 22

UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 615. G. H. Martin and J. R. L. High®eld, A History of Merton College, Oxford (1997), 321; E. A. Knox, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (1934), 97. 24 J. Jones, Balliol College: A History 1263±1939 (1988), 320. 25 OM 25 Feb. 1903, 243, cited in J. N. D. Kelly, St Edmund Hall: Almost Seven Hundred Years (1989), 99±100. 23

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In the hope of providing an inexpensive alternative to the colleges the 1854 Oxford University Act had permitted MAs, under licence from the ViceChancellor, to open private halls for the education of undergraduates. They were also intended to meet the needs of parents who were suspicious of the comparative lack of supervision in the public schools and colleges, and wished to entrust their sons to a more domestic type of institution. A decade later the experiment was said to have `entirely failed'.26 One small establishment, however, ®lled a niche in the market by receiving idle or incapable students removed from the colleges. For nearly thirty years W. H. Charsley presided over a hall in Parks Road whose members, though few in number, were distinguished for their athletic prowess.27 In 1880 H. J. Turrell, a private tutor who claimed to got have got more than 1,700 men through the pass schools, obtained a licence to open a hall, and purchased a large house across Magdalen Bridge for its premises. He identi®ed a potential demand for an institution which would admit boys at a slightly lower age than was usually accepted at the colleges, so as to qualify them for Oxford degrees and the start of professional life before they reached adulthood. This idea never caught on but, claiming by 1895 to have been reduced to `pauperism and beggary', Turrell blamed the loss of his investment on malicious changes in the University's lodgings regulations.28 Charsley's house, meanwhile, was taken over in 1892 by the Revd C. A. Marcon, who continued to receive migrants from the colleges until 1918, when this curious relic of Victorian Oxford ®nally closed its doors. Towards the end of the century private halls acquired a more serious function as the means by which non-Anglicans could establish their own denominational institutions within the University. When in 1895 the Catholic hierarchy rescinded the ban on Roman Catholics attending the University, halls supervised by clerics seemed to offer the necessary precautions for protecting the faith and morality of Catholic students at Oxford. Fr Richard Clarke SJ was licensed master of a Jesuit hall which opened in 1896 and which on Clarke's death was perpetuated by Fr John O'Fallon Pope SJ; a Benedictine hall under the mastership of Dom Oswald HunterBlair followed in 1899.29 Pope's emphasis on hard study produced some notable results in the class lists, exempli®ed by the spectacular undergraduate career of C. C. Martindale, and brought the hall to favourable 26 Parl. Deb. 3S clxxxvii. 1642 (5 June 1867); on one short-lived hall, see Josephine E. Butler, Recollections of George Butler (Bristol, 1893), 108. 27 A. D. Godley, Aspects of Modern Oxford (1894), 13. 28 See the series of published letters, 1887±1895, in Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 4 100. Turrell, like Charsley, was in holy orders. 29 V. A. McClelland, English Roman Catholics and Higher Education 1830±1903 (1973), 405; A. Stacpoole, `The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford', New Blackfriars, 67 (1986), 226± 7; A. Cramer, `The foundation of St Benet's Hall', in H. Wansbrough and A. Marett-Crosby, Benedictines in Oxford (1997), 245±8.

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notice.30 The institutions established in Oxford by the Protestant Free Churches took a rather different form. Although anxious lest their young men might drift away from their ancestral faith, they preferred not to remove them from the existing colleges. Their own colleges were nonresidential: the new buildings for Mans®eld and Manchester colleges, opened in 1889 and 1893 respectively, did not originally provide accommodation for undergraduates.31 Allowing men in lodgings to matriculate as members of the University without belonging to a college or hall (see Chapter 7) had appeared in 1868 to be a radical break from established practice. Experience soon showed the unattached students to be neither wealthy libertines beyond the reach of college discipline, as some opponents of the scheme had feared, nor a turbulent mass of rootless youths given to riot and radical politics, which other critics apprehended from the experience of university cities on the continent. The Censors to the University Delegacy charged with their supervision reported that only two of the 130 unattached students in residence had been out of their lodgings after twelve o'clock on any night during the whole of Michaelmas term 1872, con®dent that the statistic was founded upon an extremely effective regulation of lodging houses.32 The NonCollegiate students (as they were termed after 1884) rapidly sought collegiate af®liations. The opening in 1888 of a new building to house the Delegacy convinced the Oxford Magazine of the futility of all efforts to break up ``the College system''. Commissioners and newspapers and public opinion gave us Students Unattached to any College or Hall . . . but Tutors have been appointed, St Catharine's Clubs have been formed, the University has been compelled to build the Non-Collegiate Students a College.33

Instead of breaking Oxford's college monopoly, the Non-Collegiate scheme tended if anything to strengthen it with infusions of new blood. NonCollegiates who showed academic promise were lured away with scholarships and exhibitions offered by the colleges, who were also not above poaching promising sportsmen from the Delegacy. Gladstone's remark, quoted by the Non-Collegiate Students' Magazine in 1896, that he looked favourably upon `the Non-Collegiate body as a standing reserve established in favour of the colleges',34 was undoubtedly true, though not regarded as 30 Educational Times, 1 July 1903, 287, commenting that the majority of undergraduates at Pope's Hall had obtained ®rsts in classical or mathematical moderations; P. Caraman, C. C. Martindale (1967), 90. 31 E. Kaye, Mans®eld College, Oxford (1996), 79; V. D. Davis, A History of Manchester College (1932), 168. In 1900 Manchester College acquired a lodging house in Holywell Street licensed as a private hall under Revd W. E. Addis. 32 RCOC (1872), Pt II. 166. 33 Cited in R. R. Trotman and E. J. K. Garrett, The Non-Collegiate Students and St. Catherine's Society, 1868±1962 (1962), 10. 34 Non-Collegiate Students' Magazine, Oct. 1896, 3; Jan. 1897, 26.

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a compliment by the magazine's editors. At the turn of the century, however, the Non-Collegiate scheme was seen to be ful®lling an important purpose, but not as fully as some wished,35 in providing an institutional af®liation for graduate students, and especially for those from overseas. In practice the most powerful competitive pressures came from among the colleges themselves. Once undergraduates were permitted to live in lodgings, the arti®cial protection enjoyed by the weaker colleges was removed at a stroke.36 Previously, when colleges could admit only as many students as they could accommodate within their walls, the best were obliged to turn away well-quali®ed commoner applicants who, critics alleged, were driven to seek admission at those colleges where the teaching and other arrangements left much to be desired. Lodgings now offered ambitious and prestigious colleges the possibility of almost limitless growth, encouraging Jowett's visions of Balliol absorbing the rest of the University.37 As was soon apparent, however, the moment when a single college could achieve such hegemony had passed. Two of the wealthiest colleges, Magdalen and New College, now permitted under the ordinances of 1857±8 to admit commoners, took full advantage of the opportunity for expansion. From being two of the smallest colleges in terms of undergraduate numbers before 1850 (see Figure 4.1), New College had by 1911 become the largest, while Magdalen expanded more than tenfold in the ®fty years to 1891. Almost as remarkable was the dynamism of St John's, a clerical stronghold which made a virtue of obstructing statutory reform, and rejoiced in a reputation as `a College of survivals'.38 Yet, during the presidency of James Bellamy, a Norfolk landowner and leader of the Conservative party in the University, the college astutely developed its North Oxford estate while rapidly expanding its student numbers. For the under-endowed and unfashionable colleges the picture was less bright. Lack of resources prevented Wadham, which had enjoyed a high reputation earlier in the century, from adding to its accommodation to match expansion elsewhere;39 Exeter and Worcester, which had admitted large numbers of commoners in the pre-1850 period, also lost out to better-placed rivals. During the 1870s some of the smaller colleges looked to be going the 35 L. R. Farnell complained in 1914 that the `collegiate spirit' embraced by the Censor of Non-Collegiates was an obstacle to the admission of this type of student, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 283±5. 36 W. A. Pantin, Oxford Life in Oxford Archives (1972), 14. 37 Abbott and Campbell, i. 433. 38 Foster, Oxford Men, 470; on the college's dealings with the Executive Commissioners see W. C. Costin, The History of St John's College, Oxford, 1598±1860 (1958), 255±78. It also held out against electing married fellows, with the perhaps not unforeseen result of excluding two radical members of the college's teaching staff, Sidney Ball and T. C. Snow, from its governing body; W. H. Hutton, S. John Baptist College (1898) 232; T. Hinchcliffe, North Oxford (1992), 76, 166. 39 C. S. L. Davies and Jane Garnett (eds), Wadham College (1994), 46.

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f i g u r e 4.1 Numbers of undergraduates (men) in residence in each college and hall: 1842, 1871, 1891, and 1911 Sources: Pt 1, 159; RCOC (1872), vol. I; OM 4 Feb. 1891, 188; OM 23 Feb. 1911, 220.

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way of the halls. Possible scope for achieving savings by having a single head, and a single bursar, led to negotiations in 1877/8 between Lincoln and Brasenose with a view to amalgamation, though the project, like similar proposals at Cambridge to merge Emmanuel and Christ's, and King's with St Catharine's, was eventually abandoned.40 Inter-collegiate lectures subsequently proved crucial to securing the viability of the small colleges unable to maintain extensive teaching staffs, while, as the case of St Edmund Hall showed, there was a renewed sentiment in favour of preserving diversity.41 Jesus, for long tainted with an unfashionable provincialism by its closed Welsh endowments, achieved a resurgence. In 1857 it had extracted a concession from the commissioners, and was made an exception to the general policy of openness, half of the fellowships and all but two of the scholarships being protected for natives of Wales and Monmouthshire.42 By 1873, when it had slipped to the position of the smallest, the college was represented in the undergraduate press as a centre of `pig-headed conservatism', and attacked for its isolation and its failure to make a respectable showing either in the class lists or on the river.43 Two decades later, its position as the national college for Wales, which an `Anglicizing' party on the governing body saw as an anachronism, proved instead a source of strength, particularly when the reform of Welsh secondary education produced an enlarged supply of quali®ed applicants.44 During the principalship of John RhyÃs, whose election in 1895 represented a victory for those who wished to develop the connection with Welsh Nonconformity,45 Jesus became one of the most progressive colleges, admitting teacher-training students attached to the Day Training College, research students from the Welsh university colleges, and a signi®cant number of overseas students. To reaf®rm the point, in 1910 the principal and fellows elected David Lloyd George to an honorary fellowship.46 Despite some variations in the experience of individual colleges, the thirty years after 1860 were a period of overall expansion, as a surge of candidates came forward principally from the enlarged community of public schools. There was a lull during the mid-1890s; at Christ Church, which suffered from the bad publicity following the Blenheim and Bullingdon `rows', there were up to ®fty sets of rooms lying empty and depriving the scouts of 40 V. H. H. Green, Oxford Common Room: A Study of Lincoln College and Mark Pattison (1957), 298±301; Brooke, Cambridge, 44. 41 H. E. P. Platt, A Plea for the Preservation of Lincoln College (1878), 5. 42 E. G. Hardy, Jesus College (1899), 197±8, 207±8. In 1882 the restrictions on fellowships were modi®ed to allow tutors and half the scholarships to be elected by open competition. 43 UJ 5 June, 19 June, 23 Oct. 1873; H. Ll. Browne, Jesus College College, Oxford. A Letter to G. Osborne Morgan (1870), 5. 44 K. O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880±1980 (1982), 100. 45 H. Thomas (ed.), Father and Son: Memoirs of Thomas Thomas and of Llewelyn Thomas (1898), 146. 46 Gazette, xl (3 Aug. 1910), 904.

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expected income.47 A well-informed observer of the school sixth-forms in England which fed the University, Percy Matheson of New College, reckoned in 1894 that the limit of boys quali®ed for, and whose parents were able to afford, an Oxford education had been reached, and that any foreseeable increase was likely to come from overseas students.48 This proved a substantially accurate prediction during the following twenty years, when undergraduates from abroad were largely responsible for swelling the total number of men in residence to over 3,000.49 It did, however, fail to take account of the potential for expansion from within the United Kingdom, and in particular from Scotland, indicated by the prominence of Scots in the Oxford rugby football XV during the early 1880s.50 Matriculations from Scotland more than doubled between 1885 and 1910 and among these, former pupils of Scottish schoolsÐmany in¯uenced by the English publicschool modelÐwere as numerous as those who came up by the more traditional route of study at a Scottish university associated with the Snell exhibitioners who passed from Glasgow to Balliol.51 The old ideal of `the frugal student buried in his books and working by himself in austere lodgings', which had inspired the Non-Collegiate scheme in mid-Victorian Oxford,52 was in decline: Scottish parents had become increasingly willing to give their sons an English collegiate education. In response to the pressure of numbers, the colleges undertook ambitious building programmes, and succeeded in stabilizing the proportion of undergraduates obliged to live in lodgings at about a third. To critics like Mark Pattison the drive to accommodate more undergraduates had reduced tutors to boarding-house keepers and prevented colleges from serving as `retreats for study',53 while the demolition of historic vernacular buildings to make way for new student rooms led William Morris in 1885 to deliver his famous castigation of `modern commercial dons'.54 The priority given to undergraduate education in the `reformed' colleges, and the `commercial' spirit which this could engender, was most powerfully demonstrated by the annual competition for college scholarships. Redistri47

152.

48

Memorial from the Christ Church scouts to the Steward, Nov. 1897, CA S. xxxi.a.2, fo.

Bryce Commn, v. 201. See below, Table 23.A3. 50 R. McWhirter and A. Noble, Centenary History of Oxford University Rugby Football Club (1969), 42. 51 Stone, `Size and Composition', 101, table 9. Of boys admitted to ®ve leading Scottish schools, 1895±9 (all of which happened to have Oxford graduates as headmasters in 1900), 81 went on to Oxford: The Edinburgh Academy Register 1824±1914 (1914); The Fettes College Register 1870 to 1922 (1923); The Glenalmond Register, 1847±1929 (1929); The Loretto Register 1825 to 1948 (1949); Merchiston Castle School Register 1833 to 1950 (1952). 52 R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (1983), 328. 53 Essays on the Endowment of Research (1876), 10. 54 `The Vulgarization of Oxford', Daily News, 20 Nov. 1885, repr. in The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends, ed. P. Henderson (1950), 242±3. 49

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bution of college endowments after 1854 considerably increased the number of scholarships; by the early twentieth century there were some 500 in all, nearly 400 of which were open to all-comers who chose to compete for them, except that candidates must not have exceeded the age of 19 (and must, of course, be male).55 Although some were awarded for Mathematics, Natural Science, and Modern History, the great majority (about 300) were in Classics. In elections to the latter the rivalry between the colleges, anxious to attract the pick of the classically educated sixth-formers, was ®ercest. With large ®nancial resources available (by the early 1870s some £25,000 was applied to this purpose), larger and wealthier colleges, such as New College and Queen's, awarding open scholarships for the ®rst time, were tempted to try to outbid those colleges who had pioneered scholarship competitionsÐ Balliol, Corpus, Trinity, and WadhamÐliterally by offering more money to successful candidates. The Selborne Commission put a stop to this in 1882, ®xing an £80 annual maximum value for scholarships. For the next thirty years the colleges manoeuvred to hold their examinations at the most favourable position in the academic year, to sweep the cream `like some piratical milkman, from our scholastic pans before it had time to come to the top' as H. B. Gray of Brad®eld College complained, in one of the many colourful denunciations of the colleges delivered from the platform of the Headmasters' Conference.56 Combinations among colleges helped to reduce the number of examinations and disruption of the school year. Queen's negotiated with Brasenose to hold a joint examination in 1870,57 Pembroke joined with Merton in 1877. By 1885 thirteen colleges examined in three groups, who agreed to space their competitions evenly around the year, rotating year by year and so spreading the opportunities to enjoy the prime time in Michaelmas term.58 Rotation soon broke down, and the strongest group, Corpus, Magdalen, and New College took the unprecedented step of seizing the ®rst week in November 1891 as a direct challenge to Balliol which, claiming `ancient usage', held aloof from combinations and insisted on its right to recruit scholars at this most favourable moment.59 The ensuing committees, negotiations with the Cambridge colleges and the headmasters, alliances, and treaties, followed by breakaways and recriminations, made for an intricate and unedifying narrative of competition in the collegiate world.60 Balliol was identi®ed as the main obstacle to agreement, but other colleges, who set equally high store by the traditions of their scholars, were 55 G. N. Curzon, Principles & Methods of University Reform (1909), 77, 81. About 120 were still subject to local and school restrictions. 56 Journal of Education, Jan. 1897, 70. 57 J. R. Magrath, The Queen's College (2 vols 1921), ii. 190. 58 Papers relating to combined examinations for college scholarships, 1885±1900, Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c. 212. 59 Journal of Education, Jan. 1893, 62. 60 OM 2 Dec. 1903, 114±15.

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content to watch the headmasters' ideas for closed seasons and large combinations of colleges fall to the ground. `Better the thing should break down over Balliol,' a Wadham tutor con®ded to his Trinity ally about one proposal which they privately opposed, the two colleges having acted in concert for a number of years.61 Wadham had particular grounds for being wary of change, for in the early 1890s scholarship elections had brought it a particularly brilliant crop of entrants, whose celebrity helped to raise the college from the doldrums.62 The emphasis which colleges now placed on selecting the scholars who were to uphold their academic reputations ensured that the headmasters' complaints remained unresolved before 1914. To the suggestion, in 1909, that scholarship examinations `should be less wasteful of time and energy' the Corpus governing body, which was justi®ably proud of its long history of competitive elections, observed that they did not regard the exercise an excessive burden, `considering their [scholars'] great importance to the success of the College.'63 Corpus was unusual in having a large number of scholars in relation to its size (30 out of about 75 resident undergraduates at the turn of the century). In most colleges scholars, who were `elected', were considerably outnumbered by commoners, who were merely `admitted'.64 The latter procedure simply involved making an application to the head of the chosen college, producing testimonials of good conduct, and sitting whatever examination a college chose to set (though, increasingly, candidates were exempt from this if they had passed a school examination equivalent to Responsions). Commoner admissions were some of the most signi®cant remaining responsibilities of the heads who, in their dealings with parents and schoolmasters of prospective undergraduates, could play an important part in creating the `tone' of their respective colleges. In other respects, the heads had been left in an uncertain position by the new ordinances of the 1850s. Educational councils or tutorial committees reduced their power to organize teaching, while their traditional prerogatives in the appointment of tutors also came under challenge.65 Fellows were no longer willing to allow heads undisputed responsibility in matters of undergraduate discipline, as Pattison discovered when he ®nally assumed the headship of Lincoln.66 Even in the minor affairs of college administration the heads could no longer rely upon their customary powers; in 1862 the President of Trinity faced moves by the fellows to usurp what he claimed to 61

H. P. Richards to H. E. D. Blakiston, n.d. [1899], TCA. C. Ellis, C. B. The Life of Charles Burgess Fry (1984), 15. 63 HCP 84 (1909), 367. 64 Scholars and exhibitioners made up in total about a third of undergraduates, though the exact proportions varied between colleges. 65 Jones, Balliol, 210; SC. Tests (1870±1), Qs 4±5, 15. 66 Green, Oxford Common Room, 268±9. 62

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be his right to appoint college laundresses.67 Some heads found themselves reduced to ciphers. College government at Merton had almost entirely passed out of the hands of Bullock-Marsham, the ageing warden. Provost Hawkins of Oriel (whose position has been described in Part I Chapter 6) and Warden Symons of Wadham, accustomed in the pre-reform era to autocratic rule, became isolated ®gures. In the radical mood of the 1860s, some reformers questioned the need for headships at all. Many of their customary duties, W. L. Newman of Balliol contended, were being carried out by other college of®cers.68 In smaller colleges, Thomas Fowler statedÐ some years before he became President of CorpusÐ`the duties of the head are almost merely nominal.'69 One model for the regeneration of the of®ce was presented by the headmasters of the reformed public schools, who combined teaching and moral leadership with the ordinary executive duties of headship. Jowett drew an explicit parallel with Dr Arnold's successors: `I should attach educational duties to the headships; like the head of a great public school, the head of a college should teach.'70 This precept was to be enthusiastically carried out by G. G. Bradley, who had been Master of Marlborough before his election in 1870 to the mastership of University College. The transformation of Marlborough from a near breakdown of discipline and the verge of bankruptcy in the early 1850s to a ®rst-rank public school in the following decade, was reckoned one of the striking successes of Victorian upper-class education, and Bradley set about achieving a similar transformation in his Oxford college which, during the long years of Dr Plumptre's headship, had settled into a leisurely, if gentlemanly, routine. His ®rst address to the undergraduates had a decidedly headmagisterial tone, and was described as `mealy' by a diarist among them, whose ®rst impressions of the new Master were not favourable.71 Educated under Arnold at Rugby, and in¯uenced by A. P. Stanley when an undergraduate at University in the early 1840s, Bradley brought in two other Marlborough men sharing his Broad Churchmanship, J. F. Bright, who taught modern history, and the classicist, S. H. Butcher. Bradley himself undertook a signi®cant amount of teaching, `lecturing at least once daily on classical and theological subjects'.72 Together they swiftly raised academic standards and attracted sons of both Gladstone and Salisbury. His rule ended, however, in disharmony, and he accepted with some relief Gladstone's offer of the deanery of Westminster in 1881. The fellows had found an interventionist head not to their liking, and the under67 68 69 70 71 72

Trinity College Order Book 1852±85, 158±9 (18 Mar. 1862), TCA. SCOC (1867), evidence, Qs 1507±9. SCOC (1867), evidence, Q. 2306. SCOC (1867), evidence, Q. 2404. A. Cree (ed.), 1871: An Oxford Diary (1974), 14. RCOC (1872) Pt II. 201.

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graduates staged a highly publicized college `row' in 1879.73 Jowett's hand was detected in the election of another headmaster, John Percival of Clifton, to the presidency of Trinity in 1878. Already controversial as an outsider to Trinity (he was a graduate and former fellow of Queen's), Percival compounded matters by immediately embarking on a heavy-handed drive to root out undergraduate idlers.74 A similar unwillingness to tread carefully in matters touching the independence of college fellows, and lack of sympathy on his part for the growing importance which they attached to scholarly research, made for a turbulent governing body. Finding university life uncongenial, he departed in 1887 for the headmastership of Rugby. `Some scenes at college meetings have left a painful impression on my memory,' Robinson Ellis, one of the fellows, regretted.75 There was also friction at Jesus where H. D. Harper, formerly headmaster of Sherborne School and one of the founders of the Headmasters' Conference, was Principal from 1877 to 1895. He probed into every area of college life, analysed class lists, marked collections, kept records of chapel attendance, drew up the kitchen tariff, and even supervised the furnishing of undergraduates' rooms.76 His ceaseless interference was allied to a bluff manner adjudged, by an admittedly hostile witness, `better suited to a school than to a university. . . He treated undergraduates like school-boys, and dons as subordinates.'77 Subsequent elections suggested that fellows had become wary of headmasters in their midst. University's preferred choice as Bradley's successor was the scientist, T. H. Huxley (who declined the offer);78 on the death of Provost Hawkins in 1882, Oriel passed over its successful tutor and dean, A. G. Butler, a former headmaster of Haileybury College, in favour of the distinguished Homeric scholar D. B. Monro. Nevertheless, the dire position of Pembroke in the 1890s, `small, slenderly endowed and unadvertised',79 caused the college to look to John Mitchinson, formerly head of King's School, Canterbury, in an attempt to restore its fortunes. Some of the entrepreneurial abilities displayed by headmasters were increasingly expected of college heads, much as W. R. Anson, observing developments from the relative sanctuary of All Souls, might deplore a new breed who `advertised their educational wares as though old colleges had turned bubble companies'.80 In the new competitive climate heads were obliged to keep their 73 OM 6 May 1903, 307±8, and S. H. Butcher, `The Late Dean Bradley', Fortnightly Review, 80 (1903), 111±12. 74 He was lampooned in a Shrimpton caricature: Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 4 415, no. 627. 75 W. Temple, Life of Bishop Percival (1921), 91; J. Potter, Headmaster. The Life of John Percival, Radical Autocrat (1998), chs 19 and 20. 76 J. N. L. Baker, Jesus College Oxford 1571±1971 (1971), 74±82. 77 G. Hartwell Jones, A Celt Looks at the World, ed. Wyn Grif®th (1946), 34. 78 L. Huxley, Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley (2 vols 1900), ii. 31±2. 79 D. Macleane, Pembroke College (1900), 256. 80 H. H. Henson (ed.), A Memoir of Sir William Anson (1920), 15.

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societies in the public eye. Promoting good relations with old members formed a growing part of their duties.81 After the end of Bullock-Marsham's long tenure of of®ce at Merton (1826±81), the fellows elected George Brodrick, who could be expected to repair its weakened connections with the wider world. Three instances of resignation, an act rarely heard of in the earlier age of digni®ed sinecuristsÐSamuel Wayte of Trinity (1878), John Grif®ths of Wadham (1881), and Albert Watson of Brasenose (1889)Ðsuggested the new pressures which went with the of®ce. Not the least of these was an expectation that heads would take a lively interest in undergraduate enthusiasms. Heads became familiar ®gures on college barges, along touchlines, or in cricket pavilions. Even J. E. Sewell of New College, known to generations of undergraduates as `The Shirt' on account of what they regarded as his rather old-fashioned stiffness of deportment, genially presided over the rowdy celebrations which followed the college's success on the river in 1887.82 The venerable ®gure of Sewell provided a valuable symbol of continuity at New College, reconciling older generations of Wykehamists to the drastic breach with the past resulting from the opening up of the college during his wardenship.83 Elsewhere younger men came to the fore. T. H. Warren, perhaps the most prominent head of his generation, was elected President of Magdalen in 1885, at the age of 32. A pupil of Percival at Clifton and then an undergraduate at Balliol, Warren carried out in many respects Jowett's ideal of headship, continuing to teach after his election and serving as a University examiner. Warren's methods closely resembled those of the ill-fated headmaster heads, but with an important exception. Bradley gave offence by his schoolmasterly use of sarcasm with both pupils and colleagues, and Percival did so by his blunt outspokenness; Warren, by contrast, unfailingly exhibited an elaborate courtesy, which sometimes invited parody, and made conciliation an article of policy. His manner was a public acknowledgement that a college head, unlike his school counterparts (who, under the Public Schools Act of 1868, enjoyed the power to dismiss their teaching staff), was only a ®rst among equals.84 Increasingly colleges looked to heads who had made substantial contributions to learning. The statutes of 1882 included, as a general quali®cation for a headship, ®tness to preside over the college as a place of `religion, learning, and education'. All Souls omitted `education'; Queen's and St John's added `research'. Jesus, Corpus, New College, and Exeter had further stipulations that the head should be `distinguished for literary or scienti®c attainments'.85 81

Brodrick, 372. C. F. Cholmondeley diary (copy), 25 May 1887, NCA. 83 The Times, 8 Jan. 1903, 7. 84 An exception was Keble, whose charter conferred upon the Warden absolute power in internal matters, pp.179±80. 85 Statutes (1882), 405, 326, 593, 622, 497, 369, 249. 82

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Corpus, which had voluntarily revised its own statutes in 1855 in advance of the Executive Commissioners, con®rmed its commitment to university reform by electing a succession of heads (J. M. Wilson, Thomas Fowler, and Thomas Case) who were, or had been, professors.86 In other respectsÐ partly determined by the generation to which late nineteenth-century heads belongedÐtradition proved remarkably persistent. A majority of those elected between 1882 and 1914 (®fteen out of twenty-eight) were in holy orders, and only two of those who held of®ce in that period (setting aside the early elections to Keble and Hertford) had not previously been members of the colleges over which they presided.87 Open elections to fellowships, especially during the heyday of competitive examinations between 1857 and 1882, had more rapid and far-reaching effects. At a time when Balliol's academic position among the colleges was rivalled only by Corpus, its graduates enjoyed disproportionate success in fellowship examinations. Jowett's men almost literally colonized other colleges; of the 238 college fellows in 1878 who had been elected since 1860, over a quarter (65) had been Balliol undergraduates. Merton represented a very different effect of openness, for none of its fellows in 1892 had been an undergraduate of the college.88 In a few cases the working out of vested interests delayed the full impact of competition: the last Magdalen demy elected under the old statutes retained his position until 1877, while St John's congratulated itself that as late as 1898 ®ve of its twelve fellows had been elected under the conditions of the old (pre-1861) foundation.89 By 1876, however, fellows elected under the reformed ordinances were in a majority at most colleges.90 College government could very rapidly fall into the hands of comparatively young men (in 1878 over 40 per cent of fellows were aged under 35). Mindful of the ease with which some colleges freed themselves from the clerical restrictions written into the ordinances of the 1850s, the founders of Keble and Hertford created unusual constitutional arrangements to secure the position of those two colleges as, in John Wordsworth's bleak expression, `places of refuge' for religion in the face of secularizing liberalism.91 At Keble College government was ultimately vested in an external council, on which the tutors (there were no fellows) were denied an of®cial place.92 Although the Principal and fellows constituted the governing body at Hertford, Baring protected his endowment for denominational education by placing it in the hands of trustees, beyond the reach of any radical dons. 86

M. Schalenberg, `How the Professors came to Corpus', Pelican Record, xxxix (1994), 12±22. Thomas Fowler of Corpus, an undergraduate at Merton and a fellow at Lincoln, and John Percival of Trinity. 88 Foster, Oxford Men, 93±5. 89 Hutton, S. John, 232. 90 J. R. Magrath, University Reform: Two Papers (1876), 6. 91 J. Wordsworth, Keble College and the Present University Crisis (1869), 14. 92 Mallet iii. 428. 87

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A limited check upon the younger fellows was provided by the professors whom the Selborne Commission `billeted', as contemporaries saw it, upon the colleges in the 1882 statutes. Although the ordinances of 1857/8 had charged individual colleges with ®nancing chairs, they had not generally required that their holders should be elected to fellowships at the colleges which paid for them. During the 1870s some sought to place professors on to governing bodies in order to strengthen what Thomas Fowler called `the older and more experienced element' as a counter to the impulsiveness of the juniors.93 Honorary fellowships, created by the executive commissioners in the 1850s, had been intended to have something of this effect and during the following two decades distinguished outsiders were occasionally brought into contact with college life. Robert Browning, who was not an Oxford graduate, made regular visits to Balliol after Jowett had secured his election to an honorary fellowship there; and Corpus brought Ruskin into its society in the early 1870s. At Queen's, two overseas scholars, the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, sharing the research interests of one of its fellows, A. H. Sayce, were elected in 1883 and 1887 respectively.94 Such honorands could not, however, participate in college government, unlike the professor-fellows, though the in¯uence of the latter was always limited to a minority voice on bodies dominated by tutors. Chapters 1 and 2 have described the emergence of the tutorial (or `of®cial') fellow, no longer obliged to enter holy orders and now free to retain his position after marriage.95 This was accompanied by a signi®cant transfer of resources in favour of undergraduate teaching, at the expense of holders of fellowships to which no duties were attached.96 These latter, the `prize' (or to their critics `idle') fellowships represented nearly 60 per cent (some 220) of all fellowships in 1872.97 Twenty years later the number of fellows not undertaking teaching or administrative duties had fallen to about 125 (41 per cent), and among these barristers and journalists in London, the bane of commentators in the 1870s, had ceased to be the major element: the total included those who retained their fellowships after retiring from teaching, fellows holding posts at other universities, extension lecturers, masters at public schools, as well as a few clergymen undertaking parochial work at home or as missionaries overseas, and young men undertaking advanced study in Oxford or at continental UniversitiesÐas colleges increasingly encouraged them to doÐbefore embarking on academic careers. The latter accounted for a substantial number of holders of the `ordinary' fellowships, 93

The Academy 23 Mar. 1878, 259; Devonshire Commn 4th Report, Q. 13, 737. D. A. Traill, Excavating Schliemann (Atlanta, Ga., 1993), 230. 95 The ®gures cited in Engel, Clergyman to Don, 263, 287, indicating that the majority (69%) of college of®cers during 1881±1900 were clergymen, have been corrected in A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy (1984), 97 n. 71; 31% were in orders. 96 The ®nancial aspects are charted in Pt 1, 408±9. 97 Devonshire Commn 3rd Report, xliv.; Magrath, University Reform, 17. 94

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with a ®xed tenure of seven years, created in 1882. As a result of these developments, the phenomenon of non-residence was much reduced. In Michaelmas 1905 all the fellows of Trinity were reported to be resident `and taking part in the work of the College', the ®rst time that this had been the case, it was believed, since the end of the seventeenth century.98 Some indication of the total manpower now occupied in college teaching can be gained by looking in detail at the position in Michaelmas term of 1892, when there were 304 holders of fellowships.99 Setting aside the 125 who had no duties, together with the 34 fellows who were University professors and readers, and 12 who were college of®cers not involved in teaching (mainly bursars), there were 129 fellows holding teaching posts as tutors or lecturers in their own or other colleges. The subjects they taught can be determined only approximately, either because this was frequently not speci®ed or because an individual might teach two or three honour schools (in which case an attempt has been made to establish their main ®eld of interest), but the following indicates the general picture: 81 fellows taught principally in the general area of pass and honour classical moderations and Lit. Hum.; 11 taught Mathematics; 8, Natural Sciences; 3, Jurisprudence (the teaching for which was still mainly in the hands of University professors and readers); 13, Modern History; and 13, Divinity and Theology. In addition to these, the colleges, halls, and Non-Collegiate delegacy between them employed a further 40 tutors and lecturers who did not hold fellowships (roughly distributed between Lit. Hum. 14; Mathematics 3; Natural Sciences 5; Jurisprudence 5; Modern History 6; Theology 7). In all, nearly 170 college teachers were employed in teaching about 2,400 resident undergraduates. A major achievement of the late Victorian generation of dons was to institutionalize the method of individual tuition which was known to its early practitioners as the `private hour', but which became more familiar to the later twentieth century as the `tutorial'. In 1897 W. J. Ashley, who had read Modern History at Balliol (1878±81) and remained in Oxford until 1886, described the system to a readership in America, where he held a chair: As a rule, each undergraduate has a regular appointment with his tutor every week; he is alone for half an hour or three-quarters, and exhibits a piece of work, usually in the form of an essay, which is then and there read and criticised; and these weekly pieces of work are so arranged that the undergraduate may acquaint himself, during the whole allotted time, with the whole ®eld on which he proposes to be examined.100

Although the weekly meeting described by Ashley became central to the educational process in Oxford, its introduction and evolution have left little 98

Trinity College Annual Report, 1904±05. These ®gures are based on Foster's Oxford Men and Their Colleges (1893) and the Calendar for 1893 (effectively Michaelmas 1892). 100 `Jowett and the University Ideal' repr. from Atlantic Monthly (July 1897) in W. J. Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic (1900), 449±50. 99

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trace in the formal administrative records which comprise college archives. Some college tutors earlier in the century did see their pupils individually,101 but the practice of listening to and commenting on an essay read by the student was particularly associated with the private coaches. Alexander Grant of Oriel, whose tuition was sought by Greats men in the early 1850s as the most authoritative in Oxford on Aristotle's Ethics, was remembered as a candid, but always encouraging, critic of essays, whose informal mannerÐ he tilted backwards in his chair, pipe in mouth, when discussing his pupils' workÐanticipated later evocations of the of®cial tutorial system and the twentieth-century aphorism that an Oxford education consisted of `being smoked at'.102 Gradually, and informally, college tutors (many of whom in the 1860s and 1870s would have had experience of private tuition both as pupils and teachers) introduced the technique into their of®cial duties. A classical tutor at Wadham, G. E. Thorley, who had graduated in 1852, witnessed the change. `What was done by some tutors, and was looked upon as a very exceptional thing, when I was an undergraduate,' he told the Selborne Commission in 1877, `is now done by all tutors.'103 Testimony from the 1860s illustrates the beginning of the transition. T. H. S. Escott, who matriculated at Queen's in 1861, gave a favourable account of the college teaching of the time, but for individual teaching he had to seek private coaches.104 By the second half of the decade, however, Thomas Humphry Ward of Brasenose was taking essays as a matter of course to his college Greats tutor.105 Such meetings now became the principal call upon tutors' time. E. A. Knox, tutor at Merton from 1875 to 1885, gave intercollegiate lectures in Modern History twice a week in addition to lectures to his own college's passmen, but he described the bulk of his work as being `private instruction both in Honour and in Pass Work'.106 W. L. Courtney, a classical lecturer at New College, was required in 1876 to give six hours of lectures and twelve hours of `private work' a week.107 Later in the century the balance had shifted even further. H. A. L. Fisher, tutor at New College from 1891, lectured twice a week, but devoted at least eighteen hours to individual pupils.108 Colleges could now monitor students' progress, on the lines of the Balliol practice of tutors' meetings every Friday afternoon `going through the men', while teachers had regular, personal opportunities to keep their charges up to the mark.109 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

See Pt 1, 152±3. Quasi Cursores (1884), 8±9. UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2185. For early examples see Pt I, 60, 152. National Review, 24 (1894), 236±7. T. H. Ward, `Brasenose, 1864±1872', Brasenose Monographs, ii Pt ii, 76±7. Knox, Reminiscences, 99. NCA MS 9647, Minutes of the Warden and Tutors 1866±1882, 568. D. Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865±1940 (1947), 38. H. W. C. Davis, Balliol College (1899), 215.

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This intensive teaching effort virtually extinguished the demand for private coaching, at least among men reading for honours. In 1866 the Oxford Undergraduate's Journal could point to the example of the leading colleges, Balliol, Corpus, and New College, where the teaching was so effective that few undergraduates had to seek outside tuition, and called upon the other colleges to appoint more tutors so as to dispense with the need for coaching altogether.110 Those reading for the newer honour schools in colleges which had not yet appointed specialist tutors felt the lack of such guidance. Randall Davidson of Trinity, who took a third in the Law and History school in 1871, thought the inter-collegiate lectures no substitute for a `friend or tutor'. His college did not provide the tutor, who could have taken him `more thoroughly in hand' and given advice on what to read, and how.111 In 1875 a commoner reading Jurisprudence at Magdalen, which then had no law tutor, took matters into his own hands after being sent to a reluctant lecturer at another college who proved to be, in the student's estimation, `a drivelling idiot'. He approached Sir William Anson of All Souls after the latter's lecture on English real property law `and told him I should like to write for him'. Anson duly arranged a meeting, set an essay title, and sent him off with a list of books to consult.112 In the Jurisprudence and Theology honour schools, both of which had strong traditions of professorial lecturing, a shift to tutorial teaching was associated with the increased importance attached to essay work.113 This had developed rather earlier in Greats, particularly in the study of philosophy, and it is notable that the pioneers of the new tutorial system were generally the specialist philosophy tutors who, as Chapter 11 points out, began to be appointed in the mid-1860s. In a classic account of the work of a teacher of philosophy, A. C. Bradley described how R. L. Nettleship of Balliol, when discussing his pupils' essays, `attacked the matter as if it were something perfectly new, into which he was making his way for the ®rst time'. The key to Nettleship's teaching was advancing the student's understanding: `At the end of two years a pupil might have heard not a sentence from him about some of the most famous controversies, yet he found himself familiar with the points really at issue.'114 Other tutors adopted a more direct approach, criticizing the essay-writer's style, or challenging the writer to defend his conclusions; recollections of the late nineteenth-century tutorial system 110

UJ, 24 Oct. 1866, 77. G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson (1952), 24. 112 Diary of L. C. Cholmeley, 1872±5 (copy), 21 Jan. 1875, 26 Jan. 1875, MCA MS 1102/2, pp. 258±9, 262±3. 113 UOC (1877), Q. 991; Statement of the University of Oxford Commissioners, Gazette, viii (26 Apr. 1878), 341; F. H. Lawson, The Oxford Law School, 1850±1965 (1967), 56±8; W. Wand, Changeful Page (1965), 33. 114 `Biographical sketch' in R. L. Nettleship, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, ed. A. C. Bradley and G. R. Benson (2 vols 1897), i., p. xxxix. 111

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abound with accounts of peppery reactions to pupils' written offerings.115 One pupil recalled the interjections of his history tutor, Arthur Johnson, as he read out his essay: `This is all absolute rubbish!' or `I never heard such rot in my life.'116 Johnson liked his pupils to argue back, as did another history tutor of the period, O. M. Edwards, whose aim was rather to `provoke a debate or suggest an inquiry than dictate answers which might be useful in the schools'.117 Pressure from pupils to provide `coaching' for the schools must, however, have been hard to resist, and at the turn of the century misgivings were raised on this account by well-informed critics, including the modern historian, Hereford George of New College. The ancient historian Warde Fowler of Lincoln considered that individual tuition was becoming too intensive and that undergraduates were being `over-taught', though he acknowledged that his view that essays might as readily be discussed in classes as individually was `heretical'.118 An anonymous attack on `the worship paid to the ``fetish'' of the ``private hour''', pointing to the extravagance of spending `six hours telling to six men separately what could be told in an hour to the six sitting in a row', drew from a philosophy tutor the ®rm reply that the object of the individual meeting was not the delivery of a lecture `but the discussion of problems arising out of a pupil's essay'.119 Personal tuition was also adopted in the natural sciences. At ®rst the colleges had seemed willing to cede the task of teaching scientists to the professors; on the opening of the University Museum in 1859, Balliol allowed its laboratory to fall into disuse and Christ Church, at Henry Acland's suggestion, moved its anatomical collections to the new centralized facility. During the following decade, however, college appointments in science began to be made, and laboratories were established, in the face of suspicion from the professors in the University Museum, who resented the college teachers as being outside their control, and viewed their laboratories as `rival' establishments.120 Here, the tussle during the 1870s between the professoriate and the colleges for authority over honours teaching, described in Chapter 2, had immediate relevance. Magdalen maintained and encouraged its own Daubeny Laboratory for the use of its science lecturers, Christ Church ®tted up a new laboratory for its readers in Chemistry (appointed in 1860) and Physics (1869), Balliol reopened its laboratory in 1877, shared with Trinity from 1879, and a small laboratory was erected in the garden of Keble (a short distance from the Museum) in 1885 by Sir John Conroy, 115

W. S. Swayne, Parson's Pleasure (1934), 64; S. Tallents, Man and Boy (1943), 123. H. S. Furniss, Memories of Sixty Years (1931), 51. 117 A. T. Davies, ``O.M.'': a memoir (1946), 48. 118 Times Educational Supplement, 3 Jan. 1911; W. Warde Fowler, An Oxford Correspondence of 1903 (1904), 72±4. 119 Times Educational Supplement, 3 Oct. 1911, 132; 7 Nov. 1911, 140. 120 Pt 1, 674±5; UOC (1877), evidence, Qs 476, 2958. 116

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the college's science lecturer.121 Christ Church vigorously defended the independence of its three Lee's readers, one of whom insisted in 1877: `I cannot see how science can be successfully cultivated in Christ Church without teachers who are bound to look after its own men.'122 Edward Chapman, who was elected to a Natural Science lectureship at Magdalen College in 1869, urged that science teaching should not be left to the Museum departments and that science students should receive from their colleges the same amount of attention given to classicists.123 Carrying out a recommendation of the Devonshire Commission, regulations at Magdalen for tuition in Natural Science, drawn up in 1873, required that the college teachers should provide lectures, classes, and `individual instruction given to individual students'.124 Since numbers reading for the Natural Sciences school remained small, not all colleges were willing to appoint science tutors. Before 1911, when its ®rst science fellow was elected, teaching arrangements at Oriel seem to have been haphazard. An undergraduate at the college who took the Physiology school in 1898 remembered being assigned to L. R. Phelps, whose interest in political economy was thought to make him the best quali®ed among the Oriel tutors to deal with a `modern' subject. Phelps referred him to the Museum professors for guidance on his course work. Their tutorial relationship seems, however, to have been fruitful. In later life the pupil recalled with appreciation being made to write weekly essays for Phelps on such topics as `party government' or `is the good always the beautiful?' and accompanying his tutor on Sunday walks to Otmoor.125 Developments in teaching practice had been accompanied by major changes in college discipline. A gradual tightening of college requirements concerning university examinations ensured that a higher proportion of undergraduates than previously were kept at their books. By 1873 Balliol, Corpus, New College, and University College required that all undergraduates should read for honours; New College also expected its members to take the examinations at the ®rst opportunity. Not all yet felt able to apply this rigour to their commoners: in 1873 Merton allowed its members two years to get through Pass Moderations; Exeter was prepared to permit its members to keep trying, if necessary, into their third year; while members of Worcester were only obliged to remove their names from the college books in the event of a ®fth unsuccessful attempt at surmounting this rather modest hurdle.126 But by the end of the century, though there remained marked 121 Tom Smith, `The Balliol-Trinity Laboratories' in J. Prest (ed.), Balliol Studies (1982), 195; Keble College Occasional Papers, V (1887), 3. 122 UOC (1877), evidence, Qs. 3359, 4841. 123 Letter of 2 Nov. 1870 quoted in UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 565. 124 Presidents' Note Book, 1872±77, p. 124 (5 Dec. 1873), MCA PR/2/5. 125 C. J. Martin, `Arthur Edwin Boycott', ONFRS 2 (1936±8), 562. 126 Handbook (1873), 22±3.

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differences between the colleges in the proportion of passmen they admitted,127 the variation in academic practice and standards had narrowed. One outward sign of the new seriousness was the exclusion of dogs, whose nocturnal howlings had occasionally disturbed the peace of the unreformed colleges; Warden Sewell carefully enforced the rules against them at New College in the early 1860s, while George Bradley made their removal an issue at University College. Supper parties, a long-standing target for moral reformers, were suppressed at Trinity during 1857 and 1858 by the dean, Frederick Meyrick, who detested their `noisy and ill-conducted' proceedings, `gross language', and `®lthy songs'. Gatings and rustications were imposed on attenders at rowdy wine parties in the following decade.128 At Queen's the transition to a more ordered regime was carried through by J. R. Magrath, tutor from 1864 and chaplain until 1878, who coached the college eight and was active in the University ri¯e corps.129 Magrath was secretary of a committee of senior tutors established in 1867 to consult upon matters including undergraduate discipline; its existence coincided with moves to extract more work from students during the summer term.130 StrenuousnessÐand not exclusively of an academic sortÐwas exhorted, and `slacking' loudly condemned. Hereford George of New College, one of many donnish Alpinists in this period, was free with his criticisms when he detected lack of effort, intellectual or physical.131 A college sermon by L. G. Mylne, senior tutor of Keble between 1870 and 1876, took the theme of `Energy' and its application both in the schools and on the river: Mylne drew satisfaction from the effect of his preaching on the morale of the college boat, which subsequently achieved fourteen `bumps'.132 Vigour in all areas of college life was seen as the antidote to the luxury and materialism which Lord Salisbury, visiting Keble in 1876, condemned in national life. Gladstone brought the point closer to home when, addressing Glasgow students during his Midlothian election campaign in 1879, he contrasted their seriousness of purpose with the many idlers at Oxford and Cambridge who treated university life as an opportunity to `lounge'.133 This blunt message coincided with, and perhaps inspired, Percival's endeavours to shake up Trinity. Some saw promising results from the new mood of reinvigoration. Henry Scott Holland, junior Censor of Christ Church, told the university branch of the Church 127

See Pt 1, 372, Table 11. A3. Trinity College Decanal records, 1854±1882 (25 Nov. 1857, 15 Mar., 17 June 1858; 28 Apr., 18 Nov. 1864), TCA A. 2. 129 R. H. Hodgkin, Six Centuries of an Oxford College (1949), 182±3. 130 Minute Book of the Tutors' Committee, Queen's College Archives. 131 Alpine Journal, xxv (May 1911), 530±6. 132 An Account of the Proceedings at Keble College on the Occasion of the Opening of the Chapel (1876), 49, 70. 133 W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 1879 (1879; repr. Leicester, 1971), 231. I am indebted to Professor Colin Matthew for pointing out this reference. 128

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of England Temperance Society, that the recent `improvement in the condition of Oxford life' was the result of `the great variety of pursuits which now kept men constantly employed'.134 As proctors during 1882±3, Scott Holland and A. L. Smith of Balliol conducted a purge against prostitution in the town, declaring their priority to be `protecting the Undergraduates from needless temptation by vigilantly attending to the public decency of the streets'.135 Their actions, which coincided with the successful mission to Oxford by the American revivalists, Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey,136 were reinforced by the University branch of the Church of England Purity Association, founded in 1883, whose 800 members in 1887 included about 30 per cent of all undergraduates in residence. Scott Holland, Warden Talbot of Keble, and A. G. Butler of Oriel were among the organizing committee. Membership at Keble, where the association seems to have originated,137 was almost universal; Oriel and Worcester also provided substantial support.138 Sexual vice was thereafter a diminishing concern among disciplinary of®cers; entering a college after hours, though still an offence, ceased to be automatically associated with gross moral turpitude, and `climbing in' over the college walls could become a relatively good-natured test of ingenuity. In other matters it proved more dif®cult for college deans to to take concerted action. L. R. Farnell, Sub-Rector of Exeter from 1882, complained of their failure to agree a common policy towards college bon®res, undergraduate celebrations usually of sporting victories, which threatened to get out of hand in the mid-1880s.139 Some colleges treated them as occasions for licensed uproar, like bump suppers (previously disreputable occasions but which became sanctioned as of®cial college events). These provided essential outlets for the violent energies of the young men con®ned within college walls. During the restoration of the Bodleian, when the Schools tower was covered in wooden scaffolding, rockets, bombs, and sparks from a vast bon®re blazing in the nearby front quadrangle of Hertford, in celebration of the college going head of the river in 1881, presented an alarming prospect. The con¯agration, `fed with tables and chairs by a mad set of undergraduates who were chie¯y occupied in dancing insanely about it', had the permission of the Senior Proctor.140 A Harvard 134

OM 14 Nov. 1883, 372. Report to the Hebdomadal Council by the Proctors, presented 20 Jan. 1883, HCP; S. Paget (ed.), Henry Scott Holland (1921), 108. 136 UJ 16 Nov. 1882, 96, 23 Nov. 1882, 111. 137 Keble College Occasional Papers, no. III (Oct. 1882), 10±11. 138 The Church of England Purity Association. List of Members, Lent Term 1887 (1887). At Balliol and Brasenose, perhaps for differing reasons, membership was negligible. 139 L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 138±9. Six leading colleges failed to send representatives to a meeting of college deans which proposed to suppress bon®res; see circular, 23 May 1889, in Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 153. 140 A. Goudie (ed.), Seven Hundred Years of an Oxford College: Hertford College, 1284± 1984 (1987), 48. 135

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graduate visiting Queen's witnessed Provost Magrath looking on benignly at a bon®re circled by undergraduates variously hanging from trees or bashing tin baths.141 Spectacular breakdowns of control, widely reported in the press, showed that the establishment of a new order in the colleges was not uniformly smooth. Rapid expansion in student numbers during the 1860s placed additional strains on the colleges' disciplinary resources. An early sign of trouble was the gating of the whole of Merton College following a bon®re in the college on 5 November 1865.142 All the undergraduates at Trinity were threatened with rustication in Hilary term 1867 after a succession of incidents, including the blocking up of a passageway with snow to prevent access to morning chapel and the cutting of the chapel bell-rope.143 The same sentence was threatened at University College in March 1868 after a fellow had been `screwed up' (i.e. shut in his rooms by the insertion of screws into his outer oak door), and the rooms of an undergraduate vandalized, apparently in the wake of an unpopular decision of the governing body.144 At the end of November 1868, the governing body at New College actually carried out the sanction of mass rustication when the undergraduates refused to give up the names of those responsible for smashing an unpopular student's windows.145 The culmination of this turbulent period was the Christ Church library riot, described in Chapter 9. Further outbreaks occurred at the end of the 1870s. Discipline broke down in Wadham after eights week in 1879 when the authorities prohibited the holding of a college concert.146 In the following summer Bradley rusticated the whole of University College after the undergraduates refused to incriminate those responsible for screwing up the oak of a tutor, who was also Senior Proctor; they were subsequently taken back when the culprit owned up.147 An upshot of the rows was to hasten the building of houses for tutors and their families adjoining or near to the colleges, to ensure that responsible disciplinary of®cers were on hand at night. Young married tutors who could not be so accommodated were required to sleep in college rooms during term.148 Another effect was to strengthen the case for dispensing with examinations in elections to teaching fellowships. Colleges increasingly followed the lead of New College which, in 1869, gained the Privy Council's 141 O. Burnett and E. H. Goddard, Edward Perry Warren: The Biography of a Connoisseur (1941), 57. 142 L. Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols 1904), i. 19. 143 TCA, A.2 (22 Mar. 1867). 144 UCA, Minute book 1837±1877, 96±9. 145 NCA, MS 8561, p. 173; The Times, 2 Dec. 1868, 7; 3 Dec 1868, 5. 146 Davies and Garnett, Wadham, 46±7; The Guardian, 19 May 1880, 645. 147 Typescript history of the sending down of the undergraduates in 1880, UCA P45/MS/1; The Times, 13 May 1880, 9. 148 C. Colvin, `A Don's Wife a Century Ago', Oxoniensia, 50 (1985), 267±78.

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permission to do so, leaving the college `as free as possible to get the best men available for its actual business'.149 When this practice was applied generally by the statutes of 1882, selection procedures sometimes became highly informal and helped to produce an inward-looking tendency in college appointments. Recent graduates or even undergraduates about to take schools were marked out for tutorships as a premium became attached to potential teaching ability and the elusive quality of `getting on with the men'.150 For, ultimately, undergraduates had to be won over to change. The zeal of a prominent Evangelical, E. A. Knox, as principal of the postmasters (i.e. dean), to transform Merton into a reading college by a rigid enforcement of college discipline, was not an unquali®ed success. His punishments provoked formal student protests in 1880 and 1884; the historians of Merton record that when, after accepting a college living, Knox appeared in chapel for the last time, `the hymn ``Now thank we all our God'' was sung with particular enthusiasm by the undergraduates present.'151 During the 1890s two clerical deans, the cricketer H. M. Burge at University, and the oarsman Michael Furse at Trinity, enjoyed considerable in¯uence in their colleges, partly by virtue of their muscularity. Neither, however, had an academic vocation, and both left for other ®elds. Discipline tended to pass to laymen, for whom the exercise of a con®dent urbanity could achieve the desired result. `Let those who can take those who can't to bed,' was the injunction by which a Christ Church Censor, F. J. Haver®eld, the historian of Roman Britain, dispersed a late-night gathering of drunken revellers.152 The successes as a disciplinarian of R. W. Raper, Vice-President of Trinity, entered legend. `Gentlemen coming from homes where Bread throwing at the dinner table is habitual,' a notice which Raper produced at the turn of the century read, and ®nding a dif®culty in conforming suddenly to the unfamiliar ways of a higher civilization, will be permitted to continue their domestic pastime, on a payment of 5/a throw, during their ®rst year. After that the ®ne will be doubled.153

Schoolboy punishments of written impositions and admonitions, common in the pre-1850 period, were replaced by a more frequent use of ®nes and gatings; though in 1893 one experienced tutor reckoned that few measures had so immediate an effect as the threat to send a letter to an errant undergraduate's parents.154 149

Coker Adams to Lord President of the Council, 24 Oct. 1868, PRO PC1/2764. M. Bernard, A Letter. . . on the Statutes of the University of Oxford Commission (1882) 33; OM 10 Mar 1910, 258. 151 Martin and High®eld, Merton College, 313. 152 PBA ix (1919±20), 480. 153 Copy in Trinity College Archives DD32; cf. G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 82. 154 `Oxford and Oxford Life', Church Quarterly Review, xxxvi (Apr. 1893), 164. 150

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Tutors such as Raper or Alfred Robinson of New College, another bachelor layman, with either private means or secure college incomes,155 stood in an altogether more independent relation to their charges than their predecessors earlier in the century. Impermanent tenure and even the hope of receiving ecclesiastical preferment from their pupils undermined the position of many of those called upon to teach undergraduates in the `unreformed' colleges; hence F. W. Newman's comment in 1843 that tutors could not exercise moral in¯uence until the tutorial of®ce was freed from its servile `semi-plebeian associations'.156 Raper, by contrast, was well-connected, and undergraduates famously sought his assistance when embarking on their careers.157 Much was also made of Robinson's disinterested service to his college, for he chose to devote his life to tuition and bursarial duties despite possessing a large private fortune and the ability, contemporaries believed, to have made a greater career in the outside world.158 The need for tutors to be seen to be independent lent urgency to efforts to permit married men to hold fellowships. In the early 1870s, when several distinguished married tutors continued to hold teaching positions after vacating their fellowships, they did so without the authority which came with a fellowship and membership of the governing body, and as a result were in some places dubbed `the college servants'.159 With permanence of tenure and a measure of independent standing, it became easier to make the pastoral aspect of the tutorial of®ce a reality. Several future tutors were in¯uenced by the example of John Conington who, in the early 1860s, as a fellow of Corpus and professor of Latin, organized reading parties for the ablest students throughout the university, whom he treated as personal friends.160 Some of the younger dons in that decade adopted the practice of addressing their pupils by surnames only, with `no Mr-ing or Sir-ing on either side', which was taken as a sign of the new informality.161 A pupil recalled of a conscientious tutor at Pembroke, who died in 1860, that `I do not think it occurred to him to exercise any in¯uence over us outside the lecture-room.'162 To the succeeding generation duty demanded that, as Nathan Bodington, elected a fellow of Lincoln in 1874, put it, they should `get hold of the men', inviting them to breakfasts or 155 The 1858 ordinances having relaxed or, in the case of of®cial fellowships, removed property disquali®cations attached to fellowships. 156 Huber, The English Universities, ii. pt 2, 518. 157 T. Weston, From Appointments to Careers: A History of the Oxford University Careers Service 1892±1992 (1994), 23. For an example of Raper's panache as a writer of testimonials see J. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon (1995), 37. 158 The Times, 23 Feb. 1895, 10; 29 Mar. 1895, 12. His will was proved at nearly £60,000. 159 E. W. Watson, Life of Bishop John Wordsworth (1915), 88. 160 Ibid. 24±5; J. W. Mackail, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, Master of Balliol (1925), 26. 161 L. Ragg, A Memoir of Edward Charles Wickham, (1911) 53; E. S. Talbot, Memories of Early Life (1924), 31; Watson, John Wordsworth, 81. 162 Macleane, Pembroke, 481.

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afternoon walks, sharing their sporting interests, and taking them on reading parties in the long vacation.163 These closer relationships enabled Alfred Robinson, for example, to make a personal appeal to the young Richard Verney (later Lord Willoughby de Broke), to read for honours rather than devoting all his energies to hunting; Verney was forcibly reminded of the duties of the hereditary landowning class and challenged to justify his ancestral Conservative political beliefs. Robinson was no less concerned to dissuade a scholar, a clergyman's son from a minor public school, from wasting his talents (as his tutor saw it) by becoming a hack journalist.164 Christ Church men invited to join a reading party in 1890 led by Thomas Strong and W. O. Burrows, unmarried clerical dons who shared a determination to show that religious ideals could survive in a secularized University, came away with `the intimate revelation of a singularly simple, sincere, and strenuous character, the keynote of which was service'.165 Though the leisurely Oxford routine of the surviving life fellows was still kept up, as T. V. Bayne of Christ Church recorded in 1886,166 this was giving place to the teaching grind evoked by A. D. Godley's description of a ®ctional day in the life of a harassed tutorial fellow, published in 1894.167 C. C. J. Webb, a philosophy tutor at Magdalen for thirty years after his election in 1890, kept a detailed record of the new pattern.168 One volume of his diary, covering 1898±9 when he was still unmarried and living in college, documents the major themes.169 Although a layman, Webb began his days as a matter of course with college prayers. His ®rst pupil sometimes arrived at 9 o'clock with an essay. On three days a week at 10, he delivered an intercollegiate Greats Philosophy lecture. Twice a week in Michaelmas term 1898 he lectured on his special ®eld, the Philosophy of Religion, to a solitary regular attender. Further pupils came at 11 and 12, and again at 5.30, before dinner, and ®nally, after dining, two more might call in at his rooms at 9 and 10 in the evening. Tutorial duties included patrolling the college on bon®re night to ensure that ®res were dampened down; braving the college barge on a grey afternoon in February and dutifully noting that the Magdalen second Torpid had achieved a `bump'; joining with his colleagues on the tutorial board in deciding the fate of an undergraduate who had gone absent without leave before being tracked down to a Parisian hotel; or patiently listening late 163 W. H. Draper, Sir Nathan Bodington, First Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds (1912), 49. 164 Lord Willoughby de Broke, The Passing Years (1924), 149±51; Swayne, Parson's Pleasure, 64. 165 M. Moore, Winfrid Burrows (1932), 63. 166 See p. 230. 167 Godley, Aspects of Modern Oxford, ch. vii. 168 On Webb, see J. Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford 1901±1945 (Mercer, 1985), ch. ii. 169 Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1145.

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at night in his rooms to a pupil who had unexpectedly declared an intention to enter the Church. Committee work, an aspect of self-governing Oxford which Max MuÈller had noticed as unfamiliar in his native Germany, occupied much of Webb's time. In addition to the Tutorial Board and the college governing body, whose proceedings might occupy a working day, there were meetings of the college servants' committee to attend, one of which received disturbing reports of `great quarrels and dissensions' among the kitchen staff,170 or meetings of the university delegacy which regulated lodging houses. A regular attender at meetings of the university's legislative bodies, Webb was one of nearly 200 who turned out to vote in a hotly contested election for a vacant curatorship of the Bodleian which turned on the question, close to Webb's heart, of maintaining the library as a place of serious scholarship. Although he began teaching within two years of taking Schools and without embarking on a formal course of research training of the type increasingly considered necessary in university systems in¯uenced by the German academic model, Webb was a productive scholar and an active member of various inter-collegiate groups of scholars, informally constituted and independent of faculty control, which met regularly to hear and discuss papers.171 During term Webb's activity was located within a common life, which often began with a walk in the company of a colleague around the Magdalen Walks after morning chapel. Afternoons were devoted to longer expeditions by bicycle or on foot. One excursion, characteristic of donnish civic activism, took him to the Oxford workhouse with L. R. Phelps in connection with the Charity Organization Society. Then came dinners, either in Magdalen or as a guest at other colleges. On one occasion the diners heard Ingram Bywater recount `a stream of good stories, new and old . . . Oxford yarns, principally' of the sort which circulated as the oral traditions of Oxford's senior common rooms.172 On another, Webb noted a Brasenose don at the Tutors' Club dinner quite `done up' under the strain of coping with that college's notorious disciplinary problems.173 After collections on the last Saturday of Michaelmas term Webb remained in the Magdalen Smoking Room into the small hours, among a gathering of his colleagues, who vented some irritation at President Warren's interference with the Mods tuition. Webb's diary suggests how far the demands of undergraduate education had come to dominate the `reformed' colleges; ®fty years earlier, undergraduates at MagdalenÐthen an admittedly extreme caseÐhad been outnumbered by fellows, for whose bene®t (and comfort) the college had been 170 171 172 173

Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1145 fo. 15 (4 June 1898). On this point see pp. 619±22. Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e 1145 fo. 88 (5 Dec. 1898). Ibid. fo. 88 (7 Dec. 1898).

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mainly run. In the constitutional language of statutes the word `college' was still taken to mean the governing body but, in ordinary parlance, when someone spoke of `the college' they were increasingly likely to be referring to the undergraduates, their expectations, and their achievements.174 One result of the new emphasis was that the freshman coming into residence during the last decades of the century found many more of his wants provided for within his college than his predecessor of Verdant Green's generation. Since more attention was paid to him by the authorities, he would also have found his life more closely controlled, with less unoccupied time at his disposal than his predecessors had enjoyed. He also entered a more homogeneous student world, in which a majority of his peers had undergone the shared experience of a public-school education (see Chapter 23). Common concerns found expression in the emerging undergraduate press; in its early years the Oxford Undergraduate's Journal, begun in 1866, took up the questions of chapel attendance, the management of sports clubs, and college catering.175 For their part, governing bodies set about trying to cut the costs of living in college. In 1868 Pattison, who regarded the residential system as `a social luxury, like the ®rst-class carriage in a railway, for those whose fortune warrants their having the indulgence', thought the cause hopeless, and he was not altogether disproved by subsequent developments.176 Domestic arrangements, formerly devolved to cooks, butlers, and manciples, were brought more closely under college control. In 1867 the fellows of Trinity took the management of the kitchen out of the hands of the manciple, transferring the accounts to the overall supervision of the fellow bursar.177 Similar steps were taken at Pembroke and Merton.178 Undergraduates supplied some of the momentum for change. They petitioned the governing body of Balliol in 1864,179 and a scathing list of complaints was drawn up by the junior members of University College. `The cook has contrived to secure the universal disapprobation of the college. It is generally agreed,' they continued, `that his puddings and potatoes are bad, his vegetables scanty, and his coffee often undrinkable.'180 Criticism of college catering came to larger prominence in the celebrated `Bread and Butter row' at Christ Church in 1865, whose outcome was the appointment of a salaried Steward.181 In many colleges the customary perquisites enjoyed by college servants were 174

Hodgkin, Six Centuries, 192. UJ 28 Oct. 1868, 321. 176 Pattison, Suggestions, 77. 177 TCA Trinity College Order Book, 209 (17 June 1867). 178 Macleane, Pembroke, 502; Creighton, Mandell Creighton, i. 59. 179 Memorial to the Master and Fellows of Balliol, Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 269. 180 A Petition of the Resident Bachelors and Undergraduates to the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford (n.p., n.d.), Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 288. 181 Bill and Mason, Christ Church and Reform, 136, 141. 175

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cut back. In 1864 at University they were forbidden to charge for cleaning materials used on staircases and their customary right to purloin the remains from hall dinners was ended in return for a monetary payment by way of compensation. As a result, the college was able to consolidate and ®x the charges it made to undergraduates for service.182 In the following year, New College bought out many of the servants' customary privileges.183 Scouts lost much of their independent status as they became formal employees of the colleges, subject to college regulations, though they gained bene®ts such as annuity schemes, sports facilities, and social events. At the same time, they ceased to be regarded as a hazard of college life and, indeed, were even celebrated as one of its distinctive features. If Balliol practices inspired the development of the tutorial system, the Keble experiment in providing a collegiate education at an all-in charge was the example for cheapening and extending colleges' domestic facilities. Many colleges adopted the Keble plan of supplying wine and dessert from the buttery, and opened college stores to reduce the dependence of undergraduates on outside tradesmen and the credit the latter provided. New College was one of the ®rst to provide furniture for rental; it also ®xed the price for hall dinners, and reduced the caution money chargeable to those undergraduates prepared to pay their bills weekly.184 The more the colleges provided, of course, the more effectively they could monitor students' spending; and by making battels inclusive of most essential items, the colleges made it easier for undergraduates and their parents to estimate and regulate the costs of college residence.185 Not all of the savings made possible at Keble, for example, by taking all meals in common in the college hall, were achievable elsewhere. What was thought suitable for the economical education of would-be parsons was unlikely to ®nd ready acceptance in colleges where commoners intended for lucrative lay occupations might have large allowances from their parents. This was the chief obstacle to any further economies, and in the long run even Keble costs edged upwards.186 There was some debate as to how much had been achieved. Joseph Wells of Wadham took a pessimistic view. Writing in 1892, he reckoned that most men's battels came to between £90 and £110 a year, and that the overall annual cost of residence for a careful man was around £160.187 Controversially, he went on to assert that Oxford expenses had actually increased. Though criticized by reviewers, he stuck by his statement in later editions of 182 UCA University College Minute Book, 1837±77, 58±61 (18 and 19 Mar. 1864); 86±7 (20 Mar. 1867). 183 NCA Minute Book 1865±75, 228±30 (15 Oct. 1868). 184 H. B. George, New College, 1856±1906 (1906), 82. 185 Handbook (1906), 66. 186 Mallet iii. 430n. 187 Wells, Oxford and Oxford Life, 52. His estimate is corrobated by the detailed accounts of a scholar who spent £672 during his four years at Jesus (Oct. 1879 to Dec. 1883), Baker, Jesus, 78.

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his guide to Oxford life, but without making clear over which period he considered the increase to have taken place.188 His own ®gures were generally lower than those published by the Royal Commission in 1852.189 Tuition fees rose slightly from an average of £21 a year in 1866 to about £24 in 1906, but the need for private tuition, which usually cost £20 a term, had in the meantime been largely eliminated. Increases in room rents were attributable to the inclusion of furniture rental; in general, battels at the turn of the century covered many more items than they had in 1850.190 Detailed evidence from one college, Lincoln, suggests that total college charges remained stationary.191 Economical reform had undoubtedly failed to effect a substantial cheapening of an Oxford college education, yet expenses had been contained and the scope for unof®cial personal spending, the cause of ruinous debt to some undergraduates in the earlier part of the century, had been curtailed. The Oxford picture looks very similar to what is known about the stable pattern of Cambridge expenses in this period.192 A college education remained a luxury, though its cost had been brought reliably within the pockets of the professional middle class. A similarly quali®ed conclusion must be drawn about the attempts to adapt college chapels and college libraries to new undergraduate needs. After the repeal of religious tests in 1871 non-Anglicans could no longer be compelled to attend acts of worship, but for the rest attendance depended upon whatever regulations governing bodies chose to make. Some colleges introduced a secular alternative to weekday morning chapel attendance as a means of getting undergraduates out of bed.193 In the 1890s secular rollcalls, amounting to `going to the Hall and taking your hat off to the Dean, when the porter marked you off ', were the norm.194 Most colleges, however, continued to expect attendance on Sundays at a united act of worship, except in cases of conscientious objection, and this bare minimum represented the last vestige of compulsion.195 At the same time, religiously committed students expected more inspiring forms of observance. Men in¯uenced by High Anglican practices at their public schools often found that college 188

Oxford and Oxford Life (2nd edn 1899), 57n. RCO (1850), report, 32±5. These in turn had been criticized as over-stating the average costs in order to reinforce the commissioners' case for admitting students unattached to the colleges. Few commentators were strictly neutral on this point; see the different slant given by the reports of the sub-committees on university extension, SCOC (1867), 283, 289. 190 Handbook (17th edn 1906), 66. 191 Green, Lincoln, 588±9. 192 S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons (1968), 75. 193 S. C. Tests (1870±1), evidence, Q. 690; appendix, 360. By 1870 Balliol, Corpus, Merton, and New College had made attendance voluntary. 194 D. W. Carmalt-Jones, Diversions of a Professor in New Zealand (Wellington, NZ, 1945), 125. 195 UCA, Minute book 1837±1877, 122 (28 Oct. 1872); Handbook (1873), 21; Handbook, (1881), 25. Cf. Brooke, Cambridge, 111±21. 189

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chapels in the 1860s left much to be desired. At Pembroke in the last years of Dr Jeune's mastership some were distressed by the absence of `warmth' of devotion in chapel worship, the lack of music, and the single, termly celebration of Communion in which even the most notoriously depraved students were forced to take part: after the chapel doors were shut and locked, the Sacrament was brought to the seats of all those present as was standard Low Church practice. A student memorial to the Pembroke authorities was organized in 1863, requesting that Communion be more regularly celebrated, but no longer compulsory, and the Sacrament received at the altar. Weekly Communions were introduced there in 1877, though it took until 1893 for hymns to be regularly included in services.196 Other colleges proved more amenable to change. Hymns Ancient and Modern was adopted at University College in 1863, when music was introduced into the chapel.197 The future botanist W. T. Thiselton-Dyer was party to a memorial from the junior members of Christ Church in 1865, which persuaded the Dean and Chapter to introduce weekly celebrations of Holy Communion in the Cathedral. A special 10 o'clock service on Sundays was instituted in 1869 with a short sermon particularly intended for undergraduates among the Cathedral congregation.198 Another impulse for change was the responsibility felt by colleges to raise the standard of Church music. Some endowed organ scholarships to support promising young musicians who were reading for degrees. Exeter founded a scholarship for its organist in 1859, when the new chapel opened, and was followed by Keble in 1876. The interest taken by two heads, T. B. Strong of Christ Church and John Mitchinson of Pembroke, in the state of music in their colleges has been described elsewhere (see Chapters 9 and 18). But despite the undoubted improvements in college religious observances during this period, it proved dif®cult, as Chapter 3 has shown, for college chapels to hold their own against the alternative centres of worship which sprang up in the University and city; hence R. W. Macan's stark assessment that the half-century prior to 1914 had witnessed `the disintegration of the college as a religious institution, in any ordinary sense' was not inconsistent with other evidence of a resurgence in voluntary religious activity among dons and undergraduates alike.199 In 1878 the bibliophile E. C. Thomas, a recent graduate of Trinity, criticized the colleges for neglecting their libraries, from which he claimed undergraduates continued to be excluded. His comments were supported 196 W. C. E. Newbolt, Years that are past (1921), 54±5; Macleane, Pembroke, 368, 502; UJ 17 Feb. 1876, 213. 197 UCA Minute Book 1837±77, 58 (20 Apr. 1863); MCA CP 1/5 (20 July 1869). 198 W. T. Thiselton-Dyer to C. M. Blagden, 3 June 1909, CA GB xiv.c.1; H. L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell DD (1899) 153±4, 159; for a similar petition at Balliol, and the institution of weekly Communion at Lincoln and Worcester, see S. R. Brooke diary, 1 Apr. 1865, CCCA D498/6. 199 R. W. Macan, Religious Changes in Oxford during the Last Fifty Years (1917), 32.

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by a Balliol graduate who recalled his own dif®culties in obtaining access to the library.200 Both men were principally concerned to promote the abortive project for turning college libraries into specialized holdings open to outside researchers,201 and they overlooked the creation over the previous decade in every college of designated undergraduate reading rooms, with lending collections tailored to the requirements of examinations.202 Falconer Madan, the librarian of Brasenose, enthusiastically promoted this new development. He wanted to make libraries more serviceable to college members, providing works of reference and acquiring multiple lending copies of texts needed by undergraduates, rather than amassing rare books and manuscripts. His ideal was that the library should become `a centre of literary information' within a college.203 Yet undergraduates tended to seek this sort of facility elsewhereÐnot least in the UnionÐwhile college authorities proved unwilling to be generous in their expenditure on book acquisition for undergraduate use. Nor, with certain exceptions,204 was suitable accommodation provided for undergraduate readers. For many years the undergraduates' library at Christ Church was housed in an unsupervised and musty room in Tom Quad.205 Some of this of®cial parsimony stemmed from a sense that corporate funds should not subsidize what individuals ought to provide for themselves. A Christ Church history tutor, Arthur Hassall, took the argument further by suggesting that lending facilities were positively damaging, for they offered students an excuse not to buy books. In his view, every man reading for honours should possess his own small library, for this was the key to a good class: `books must be bought, marked, and pored over.'206 Whatever their shortcomings in providing facilities for worship or study, the colleges more than ever became the focus of undergraduate leisure. Organized sport was only one elementÐthough the most visibleÐof a much broader trend. College debating societies, founded in imitation of the Union, and often used by members as a preparation for entry into that larger arena, sprang up during the 1860s. At Pembroke the debating society was established on a permanent basis in 1864 by a group of prominent 200 H. R. Tedder and E. C. Thomas (eds), Transactions and Proceedings of the ®rst annual meeting of the Library Association of the United Kingdom, held at Oxford, October 1, 2, 3 1878 (1879), 26, 28, 125. 201 On the 1871 scheme for subject specialization see P. Morgan, Oxford Libraries outside the Bodleian (1980), xii±xiii. 202 Handbook (1881), 45±8. 203 F. Madan, `The Library of Brasenose College, Oxford', Notes and Queries, 6th ser. ii (Oct. 1880), 321±2. 204 The new quadrangle at Trinity (1885±7) contained `a handsome room' for the undergraduates' reading room and library, H. E. D. Blakiston, Trinity College (1898), 239, though it soon proved too small for its purpose. See also OM 28 Oct. 1885, 329. 205 W. G. Hiscock, A Christ Church Miscellany (1946), 107±9. 206 OM 17 Oct. 1912, 16.

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reading men.207 A meeting of twenty-eight undergraduates in rooms at Exeter brought the Stapeldon debating society into being, in 1869, with rules which were characteristic of similar societies in other colleges. Membership, like that of college sports clubs, was open to the whole college and, since coffee was the only refreshment offered, subscriptions were low.208 By the 1880s, when the Trinity debating society regularly attracted nearly half the college, their vigour may account for a correspondingly quiet period in the Union's own history.209 A majority of the members of Corpus turned out in November 1889 to hear a debate on Liberal Unionism opened by two dons, Arthur Sidgwick and H. D. Leigh.210 Earlier in the term sixty-seven members of the New College discussion society had crammed into an `inconveniently crowded' room to debate the abolition of music-halls, whose censorship by the London County Council was a favourite topic for college debates, probably because of the opportunity for ribaldry which the subject afforded.211 Friday evening debates at Hertford considered such questions as whether smoking for ladies was `bene®cial or desirable', or the relative merits of Association and Rugby football, while the more sober and select Tyndale debating society, meeting in that college on Sunday evenings, argued over the results of Biblical criticism, or the effect of the High-Church revival on the Church of England.212 Only in the larger or more divided colleges, such as Balliol which had three competing societies (the Dervorguilla, the Brackenbury, and the Arnold), did it prove impossible to organize a single, open society. Debating societies were the model for and even the origin of the most inclusive college institutions of all, the Junior Common Rooms. `There is no more distinctive feature of modern college life than the J.C.R.,' proclaimed an undergraduate magazine of that name in 1897.213 Some junior common rooms had a long history: the New College JCR dated from the 1680s and the Pembroke JCR celebrated its centenary in 1894. Yet at mid-century their future lay in the balance. Constituted as private clubs, they were regarded by the authorities as a source of extravagance and idleness. The Corpus JCR was dissolved in 1852, at the same time as the fellows of Magdalen contemplated closing down the common room used by the demies.214 To the New College dons of the 1860s, the JCR represented an obstacle to their plans for 207

Macleane, Pembroke, 488. W. K. Stride, Exeter College (1900), 244. The 1878 rules of the Brasenose debating society stipulated that membership should be unlimited and subscriptions restricted to 2s 6d a term, Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 271 (40). 209 OM 28 Feb. 1883, 113. 210 OM 20 Nov. 1889, 96. 211 OM 6 Nov. 1889, 58. 212 OM 30 Oct. 1889, 41; 4 Dec. 1889, 130. 213 The J. C. R. 1 (1897), 3. 214 Fowler, Corpus, 322; PP 1854 1. 290. 208

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expansion. They pointed to the expensive annual subscription (6 guineas) which was beyond the means of poorer students, and the inappropriate style of social life which the JCR encouraged, illustrated by damning statistics of champagne consumption.215 Matters came to a head after the disturbance and rustications of November 1868. Forti®ed by the legal opinion of Lord Chief Justice Erle, an old member of the college, concerning the ownership of the JCR's property (which included a considerable quantity of port), and having sought the views of John Conington and Jowett, the governing body decided to shut down the common room inde®nitely.216 Their action, however, provoked the JCR of®cers into a spirited defence of a facility which, they argued, reduced the need for individuals to hold private parties, brought `minor comforts' within the reach of all, and helped to integrate freshmen into college life.217 These considerations evidently weighed with Alfred Robinson who began instead to draw up a plan to revive the New College JCR, subject to of®cial control and economical management. Following the precedent of the Magdalen JCR, which had been reconstituted in 1867 on the basis of open membership,218 the common room was reestablished but with lower subscriptions which were to be incorporated into college battels and supervised by the Junior Bursar.219 In a process which mirrored that undergone by sports clubs, described in Chapter 22, JCRs became an established element of college life. At St John's the creation of a JCR was one of the innovations carried through by the Greats tutor Sidney Ball.220 Most offered the types of amenities at a modest subscription, kept in check by a don acting as senior treasurer, for which mid-Victorian undergraduates had been obliged to resort to the Union. As well as providing `some common ground on which all members of the House could meet', the Christ Church JCR, founded in 1886 by a committee of undergraduates who had obtained the sanction of the governing body, took in newspapers and magazines, and supplied writing materials and tea and coffee `at reasonable prices'.221 By 1890 Corpus was `almost unique among Colleges' in not having a common room, though some of those in existence failed initially to thrive.222 In every college the intellectual eÂlite created its equivalent to the celebrated essay societies which drew in members from across the University 215

A. Robinson to F. B. Harvey, 26 Aug. 1869, NCA MS 11741. NCA MS 11738. 217 Memorial from members of New College JCR, 9 Oct. 1869, NCA MS 11741. 218 `Rules of the Magdalen College Junior Common Room' (1867) Bodl G. A. Oxon c. 279; Magrath, Queen's ii. 191. An exception was Hertford, which inherited from Magdalen Hall a JCR which remained a `close and exclusive wine club'; The J. C. R. 1 (1897), 3. 219 NCA MS 11726. 220 O. H. Ball, Sidney Ball (1923), 15, 19, 54. 221 Circular in Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 272, p. 46. 222 Pelican Record, 2 (1893), 2; C. M. Blagden, Well Remembered (1953), 81±2; Jones, Balliol, 241. 216

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from the 1840s until the demise of Old Mortality in 1866. Again, a pioneer of this new form of college institution was New College, where an essay society was founded in November 1868. Its constitution was typical: membership, limited to ®fteen, was elective (generally comprising men reading for Greats), and essays were read in a member's rooms every Saturday evening.223 In some colleges donnish involvement reduced the danger of the gathering degenerating into a dining club or a clique. A. E. Housman was invited by his tutor at St John's to the weekly `Sunday-Night Essays'.224 Herbert Warren and other dons attended the weekly papers read to the Magdalen College Wayn¯ete Society, which had twenty members.225 Playreading societies were popular during the 1870s, when dramatic performances were still of®cially prohibited; while a tutor at University College, Bernard Bosanquet, started a Shakespeare Society.226 Smoking concerts (`smokers') and other entertainments given by college musical societies became regular events in the 1890s.227 Keble claimed one of the ®rst subject-based societies, the Tenmannetale, comprising ten members reading for Modern History honours.228 College Church societies heard papers on subjects of interest to members of the established Church, who now met without any hint of pressure from above.229 The `mushrooming' of clubs and societies catering for an immense variety of political, philosophical, literary, musical, and religious interests, and a general `quickening of literary tastes' noted by an observer in 1883, is apparent in undergraduate letters and diaries.230 They suggest how broad the enthusiasms of both scholars and commoners were and how, in particular, participation in literary activities and sport overlapped. The historian of Jesus points to undergraduates in the early 1880s who were keen oarsmen and cricketers, as well as reading papers to the college's Elizabethan Society and playing instruments in the philharmonic society; similarly a scholar at Corpus during 1883±6 was both a prominent contributor to the college debating and essay societies and an energetic member of the boat club.231 A commoner in residence at New College during the same period, whose enthusiasms were primarily athletic, nevertheless attended college meetings in support of Oxford House at Bethnal Green, took part in play-readings at the Shakespeare Society, and debated in the college discussion society, bring223 New College Essay Society minutes, vol. i (1868±73), NCA MS 3557. For the Old Mortality see Pt 1, 710 and Plate 58. 224 H. Mass (ed.), The Letters of A. E. Housman (1971), 12. 225 MCA MS 758. 226 H. Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet. A Short Account of his Life (1924), 33. 227 See Ch. 18. 228 OM 24 Jan. 1883, 9. 229 OM 3 Nov. 1886, 332; cf. V. H. H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge (1964), 320. 230 OM 28 Feb. 1883, 113. 231 Baker, Jesus, 78±9, 84±5; A. Kadish, The Oxford Economists in the Late Nineteenth Century (1982), 22.

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ing forward a motion in May 1885 against the proposed Channel tunnel.232 The diary pages of a passman at St Edmund Hall between 1885 and 1888 `abound in graphic accounts of outings in pairs or fours' on the river, but he nevertheless `rarely missed' a meeting of the Hall's debating society.233 Older patterns of sociability thrived in the sometimes long-established dining or wine clubs. Most adopted colours of some sort: members of the King Charles club at St John's dined in blue and yellow smoking jackets, the Trinity College Claret Club, founded in 1870, prescribed a dark blue dinner jacket with claret facings. At Wadham's Olympic Club, a member recalled, `we all wore tails, with the distinctive badge of a light blue silk waistcoat with gilt buttons, and a white tie.'234 Penalties were exacted for breaches of decorum; the Claret Club ®ned members for `talking bawd', swearing, not passing the wine, leaving the table before other members, or failing to wear club dress.235 A signi®cant characteristic, which was prominently advertised in a series on `famous college clubs', published in the Bystander magazine in 1909, was their exclusiveness. Two black balls excluded candidates from the St John's Archery Club forever; one black ball was suf®cient to disqualify from the Exeter Adelphi club, which also excluded exhibitioners from membership. This tendency `to hold aloof from and look down on the society of the rest of their college' was criticized by a former Union president, writing in 1892, as `out of keeping with the more democratic character of modern Oxford'.236 In place of the exclusiveness, whether of `sets' or social ranks, which marked undergraduate life earlier in the century, the late Victorians attempted to create institutions which involved all members of a college. That they had some success is indicated by the testimony of comparative outsiders who found ready acceptance within their colleges.237 Scholars could, and were expected to, play a full and equal part in student life; since scholarships were awarded purely on merit, tenable equally by those who had substantial means and by those who had little, their holders were never stigmatized as recipients of charity.238 Americans noticed the ease with which freshmen generally found their place; a system in which senior men 232

Diary of C. F. Cholmondeley (New College 1883±7), copy in NCA. Diary of C. H. Fullmer (St Edmund Hall 1885±8), cited in Kelly, St Edmund Hall, 96±8. 234 T. A. Cook, The Sunlit Hours: A Record of Sport and Life (1925), 50±1. 235 Claret Club minutes 1870±4, TCA. 236 J. S. G. Pemberton, `Social Life at Oxford' in J. Wells (ed.), Oxford and Oxford Life (1892), 108±9. 237 W. Grif®th, Thomas Edward Ellis, 1859±1899 (Llandybie, 1959), 13; L. S. Peake, Arthur Samuel Peake: A Memoir (1930), 95; J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1949), 31; S. P. B. Mais, All the Days of My Life (1937), 24; an undergraduate who had been educated at home made a similar point, J. St L. Strachey, The Adventure of Living: A Subjective Autobiography (1922), 144. 238 W. J. Ashley contrasted their position at Harvard, Surveys Historic and Economic (1900), 465. 233

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vacated their rooms and moved into lodgings to make way for the new intake of freshmen was viewed with some surprise by observers familiar with types of student life based on `years' or `classes' and the hierarchies which they implied.239 A freshman still had to be careful not to violate conventions which forbade him to address himself to a senior manÐthe ®rst move must come from the latter. This was not likely to be long in coming. One of the ®rst calls was certain to be from the Captain of Boats with an invitation to row; the nearest to a college initiation ritual, apart from the time-honoured freshmen's wine party, was the subjection to `unpleasant truths' bellowed from the tow-path by the rowing coach at those being `tubbed'.240 Sport provided common ground and the simplest means of ensuring college unity. Captains of boats, football, and cricket were elected at open meetings held in JCRs.241 Corpus undergraduates assembled in Michaelmas term 1886 to deliberate upon the colours of the college's rugger jersey and to organize a smoking concert, matters in which the whole college might be presumed to take at least a passing interest.242 Arrangements to enter a boat at Henley, to hold a Commemoration Ball, or to organize a college mission in the East End of London were equally occasions to bring all the undergraduate members of a college together.243 An ethos which promoted public spirit in all its forms could be intolerant towards those who were thought not to be joining in the common effort. Critics argued that unity had brought with it conformity and the tyranny of `good form'.244 In a University Sermon on college life, delivered in 1882, Thomas Fowler, president of Corpus, criticized `sets' and exclusiveness, but urged that college feeling should mean something more than the shared pleasures of college successes on the river or in the class lists; it should bring about `widening sympathies' and exposure to `wider contacts', founded on a genuine mutuality and tolerance.245 Fowler's comments followed the suppression of the aesthetic movement, in the face of what one tutor euphemistically called `corporate disapproval'. Blue china and other ornaments symbolic of the movement's followers had been smashed up.246 The occupant of a set of rooms, the symbol to the early nineteenth-century undergraduate of his independence and emancipation from boyhood, might now be subjected to `ragging', a phenomenon discussed in Chapter 31, or suffer 239 Burdett and Warren, Warren, 58; J. Paul Getty, My Life and Fortunes (1964), 52; E. B. Poulton, John Viriamu Jones and other Oxford Memories (1911), 111. 240 W. J. Gordon, `New Oxford', Leisure Hour (1895), 387. 241 OM 28 Oct. 1885, 329; Wadham College Gazette, no. 3 (1898), 48. 242 OM 24 Nov. 1886, 384. 243 The Christ Church mission in Poplar, dating from 1881, was the ®rst; this was followed by the Trinity mission at the Great Eastern Railway works, Stratford, East London. 244 Fraser's Magazine, 23 (May 1881), 628. 245 UJ 23 Nov. 1882, 111±12. 246 T. L. Papillon, `University Amusements', The Guardian 16 April 1884, 578; W. Sichel, Sands of Time (1923), 119; Aestheticism and Intolerance: A Protest (1882), 6, 8.

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the humiliation of `de-bagging', a sanction popularized in this generation. Peer pressure to conform was strong. A rather timid freshman from a Nonconformist family, admitted to Exeter in 1891, justi®ed to his father his immediate purchase of a boating cap, sweater, and blazer, which `everybody who is not an anti-recreation swot wears'.247 Radical or unconventional views might be aired at college debating societies, but were barely tolerated in other circumstances, especially if they were promoted in such a way as to violate the accepted norms of conduct. In the early 1890s an undergraduate at Trinity who was active in the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union was struck in the face by one of the rugger `bloods' who objected to him preaching in the street.248 Outside visitors whose presence was thought damaging to the reputation of the college within the wider undergraduate community received a hostile reception. After William Morris had delivered his lecture on `Art and Democracy' in University College Hall, the undergraduates presented a petition to the Master in protest against the association of the college with any `pronounced form of party politics'.249 In 1886 Michael Davitt, founder of the Irish Land League, was mobbed in his bedroom when staying overnight in the college as a guest of an of®cer of the Russell Club. A Catholic convert accused of proselytizing, Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, had to be escorted from Pembroke in 1883 under a hail of missiles hurled by a crowd of undergraduates shouting no-popery insults; and in 1892 a socialist meeting at Magdalen attended by George Bernard Shaw was broken up and the host's rooms wrecked.250 Jowett was not alone in his observation, made to the Balliol freshmen in 1885, that although there was `more knowledge and steady industry' than formerly, the youth of forty years earlier had shown, among other things, more `originality'.251 This was perhaps an inevitable result of the more intense organization of both study and leisure which the colleges had brought about in the intervening period. The urgent demands of social reform and empire, and the ideal of public service, now placed a premium upon active virtues; this generation was considered to have less interest than its predecessors in broad speculation and critical re¯ection. Aestheticism seems to have attracted fewer adherents. `Art has not the barest representation,' the Indian poet, Manmohan Ghose, who came up to Christ Church in 1887 complained. `Indeed it would grieve the soul of an artist to see in this place of culture the stupid want of taste which mocks us from the walls of 247

J. T. Carkeet to J. Carkeet, 22 Oct. 1891, Carkeet MSS, ECA. C. E. Padwick, Temple Gairdner of Cairo (1930), 36. 249 OM 21 Nov. 1883, 386±7. 250 UJ 1 Mar. 1883, 285; 8 Mar. 1883, 313; Oxford Times, 20 Mar. 1886; 27 Feb. 1892, 5; OM 24 Feb. 1892, 191; Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885±1897, ed. S. Weintraub (2 vols 1986), ii. 796. 251 B. Jowett, College Sermons, ed. W. H. Fremantle (1895), 35; cf. G. W. Kitchin's comment, Pt 1. 285. 248

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Oxford rooms.'252 Five years later, a Harvard professor whose experience had been at Balliol, one of the more cosmopolitan colleges, nevertheless warned of a dangerous parochialism in Oxford student life. In contrast to their counterparts at French and German universities, he contended, Oxford undergraduates encountered only men whose backgrounds and school experience were broadly the same as their own.253 `The perfect brotherly equality which College life and College rooms make peculiarly possible to us', evoked by T. H. Warren in an address to Magdalen undergraduates in 1885,254 was founded upon the fact that the colleges continued to recruit their students from a comparatively narrow social range (see Chapter 24). OutsidersÐwhether non-Anglicans, overseas students, or former pupils of elementary schoolsÐwere never suf®ciently numerous to threaten the majority. After 1900, when admissions became more diverse with the arrival of substantial numbers of overseas students, the ®rst graduate research students, and holders of local authority scholarships, the homogeneity which the late Victorians took for granted was undermined, and signs of fragmentation and division appeared.255 Corporate unity remained, for the moment, the dominant force. Selfconsciously promoted by the men's colleges, it replaced the old attachments of locality and religion which university reform had weakened. College life was seen to mitigate the corrosive, individualist tendencies of open competition and the class lists, and to counter the divisiveness of academic specialization. Despite occasional breakdowns, relations between dons and undergraduates were generally reckoned friendly,256 while professors, dons' wives, and servants were in varying degrees incorporated within the new college communities. Relationships with those who had gone out of residence were also signi®cantly rede®ned. Traditional college feasts, which appeared anachronistic in 1863 `in these days when everyone has everyday a good dinner', and which were abolished in at least one college, found a new function as a means of entertaining old members.257 Gaudies and London dinners, frequently held in the week of the Varsity cricket match, became common in the 1880s.258 Keble was again a pioneer, claiming to be the ®rst college to treat gaudies as reunions, and to issue reports of its doings to 252 M. Ghose, Collected Poems, ed. L. Ghose (5 vols Calcutta, 1970), i. 170; cf. J. Russell, A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith (privately printed, 1950), 46. 253 L. Dyer, `The danger of athleticism', Educational Review, iii (Dec. 1892), 80. 254 T. H. Warren, College Unity (1885), 8. 255 See Ch. 31; there were similar developments at Cambridge, J. Twigg, A History of Queens' College, Cambridge, 1448±1986 (Woodbridge, 1987), 251. 256 See Cosmo Lang's comparison of Oxford with Scottish university life in OM 30 May 1883, 266, and James Bryce's comments in The American Commonwealth (3 vols 1888), iii. 452. 257 C. C. Clerke to H. G. Liddell (Copy), 29 Oct. 1863, CA DP.ii.c.3; E. G. Hardy, Jesus College (1899), 235. 258 Magrath, Queen's, ii. 189; Jones, Balliol, 218; Macleane, Pembroke, 488; F. Madan, `Brief Annals of the College', Brasenose Monographs, i. 10.

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former students.259 Honorary fellowships provided a more formal relationship with distinguished old members. Trinity and Worcester, for example, used this device to restore the brothers J. H. and F. W. Newman to their books in 1877 and 1883 respectively. But the number of graduates with whom contact was lost, compared with the high degree of alumni attachment achieved by American universities, pained one far-sighted bursar.260 More immediate anxieties pressed at the end of the nineteenth century. Had the success of the colleges as teaching bodies been achieved without suf®cient regard being paid to higher learning and research? Balliol, the leading exemplar of the new system, was seen to be peculiarly well adapted for educating men of affairs, but `the long and distinguished list of its men of mark' was judged to include `not many scholars of the ®rst rank'.261 There were further doubts whether the colleges could meet the imperial needs envisaged in Cecil Rhodes's will, signed in July 1899, the demands for `national ef®ciency' following Britain's humiliating reverses in the Boer War, or the drive for working-class higher education in the aftermath of the Liberal electoral triumph in 1906. These form some of the major themes in later chapters of this volume. 259

OM 2 May 1883, 190; Keble College Occasional Papers, 1 (1879), 2. Wells, Oxford and Oxford Life (2nd edn 1899), 36n. 261 R. L. Poole, `Balliol', in A. Clark (ed.), The Colleges of Oxford: Their History and Traditions (1891), 58. 260

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5 `Balliol, For Example'* j o hn p re s t When `the old Master', Richard Jenkyns, died in 1854, there were two candidates to succeed him, Benjamin Jowett and Robert Scott, and Scott won by a single vote. The new Master was a former tutor of the college and a distinguished lexicographer, who had married in 1840 and taken a college living. Ten years later, when the Commission of Inquiry was appointed, he was far away in South Luffenham. He was not altogether out of touch, but he shared the diehards' view of the endowments of the University and the colleges as private property, belonging to the Church. He disapproved of the reform, and his rule began with a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to frustrate the will of Parliament and reimpose a religious test.1 Scott was, as Jowett said, `a very good and conscientious man, but narrow'.2 For twelve years the Master was able, with the help of Edward Woollcombe, the senior fellow, and Henry Wall, one of the two Bursars, to retain a majority in meetings of the governing body. But elections to fellowships gradually changed the outlook of the collegeÐthat of T. H. Green in 1861 especiallyÐand in 1866 Scott lost control to Jowett. Analysis of the composition of the college in the decade 1854±633 shows that, for all the new building carried out in Jenkyns's time, Balliol was still a very small college. In ten years, 241 men, seventy-two (30 per cent) of whom were the sons of clergy, came into residence. Thirty-®ve (14 per cent), a large number, stemmed from homes in Scotland, ®ve (2 per cent) from Ireland, and seven (3 per cent) from outside the United Kingdom. The 241 had been educated at ®fty-four different schools and universities, but sixty (25 per cent) of them had been to Eton, thirty-nine (16 per cent) to Harrow, and twenty-®ve (10 per cent) to RugbyÐthese three schools between them supplying over half the total entry and winning most of the open scholarships. Two other schools, Cheltenham and Marlborough, reached double * Robert Lowe, Parl. Deb., 5 June 1867, clxxxvii, 1633. 1 J. M. Prest, `Robert Scott and Benjamin Jowett', supplement to the Balliol College Record 1966, 3±4. 2 Quinn and Prest, 307. 3 Sir Ivo Elliott, The Balliol College Register, 1833±1933 (1934).

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®gures. Glasgow University, through the Snell Foundation, sent thirteen. Sixteen of the 241 migrated (with awards) to other colleges, and three died. Among the 222 who remained, 162 (73 per cent) took honours (the university average at this time was about 25 per cent), and sixteen achieved honours in two schools of study. Out of the 178 classes obtained, 112 were in Lit. Hum. (44 ®rsts), 42 in Law and History (10 ®rsts), 18 in Mathematics (8 ®rsts), and 6 in Natural Sciences (4 ®rsts). The remaining sixty undergraduates read for pass degrees. When the cohort went down and chose careers, seventy-three men (33 per cent) turned for a time at least to the law, and sixty-four (29 per cent) took holy orders. One practised medicine. Twentyseven (12 per cent) were, or became, landowners, and seven entered the regular army. Twenty-three (10 per cent) followed careers in university teaching, and ®fteen (7 per cent) in schoolteaching. Two were selected for the diplomatic service, thirteen for the Civil Service, and six for the Indian Civil Service. Nine became businessmen; one an engineer. According to the College Register, ®fty-three (24 per cent) subsequently published books. Jowett was an educational enthusiast who believed in `the endless possibility of improvement in all human creatures during the ®rst years of life'. Unlike Scott, he looked upon the universities as national property, and detected guilt `in the neglect of education'.4 In 1850 he welcomed the appointment of the Commission of Inquiry, to which he gave evidence. In December 1853 he took the astonishing initiative of drafting a Bill privately, and forwarding it, through Gladstone (the Member for the University) to the Aberdeen government to show how the recommendations of the Commission could be carried out, directly, by enactment.5 1854 was a bad year for Jowett. First, the government preferred Gladstone's plan to his own, and decided to reform Oxford indirectly, by means of Executive Commissioners, who, as Jowett had feared they would be, were tender to established interests. Then Scott was elected Master over his head. Religious differences had as much to do with Jowett's continuing restiveness under Scott as resentment. Scott was a high and dry Anglican, Jowett a Broad Churchman. In his essay upon `The Interpretation of Scripture', published in Essays and Reviews in 1860, Jowett pleaded, in a memorable phrase, for the Bible to be `read like any other book'.6 A conventional churchman, Henry Scott Holland, felt that Christianity was `gutted by him'; a sermon by Jowett was `just Platonism ¯avoured with a little Christian charity'.7 That was one view. But Jowett's stance held many attractions 4 J. M. Prest, `Jowett's Correspondence on Education with Earl Russell in 1867', supplement to the Balliol College Record 1965, 10. 5 BL Add. MS 44743, fos 1±12. 6 Essays and Reviews (1960), 338, 375, 377. See also Pt 1, 707±8. 7 S. Paget, Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters (1921), 33, cited in P. B. Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (1987), 116.

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for undergraduates adjusting to an increasingly pluralistic society. Observing that `Socrates is nowhere represented to us as a freethinker or sceptic,'8 Jowett held `a distinct view of the importance of some solution' to theological and philosophical problems. To this he coupled `the profound conviction that no conceivable solution would hold water'.9 This led him to put aside `all logical dif®culties on the ground that somehow or other contradictory assertions may both be true',10 and to obtain `glances at truth from various points of view somewhat inconsistent with each other'.11 The perfect medium of instruction, therefore, was Lit. Hum., with its mixture of ancient Greek and modern utilitarian and idealistic philosophies which out¯anked Christian philosophy at both ends. When the long years of having `to force along the inef®ciency of others'12 were over and Jowett seized power in 1866, he lost no time in turning the college into the model institution of which he had dreamed in the 1850s. In the space of eight years, in the middle of which, in 1870, Gladstone invited Scott to become Dean of Rochester, and Jowett was elected Master, he changed Balliol from an inconsiderable part of the ecclesiastical establishment into the awesome exemplar of a new educational one. With the consent of the Visitor, the Bishop of London, the Right Revd John Jackson, clerical fellowships, and the necessity for the Master to be in holy orders, were abolished. Services in chapel were rewritten with an interdenominational slant, and Jowett himself delivered addresses upon the (other) religions of the East. Tutors were allowed to retain their fellowships after marriage, and two college livings at Marks Tey and Brattleby, which would no longer be needed as receptacles for fellows who had resigned on marrying, were sold.13 Balliol was now perceived as an ef®cient college. In 1873 the Cleveland inquiry, which distinguished between external and internal sources of income, found that of all the colleges only Pembroke and Trinity received less external income than Balliol (£5,513). Of all the colleges, only Christ Church and Exeter took in more by way of tuition fees than Balliol (£2,548). In the case of trust income, which was laid out upon scholarships and exhibitions, only three colleges, Christ Church, Queen's, and Jesus, gave away more than Balliol (£1,367).14 Putting the three sets of ®gures together, it appeared that of all the colleges in Oxford, Balliol possessed least by way of endowment, earned most by educational prowess, and contributed most in educational support. In February 1876 Lord Salisbury said: 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

B. Jowett (ed.), The Dialogues of Plato (2nd edn, 5 vols 1875), i. 345. L. Stephen, `Jowett's Life', in Studies of a Biographer (1898), ii. 143. Ibid. 136. Sir Henry Jones and J. H. Muirhead, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird (1921), 133. Quinn and Prest, 40. College Meeting Minutes, 12 October 1876, 23 February 1878. See also p. 17 above. RCOC (1872), Pt 1, table B, 200, 202.

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the income per undergraduate in all the colleges is £203; but in Exeter it is only £97, in Trinity £86, and in Balliol £75. If University education were provided in all the colleges as cheaply as at Exeter, there would be at present a saving annually of £165,578; as cheaply as at Trinity, there would be a saving annually of £167,129; or as cheaply as at Balliol, a saving annually of £197,700.15

One month later, a justi®ably proud, but somewhat self-righteous Jowett persuaded the governing body to assert, in an address to the House of Lords, that, `the vast funds' already held in trust for education would, `if economically administered', be amply suf®cient to provide for all the objects which can legitimately be embraced by a University system, whether the affording education for the many, or making provision for the researches of the few, or establishing University Professorships and Readerships, or improving the buildings and apparatus of the University and colleges . . . or promoting University education in the large towns.16

Balliol enjoyed a reputation for frugal management, professional tutoring, and excellent results, and it became `the desire of every man who sent his son to Oxford', as Robert Lowe expressed it, `to send him to the best CollegeÐ Balliol, for example'. `But in Balliol there were only a certain number of rooms, and if a youth could not be received there he must go down in the list till he found a College which could admit him . . . This was false political economy.'17 One answer to this problem was to build a larger college. In this respect Balliol had already been lucky. Coal lay beneath the college's estate at Long Benton, near Newcastle upon Tyne, and for ®fteen years in the 1850s and 1860s royalties on mines yielded an average annual windfall of £795. `Twothirds of the moneys received' were `laid out on buildings and other permanent improvements'.18 Just as the seam was becoming exhausted, a rich spinster living in Brighton, Hannah Brackenbury, who had convinced herself that she was descended from the founder's family,19 presented the college with a new Broad Street front, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, which cost £9,100.20 Then, as Master, Jowett found `begging letter writing a very fascinating occupation'.21 The Marquess of Westminster pleaded `motives of economy', but the Duke of Bedford subscribed generously.22 In 1875 Jowett wrote that he was composing `3 letters per diem until the whole Balliol 15

Parl. Deb. 3S, 24 Feb. 1876, ccxxvii, 795±6. Trinity's ®gure should be £96, not £86. College Meeting Minutes, 22 Mar. 1876. 17 Parl. Deb. 3S, 5 June 1867, clxxxvii, 1633. This Liberal view would not have been echoed by all on the Conservative benches. 18 RCOC (1872) Pt 1, 56. See Pt 1, 176±7. 19 John Jones, Balliol College: A History, 1263±1939 (2nd edn 1997), 210±11. 20 RCOC (1872), Pt 1, 56. 21 Quinn and Prest, 266. 22 Ibid. 253. 16

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world is canvassed'.23 Single-handedly he raised enough to invite Waterhouse back to develop the northern end of the college's site and construct a new dining hall and about twenty-®ve new sets of rooms. But there was a limit to how many undergraduates could be accommodated in the traditional manner, and Jowett had also pursued another scheme, which was to graft a Scots university onto Oxford, and allow students to live in lodgings.24 There were two lines of thought behind this proposal. The ®rst was to enable Balliol to increase its share of the market among the sons of the professional classes. There were, Lowe thought, `few persons who would not send their sons to Balliol to live in lodgings, rather than to some Colleges he could mention',25 and in 1869 Jowett wrote the exultant comment about the effect of the University's new lodging-out statute on Balliol's expansion which was quoted in Chapter 1: `if we had a little more money we could absorb the whole university.'26 The second object was to enlarge the market and bring university education within reach of social classes for whom it had never yet been an option. `It is very important,' Jowett wrote to Earl Russell, `to provide a means of giving the best education to the best intelligences in every class of Society.'27 In 1866 Jowett brought before the college a scheme to allow undergraduates coming to Balliol to live either in college or outside. A house was bought, a warden (T. H. Green) was appointed, and the tutors resolved to `give to all such students the bene®t of their tuition . . . making no charge whatever for it'.28 Under Jowett, Balliol was con®rmed in its pre-eminence at a time when British power was at its height. Young men were attracted to Balliol from every corner of the empire, and from other lands touched by British in¯uence where the rulers wanted to learn something about the principles of liberal and constitutional government. C. E. Vaughan, who came up in 1873, recalled how, already, the place was a medley of `Japanese and Scots, Hindoos and Frenchmen, Americans and Englishmen, Brahmins and Catholics, Nonconformists and high Anglicans, Jews and Gentiles . . . sparks of nobility and artizans; a bazaar of all nations and languages, the whole world in miniature'.29 One other group, which was indigenous to Britain, but was preparing to leave the United Kingdom for a lifetime's service abroad, must also be mentioned. In 1874 the British government decided to send the candidates selected for the Civil Service in India to university before despatching them 23

Ibid. 266±7. Ibid. 110. Parl. Deb. 3S, 5 June 1867, clxxxvii, 1633. 26 See p. 22 above. 27 Prest, `Jowett's Correspondence on Education', 8. 28 Lowe, 5 June 1867, Parl. Deb. 3S, clxxxvii, 1634. 29 C. E. Vaughan, `Balliol Five and Twenty Years Ago', South Wales and Monmouthshire University College Magazine, XI, no. 4 (March 1899), 139. 24 25

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to the subcontinent. Jowett, who con®ded that he would `like to govern the world' through his pupils,30 decided to bid for them. The Master wrote personally to every candidate,31 and the college appointed a tutor, Arnold Toynbee, to look after them. Out of the 255 candidates selected by the British government between 1878 and 1885, 51 went to Cambridge, and 161 to Oxford: of these 161, no fewer than 103 were attracted to Balliol.32 The presence of so many Indian probationers helped to con®rm the impression that the college, which was broad-minded in religion, international in composition, and increasingly open as to social class, was also acquiring a distinctive ethos of public service. An analysis of the Register for the decade 1874±83 shows how completely Jowett had transformed the college.33 During this period 584 men entered into residence, of whom eighty-seven (15 per cent) were sons of the English and Scots clergy. Sixty-®ve (11 per cent) members of the college, including twenty-three Snell scholars, had home addresses in Scotland, and thirteen (2 per cent) in Ireland. In addition, there were now three overlapping groups totalling ninety-®ve (16 per cent) with overseas backgrounds. First came the sons of British merchants and of®cials serving abroad, and especially in India; second the children of British emigrants to Canada, Australia, and other parts of the empire; and third a trickle of foreigners from the United States of America, and from Europe and Asia, from France, Germany, and Italy, Persia, Siam, and Japan. No fewer than 125 schools and universities supplied Balliol with undergraduates. Eton continued to top the list with sixty-seven (11 per cent), and Harrow remained in second place with forty (7 per cent). Rugby, with thirty-three (6 per cent), was being challenged for third place by Clifton with thirty-two, and they were followed by Winchester with twentyone, and by dozens of other public schools with a few each. In addition, the grammar schools contributed a new element. Manchester Grammar School won thirteen places, Bradford six, Bedford four, Birmingham three, Bristol two, Richmond two, and Cardigan, Doncaster, Handsworth, Monmouth, and Wolverhampton one each. These ®gures are a tribute to Jowett's skill in forming new connections without alienating old ones. Twenty of the 584 migrated or died, and another 100 were Indian Civil Service probationers who stayed for two years and did not seek degrees. Among the remaining 464 men, 118 (25 per cent) settled for pass degrees. The remaining 346 (75 per cent) took Honours, and secured 373 classes, 175 in Lit. Hum. (47 ®rsts), 87 in Modern History (27 ®rsts), 45 in Law (8 ®rsts), 31 in Natural Sciences (16 ®rsts), 23 in Mathematics (14 ®rsts), and 12 in Theology (4 ®rsts), a school invented by Jowett's arch-rival in Oxford, Pusey. 30 31 32 33

Quinn and Prest, 249. R. Symonds, Oxford and Empire (1986), 187. Quinn and Prest, Introduction, xxx±xxxi. Sir Ivo Elliott (n. 3).

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This was Jowett's college, and career choices were beginning to change. 149 men (32 per cent) embarked upon Law. Fifty-seven (12 per cent) became ministers of religion. Fifty of these were Anglican priests, but the college had acquired a religious penumbra, and three went into the Roman Church, two into the Presbyterian Church, one into the Free Church of Scotland, and one into the Congregational Church, while one of the Anglican ministers resigned and later became an occasional preacher in Unitarian churches. Eight practised medicine. Twenty were landowners, and one became a land agent. Ten accepted commissions in the regular army, and one in the Metropolitan Police. The growth area was university teaching, where seventy-seven men (17 per cent) found openings, and schoolteaching with ®fty-eight (12 per cent). Journalism attracted seventeen, the arts ten, publishing two, and librarianship and social work one apiece. Eleven were taken into the Diplomatic Service, three into the Colonial Service, and sixteen into the Civil Service. Thirty-six (8 per cent) became businessmen, and three engineers. Including the Indian probationers, 165 (29 per cent) achieved publication. Jowett had raised money for building just before the agricultural depression struck the University and its donors. The college was not well endowed, but it held land, and in the 1880s it was dif®cult to ®nd a new tenant and ruinous to lose a good one. The minutes of governing body meetings became a catalogue of rent remissions, leave to convert arable to grass, and outlays by the college. Rack-rents fell from £3,018 in 1875 to £2,426 in 1885, £2,203 in 1895, and £1,935 in 1905. Total income, which was averaging about £21,000 p.a. in the late seventies, fell below £20,000 in every year between 1883 and 1898.34 In 1881 the college made a successful take-over bid for New Inn Hall, but the buildings were beyond repair, and the site was sold in 1899, when the college incurred the suspicion of asset stripping. The £200 p.a. which had been donated to Bristol University in the 1870s was reduced, in 1881, to £50 p.a. Henceforward, there was to be no more lecturing other colleges about the extended uses to which their endowments might be put. Educational initiatives were restricted to what was cheapÐa `memorable Sunday afternoon concert in the garden quad., when a military band', as an unkind critic remarked, `discoursed quasi-sacred music to a disorderly mob of ruf®ans from the town',35 and throwing the college open to summer schools for under-masters in elementary schools in the long vacation.36 Surprisingly, the plan which lay closest to Jowett's heart, which was to bring many more men up to the University by allowing a college's undergraduates to live in lodgings throughout their time as students did in Scotland, never really caught on. Expansion came to an end, and in the nineties, when the 34

Printed Annual Accounts. [ J. H. Millar], `Mr. Jowett and Oxford Liberalism', Blackwood's Magazine, clxi (May 1897), 728. For Balliol's ®nancial situation see also Pt 1, 382±3, 403, 411, 417. 36 College Meeting Minutes, 16 May 1885, 20 Feb. 1886, 15 Feb. 1889. 35

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Indian probationers spread out among the colleges, numbers began to fall. Measured both by the quality of its entry, and by its results, the college continued to ¯ourish in its stationary or contracting state. But the visionary and innovative institution of the late sixties and early seventies was rigidifying, and Jowett's Vice-Chancellorship (1882±6) marked a rapprochement between the college and the University. The unique, prodigious moment in the college's history was fading. T. H. Green, `the ®nest brow, surely of his generation',37 died at the age of 45 in 1882. Jowett's favourite, R. L. Nettleship, who could `unsphere the spirit of Plato',38 succumbed to exposure on Mont Blanc in 1892. Jowett himself died in 1893. Jowett's successor, Edward Caird, was the ®rst lay Master and the ®rst Scot. He had come to Balliol from Glasgow University in 1860. From 1866 to 1893 he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, where, with more conviction than Jowett, he presented Greek philosophy and Christian thought as mutually supporting one another. When he was elected, he remarked that `all good Scotsmen go to BalliolÐeven in this life,'39 and accepted the call `to the college of Jowett and Green'.40 Caird was an anticalvinist Presbyterian who held that teachers at a university ought not to despair of human progress.41 He was much more radical than Jowett about female education, and he expressed sympathy for `every one held down and deprived of healthy citizenship whether by lack of education, or votes, or even of character'.42 In 1886 he had attended the opening of Toynbee Hall.43 Now, as Master, he opposed Rhodes's honorary degree and spoke out against the Boer War.44 In Caird's time the college's ®nances took a turn for the better. Jowett himself bequeathed a modest estate, the return upon investments improved, and in 1904±5 a group of old members including Robert Younger (1880), Lord Brassey's eldest son (1882), and Viscount Morpeth (1886), came to the rescue and formed an endowment fund. By June 1906 they had raised £14,700, by 1911 £28,498.45 The college's annual income rose from £20,149 in 1899 to a steady £26,000±£27,000 between 1906 and 1914. Building was resumed, and the St Giles±East Magdalen Street facËade was completed with the erection of the Warren buildings in 1906 and 1912±13. In 1907, when Caird became ill, and resigned, James Leigh Strachan Davidson was elected in his place. Strachan had been a fellow since 1866. 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Vaughan, 144. Ibid. 143. Jones and Muirhead (n.11), 128n. Ibid. 131. B. Bosanquet, `Edward Caird 1835±1908', PBA 1907±8, 380±1. Jones and Muirhead, 113. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 153. College Meeting Minutes, 21 Mar. 1905, and Minutes of Trustees.

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He was a good college man who disapproved when tutors wanted to `commit matrimony',46 and a popular dean. But he had not been sorry when the numbers coming up to Balliol fell from 584 in the decade 1874±83 to 501 between 1894 and 1903. He considered that the greater part of the college's entry always has consisted and . . . always must consist, of English public school boys',47 and he was pleased to see Eton and Harrow increasing their share of the 1894±1903 intake to 15 per cent and 9 per cent. He had never sympathized with Jowett's wish to make Oxford `a sort of entrepoÃt for all kinds and varieties of educational wares',48 though he was prepared to welcome `other types and classes'49 provided they conformed to the standards of the majority. In 1895 Strachan rejoiced that `the College is, and for the last seven or eight years has been, full of the sons of Balliol men.'50 He had a point, for old members' sons increased their share of the intake from 5 per cent between 1874 and 1883 to 9 per cent between 1894 and 1903. Strachan had a much more cosy approach to college life than his immediate predecessors, and his attitude to public affairs too was more conformist than Jowett's and less courageous than Caird's. He spoke dutifully of his satisfaction when Asquith became the ®rst Balliol Prime Minister in 1908, but he was out of sympathy with the new Liberalism of the twentieth century.51 Fortunately for the college, the quality of the tutors remained high throughout the period from 1893 to 1914, outstanding appointments having been made in Harold Hartley (1901), Cyril Bailey and H. W. C. Davis (1902), and A. D. Lindsay (1906). Under their guidance, even public schoolboys occasionally set off in directions which Strachan did not approve of. R. H. Tawney (1899) had been educated at Rugby, and G. D. H. Cole (1908) at St Paul's. The `other types and classes' continued to apply to Balliol as before. The overseas intake included an increased number of native Indians and some of the ®rst Rhodes Scholars, and WEA summer schools enjoyed the hospitality of the college during the long vacations. Looking back over the whole period from 1854 to 1914, there is no mistaking the extent to which Jowett stamped his personality upon the college. Jowett's teaching was equally free of dogma and of echoes of the outpourings of useless, speculative radicals'.52 Above all he shared the sentiment of the college's ®rst honorary fellow, Robert Browning, that hell was the 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

J.W. Mackail, Strachan Davidson (1925), 57. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Quinn and Prest, 139.

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consciousness of opportunities neglected. Balliol men were `subject to a vigorous course of prodding and rousing . . . You might be propelled in any direction, but at least you would not stand still.'53 Members of the college learned to take themselves seriously, and they carried Jowett's standards into other colleges and universities. In 1900 there were Balliol heads in nine other colleges in Oxford. While Balliol's in¯uence spread through the higher educational world, a second group of Balliol men made careers in the public service. The politicians, Lansdowne and Brodrick on one side, Asquith, Grey, and Loreburn on the other, and Milner (who was cross party), lived in the public eye. But the spirit of the college was caught early in the twentieth century when the fellows published annual lists of `those former Undergraduates of the College, now living, who either are or have been in the service of the Crown at home or in other parts of the Empire'.54 As a young tutor Jowett had participated eagerly, in the 1850s, in the institution of a system of competitive examination for entry to the civil and public services. Now, in 1904, there were twenty Balliol men in the Colonial Service, and a further six in Egypt and the Sudan. Under the heading of the Indian Civil Service there were 226 names. The column started with the three successive Viceroys, Lansdowne, Elgin, and Curzon. One of the remaining 223 succeeded to a peerage and one to a baronetcy. Fifty-®ve more, two of whom were native Indians, were knighted. Eighteen of them had attended schools in Scotland. There was not an Etonian among them. Etonians conspicuously had no need and no wish to join the Indian Civil Service, except, that is, as Viceroy and Governor-General.55 Under the Home Civil Service were 164 names. By 1903 Jowett's `children' were rising towards the top of their departments and to their rewards in the honours lists. Among those who graduated between 1863 and 1887 (the peak period) no fewer than thirty achieved knighthoods, eleven in the Foreign Of®ce and Diplomatic Service, three in the War Of®ce, and two each at the India Of®ce and the Colonial Of®ce, one at the Home Of®ce, one at the Treasury, one at the Education Department and two at the Scottish Education Department, one at Woods and Forests, one at the Local Government Board, and two at the Inland Revenue. One became Clerk of the Privy Council, one ran the Lord Chancellor's Department, and one was Chairman of the Prison Commission.56 Seven of these thirty men had been to school at 53

L. Stephen (n. 9), 157±8. Balliol College [Record], Oct. 1903±Oct. 1904. Lansdowne, Elgin, and Curzon had all been at Eton. 56 Sir Arthur Hardinge (knighthood conferred 1897), Sir James Rennell Rodd (1899), Sir Charles Eliot (1900), Sir Francis Elliot (1904), Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (1906), Sir William Davidson (1907), Sir William Cartwright (1910), Sir Louis Mallet (1912), Sir Henry Lowther (1913), Sir William Tyrrell (1913, baron 1929) and Sir Arthur Grant Duff (1924); Major General Sir Coleridge Grove, who had passed top into the Staff College (1898), Sir Charles Harris (1913) 54 55

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Eton, and four had been educated privately. There were two each from Clifton, Rugby, and Winchester, and one each from Bromsgrove; Charterhouse; Cheltenham; Glenalmond; Haileybury; Harrow; King's College School, London; and Uppingham. Three had attended high schools or academies in Scotland. One came from Bradford Grammar School, and one from Clapham Grammar School (both grammar-school boys were in the War Of®ce). Some had been born with silver spoons in their mouths, and had not attempted to study hard at the University. Many more were the bene®ciaries of the career open to talents. All lived up to Jowett's earnest ideal of of®cial usefulness, and won their distinctions, working at a remove from the ups and downs of Westminster politics to serve the state and to apply its power to the common good. With others, they created an enlightened and ef®cient public service capable of enlargement, when the need arose, to play a major part in the two great British achievements of the early and mid-twentieth century, victory in total wars and the establishment of a welfare state. In comparison with the population at large, Balliol men were but few, but they played their part, both in India and in the United Kingdom, in ensuring the security and bettering the condition of millions. and Sir Bertram Cubitt (1920); Sir Arthur Godley (1893) and Sir Charles Lyall (1897); Sir Ernest Bickham Sweet-Estcourt (1904) and Sir Charles Lucas (1907); Sir Edward Troup (1909); Sir Frederick Parry (1925); Sir George Kekewich (1895) and Sir Henry Craik (1897) and Sir George MacDonald (1927); Sir John Horner (1907); Sir James Davy (1911); Sir Henry Primrose (1899) and Sir Bernard Mallet (1916); Sir Almeric Fitzroy (1909); Sir Kenneth Muir-Mackenzie (1898, baron 1915); and Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise (1902).

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6 `Training in Simple and Religious Habits'*: Keble and its First Warden g eoff r ey row e l l One of the central concerns of the Oxford Movement was `education on Church principles'. Clergy in¯uenced by Tractarian ideals promoted Church schools in their parishes. Schools like Marlborough and Fleetwood were founded for the sons of poor clergy. In 1848 Nathaniel Woodard began what was to become Lancing College, the ®rst of the many schools of the Woodard Foundation.1 It is not surprising that there were those concerned to see educational ventures in Oxford to match the burgeoning provision for education on Church principles, where fees and charges would not be a barrier to poorer students. In March 1846 a committee of the Hebdomadal Board responded to an address on university extension bearing the names of some notable signatories, Ashley, Gladstone, Tait, and Samuel Wilberforce among them. They had urged that `academical education' should be made `accessible to the sons of parents whose incomes are too narrow for the scale of expenditure at present prevailing among the junior members of the University of Oxford, and that this should be done through the addition of new departments to existing colleges, or, if necessary, by the foundation of new collegiate bodies.' The memorialists added: We have learned, on what we consider unquestionable information, that in such institutions, if the furniture were provided by the College, and public meals alone were provided, to the entire exclusion of private entertainments in the rooms of the Students the annual College payments for board, lodging, and tuition might be reduced to £60 at most, and that if frugality were enforced as the condition of membership, the Student's entire expenditure might be brought within the compass of £80 yearly.2

The 1846 Committee had responded by favouring in a lukewarm way new building in existing colleges, and extra ®nancial provision by eleemosynary * 1

From the Appeal launched after the Lambeth meeting, 12 May 1866.

Brian Heeney, Mission to the Middle-Classes: The Woodard Schools 1848±1891 (1969), is the most recent and full account of the movement. 2 Report on University Extension, Mar. 1846, reprinted in RCO (1850), appendix E, 55.

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exhibitions or loans. `To build and adequately endow a new College' was `suited rather to ancient muni®cence than to the economical views of modern times.' There would be dif®culties were the college insuf®ciently endowed, and the University ought not to incorporate `any institution analogous to a proprietary school'.3 One of the leading movers over the next ten years for the founding of a new college in Oxford run on Church principles for poor students was Charles Marriott, a tutor at Oriel and Newman's successor as Vicar of St Mary's. At the end of 1845, after Newman's secession, Marriott wrote to Bishop Selwyn, saying that there had been much talk of university extension. Eighteen months previously he could have `raised money to found a College on strict principles. Now, people are so shaken that I do not think anything can be effected.'4 In January 1846 he was consulting Knottesford Fortescue, later Provost of Perth, to help him think through `a design wh. I am trying to bring into shape for a de®nite attempt.' My notion is to get people to help me in founding a small college at Oxford, especially for educating candidates for Holy orders in a stricter, simpler way than usual. I could furnish a good deal of the money towards building myself, or at least render myself responsible for it; and I think I could ®nd competent Tutors ready to devote themselves to the work without any prospect beyond maintenance in a plain way for the time. If we cd. ®nd such men, we might do with very little endowment.

Marriott was prepared to act as head of such a college himself, but hoped another suitable candidate might be found. The plan, he told Fortescue, must be kept secret `as there are those who would oppose it tooth and nail if known'. `Our almost only chance is to get it accepted by Govn. in connection with the movement for cheap education, & proposed by them to be chartered in the University.'5 Two years later, in 1848, he wrote to Keble reviving the idea of a `college for literates', proposing to take `a large house for the purpose' and get `a sort of Warden and Fellows into it.'6 By the spring of the following year some £3,000 had been collected, and Marriott proposed to Mr Justice Coleridge that he join with himself, Robert Wilberforce, and Manning in acting as a trustee of the new foundation. Bishop Hat®eld's Hall at Durham was proposed as a model. I think the most effectual measure would be, with the consent of the proper authorities, to found and partially endow a College, in which the Fellows should be bound to the work of Tuition for a moderate maintenance, and should associate with the Undergraduates as far as might be desirable. The saving of expense to the latter would 3

Ibid. 56. See also Pt 1, 310±11. J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men (2 vols 1888), i. 320. 5 Copy letter, Charles Marriott to E. B. Knottesford Fortescue, 15 Jan. 1846. Marriott Letters, KCA. 6 Copy letter, Charles Marriott to John Keble, Maundy Thursday 1848, ibid. `Literates' were those admitted to holy orders in the Church of England but who had no degree. 4

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be so great that even Students with small means might contribute toward the maintenance of the College. The sum of £40,000 would raise buildings for a Head and six Fellows, with eighty or more students, and provide an endowment of £600 or £700 per annum, which would be suf®cient to ensure permanency. Should it be found impossible to raise so large a sum, the work might be begun with £20,000, supposing authorities to consent to a foundation consisting of a Head and three Fellows, and with small premises. This would form a nucleus which would very soon expand into a larger institution.7

Marriott reassured a critic that `those who are concerned in the plan are far too practical to be amusing themselves with medievalisms, and that a plain straight-forward economical college is intended.'8 Burgon noted that Marriott succeeded in obtaining substantial promises of funds for his foundation and that it was only his early death in 1858 that brought the project to an end. The 1854 Oxford Act, which had permitted the creation of private halls, had given those concerned for a Church college an opening. `We are as free as ever we were to found for the Church of England, and freer to choose our men.'9 Negotiations were in train with St John's and Merton for the purchase of a building site, and Marriott had talked with Butter®eld as a potential architect although Marriott did not think any obligation to employ him had been created. `On the spot there are Street and Buckler, competent men though of less calibre.'10 Marriott got as far as leasing some land, probably the site on which Keble was eventually to be founded. `The land I have on lease is by the Parks, within 150 yards or so of the proposed site of the University Museum.'11 If the land were purchased it would, he thought, be `a moderately natural situation where one might offer a chapel to a number of Private Halls should we go on the aggregative planÐwhich is not a bad idea.'12 Though Marriott's scheme did not in the end get off the ground there are strong echoes of it in the 1866 report on university extension, which was one of the immediate catalysts in the foundation of Keble. The genesis of the 1866 report was a meeting at Oriel in November 1865 to consider university extension `with a view especially to the education of persons needing assistance and desirous of admission into the Christian ministry'. Six subcommittees were set up to consider various means of extending the University. The subcommittee concerned with a new foundation was chaired by Walter Waddington Shirley, Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of 7

Charles Marriott. Open Letter to Mr Justice Coleridge n.d., ibid. Copy letter, Charles Marriott to an anonymous correspondent, 24 Nov. 1849, ibid. 9 Draft letter, 1855, ibid. 10 Copy letter from Charles Marriott to Mr Justice Coleridge, 2 Oct. 1854, ibid. For work in Oxford by G. E. Street and C. A. Buckler see Appendix to Ch. 30. Wilberforce had made Street his honorary diocesan architect. 11 Copy letter Charles Marriott to Mr Justice Coleridge, 7 Oct. [1854], ibid. 12 Copy letter Charles Marriott to Mr Justice Coleridge, 8 Oct. [1854], ibid.; see Burgon, Twelve Good Men, i. 359±62 for further details of Marriott's concern for a new college. 8

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Ecclesiastical History. There were nine members including Pusey, Mansel, Mountague Bernard, and Burgon. It produced the most substantial of the six reports. The major starting-point was the perception that `the education of the Clergy, which has been from time immemorial the staple work of Oxford, seemed to be in a large measure passing out of her hands.'13 Tables were appended showing that of English and Welsh ordinations in 1841 Oxford had supplied 242 out of 606 (Cambridge 270) and only 48 literates had been ordained, whereas the ®gures for 1865 were Oxford 166 and Cambridge 182 out of 535 ordinations with 146 literates.14 The committee perceived that one of the major impediments to many of these literates (and others like them) gaining a university education was `simply. . . its expensiveness; not only in its actual cost, but in the extravagant habits which it is often believed to form'.15 In any new foundation, while tutorial fees should not be reduced `so low as to impair the ef®ciency of the educating staff,' fees might be ®xed `as low as £12 a-year.' Economical management might considerably reduce the cost of college residence. The new foundation envisaged was, the committee emphasized, not that `of a ``Poor Man's Hall,'' as the phrase is commonly received, not, that is, of such an eleemosynary establishment as would be sought only by persons of inferior social position, less cultivated manners, or attainments and intellect below the ordinary level of the University, but rather of one which is adapted to the natural habits and tastes of gentlemen who wish to live economically.'16 Shirley's committee surmised that the greater proportion of any new foundation would not be greatly socially differentiated from the general run of colleges. `There would be a sprinkling of wealthier men, who prefer for their sons a College where plain living and steady reading set the prevailing tone.' There would be others `socially in no way inferior, who are kept aloof from us by the tone of indolent extravagance which is believed to prevail among us, even more than it really does,' who would be attracted by such a college.17 The committee concluded by recommending the foundation of a hall for 100 undergraduates. The property should be vested in trustees until suf®cient endowment was received to make incorporation desirable. The principal was to be in Anglican orders and appointed by the two Archbishops and the Chancellor. He should have a teaching role, especially in the provision of theological lectures. The tutors were also to be in orders. Charges were to be levied as follows: tuition £4; furnished rooms £3; battels £10 per term. Battels would cover `breakfast, plain lunch13 Oxford University Extension (1866), 8. The six reports were republished in SCOC (1867), 270±95. 14 Ibid. 9. 15 Ibid. 10. 16 Ibid. 13. SCOC (1867), 274. 17 Ibid. 15±16.

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eon, dinner, attendance, and the general lighting of the College'. Breakfast and dinner were to be in common, with the principal and tutors being expected to be generally present at these meals. Economical living was, if necessary, to be enforced by discipline: `if any member contract debts beyond a certain amount, or be found to be forming expensive habits, he be requested to remove to some other College or Hall, as not being of the character for which this foundation was instituted.'18 Undergraduates were to be encouraged to reside during the vacations, paying, if possible, at the same rate as in term.19 Once money had been donated for the establishment of the new foundation suf®cient to allow for the purchase of a site and erection of buildings, work should begin. `For an endowment, the Hall could afford to wait; if the result is what we expect, it would not long be wanting'Ða prophecy which was to prove false in the case of Keble.20 The report on university extension was published late in 1866. Earlier that year, on Maundy Thursday, 29 March, John Keble had died at Bournemouth. The funeral was arranged for 6 April in Keble's parish at Hursley. H. P. Liddon went down the day before, having received that morning a letter from Gladstone urging immediate action in respect of a Keble memorial. That evening a party went out to meet the funeral corteÁge bearing Keble's body from Chandler's Ford station. Liddon noted in his diary: It was a beautiful starlit night: and the solemn movement along the road in front of the hearse ®lled one with wonderful thoughts . . . Dr Pusey arrived last of all from Amp®eld where he had left the Bp. of Brechin. He wishes the College at Oxford to be the Memorial: & to be called Keble College. I trust this will be so.21

The next morning, after the Eucharist, Pusey and Liddon went over to Hursley Park and met Sir William Heathcote and the Bishop of Salisbury (Walter Kerr Hamilton), together with the Bishop of Brechin (Arthur Penrose Forbes), the Dean of Chichester (Burgon), Earl Nelson, Sydney Lear (the Precentor of Salisbury), Upton Richards, and R. J. Wilson. The meeting resolved to raise a sum of not less than £50,000 to found a college or hall at Oxford bearing Keble's name. This would serve the purposes of university extension and would also `afford to those many persons who love and revere the memory of the Author of The Christian Year some opportunity of publicly expressing their deep gratitude' for Keble's `long and devoted services to the Church of England'.22 Some pressed alternative schemes. James Skinner, incumbent of Newland near Malvern, urged that a better memorial would be a college for disabled clergy. He doubted whether 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid. 16±17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. 5 Apr. 1866, Liddon, Diaries PHL. Ibid. 6 Apr. 1866; ¯ysheet published after the Hursley Park meeting.

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churchmen would be prepared to give money `to the rich Univ. of OxfordÐ to enable it to do that wch. is its ®rst dutyÐto educate and prepare poor scholars for the service of Christ's Church here in England'.23 Others expressed concern about ensuring the continuity of Church principles in the proposed college, and about the inferiority complex which might result in a college founded for `poor students'. Efforts should be made to ensure that the members of the new college `should all be gentlemen'.24 The appeal was launched at Lambeth on 12 May, with Archbishop Longley in the chair. Among those present were R. W. Church; the Earl of Devon; Lord Richard Cavendish; the Bishop of Salisbury; Sir John Coleridge; Lord Lyttelton; the Hon. Charles Wood; the Hon. Hugh Gathorne-Hardy; Newman's old friend Sir Frederic Rogers; T. T. Carter of Clewer; and J. G. Talbot. Messages of support came from Lord John Manners, the Earl of Carnarvon, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the banker, Henry Hoare. It was hoped that the new foundation would `tend to promote the supply of candidates for Holy Orders'.25 Archbishop Longley was appointed president of the new Keble Memorial Fund. Frederick Lygon, sixth Earl Beauchamp, a friend of Liddon and a devout High Churchman, was appointed as Vice-President and one of the three general trustees, along with the Bishop of Oxford (Samuel Wilberforce) and Gathorne-Hardy. John Archibald Shaw Stewart undertook to be treasurer, and the Hon. H. E. Pellew (later Viscount Exmouth), secretary. Gladstone was invited to be a trustee but declined.26 A standing committee was formed consisting of Beauchamp, Cavendish, Heathcote, GathorneHardy, Shaw Stewart, Shirley (until his early death in September 1866, when he was succeeded by H. L. Mansel), and Mountague Bernard. Beauchamp was to play a leading role in the founding of the college and to contribute liberally to its ®nances. He subscribed £5,000 in the ®rst year of the appeal, a sum which was equalled only by an anonymous donation of the same amount from Pusey. Many of these High Churchmen were to be found together on various Church defence committees. Beauchamp, Liddon, Pellew, Coleridge, and William Butter®eld were, for instance, all members of the Athanasian Creed committee, set up to resist attempts to modify or abolish this creed as a standard of Anglican orthodoxy. At a meeting on 29 May, Butter®eld was appointed as architect for the new college, though a plea was made for Wilkinson, the architect of the new Randolph Hotel. A thousand copies of the ®rst circular were approved for distribution in London and for individuals known to be sympathetic to the scheme. It was 23 24

ibid. 25 26

James Skinner to H. P. Liddon, Easter 1866 and 19 Apr. 1866, Liddon Papers, KCA. Thomas Keble to H. P. Liddon, 19 Apr. 1866; J. P. Young to H. P. Liddon, 10 Apr. 1866, First Appeal Notice of the Keble Memorial Fund. First meeting at Lambeth Palace, 12 May 1866, Keble Memorial Fund Minute Book, KCA.

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agreed to send copies to all clergy in England and Wales, and Pusey undertook to approach Bishop Potter of New York. Liddon was sounded by Pusey about becoming the college's ®rst head.27 Negotiations were opened with St John's for the acquisition of a site. The committee having satis®ed the president that no action would be taken which would be prejudicial to adjacent property and that the new foundation would not be a centre of hostility to the Established Church, St John's agreed to the sale of the site in Parks Road for £7,047 at the end of 1867. The fund-raising had gone well, and Butter®eld was invited to submit plans, which he did in December 1867. He planned a college which would eventually accommodate 250 undergraduates, with a large quad 220 feet square and a smaller court 115 by 100 feet. Three of the blocks would accommodate 106 men and six tutors, but as the cost exceeded the balance available it was suggested that only two blocks should be begun.28 The Archbishop was invited to lay the foundation stone on St Mark's Day, 25 April, which was John Keble's birthday. Preceded by a service in St Mary's, the laying of the foundation stone would be followed by a meeting in the Sheldonian, at which three resolutions would be put, the ®rst relating to university extension, the second concerning the establishment of a new college to effect this, `the aims of which should be to impart a Christian training, encourage industry, and discourage habits of expense', and to dedicate such a new foundation to the memory of John Keble.29 By the time the foundation stone was laid over £30,000 was available for the building work, and in May 1868 Parnells of Rugby were appointed as the contractors. Over the next six months there was considerable pressure on Liddon to accept the headship of the college. The Archbishop formally offered him the post, and Samuel Wilberforce, Beauchamp, and Pusey were all anxious that he should accept. Beauchamp saw Keble as presenting an unparalled opportunity to organize a staff which would `counteract Rugby and Balliol'. Liddon, he believed, could do this.30 Liddon demurred. My power of doing good might be destroyed by the pressure that Low Church fanaticism might be able . . . to bring to bear against me . . . My appointment to the Headship of Keble College would at once provoke an outburst of Puritan feeling, which would be powerfully reinforced by resident unbelief at Oxford, and which would surround the new College in its ®rst and modest struggles with a gratuitous supply of very serious dif®culties.31

By March 1869 three blocks had been contracted for and were in progress. A new road, of which the Keble committee were paying half the cost, was 27 28 29 30 31

4 Apr. 1866, Liddon Diaries, PHL. Building Committee Minute Book, 17 Mar. 1868, KCA. Ibid. 20 Apr. 1868. Earl Beauchamp to H. P. Liddon, 9 Apr. 1869, Liddon papers, KCA. H. P. Liddon to Earl Beauchamp, 10 Apr. 1869 (copy), ibid.

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constructed to link Parks Road and St Giles. Permission was sought from St John's to name it Keble Road. Earth had to be brought in to raise the terraces to the buildings within the main quadrangle, the ground being very low `in consequence of the site having formerly been a quarry'. Thirty-two plane trees were ordered for the garden. Each undergraduate room was to be provided with the following furniture: 1 table; three chairs to match; 1 elbow or folding chair; 1 bookcase with cupboards at the side; 1 carpet; blinds; 1 stump iron bedstead with a straw palliasse mattress, a quilt, wool bolster and pillow; 1 washstand; 5 pieces of crockery, a goblet and a tumbler; 1 looking-glass; 1 chest of drawers; 1 water-can; 1 bath; ®re-irons, guard, fender, and coal-scuttle. It was agreed that the gate-porter should be a married man and have £60 per annum together with lodging. Other staff would be a butteryman with board and lodging, a head scout (to receive £50 with board and lodging) together with two assistant scouts (at £18 with board and lodging). A steward was not considered necessaryÐ`a superior sort of butteryman might suf®ce.' The servants were to begin work at 6.00 a.m. and ®nish by 9.00 p.m.32 With Liddon resolute in declining the headship, the search commenced for another candidate. Pusey had thoughts of a clergyman named Martin, who consulted Liddon in May 1869. Liddon noted that `Martin was very doubtful about accepting Keble College, thinking that his marriage would be an objection . . . and that he cannot in¯uence young men . . . The Ritualist undergraduates would wear him out.'33 The question was resolved with Pusey's attention being drawn to Edward Stuart Talbot, whose elder brother was a member of the memorial fund committee. Pusey told Shaw Stewart: He will be 26 1/2 I believe when K.C. is ready to open Mich. Term 1870. He has good energy and enthusiasm, is successful here in making way with the young notwithstanding the groove in which the relation of tutors and pupils runs . . . His youth will be rather an advantage, at starting, because the young men will be more open with him.34

The committee was to meet at the end of June to approve Talbot's appointment. Earlier that month Talbot wrote to Shaw Stewart as treasurer to inform him of his engagement to Lavinia Lyttelton, the sister of his brother John's wife, Meriel. He reported that he had had a long talk with Pusey, whom he supposed `had a little regret at the failure in getting an unmarried man' but who had been most kind, sending Lavinia a message that `he thought there was a distinct work for her to do' in Keble.35 `Religious women 32 Keble Memorial Fund Standing Committee Minute Book, minutes of meetings 5±10, 1869±70, KCA. 33 4 May 1869, Liddon Diaries, PHL. 34 E. B. Pusey to J. Shaw Stewart, 15 May 1869, Keble Memorial archive, KCA. 35 E. S. Talbot to J. Shaw Stewart, 17 June 1869, ibid.

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have such a powerful in¯uence for good over young men.'36 Talbot was appointed as Warden at a salary of £400 p.a. It was agreed that he should be inducted into his of®ce on St Mark's Day, 1870. In July Lavinia visited Oxford and went over Keble with Liddon. `It is immensely larger and on a more digni®ed scale than I had expected. I don't admire the architecture wh. is Butter®eld's. The Chapel, Hall, Library and kitchen have yet to be built . . . Much struck and impressed.'37 Supporters of the new foundation argued that the principle of liberty in religion, which was the ground for abolishing religious tests for membership of the university, must also include the liberty of Churchmen to found a speci®cally Church college. This argument by no means convinced all committed to the abolition of religious tests, for whom Church colleges were outmoded, narrow, and reactionary. There were therefore those who were opposed to the proposals that the new college should be incorporated as a full college of the University. Moreover, since no college had been incorporated since Worcester in 1714 it was unclear precisely what had to be done. There was a further complication in that Keble was not to be a college governed by its own fellows, it was to have an external council of Churchmen, on which the Warden and Bursar sat. Tutors were to be appointed by the Warden, but were not represented on the council. The overriding concern of those behind the founding of Keble was that the college should permanently remain what it was founded to be `in respect of (1) consisting of members of the Church of England only, and (2) providing for them teaching and worship in accordance with its doctrines and Order.' A College organized on the old Oxford model (in its modernized form) with a body of Fellows, electing to the vacancies among them, and to the Headship, would, it was thought, certainly fail to transmit and secure any distinctive character of the desired kind. It would in ®lling its vacancies take account of only two quali®cations (1) intellectual distinction (2) teaching power. . . Membership of the Church of England would at most have been required: and that requirement would have been constantly and increasingly resented.38

The council was to be responsible for the ®nancial solvency and ef®ciency of the college, but it was restrained from interference in detail with the internal life of the college by the provision of a warden with whom `was the entire administrative authority'. To him was committed the religious life of the college, and it was the warden who was solely empowered to name the 36

E. B. Pusey to J. Shaw Stewart, 20 June 1869, ibid. Lavinia Talbot diary, 1 July 1869, Lavinia Talbot papers (Hagley Hall, Stourport, Worcestershire). 38 E. S. Talbot, `The Constitution of Keble College', private statement for the Keble Council, 1928. Non-Anglican students were admitted to Keble from the 1930s; non-Anglican fellows became electable in 1952, when the college was made self-governing under its Warden and fellows. The wardenship became open to a layman in 1969. See The Twentieth Century, 303. 37

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tutors, who were to be responsible for the pastoral care and teaching of the undergraduates. Looking back Talbot noted that he and subsequent wardens had in practice acted with the tutors as though they were fellows. Lord Beauchamp foresaw that the council might ®nd itself with little to do. `Chie¯y by his initiative the Council began to welcome and receive the Patronage of a considerable number of Livings.' Thus in this respect the new college gained something of the character of an ecclesiastical party patronage trust.39 A Church college, and one governed by a council, not by fellowsÐit was this proposal which had to be considered by the University for incorporation and by the Crown for an issue of a Royal Charter. Pusey feared that fellowships would endanger the character of the college. He remembered how at the time of the University Commission the different designation of the `Students' of Christ Church had failed to prevent the reforming zeal of the Commission being applied to Christ Church as well as to other colleges, thus removing the canons from their controlling position.40 By April 1870 the Charter had been drafted suf®ciently for Gladstone to be in correspondence about it with Earl de Grey, the Lord President of the Council: I apprehend it may have a bearing on the course to be taken in Ireland when we come to deliberate about the higher Education there. If it can be done with propriety, I should lean to direct acts of incorporation rather than relegating bodies not Commercial to the general category of Joint Stock.41

The matter came to the cabinet meeting of 14 May, and after a report from de Grey on the relationship of the new college to the University, a subsequent cabinet meeting on 21 May agreed that the Keble Charter should proceed.42 On 24 May Pusey reported further opposition in the University. The principal of Magdalen Hall had objected to Keble being a `college' because, Pusey surmised, it might then rank before Magdalen Hall.43 This exchange seems to have taken place the previous day at a meeting of the Hebdomadal Council, when the Vice-Chancellor had read a letter from Beauchamp stating he had reason to believe that the Crown would grant a charter to `Keble College' and requesting steps to be taken in order that the college might be placed in direct relationship with the University.44 Mountague Bernard had 39 Ibid., cf. W. A. Evershed, `Party and Patronage in the Church of England 1800±1945: a study of patronage trusts and patronage reform' (unpublished Oxford D. Phil. thesis 1985) for the patronage of Keble and its operation. 40 E. B. Pusey to Earl Beauchamp, 3 Jan. 1869, Beauchamp Papers (Madres®eld Court, Malvern, Worcestershire), Box 17. 41 Gladstone, Diaries vii (1982), 279. 42 Ibid. 290, 294. 43 E. B. Pusey to Earl Beauchamp, 24 May 1870, Beauchamp Papers, Box 17. 44 Hebdomadal Council Minutes, 23 May 1870, Minute 197, OUA.

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argued that Keble could not be considered a hall in University terms as halls were the property of the University, Pusey suspected that the opposition was using delaying tactics. `They have an inde®nite power of wasting time, (as obstructioners mostly have). And their game evidently is to get the lawof®cers of the Crown to object to the word ``College'' and to require, as a Condition of the Charter, that K.C. should be entitled Hall.'45 A committee, which included Pusey and Bernard, considered Beauchamp's request and reported that the recognition of the new foundation as a place of education should take place by an act of the University.46 Pusey professed himself satis®ed with the outcome and thought there was no reason why the Chancellor (Lord Salisbury) should not of®ciate at the opening ceremony in Commemoration week.47 The committee of the Memorial Fund, particularly Pusey, continued to be exercised by the question of fellows, which had been queried by the Privy Council,48 but on 6 June the Charter was granted, and ten days later the legislation enabling Keble to matriculate undergraduates was passed by Convocation. The detailed discussion of statutory provisions for new foundations was deferred until the new academic year.49 The granting of the Charter coincided with the election of the ®rst two exhibition candidates, W. L. A. Bartlett of Highgate School (in later years to marry Baroness Burdett-Coutts, `the richest heiress in all England') and W. S. Dixon of Marlborough (who followed the career of an academic clergyman).50 On 23 June the college was of®cially opened, and Talbot was installed as Warden by Lord Salisbury as Chancellor of the University. Lady Frederick Cavendish, Lavinia Talbot's sister Lucy, recorded her impressions. The quad was all dotted over with bright groups of people; old Edward plunging about 50 ways at once, and enthusiastic friends kept turning up. I . . . was shown Miss Yonge the Great, a striking-looking, grey-haired woman, with beautiful eyes and an expressive face. Considering the College is now nothing but rooms, being minus chapel, library, and hall, it is very well-looking; original and as little monotonous as possible. Towards 11 the procession formed; and after securing places in the temporary chapel, we ¯ew to the door to see it streaming round the quad. Beautiful it was, with its white clergy and choir, its scarlet Doctors and Bishops, its golden-robed Chancellor. We had but a glimpse and went back into the chapel. But then came the loud, 45

E. B. Pusey to Earl Beauchamp, 24 May 1870, Beauchamp Papers, Box 17. Hebdomadal Council Minutes, 30 May 1870, Minute 200. 47 E. B. Pusey to Earl Beauchamp, 30 May [1870], Beauchamp Papers, Box 17. 48 E. B. Pusey to Earl Beauchamp, n.d. (? May 1870), ibid. 49 Keble Memorial Fund Minute Book, 28 May 1870, KCA. 50 Lavinia Talbot diary, 11 June 1870; B. St G. Drennan (ed.), The Keble College Centenary Register, 1870±1970 (1970), 19. 46

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joyous chanting nearer and nearer, and so they entered the chapel, where a solemn little service was held.

Lavinia noted that `the service was very solemn and ®neÐnot long, & much of it in Latin. The Bp. of Oxford read very grandlyÐ& the Chancellor said what he had to say very well. Ed. was ®nally installed in the Warden's stall.'51 Beauchamp wrote the day after offering a further contribution of £1,000. The Hon. E. H. Legge, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, was appointed as bursar. During the Long Vacation of 1870 he oversaw the preparations for the ®rst undergraduates. Fees were ®xed at £81 per annum, or £27 per term, including the statutory University fees. Bibles and Prayer Books were ordered for the chapel. Compline, which it had been agreed was to be a feature of the new college's daily worship, was specially printed and incorporated in the Prayer Books. A striking clock was acquired to ensure that the gate was shut sharply and that all could be in in time for service. At the end of September the newly married Edward and Lavinia Talbot returned to Oxford and settled into their rooms in Keble. Just before the beginning of term there was a retreat for the small college staff taken by Edward King, the saintly Principal of Cuddesdon.52 There proved to be more applicants than there were places. On 13 October decisions were made. Very exciting dayÐat times so at least. The 2nd. Matriculation Exam: came offÐ9 altogether plucked, so reducing the number to 30, wh. all are glad of. Edward and the tutors hard at work till 11 at night. Those plucked felt it in several cases sadly strongly, one nearly burst into tears, another pleaded piteously, & as a climax one fainted dead away. I was sitting in the drawing room when I heard Edward loudly call me. I rushed into the study & saw the unfortunate on the ground. Edward saying `He is in a ®t.' However it proved to be a fainting, & he soon came to with water, &c. It must have been a mixture of disappointment and tire.53

Two days later the ®rst members of the college arrived. The great day. Throughout the day the undergraduates came chopping in, bringing with them their more or less luggage and ominous bits of furniture . . . Keble Coll. is inhabited. Edward dined in Hall, dinner was a failure the ®rst night,Ðone bit of beefÐone batter pudding. A little speech of explanation had to be made.54 51 J. Bailey (ed.), The Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish (2 vols 1927), ii. 85±6; Lavinia Talbot diary. S. Fletcher, Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttelton's Daughters (1997), 154±5, gives further details. Keble's vicarage had been fairly near Charlotte Yonge's home in Hampshire and she had been greatly in¯uenced by him. The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) had established her fame as a novelist. 52 J. Shaw Stewart to H. E. Pellew, 26 July 1870; E. S. Talbot to H. E. Pellew, 5 Oct. 1870, Keble Memorial archive, KCA. 53 Lavinia Talbot diary, 13 Oct. 1870. 54 Ibid. 15 Oct. 1870.

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There were good attendances at Communion in chapel and at Compline. On the ®rst Wednesday the two tutors, L. G. Mylne and Walter Lock, gave their ®rst lectures. Later in the week a choir was started, with practice twice a week, and singing Gregorian chant as well as hymns for the chapel services.55 The pattern of life for the thirty-one who comprised the ®rst Keble undergraduates may be deduced from the ®rst college regulations. Breakfast ran from 8.30 to 9.30. Undergraduates were expected to be present unless they had leave of absence from their tutor. Lunch was from 1 until 2 and dinner was at 6. Guests were welcome to lunch and dinner at a charge of 6d for lunch and 2s for dinner. Beer, coffee, soap, candles, wine, and milk were to be charged to private bills, which, in accordance with the college's principles of economy, were not to be allowed to exceed £3 in any one term. Meals in rooms were forbidden. The college servants were not entitled to any gratuities or perquisites. To pay for messages carried by the college messenger to other places in Oxford a college stamp was introduced at a charge of 12 d per note. If two stamps were put on, the messenger would wait for an answer. The stamps were an innovation and were taken up by a number of other Oxford colleges (and by Selwyn, Queens', and St John's in Cambridge) and used until 1886 when, as a consequence of protests by the Postmaster General, college stamps were abandoned.56 W. H. Bunce, who was college messenger at Keble from 1873 to 1885, recalled collecting letters for delivery seven times a dayÐat 8 and 10 a.m., 12 noon, 2.45, 6, 7.45, and 9 p.m. Towards the end of his time, when there were over 130 undergraduates resident, he noted that in a single fortnight he had delivered between 800 and 900 items of internal mail, and 2,300 items of mail collected from the Post Of®ce and delivered in college.57 All undergraduates were expected to attend morning and afternoon service on Sundays and morning chapel `regularly'. The gates were opened at 7.00 a.m. in the summer, after morning chapel in other terms. They were closed at 9.00 p.m., after which undergraduates were con®ned to college. Gate-®nes were imposed on those coming in after 11.00 p.m. and on strangers going out after the same time, at the rate of a shilling a time. Academical dress was to be worn at morning and afternoon services, at lectures, and at dinner.58 Some idea of the fare in hall is given in two pencilled lists from later in Keble's ®rst decade. One, rather surprisingly, is headed `Revised Bill of Fare for Days of Abstinence'. On such days there were eggs and cold meat for 55

Ibid. 21 Oct. 1870. See R. Lister, College Stamps of Oxford and Cambridge (1966). For Keble stamps see pp. 19±31; also H. Cummings, The College Stamps of Oxford and Cambridge: A Study of their History and Use from 1870 to 1886 (n.d.). For Keble see pp. 13±41. 57 Cummings, 39±40. 58 Keble College Regulations, KCA. 56

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breakfast, and at dinner there was ®sh at the carving table, hot roast beef and mutton, cold boiled beef, potatoes, and a green vegetable. Did abstinence mean merely no lunch? The other list is headed `Warden's List of Puddings' and runs as follows: `Bread Pudding; Bread and Butter Pudding; Milk Rice (without egg); Ordinary Rice (with egg); Sweet Pudding; Tapioca; Sago; Semolina; Hasty Pudding; Ground Rice and Batter Pudding.'59 During the ®rst two terms of Keble's existence the question of the statute concerning new foundations was still under debate. The leaders of the opposition were Thorold Rogers and H.A. Pottinger. Rogers was a former strong supporter of Tractarianism, who had lost his faith in the 1860s (his radical views preventing his re-election as Professor of Political Economy in 1867). Having campaigned for the passing of the Clerical Disabilities Act he became the ®rst clergyman to resign his orders under its provisions in August of 1870. Pottinger was a barrister and a law lecturer at Worcester, known as `a strong anti-clerical and agnostic'.60 Both pressed that Keble should merely be granted the status of a private hall. Lavinia Talbot attended the debates in Congregation, and considered that although they were much in Keble's favour, `there was a certain feeling in Keble of being out in the cold, & having to ®ght our own against a certain amount of odds'Ð a situation which strengthened the `patriotic and warm family spirit' of the college.61 During the discussions in January 1871 Rogers and Pottinger were `much to the fore, but were as before beaten on every point but the last. The last amendment was carried by wh. the Heads of new ``institutions'' are not to be entitled to the same privileges as the older Heads.'62 A month later, despite continuing opposition, the statute was passed by 27 to 7. Pusey gave notice of a motion asking for Keble to be admitted to the privileges of new foundations. This was approved on 18 April by 30 to 2, the two being Rogers and Pottinger. Keble's ®rst year passed with quiet success for what was still a small ventureÐthirty undergraduates, a warden, bursar, and two tutors. At the end of the year there was a de®cit of about £100. Legge resigned as bursar (though not for this reason) and was succeeded by Col. Sackville West. Minor improvements were made to the buildings. Nine extra earth closets were constructed and a women's earth closet `complete with Mould's apparatus'. The lower windows in the men's bedrooms were obscured for decency and a smoke-consuming apparatus was purchased for the kitchen.63 The new 59 Keble Memorial archive, 31 Jan. 1879 (Revised Bill of Fare for Days of Abstinence) and Feb. 1879 (Warden's List of Puddings), KCA. 60 For Rogers see DNB; for Pottinger see F. H. Lawson, The Oxford Law School 1850±1965 (1968), 53. The Clerical Disabilities Act, 33 and 34 Vict. c.91, received the Royal Assent on 9 Aug. 1870. 61 Lavinia Talbot Papers, MS Memoir. 62 Lavinia Talbot diary, 31 Jan. 1871. 63 Special committee for estimates of small items, Keble Memorial archive, KCA.

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academic year brought twenty-six new members. There were Keble sports, `a shivery tiresome business', the ®rst Keble concert, `the men's quartets admirable . . . tea & hot negus &c. between acts', and participation in the day of thanksgiving for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, `speechesÐtoasts, holiday, illuminations, & singing in procession'.64 In Hilary term, 1872, the number of tutors was increased to ®ve for the next academic year. A sports ground was acquired in the Woodstock Road opposite the new St Edward's School. In the summer came news of a gift of funds for the construction of a new chapel. The donor was William Gibbs, an octogenarian businessman, who resided at Tyntes®eld near Bristol, and who had made his money in the phosphate trade with South America. Encouraged by Sir John Coleridge, Gibbs enquired of Butter®eld what the cost of a chapel would be, and was told £25±30,000.65 Gibbs intimated that funding would have been forthcoming earlier had it not been for `the claims . . . made on us' as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war, and `by the appeals for help to our Schools' in consequence of the Forster Education Act.66 While unreservedly welcoming Gibbs's generosity, Talbot warned that with Butter®eld's strong ecclesiastical and architectural views there was likely to be a battle royal over the chapel arrangements.67 It was the proposed mosaics over which controversy most sharply erupted. Liddon took exception to the great east-end mosaic of the Lord in glory in the midst of the seven candlesticks with the sword proceeding out of his mouth. The cruci®xion would, he thought, be more appropriate, and he was conscious that the eastward-facing arrangement of pews would focus undergraduate attention upon it. Talbot feared that it might be a `cause of offence' to undergraduates who `are more ready to see what is at all ludicrous than to care excessively for reverence'.68 Butter®eld stated that his intention was, as a plaque at the back of Keble chapel still records, `to represent in order, the successive dealings of God with His Church, Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian, as comprehensively as the space and circumstances will allow, and somewhat after the manner of the Christian Year'. He lamented the subjectivity and sensationalism of the age. It is an age of preaching, I wish I need not add, of wild, unguarded preaching. We are appealing to the feelings of people by Missions of the revival type, and are, I fear, by such means making everybody weaker and weaker, and are losing backbone. Creeds and de®nite principles are out of fashion. Our feelings take their place . . . At such a time I ask that the Mosaic subjects of Keble College Chapel may be allowed to set 64

Lavinia Talbot diary, 15, 16 Nov. 1871; 7 Dec. 1871; 10 Mar. 1872. J. Shaw Stewart to E. S. Talbot, 12 July 1872, KCA; Lavinia Talbot diary, 15 July 1872. 66 William Gibbs to J. T. Coleridge, 14 Nov. 1870, KCA. 67 E. S. Talbot to J. Shaw Stewart, 12 July 1872, KCA. 68 Correspondence concerning the Mosaics in the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford, during the year 1873 (Privately printed, by W. Butter®eld, 1893), 23±4. 65

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forth as completely as the space will allow the leading facets of the Christian and preceding dispensations in an even and orderly way, with nothing forced out of its place to meet any supposed special need of undergraduates.69

Butter®eld having gained the support of the donor, the design for the chapel was accepted, and William Gibbs laid the foundation stone on 25 April 1873. Gibbs hoped that the chapel might be the means of `upholding and spreading the true Principles of the Church of England as professed by moderate and yet thoroughly Catholic Churchmen, as much opposed on the one hand to extreme views of Doctrine and Ritual, as on the other to those of the very Low Church'.70 The worship of the temporary chapel was not considered to be in any way extreme. An early observer wrote: `the services were of the simplest; of ritual there was almost none; the singing was crude in the extreme.'71 Shortly before the foundation stone was laid Butter®eld had been faced with a further question in relation to the chapel. Mrs Martha Combe, the widow of the University printer, had presented Holman Hunt's painting, The Light of the World, to the College with the intention that it should adorn the new chapel. Butter®eld wrote strongly to Shaw Stewart that to acquiesce in such a scheme would destroy the quiet feeling of the chapel `for it will be a proper lion and will be put down in Oxford Guide books and visited by Americans and such like folk in throngs.' The chapel must remain a house of prayer and not, by virtue of Hunt's picture, lead the crowd `to mistake a Church for a mere gallery'.72 The picture found a place in the library when that was built, where it remained until the construction of the side-chapel (to a design by Micklethwaite) in 1892, as a memorial to Liddon. The chapel took three years to build, Parnells of Rugby being employed, as they had been on the original buildings. The glass and mosaics were executed by A. Gibbs of Bloomsbury Street, London, working under Butter®eld's close supervision. The chapel rose to some 90 feet from the ground to the ridge of the roof, was 124 feet long and 35 feet wide. The interior decoration was of coloured brick and stone, with incised patterns of mastic in the nave, and of alabaster, marbles, and granites in the sanctuary. The shafts bearing the ceiling vaulting were of Devonshire marble. On the outer wall at the west end was placed a statue of Archbishop Longley in cope and mitre and carrying a crozier; a niche on the other side was reserved for a corresponding statue of Lord Salisbury as Chancellor, but this was never added.73 69

Ibid. 14±15. William Gibbs to E. S. Talbot, 9 Oct. 1873, KCA. 71 (H. W. McKenzie), Keble College, the First Thirty from within (1930), 6. 72 William Butter®eld to J. Shaw Stewart, 13 May 1873, KCA. 73 See An Account of the proceedings at Keble College on the occasion of the opening of the Chapel and the laying of the Foundation-stone of the Hall and Library on St. Mark's Day, 1876 (1876), pp. vii±xv. 70

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The chapel was completed in 1876 and was opened on St Mark's Day. It was not free from controversy. Liddon objected to Archbishop Tait being invited because of Tait's public hostility to Tractarianism.74 More protracted was a dispute about whether the chapel should be consecrated. Mackarness, the Bishop of Oxford, wished to consecrate it, as Samuel Wilberforce had consecrated Exeter chapel earlier in the century. A signi®cant number of the college council were nervous about consecration, fearing that its legal effect would be to make the chapel vulnerable to Acts of Parliament governing the doctrine, worship, and character of the Church of England as a whole. If the Burials Bill were to be passed Nonconformist funeral rites would become lawful in consecrated Anglican churchyards. As Pusey told Talbot, `it is a much shorter step from the Church yard into the Church, than from outside into the Church.'75 The opposition were sensitive not only about future legislation, butÐonly shortly after the attempt to `put down ritualism' by the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874)Ðabout consecration as providing a possible entreÂe for the regulation of worship by an unsympathetic Bishop of Oxford. Gladstone and Salisbury were sympathetic to the non-consecration party, though the latter cautioned against the bad publicity that too intransigent a stand against Mackarness's desire to consecrate might produce, and in the end, after mediation by Gladstone and others, a compromise formula was found: Legal questions having been suggested as to the effect of the Consecration of the Chapel of Keble College, in restraint of powers given to its authorities by the Charter, it has been agreed between the Bishop of Oxford and the Council that the Consecration of the Chapel shall be deferred.76

In the event nothing further was done. A large congregation attended the opening, with Pusey preaching at the morning service which followed the early celebration of Communion. `The wretched thing was hardly anyone heard Dr Pusey, ®rst from the great echo, then because he coughed incessantly.'77 If the acoustics came in for criticism, so too did the architecture. The Hour commented that the chapel was `externally a hideous building, vividly suggestive of a workhouse or a county lunatic asylum'. The writer clearly did not recognize Butter®eld's inspiration drawn from the upper chapel of the basilica of St Francis at Assisi.78 In the public speeches there was concern to allay fears that Keble was a hotbed of ritualism. Archbishop Tait confessed to fears, when he had ®rst been asked to be Visitor of Keble, that `it would turn out a monkish institution and 74 75 76 77 78

H. P. Liddon to E. S. Talbot, 21 Feb. 1876, KCA. E. B. Pusey to E. S. Talbot, 21 Feb. 1876, KCA. Keble College Council, Minutes, 24 Apr. 1876. Lavinia Talbot diary, 25 Apr. 1876. The Hour, 26 Apr. 1876.

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would breed young monks who would do a great deal of mischief in England.' Pusey's proposal of a married Warden had set his mind at rest.79 Talbot hoped that, although Keble would certainly contribute its quota of ordinands, `it was not merely to bring up candidates for holy orders.' Keble had to avoid one-sidedness, whether in religion, or in academic study, or in sporting activity.80 In view of Talbot's comment it is worth noting that in the ®rst twenty years of its existence out of 879 matriculations 450 took holy orders, 240 out of 404 in the ®rst decade, 210 out of 475 in the second.81 Those who were not ordained for the most part comprised schoolmasters, solicitors, and colonial administrators. At the opening of the chapel William Gibbs's sons, Martin and Anthony, announced (at ®rst anonymously, and later openly) their gift of a hall and library to match the gift of the chapel by their father. These major additions to the college's buildings were completed in two years, the hall being deliberately built a few feet longer than that of Christ Church, the longest hall in Oxford. Butter®eld's symbolic themes were continued in the texts from the Old Testament Wisdom literature, together with the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life in the library, and a sequence of Psalm texts in the windows in the hall, with the Supper at Emmaus as the subject in the uppermost light of the window over the high table. In 1879 Edward King, preaching the St Mark's Day sermon, urged the enrichment of the library with manuscripts and hoped that the college would encourage the study of palaeography. The college acquired its ®rst manuscript in 1881 and in the next twenty years received benefactions of medieval liturgical manuscripts such that the Keble collection is today `the most remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts preserved in an Oxford college library'.82 These liturgical manuscripts, most notably the gifts of Henry Parry Liddon and Charles Edward Brooke, re¯ect both the Tractarian concern with the reappropriation of traditional ceremonial in worship and close personal connections between donors and members of the college council, such as Earl Beauchamp and P. G. Medd.83 A year before the library was completed the construction of the warden's lodgings released the Talbots from their cramped quarters in the corner of the main quadrangle. As the college grew and became established there were important links with other developments. Most notable, perhaps, was the founding of a similar `church college' at Cambridge in 1881, when Selwyn came into being. The ®rst Master, Arthur Temple Lyttelton, was E. S. Talbot's brother-in-law, who had spent three years as a Keble tutor. Much of the Keble pattern was 79 80 81 82 83

Proceedings, 1876, 42. Ibid. 50. See Drennan, Keble College Centenary Register. M. B. Parkes, The Medieval Manuscripts of Keble College, Oxford (1979), p. xi. Ibid. pp. ix±xi.

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translated to Cambridge (Lavinia Talbot thought B. F. Westcott, who spoke at the opening of Selwyn, very `Cambridge', and found the proceedings curiously `da capo').84 There were common wider social concerns, with Josephine Butler's campaign over the Contagious Diseases Acts, with `settlements' in London, and, within the universities, women's education. Talbot was much involved with the foundation of Lady Margaret Hall, and his concern was shared by both his wife and his sister-in-law, Kathleen Lyttelton, the wife of the Master of Selwyn. In 1879 the Revd P. R. Egerton, the founder of All Saints School at Bloxham, offered to transfer the school to Keble as trustees. The offer was declined on legal advice based on the restrictions of the Charter.85 Bishop Walsham How and Octavia Hill spoke at a crowded meeting in Keble hall in March 1884 to launch the founding of Oxford House in Bethnal Green.86 Toynbee Hall, whose support was centred on Balliol, was thought to have too little speci®c Church commitment. Oxford House, with its Keble links, was established in order that Oxford men may take part in the social and religious work of the Church in East London; that they may learn something of the life of the poor; may try to better the condition of the working classes as regards health and recreation, mental culture and spiritual teaching; and may offer an example, so far as in them lies, of a simple and religious life.87

The ®rst head, 1884±6, was W. E. Jackson, who was succeeded by the Hon. and Revd James Adderley and then by the young Herbert Hensley Henson, a fellow of All Souls, who both stayed for only a year, but left their mark.88 The fourth head, A. F. Winnington-Ingram, himself a Keble graduate, stayed for nine. Under him new buildings were erected and Oxford House became so well established that on Winnington-Ingram's departure in 1897 to become Bishop of Stepney, Adderley could comment that Oxford House was `almost the most important factor in the ecclesiastical life of East London, and certainly one of the greatest forces for good in the ``Varsity''.'89 The young Cosmo Gordon Lang found the atmosphere of Oxford House `less strained and self-conscious' than that of Toynbee Hall, `The residents and 84

Lavinia Talbot diary, 1±14 Oct. 1882. The Revd P. S. Egerton to J. Shaw Stewart, 10 Mar. 1879; 11 Aug. 1879, Keble Memorial archive, KCA. A similar scheme to link Keble with St Edward's School also came to nothing. See B. S. Smith, A History of Bloxham School (Bloxham, 1978), 51±3. For Talbot's part in the foundation of LMH see p. 246 below. By 1884 the connection was giving him trouble: G. Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer (1978), 92. 86 Lavinia Talbot diary, 7 Mar. 1884. 87 Oxford House Magazine, 1894, cited in M. Ashworth, The Oxford House in Bethnal Green, 100 Years' Work in the Community (1984), 4. 88 O. Chadwick, Hensley Henson: A Study in the Friction between Church and State (1983), 39±48. 89 Ashworth, 11. See also S. C. Carpenter, Winnington-Ingram (1949), 25±60; A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Fifty Years Work in London, 1889±1939 (1940), 5±14. 85

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visitors seemed to have less sense that they were, no doubt quite disinterestedly, studying problems or testing theories. At the Oxford House they were, rather, loyally accepting something old and tried and sure and bringing it as a gospel, a good gift, to the people.'90 If Oxford House represented Keble's social concern, there was also intellectual endeavour in the theological ®eld. Lux Mundi, a notable collection of theological essays, published in 1889 just after E. S. Talbot had left Keble to become Vicar of Leeds, was the work of a group closely connected with Talbot, almost all of whom had been tutors or lecturers at Keble. It was characterized by an incarnational and sacramental theology, which accepted evolution, a cautiously critical approach to the Bible, and a more immanentist understanding of God.91 On a more material level Keble was established but often found ®nances dif®cult. In 1873 the Bursar (Sackville West) told Shaw Stewart that the college was working on a pro®t of about £12 per annum for each undergraduate, the equivalent of a 212 per cent dividend. The aim should be at least 7 per cent and preferably 10 per cent. New building might be ®nanced by the issue of shares to friends of the college. `The question,' he urged, `should be looked at from a commercial point of view: the success would read an important lesson to the older colleges and the eleemosynary element would be got rid of.'92 The scheme did not commend itself to the council, and the college continued to depend upon appeals and gifts. There were also tensions over the provision of scholarships, necessary to ful®l the college's ideal of enabling poorer students to come to Oxford, but causing concern to those like Pusey who feared that money and academic quali®cations would triumph over training in the faith of the Church of England.93 `Economical living' was monitored by a list of `economists', and `exceeders' presented to the council. Typical is the list for April, 1875, which records 33 exceeders (8 of £5; 14 of £6; 8 of £7; 2 of £8; and 1 of £12 or more).94 The Oxford Times in the same year urged the gift of `a farm or two or a few score of houses to endow' Keble, and went on to commend the policy of `economical living' as advantageous to both parents and Oxford tradesmen.95 At the end of 1888 Edward Talbot left Keble. He was succeeded by R. J. Wilson, the Warden of Radley, and a former fellow of Merton, Francis Paget having declined. Keble was established and it seemed to friends of the Talbots the end of an era. Scott Holland wrote with characteristic effusion to Lavinia: 90

J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1949), 50. See G. Rowell, `Historical Retrospect: Lux Mundi 1889' in R. Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol, 1989), 205±17. 92 Sackville-West to J. Shaw Stewart, 1 Mar. 1873, Keble Memorial archive, KCA. 93 E. B. Pusey to Shaw Stewart, 10 Oct. 1879, ibid. 94 List of exceeders, 24 Apr. 1875, ibid. 95 Oxford Times, 26 June 1875. 91

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How the eyes & the heart go ¯ying back over the years. Back to the thrill and the fun of the little Cabin-hole in the Corner, with almost the glow of a Picnic about itÐand the early twin-life with the dear Warden brimming into hopes, & joysÐand then the sudden blessed discovery of childrenÐand the big great HouseÐand the crowded Drawingroom, & the Social Centre, & the friends from London, & the ®rm grown College with a history, and Past, & and the many renewals of terms, and then, the awful shadow of the sickness, and the wonder of the release from fearsÐand all the recovered heartÐand the laughter, and songs, and tears. All to go. What a memory to carry away! What a brimful treasure! What an endless joy! No taint upon it.96 96 Henry Scott-Holland to Lavinia Talbot, Christmas 1888. Lavinia Talbot±Scott-Holland correspondence, KCA.

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7 `A Scotch University added to Oxford'*? The Non-Collegiate Students alan bullock The proposal that students unattached to any college or hall should be allowed to matriculate as members of the university was a product of the campaign for university extension and reform which forms one of the major themes of this volume. It had been advocated in the early 1830s by Sir William Hamilton as a counter to what he described as the supplanting of the University by the colleges. Undeterred by the weight of opinion against the idea, the ®rst Royal Commission (1850±2) came down strongly in favour of recognizing non-collegiate students. This was, in the judgement of one of the Commissioners, A. C. Tait, the most signi®cant of their recommendations.1 Like Hamilton, Tait had come to Balliol from Glasgow University as a Snell exhibitioner, and his views re¯ected his Scottish experience; the Oxford Commissioners quoted approvingly the evidence gathered a generation earlier by the Commissioners for the Scottish universities, which recorded the self-denying struggles of poor students north of the border. It was reported to be not uncommon in Scotland for students, who were able to live cheaply in lodgings, to support themselves by farm labour during the vacation.2 William Ewart, MP for Dumfries Burghs, cited these examples in support of his unsuccessful attempt to insert an amendment into the 1854 Oxford University Bill, to permit the admission of unattached students living in lodgings.3 A decade later the subject was revived by one of the six subcommittees of Convocation set up to explore the options for university extension.4 One of the subcommittees, chaired by H. G. Liddell, was nominated `to consider the * For the source of the phrase quoted in the heading see n. 30 below. 1

R. T. Davidson and M. Benham, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait (2 vols 1891), i. 168. RCO (1850), report, 49. 3 Parl. Deb. 3S cxxxiii. 1186 (1 June 1854). 4 They were published separately as Oxford University Extension (1866), and as an appendix to SCOC (1867), 270±95. 2

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expediency of allowing undergraduates to reside in lodgings, whether with or without connexion with colleges, and to recommend provisions for securing their discipline and tuition'. Like the Royal Commission, Liddell and his colleagues were impressed by the Scottish precedent and, after carefully rejecting the arguments which had been levelled against unattached students, submitted a detailed plan for their admission.5 The Hebdomadal Council's dilatory consideration of these proposals, largely as a result of obstruction by Pusey, led William Ewart to make a second attempt in 1867 to bring pressure to bear on the University by introducing a bill in Parliament to open Oxford and Cambridge to students not residing in a college or hall.6 Ewart, a Christ Church contemporary of Lord Derby, the University Chancellor, supported `advanced' liberal causes, and was particularly active in promoting free trade, humanitarian reforms, and popular education.7 Perhaps his greatest achievement in Parliament was to carry legislation in 1850 to permit the establishment of free municipal public libraries. He wanted to bring knowledge within the reach of all, and saw the existing collegiate monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge as an unjusti®able barrier against those who could not afford the costs of living in a college. His renewed pressure to bring about the admission of non-collegiate students was referred to a Select Committee, which published the evidence it received but made no recommendation.8 It did not need to. Ewart's initiative had worked the second time it was tried, and Pusey was later to complain: `The system of unattached students was forced upon us by Parliament; it was said to us that if we did not do it for ourselves it should be done for us.'9 In March 1868 the Hebdomadal Council introduced a statute to permit the matriculation of Unattached students, along the lines recommended two years earlier by the Convocation subcommittee. In October 1868 the ®rst of them presented themselves to the Delegates for Licensing Lodgings10 in the Clarendon Building for the ®rst matriculation examination ever to be held by the University itself. At the end of the ®rst year 1868±9, forty-three had been inscribed on the Delegacy's books as Scholares non Ascripti, a third of them Noncomformists.11 The University had reluctantly agreed to admit Unattached students; it did as little as possible to provide for them. Two stipendiary delegates, to be 5

SCOC (1867), 288±91. Parl. Deb. 3s clxxxvii. 1615 (5 June 1867). See also Pt 1. 726±7. 7 W. A. Munford, William Ewart, MP. 1798±1869. Portrait of a Radical (1960). 8 See SCOC (1867), passim. 9 UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 4587. 10 At Easter 1869 the Delegacy of Unattached Students was separated from the Delegacy of Lodgings, although as the last Censor of St Catherine's Society (1952±60) the author still ex of®cio took the place of the Vice-Chancellor as Chairman of both Delegacies. See M. and D. Davies, Creating St Catherine's College (1997). 11 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 404 n. 36. 6

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known as Censors, G. W. Kitchin, a Student of Christ Church, and G. S. Ward, later a fellow of Hertford, were appointed to supervise them. Each was a clergyman, and received a salary of £100 per annum (later raised to £150) charged against the fees and dues paid by the students. These were kept to the minimum. In October 1874 the Delegates reported that an average of 46 students' budgets which they had examined showed that a man could study at Oxford for three terms of eight weeks each year at annual cost of £50.14s. Board and lodgings could be obtained for 28s 6d a week (£34.4s in total), and dues and fees amounted to no more than £16.10s. This did not of course cover `travelling, clothes, books or the cost of living in the vacations': even so, it was as much as 50 per cent below the lowest ®gure in a college.12 Forty years later, in the summer of 1914, the Delegates still found it possible to put the ®gure at between £50 and £60 unless a student chose to study a scienti®c subject and thereby incur extra laboratory fees of £10±£20 p.a. Lodgings in the centre of the city were too expensive (rents of 25 to 40 shillings a week); the majority of Unattached students lived in houses in Jericho and the Kingston Road, or between the If¯ey and Cowley Roads at rents of 8 to 12 shillings.13 The Censors' own accommodation in the Clarendon Building was on the same economic scale. The only room we really have as our own is a very small and inconvenient Library, which is full if four men sit reading in it. Our Of®ce is shared with the LodgingHouse Delegacy: there is no private of®ce for the Censors; we do all our work in the same room with our clerks, with interruptions every moment from Lodging-house keepers and their servants, as well as from Students and others enquiring as to a thousand matters. If an Undergraduate, or a Parent, wishes to consult us privately, we have no retiring room. The work of each Delegacy involves a huge collection of petty details; the books, accounts, and forms, of the two are liable at any moment to get mixed up together. . . We have neither lecture-room nor examination room of our own . . . There is no lavatory or other accommodation for the Students or ourselves.14

In the course of the ®rst ten years some small improvements were made. Provided they could raise the £400 needed to restore it, the Unattached students were allowed to use a chapel in St Mary's, the Old Convocation House, for weekly services, soon augmented by a choir. The University gave a grant of £200 to start a library and gifts of books were received from Canon Liddon and Dr Pusey, as well as 180 volumes from Mr Gladstone. Lacking anywhere to meet each other the students themselves set up a social club, known as the Clarendon University Club, which held a weekly debate. This lasted until 1874: with the help of one or two of their number who were 12 13 14

UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2732. UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2805. G. W. Kitchin, The `Scholares Non Ascripti' (1876), 10±11.

196

a new collegiate pattern

better off, it was then superseded by St Catharine's Club housed in St Catharine's Hall, a private house opposite the Clarendon Building with a reading-room and dining-room where members would meet for lunch and dinner. `I have been at luncheon there today,' Censor Kitchin told the 1877 Commission, `and I had as good a plate of beef as I could wish to have, and plenty of it, and some bread, and a glass of very tolerable sherry, for 9d.'15 The house has long since been incorporated into Hertford College, but the club ran until 1881±2, before going bankrupt, and it was under the name St Catharine's that the boat club (in 1876, when it ®rst entered for Eights) and then the musical society (1881) performed. As other clubs and societies were formed the name was consistently used, and St Catharine's (or St Catherine's)16 was the recognized unof®cial title (invariably abbreviated to St Cath's) under which they took part in inter-collegiate activities, thereby avoiding the odium of the much disliked negative description as `unattached' or (later) `non-collegiate'. Appeals to City Livery Companies, the Grocers' and the Clothworkers', and later to the Leathersellers', produced a small number of exhibitions (worth £25 or £30 per annum) which were used to help poor students. The most unsatisfactory feature was the lack of proper arrangements for tuition. The small number of men reading for honours could derive bene®t from the professors' lectures, and Balliol allowed them to attend, free of charge, any honours lectures given by its tutors. But nothing was done for the passmen, who were in a majority, and who had to make such arrangements as they could for private tuition at their own expense. In 1877 the Delegates squeezed £200 out of their annual income of £1000 to pay two lecturers to supervise their studies, but each had to look after 40±50 students and their time was fully taken up in helping these to pass Responsions. This points to a further problem, frequently commented on by the Delegates in their report: the inadequate preparation of many of those who applied for admission as Unattached students. This re¯ected the poor level of secondary education in England outside the public schools, a de®ciency which had been referred to by several witnesses to the 1867 Select Committee. In their report for 1877±8 the Delegates commented: The results of the Matriculation Examinations carried on by the Delegacy prove that the education of boys is very inef®cient in English schools . . . only a small proportion of [those presenting themselves] are even tolerably instructed in the rudiments of a good education: their ignorance is by no means con®ned to Classical subjects; it is equally marked in Mathematics.17 15

UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2761. Both spellings are to be found until 1919 when the Finance Committee of the Amalgamated Clubs ruled in favour of St Catherine's: a major reason was to avoid confusion with St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. 17 Annual Report of the Students' Delegacy, Oxford, 1877±1878, 11±12. 16

the non-collegiate students

197

As a result, a much higher proportion of undergraduates than was usual in colleges had to take Responsions after they had matriculated. For this they required intensive tuition, and in many cases still failed to pass. Given these drawbacks, the rise in non-collegiate admissions from 44 in 1870±1 to a peak of 119 in 1878±9, and again in 1880±1, was impressive, and represents 16 per cent of the total number of admissions to the University. But the ®gures are misleading, for the regulations permitted Unattached students to migrate to colleges, and in the 1870s roughly half of them did so. Thus, against the peak ®gure of 119 non-collegiate matriculations in 1878±9, there has to be set a loss, in the same year, of 70 by migration to colleges. The loss was greatest among the ablest men, and the effect of this on the morale and reputation of the Unattached students was expressed by the Censor, G. W. Kitchin, in a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of 20 April 1881: Most of the `Unattached' Students belong to those classes of society from which the University is chie¯y drawn; they are the sons of clergymen and other professional men, with means so narrow that they welcome the relief afforded, while their traditions are so thoroughly collegiate that they cannot feel easy unless their boys are also at College; consequently they keep them on our books as long as it is safe, and then get them to migrate: by this they reduce the cost of the B.A. degree by about one-half, while to the outer world it seems as if the lads had been at college all the time, and all social dif®culties are avoided. I have known a young man migrate from us after he had obtained all his Testamurs, so as to take his degree as of such and such a college, while he had never received ®ve minutes' teaching or cultivation, social or other from the body to which people suppose he has always belonged . . . All this is perfectly natural: the Colleges have not merely attractions but real advantages of no mean kind; and no one can blame a student for wishing to enter on a way of life at once so pleasant and so reputable, and, in the case of men of ability, so full of real opportunities and bene®ts . . . Englishmen hardly regard the University as a place of learning and education; they dwell persistently on the social advantages of the place, and send their sons here to `make friends', and are specially happy if those friends are persons who would not care much to know them `at home'. If a lad behaves fairly well, and arrives at his B.A. degree, little is asked in peaceful English homes about his learning or mental gains; the young man in due time goes off to his curacy, where he does his work in a manful, honest way, and we all agree that College life was the making of him.18

Kitchin went on to say that `a higher view of the objects of the University is gradually rising before us', but until this changed `the popular view of the older universities is that they are a sort of more expensive public school intended for those who can pay high', and poor men coming to them `must 18 G. W. Kitchin, Letter to Mr Vice-Chancellor on Amendments to the new Statute on Students not attached to any College or Hall (1881), 5±6.

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a new collegiate pattern

be prepared to face the discomforts which in England beset an honourable poverty'. Migration was allowed both ways, and in the 1870s no fewer than 200 undergraduates transferred from colleges to the status of Unattached. The Censors, however, were far from regarding this as a compensation for the loss they suffered by migration to the colleges. The ®gures they gave for inward migration up to October 1877 were 178, compared with 310 migrating to colleges. At least 140 out of the 178 had taken up non-collegiate status after being dismissed from their colleges for failing to pass their examination. When asked if the Censors thought this was a desirable arrangement G. S. Ward replied: `I think it is bad on both sides . . . it tends to reduce the discipline in the colleges . . . and to give these young men more freedom than they possessed before.'19 He added that those who migrated from colleges were guilty of more than four times as many disciplinary offences as those who had matriculated as Unattached in the ®rst place. In fact, at the time Kitchin wrote his letter to the Vice-Chancellor, the non-collegiate students were about to enter a second and rather different phase of their history. The outward sign of this was a decline in the number of admissions.20 After a second peak of 119 in 1880±1, the numbers fell to 83 in 1882±3, and as low as 64 in 1885±6, and only once again rose as high as 100 (1894±5) before the mid-1900s, when a third, and again different, phase began. There were also changes in the organization of the Delegacy for Unattached Students which mark off the period after 1881 from that before and help to account for the reduction in numbers. As a result of the recommendations of the 1877 Commission, a new University Statute was passed in 1881 which provided for the appointment of one Censor instead of two, with the obligation to take part in the actual teaching of the students, and for the appointment of tutors and lecturers. The University undertook to pay £400 per annum towards the cost of the Censor's salary; not less than £600 per annum for other teaching appointments or for maintaining scholarships and exhibitions; and `as soon as the state of the revenue of the University will admit', a capital sum of £7,000 to create proper of®ces for the Delegacy, a library, and other necessary buildings.21 Some of these reforms were put into operation immediately, G. S. Ward retiring and G. W. Kitchin becoming the sole Censor, with three stipendiary tutors responsible for giving tuition in the pass school as well as Responsions. The rest had to wait until the new Statute was implemented and the most sanguine estimate suggested this might take ten to twenty years. The 19

UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2743. There was a similar decline in numbers of Cambridge non-collegiates, J. A. Venn, Matriculations at Oxford and Cambridge (1906), 18. 21 Statutes (1882), 134±5. 20

the non-collegiate students

199

appointment, however, as Vice-Chancellor of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, in Michaelmas term 1882 transformed the situation. Jowett had been a staunch supporter of University extension and, once in of®ce, he used all his in¯uence to secure better provision for the Unattached students. They were assigned the use of lecture-rooms in the new Examination Schools and plans were drawn up by T. G. Jackson, the architect of the new Schools, for an adjoining building in High Street to be occupied by the Delegacy22 and paid for by the University's capital grant of £7,000. Besides of®ces and rooms for the Censor and the tutors, 74 High Street provided a reading-room housing a collection which had risen to more than 6,000 volumes by 1914. When Gladstone nominated Kitchin to become Dean of Winchester, an equally distinguished successor as Censor was found in W. W. Jackson (a future Rector of Exeter), while a Balliol don, A. L. Smith, eventually to become Master, but in 1883 Junior Proctor and as such a Delegate, reorganized the St Catherine's clubs when they ran into debt, creating an amalgamated clubs committee with a senior treasurer and restoring them to solvency.23 With the assistance of a grant for several years of £150 per annum from All Souls, and the payment in full of the University's annual grant, it was possible to provide tuition for the ®rst time for all honours students. In addition to the three (later two) stipendiary tutors who were to provide the teaching for Responsions and the Pass School, arrangements were made with nine fellows of colleges to act as tutors for those non-collegiate men reading for honours. In place of a haphazard list of charges, a ®xed tuition fee was set at two guineas a term for all undergraduates in residence. Jowett proposed an increase in the number of Delegates from eight to eleven, becoming one himself when he gave up of®ce as Vice-Chancellor and chairman of the Delegacy, and involving a succession of in¯uential heads of houses (Anson of All Souls; Percival of Trinity; Warren of Magdalen) in the affairs of the Unattached students. The Delegacy was further strengthened by the appointment of Dean Kitchin and (when he became Rector of Exeter in 1887) W. W. Jackson as Perpetual Delegates. Jowett's efforts on behalf of the Unattached students, however, fell short of their hopes on two counts: he failed to secure a change of name which would make clear their legitimate position in the University or to end the practice of migration to colleges. When the 1881 Statute was being considered, the President of Trinity (Dr Percival) moved an amendment to alter the name to `Students of University Hall' and Dr. Kitchin proposed the less controversial `University Student'. Both were rejected by Congregation. A circular to members of Congregation declared: 22 No. 74 High Street is now the home of another body of unattached students brought within the academic fold, the Ruskin School of Drawing. 23 Fifteenth Annual Report of the Delegacy of Students not belonging to any college or hall 1882±1883, 12.

200

a new collegiate pattern

The carrying of this Amendment would be the coup de graÃce of the policy which led to the original Unattached Students' Statute. That policy has already been reversed to a considerable extent. Instead of living in Oxford, as Students live in most foreign universities, with an almost unlimited freedom . . . the Unattached Students have been so organized . . . that it is dif®cult to discern in what respect they differ from members of a college or Hall . . . The chief point of difference seems to be the name. It is now proposed to apply the process of `levelling up' to this point also, and formally to enrol the body of Unattached Students as a `University Hall' in the class of traditional institutions.24

Aware of Congregation's suspicion of any move to assimilate the Unattached students more closely to collegiate status, Jowett was content to adopt the Cambridge solution of calling them `Non-Collegiate students'. For the same reason, the Delegates decided not to interfere with the practice of migration to colleges which was not contrary to the Statutes, although a very rare occurrence between colleges. Jowett's hope was that raising the academic standard of the Non-Collegiates, for which he had opened the way, would do more than anything else to raise their reputation and check losses to the colleges. In taking this line, Jowett was following the approach which Dean Kitchin had worked out earlier. Kitchin had grasped that, whatever the original hopes entertained by the reformers, there was no room in a University so strongly collegiate in its ethos as Oxford for `the Scotch solution' (which Jowett had championed earlier) of a strong non-collegiate element to balance the collegiate. On the other hand, he also grasped that, even if the necessary funds could be found (and that was virtually impossible) there was equally little room for `a poor man's college' setting out to attract a new class of undergraduates with reduced costs and the offer of generous awards for needy students. Keble had been able to achieve something like this by appealing, as an Anglican foundation, to the anxiety felt by many Oxford men over the inadequate number of candidates coming forward for ordination. But any plan to establish a new college on the grounds of economy alone would never be passed by Congregation. However regretfully, Kitchin accepted that Non-Collegiate students would remain an anomaly in Oxford and that the social and academic prejudices expressed in the contemptuous term `toshers' (duly recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as `a humorous deformation from unattached', `tosh' being de®ned as `trash' or `rubbish') would prevent them becoming more than second-class citizens. His object was to do as much for them, in that situation, as he could, without supposing he or anyone else could change it. After twelve years of frustration he now saw the possibility of doing a good deal more, with the new 24 Quoted in R. R. Trotman and E. J. K. Garrett, The Non-Collegiate Students and St. Catherine's Society (1962), 7. Convocation agreed to the `Non-Collegiate' title without opposition, 25 Nov. 1884: Gazette, xv. 141±2.

the non-collegiate students

201

statute of 1881 passed and Jowett in a position to see it was implementedÐ provided that the limitations were not directly challenged.25 After 1883 he was no longer in charge (although still a Delegate) but the changes put into effect under Jackson (1883±7) and Pope (1887±1919) had been designed by Kitchin before he resigned, and were carried out without any increase in charges to students. A ®rst step was to remove from the Delegacy books the names of those who had not completed within a certain length of time the examinations necessary to secure a degree. In 1880 out of 284 undergraduates on the books, 204 had not yet passed the ®rst public examination; the comparable ®gure in 1885 had been reduced to 90 out of 211. Henceforward, all students were required to enter for the ®rst public examination within a year, and, if possible, within 18 months of taking Responsions. All examinations for the BA degree had to be passed within ®ve years from matriculation. Standards for admission were raised at the same time; candidates were strongly advised to pass Responsions before matriculation and those who had not were required to do so within a year of matriculating. The effect can be demonstrated from the ®gures. In 1887±8 19 non-collegiates secured exemption or passed Responsions before matriculation, 50 afterwards; in 1903±4 the comparable ®gures were 30:23, and in 1913±14, 62:20. The fall in the number of non-collegiate students to which these measures inevitably gave rise was more than compensated for by the effect of raising standards. The improvement in the tutorial arrangements for those reading for honours degrees was accompanied by the opening, without restriction, of almost all college as well as university lectures for the honours schools. From the 1880s onwards there were never fewer than 50, often as many as 70±80, Non-Collegiate students at any time working for honours. There was a clear improvement after the ®rst ®fteen years. Most years the Delegates were able to report at least one ®rst in the Schools; in 1885 they were even able to report that Hensley Henson (the future Bishop of Durham) had broken into the charmed circle by winning a prize fellowship of All Souls. By that year Non-Collegiate students had won a share of University scholarships and prizes, including the Vinerian Law Scholarship, the Pusey and Ellerton Scholarship and the Ellerton Prize in theological studies, the Davis Chinese Scholarship and Exhibition (in each case several times), and the Arnold and English Essay Prizes. It was still, however, a modest record, and the gap between non-collegiate and collegiate performance, although reduced, was not closed. Little change took place in the framework of the non-collegiate body after the reforms of the 1880s. Migration from the colleges to the Delegacy was 25 The sources for Dean Kitchin's view are his evidence to the 1877 Commission, with the article `Scholares Non Ascripti' and his letter to the Vice-Chancellor, already quoted.

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a new collegiate pattern

virtually eliminated. Losses from the Delegacy to the colleges, however, remained a problem, although no longer on the scale of the early period. The Delegates' Report for 1902±3 summed up the contrast by saying: `Roughly it appears that one man in eight or nine migrates. In the ®rst 25 years of our existence the average was one out of two.' Looking at the period 1868±1914 as a whole, an average of 57 per cent migrated to colleges in the ®rst ®fteen years, an average of 29 per cent in the last thirty. Migration from colleges to the non-collegiates ceased to be of any importance: the total numbers for the ®rst ten years had been 199; for the remaining thirty-®ve it was 71. In 1908 another attempt was made to secure a change of name. A petition signed by 379 past and present members urged the adoption of `The New Foundation of St Catherine's College'. The Delegates replied that they could hold out no hope `that any title conferring the name of ``college'' would be favourably entertained'. The Hebdomadal Council's 1910 response to Lord Curzon's proposals for University reform reinforced the Delegates' rejection. `The desire for change of name,' Council noted, with apparent surprise, `has been stated to be to some extent a symptom of a desire for more social unity, and it has been suggested that it would be advisable that a place should be provided where the students might have a common dinner.' This might be borne in mind, Council conceded, if at any time new buildings were assigned to the Delegacy.26 Such reforms, like the change of name, had to wait until the 1930s. In the meantime, however, the ®fty or sixty men who made up the active core of the non-collegiate body refused to be deterred from doing the best they could with the cellar in 74 High Street which they had been allotted for a JCR. In this they demonstrated that spirit of self-reliance, a virtue born of necessity which Kitchin had claimed for them, as distinguishing the noncollegiate from the college undergraduate. Cheerfully assuming the name of St Catherine's which was of®cially denied them, they continued to extend the number of sports in which they competed with the colleges and to win University blues and half-blues in all except rowing. In 1905 they acquired a sports ground adjoining the Oxford University Golf Club on Cowley Marsh, and in 1908 bought a barge from Wadham. Their energies were not con®ned to sport, but found other outlets in the Non-Collegiate Company of the OU Volunteer Corps (later OTC), the debating society which met every Saturday night and could trace its existence back to 1869, the music society which had held its ®rst concert in 1881, and the history (later Kitchin) society which celebrated its two-hundredth meeting in 1911. 26

57.

Principles and Methods of University Reform. Report of the Hebdomadal Council (1910),

the non-collegiate students

203

Although no constitutional changes were made, a new phase in the history of the non-collegiate body opened in the Edwardian era with a renewed rise in its numbers, which reached a peak of 123 in 1909±10, the highest ®gures of the whole pre-war period. The new feature of this phase of expansion was the large number of special students, a status created in 1871 to allow the Delegates to admit students for the purpose of study outside the conventional limits of the BA course, but hardly used at all until the 1880s.27 The great majority of the special students were graduates of other universities. Some were attracted by the establishment of the new research degrees of B.Litt. and B.Sc., followed by diplomas in economics, and in forestry for prospective entrants to the Indian Forest Service. Many, especially those from overseas, already held academic appointments and came to Oxford for the purpose of attending the specialized lectures of individual professors as well as undertaking private study. In a limited way, the special students came to ful®l the object of many of the mid-Victorian promoters of unattached students, to create a class of students who would look to the professoriate for instruction. A large contingent of the special students came from the USA, a sizeable one from India, Asia, and the colonies, but the largest group, comprising more than a half of the special students, was from Europe, particularly Germany. Nineteen Germans came up in 1909±10, twenty-two in 1911±12. The special students brought the proportion of non-collegiates from overseas to 44 per cent by 1909±10. Most of them stayed for a shorter time than the younger undergraduates who were reading for a degree, often no more than a year. They differed in another respect from the rest of the NonCollegiates since the cost of coming from overseas to study in Oxford could only be met by young men from families with greater ®nancial resources and higher social standing than the ordinary Non-Collegiate student from the United Kingdom.28 The numbers, however, of both research and special students who took advantage of the non-collegiate status, rather than seeking admission to colleges, proved the value to the University of the Delegacy's adaptability in ways unforeseen by those who had advocated its introduction in the 1860s. Great hopes had been put on the re-creation of the non-collegiate statusÐ and great fears expressed. How far were they realized in practice? The fears can be dealt with easily. The Delegates reported already in July 1878 that ten years' experience enabled them 27

R. L. Abbott, The Non-Collegiate Students: A Brief Sketch of their History (1894), 12±13. Among those matriculating in 1912 were Dietrich K. L. O. von Pritzbuer; Jean Paul Getty (later the world's richest oil millionaireÐhe took the Oxford Diploma in Economics); in 1913, Etienne A. E. de Clebsattel; Moustapha Fahmi; Romillo M. K. von Gersdorff; Hans C. L. R. Krug von Nidda; Count Ferdinand von Arco-Valley; Jules M. Deminsky; Luca Smodlaka; and in 1914, Joseph J. Wolodkowica; Franz J. Mayer von Gunthof; and Baron Waldemar F. A. von Oppenheim. 28

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To speak very highly of the independence of character and excellent moral behaviour of their Students; the prophecies as to the evils which might result from the presence of a large body of Students living in lodgings have remained unful®lled . . . The Students come up to Oxford intending to live thrifty and industrious lives; their social temptations are few; their good sense and obvious interests guide them rightly; and the Delegates can safely say that if their men do not make a brilliant appearance in the Examination Lists, at any rate they have added little to the dif®culties which always beset the conduct of University discipline.29

The Delegates saw no reason to alter this view in the rest of the period, and their favourable judgement was never seriously challenged. A considerable variety of opinion had been expressed during the twenty years of discussion which preceded the admission of unattached students about the class of undergraduates which such a scheme would attract. Jowett told the Select Committee on the 1867 Bill: What I think you want is to retain Oxford in many respects as it is, and to add to it a Scotch university; to retain the life and ways of the colleges for those who can afford them, and also to provide means of access to the University for poorer students . . . Such a change as would bring a greater number of the middle or lower class of people to Oxford would be analogous to the change that we see going on around us in society.30

How far were these hopes realized in practice? On cost, the answer is straightforward. The Delegates succeeded in keeping the expense of studying at Oxford and taking a degree well below the average ®gure in colleges. But how many who took advantage of the new status came from those classes which its advocates had in mind? Table 7.1 gives an approximate picture of the backgrounds of Non-Collegiate students.31 Compared to the rest of the University, a signi®cant proportion (nearly a ®fth) of Non-Collegiates were drawn from what may loosely be described as `lower middle-class' backgrounds. But it should be noted that these proportions are based on comparatively few individuals, so although the Non-Collegiate Delegacy was reaching a wider range of social backgrounds than the colleges, the numbers were too small to make much of an impact on the University as a whole. Within this general conclusion there are several speci®c features which merit notice. First, the non-collegiate scheme provided an opportunity to parents living in Oxford to send their sons to the university without incurring the expense of lodgings. 174 (6 per cent) of the 2,871 Non-Collegiates who matriculated between 1868 and 1914 were sons of Oxford residents who took advantage of the facility 29 Annual Report of the Students' Delegacy, Oxford. 1877±1878, 13. Jowett testi®ed to the same effect: UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 2611. 30 SCOC (1867), Q. 2388. 31 Information about fathers' occupations was not recorded between 1880 and 1891.

the non-collegiate students

205

TA B L E 7 .1 fat h e r s ' o c c u pat i o n s o f n o n - c o l l e g i at e students admitted 1870±1879, 1891±1910 ( ro u n d e d p e r c e n tag e s ) 1870±79 Landowners, farmers, `gentlemen' Clergy Professional Commerce and ®nance Industry Tradesmen and clerks Working class Not known Total Total admitted

1891±1900

1901±10

28 27 19 11 4 19 2 0

11 23 21 13 6 19 5 2

13 17 26 14 8 16 5 1

100 818

100 847

100 890

Source: Oxford University Matriculation Register, OUA.

in increasing numbers in the latter part of the periodÐan average of three a year in the 1870s, six a year in the 1900s. The editors of the Oxford Journal and Oxford Chronicle respectively, Salter the boat-builder, the proprietor of the Merton Street royal tennis court, and a Walton Street masseur were among those whose sons matriculated as non-collegiates. At least 38 (22 per cent) of the Oxford sample fell into the category of working class, mainly representatives of the Oxford service industries, such as college servants, compositors from the Clarendon Press, and skilled operatives from the local building trades. Sons of Protestant dissenting ministers were another distinctive element. The attraction of the Non-Collegiate scheme to Noncomformists increased following the removal of the Nonconformist theological colleges, Mans®eld (Congregational) and Manchester (Unitarian), to Oxford in 1886 and 1889 respectively. If they were not already Oxford graduates, students attached to those institutions who wished to become members of the University tended to matriculate as Non-Collegiates. In the period up to 1914, 141 Mans®eld College students and 26 Manchester College students matriculated as NonCollegiates. In this way the Delegacy made its contribution to removing the obstacles in the way of the Nonconformist denominations bene®ting from membership of the University. In two other respects the University matriculation records illustrate differences between the students admitted by the Non-Collegiate Delegacy and the colleges. Only 6.5 per cent of Non-Collegiates matriculating in 1895±8 had attended one of the ®fty schools which constituted the public-school community at the turn of the century (see Chapter 23). For the University as

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a new collegiate pattern

a whole the proportion was about 57 per cent. And 47 per cent of NonCollegiates had attended British schools with no claims to public-school status (compared to 19 per cent for the whole university). Finally, there was a marked difference in age between the Non-Collegiate students and the overall pattern for Oxford matriculations analysed by Lawrence Stone.32 There were always rather more younger undergraduates than in the colleges; 16- and 17-year-olds accounted for 8 per cent of the Non-Collegiate intake in 1905. But the most obvious difference was in the number of older students. Censor Pope reported to the Registrar that of 190 Non-Collegiate undergraduates in residence in Trinity Term 1909, 68 were over 25 years of age and 13 of them married.33 Not all of these older men were research students. Some were schoolmasters studying for Oxford degrees, or men who sought degrees for ordination in later life. The available evidence about the subsequent careers suggests that, in the early decades at least, these two vocations attracted most of those who graduated as Non-Collegiates. After ten years' experience, the Delegates reported in 1878 that out of 62 graduates who had retained their names on the books, 30 were clergymen or ministers of religion and 24 were schoolmasters or tutors.34 Judged by the expectations of the reformers in the 1860s, it is evident that the Non-Collegiate Society failed to achieve the role assigned to it. There was going to be no Scotch university for Oxford, as Jowett had himself realized by the 1880s. There were both external and internal reasons for the disappointment of their hopes. In addition to the steps taken by Oxford and Cambridge colleges to make access easier and admit more undergraduates, the creation of new universities and university colleges offered an alternative by 1900 to more than 6,000 students (60 per cent living at home) who might otherwise have attempted to come to the older universities as non-collegiate students. The internal reasons have been suf®ciently identi®ed in the preceding chapter: inadequate preparation of many who applied to the Delegacy for admission, the University's demand that candidates, even when reading for a scienti®c degree, must show a knowledge of both Latin and Greek; teaching arrangements which, even when improved, remained below the standards of college tuition; insuf®cient sources of ®nancial assistance to students; above all, the lack of that daily life in common with able men of their own generation which, as so many contemporary accounts make clear and as the ®rst Censor, G. W. Kitchin, emphasized to the 1877 Commission, was (and remains) the unique character of an Oxford college education. But if one leaves aside the expectationÐwhich many judged unrealistic at the timeÐthat opening Oxford to Non-Collegiate students would have 32 33 34

Stone, `Size and Composition', Table 6. OUA HC/R/6/1. Annual Report of the Students' Delegacy, Oxford 1877±1878, 5.

the non-collegiate students

207

a decisive effect in promoting major changes in the University, the fact that more than 4,000 men were matriculated as Non-Collegiate students between 1868 and 1914, many of whom might otherwise never have come to Oxford at all, is not to be despised. It is true that 1,500 of them used the noncollegiate status as a stepping-stone to membership of colleges, winning 37 scholarships and 90 exhibitions in the process and taking 528 honours degrees, with 59 ®rst classes. But the Delegates, although regretting their loss, refused to regard their migration as evidence of failure on their own part, and duly recorded their successes, separately, in their annual reports. The non-collegiate status had provided them with an alternative way by which men of limited means could secure access to colleges, and one without which many of them might never have done so. In round ®gures, of the 2,700 who remained Non-Collegiate students, some 600 are accounted for as graduates studying for research degrees and diplomas, or as Special Students following their own individual interests. A further 250 were students of music, many of whom found it convenient for ®nancial reasons to matriculate as Non-Collegiates.35 This leaves 1,800 undergraduates who were admitted as candidates for the BA degree, the original purpose which the Delegacy was set up to serve.36 Nearly 40 per cent (700) of these, a considerably higher proportion than for the University as a whole (about 25 per cent) failed to secure even a pass degree. A substantial number, no doubt, dropped out because of poverty, but whatever the reason, the comparison with the colleges showed up a serious weakness. Another was the percentage taking an honours degree, which had risen since the 1870s and 1880s, but was still much lower than the ®gure for the University as a whole. Again, one has to add that, none the less, 525 graduated with honours, and that, taken together with the 528 who migrated to take their honours degrees in colleges, this represents more than a quarter of the total number of those who matriculated as non-collegiate students, many of whom would never have had the chance to secure an honours degree at all if there had been no Non-Collegiate Delegacy to admit them at charges they could afford to pay. The ®nancial advantage had to be balanced against the limitations of the non-collegiate status, frustrating for most and humiliating for some. How the balance was struck varied from individual to individual. Was it, as some of the ablest believed, a stigma to be borne only until they could get into a college; or, as others equally able but with more taste for self-reliance believed, a badge of independence to be worn with pride? The same question 35

For the regulations for B. Mus. degrees, which did not require residence, see Ch. 18. This ®gure does not include those admitted after 1909±10 and the subsequent years, since that was the last academic year's intake which can be certain to have completed its studies for the BA degree before the War (®ve years were allowed for a pass degree). 36

208

a new collegiate pattern

has to be asked when the non-collegiate episode is considered retrospectively as a chapter in the history of a collegiate University. Was it a mistake or a proof of the University's willingness to make concessions to change pending the more radical solution which became possible after the Second World War? The answer, now as then, depends upon a balance best left to individual judgement.

page

8 All Souls j. s. g. simmons An All Souls fellow did not exaggerate when he described his colleagues in the 1850s as being sui generis.1 They formed a large society consisting of a Warden and forty fellows (only New College, Christ Church, and St John's had more), most of whom were non-resident and none of whom was under an obligation to exercise any educational function. Not on the foundation were two chaplains and four Bible clerks. The Warden, Lewis Sneyd, was of the Sneyds of Keele in Staffordshire, and twenty-nine of the forty fellows were of the kin of the founder.2 As such they had been given preference in the competition for vacancies at the time of their election after a sometimes perfunctory examination, and had been spared the statutory probationary year. Fourteen of the forty fellows were sons of peers or were baronetsÐat a time when elsewhere in Oxford only the Honourable Thomas Capel, fellow of Merton, was in the same class. Eighteen of the forty had been undergraduates at Christ Church: only twelve were clerics (30 as against the 57 per cent average ®gure for fellows of the other Oxford colleges in 1850). If the social pro®le of All Souls was uniquely high, its academic standing was uniquely low. In 1850 only three of the fellows had taken ®rsts and twenty-six of them were passmen.3 They could hardly contest the President of Trinity's characterization of All Souls as `not so much a place of elementary education as of cultivated society'Ðor the ancient gibe which pilloried the All Souls fellows as bene nati, bene vestiti, et mediocriter docti.4 At Oxford, in 1846 there had come about a turn of the tide in favour of reform. In that year the University had started moves to introduce new subjects to be added to the two existing honour schools of Lit. Hum. and Mathematics and Physics, and in 1850 there had been established two new 1

H. H. Henson, Memoir of the Rt Hon. Sir William Anson (1920), 104. G. D. Squibb, Founder's Kin (1972). 3 In 1850 only two of Balliol's twelve fellows were not ®rst-class men. 4 J. Ingram, Memorials of Oxford (3 vols 1837), i (All Souls), 15; the gibe is found as early as 1655 in Thomas Fuller's Church-History of Britain (Book 4, at p. 182). It is an unkind variation on a passage in the Founder's Statutes which laid down that would-be fellows must have been born in wedlock and be suitably clothed and mediocriter docti in grammar and plainsong. 2

209

210

a new collegiate pattern

schoolsÐNatural Science, and Law and Modern History.5 Moreover, by 1850 what has been described as the `Balliol colonization' of the other Oxford colleges had been in progress for several years, with All SoulsÐas a college recruiting exclusively from other collegesÐpeculiarly exposed to its effects. Indeed, though ten of the thirteen fellows elected at All Souls between 1847 and 1850 were founder's kin, seven of them, that is, more than half, were Balliol men. Thus Balliol was already beginning to succeed Christ Church as the main source of All Souls fellowsÐa development which brought about a strengthening of the forces in All Souls which were likely to favour change when the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1850 came to be debated. The Commissioners reported in April 1852. They surprisingly failed to condemn All Souls' non-residence but, on the other hand, they recommended that the fellows be relieved of a number of outdated statutory obligations, such as the study of the canon and civil laws and the use of Latin and the Bible-reading in hall. They also hinted that a sharper eye should be kept on college expenditure. But one of their recommendations was more than a hint: it was that twenty-four (more than half) of the fellowships should be suspended in favour of at least four professors, each funded by £800 a year emanating from the suppressed fellowships.6 The recommendations were considered by a committee of the college, and early in 1854 the Warden expressed in a letter to the Under-Secretary to the Home Department the college's strong objection to the proposed massive suppression of fellowships.7 This objection was taken account of by the Executive Commissioners appointed under the Act of 7 August 1854, and the Ordinance which they imposed on the college three years later abolished no more than ten fellowships in favour of only two professorsÐwho were not necessarily to be fellows of the college. Even more important for the college's future were two other provisions of the Ordinance of 3 April 1857: ®rst, the abolition of the founder's kin privilege, and, secondly, the requirement that in future candidates for fellowships at All Souls must have either won a University prize or taken a ®rst class in Honour Moderations or in one of the ®nal honour schools.8 This high intellectual hurdle was to transform the All Souls fellowship from an abuse into Oxford's most prestigious academic prize. The Commissioners took account of the All Souls legal tradition (which dated from the college's foundation) by linking the college to the new combined School of Law and History (®rst examined in 1853): the Ordin5

See Pt 1, 313±15. RCO (1850), report, 220, 181. 7 Correspondence respecting the proposed measures of improvement in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (PP 1854 L. 245). 8 The text of the 1857 Ordinance is printed in Ordinances and Statutes (1863), 243±60. 6

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ance stipulated that the fellowship examination should be in subjects `recognized in the School of Jurisprudence and History'. The Ordinance also introduced at All Souls the possibility of electing to fellowships without examination `professors or public lecturers' and principals of halls within the university, or `persons of eminence in literature, science or art'. The ®rst `non-examination fellow' of All Souls elected under this rubric was Friedrich Max MuÈller, the University's Professor of Modern European Languages. He was elected in the summer of 1858 and, as a professor and therefore not subject to the celibacy condition, created a precedent by marrying within a year.9 The next professorial fellowship elections were to the two chairs speci®cally attached to All Souls by the Ordinance. Five fellowships having fallen vacant by 1859, an election to the Chichele chair of International Law and Diplomacy could take place. Mountague Bernard, a distinguished international lawyer, was elected. Three years later, when the requisite ®ve further fellowships had been vacated, the second Chichele chair (of Modern History) could be ®lled. With the support of Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, with whom he saw eye to eye on Church matters, an unlikely candidate, Montagu Burrows, a retired naval post-captain and a successful tutor who had taken ®rsts in Greats and in the new Law and History School, was unanimously elected.10 The two professors were politely received at All Souls but had to wait until 1870 before they were admitted to its governing body.11 The rubric of the 1857 Ordinance which allowed for the election to fellowships at All Souls of `persons of eminence in literature, science or art' was not made use of by the college before it reappeared in the 1882 statutes, with the important addendum that such fellows should undertake some piece of literary or other research; the fellowships had become what were later to be termed research fellowships. On the other hand, the College seized with enthusiasm on the possibility which the 1857 Ordinance afforded of electing to honorary fellowships. The two burgesses for the University, Gladstone and Sir William Heathcote (a fellow from 1822 to 1825) were elected in 1858Ðthe ®rst in a roll that was to include in the years before 1914, Samuel Wilberforce (1871), Hubert von Herkomer (1887), Lord Acton (1890), and Viscount Morley (1903). 9 G. M. MuÈller, The Life and Letters of the Rt Hon. Friedrich Max MuÈller (2 vols 1902), i. 210±12. 10 M. Burrows, Autobiography (1908), 215±17; D. M. Owen, `The Chichele Professorship of Modern History, 1862', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 30 (1961), 217±20. 11 There was resentment on the grounds that the occupants of the chairs had been elected not by the All Souls governing body, but by a special committee of ®ve distinguished persons which included the Visitor and Warden of All Souls but none of the fellows of the college. Their professorial incomes (equivalent to ®ve fellowships) and their possibility of matrimony were advantages shared by none of the fellows at the time.

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a new collegiate pattern

One aspect of the 1857 OrdinanceÐthe speci®c law and history orientation which it imposed on the CollegeÐrapidly produced friction between the `ancients' and the `moderns', that is, the Christ Church and the Balliol men. Three of the latter, the recently elected (1853±4) William Fremantle (later Dean of Ripon), Godfrey Lushington (later Sir Godfrey and Permanent Secretary of the Home Department), and Arthur Watson (later a Harrow schoolmaster) evidently feared that considerations other than intellectual might continue to sway elections in spite of the Ordinance. In August 1857 they appealed to the Executive Commissioners to con®rm that the fellowship examination was intended to be a competitive one in which the candidate or candidates with the highest marks should be elected. Not surprisingly, the Commissioners gave the applicants the desired con®rmation. Even so, at the annual election which followed three months later, in November, though there were three candidates with ®rsts in the Law and History School, a man with a ®rst in Greats only was elected. Fremantle, Lushington, and Watson appealed to the Visitor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, J. B. Sumner, but in vain. They then took the matter to the Queen's Bench and to the columns of The Times, dragging the affair on until 1864 when it was settled broadly in their favour: thenceforward the annual entrance examination was to be a genuinely competitive intellectual test.12 The strains induced by the 1857 Ordinance soon led to a second controversyÐover the role and accessibility of the college library. In 1865 a subcommittee was appointed to examine the Codrington's `legal department'Ð clearly a delayed-action response to the linkage of the college with legal and historical studies. The fellow behind moves for library reform was C. H. Robarts, an energetic but eccentric Christ Church man who had taken a ®rst in the Law and History School in 1864 and who in 1866 was only recently out of his probationary year at All Souls. At his instigation, the college ®nally agreed in January 1867 that the Codrington should in future pay special attention to law and historyÐa logical and unique specialization by a nineteenth-century Oxford college library that has stood the test of time. A no less logical step was taken (after much opposition) a month laterÐthe opening of the library to out-college readers. This involved the construction of a special reading-room to accommodate them, and what is now known as the `Anson Reading Room' welcomed its ®rst readers in November 1867.13 12 G. C. Faber, Jowett (1957), 202±4; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 210±11. A volume of contemporary printed papers connected with the affair is in the All Souls Library (GZ. 9. 24 ult), and an unpublished study of it by Sir Geoffrey Faber is in the college archives. For a suggestion (1876) that Law and Modern History had gained little from the Ordinances see ch. 1, n. 247. 13 H. H. E. Craster, The History of All Souls College Library (1971), 94±5. An earlier attempt to open the Library to out-college readers had failed (College Minutes, 17 Dec. 1858). For a third controversy (over the gothicizing of the college chapel, 1869±1877), see Howard Colvin and J. S. G. Simmons, All Souls: An Oxford College and its Buildings (1989), 58±70.

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The 1870s at All Souls were dominated by ®nancial issues and by the debate over the future direction that the college should takeÐin particular, regarding its role in relation to the University. The 1850 Commission had been unsuccessful in extracting ®nancial information from most of the colleges, but by 1872 the atmosphere had changed: the evidence and statistical data that the Cleveland Commission of that year was able to publish in 1873±4 presented for the ®rst time a clear picture of Oxford ®nances. University revenue in 1872 was shown to stand at £47,589 as against a combined total of £360,136 for the colleges. All Souls, which reported some £19,097, occupied somewhat surprisingly (in view of its legendary opulence) seventh place in the college annual revenue tableÐa position which (also somewhat surprisingly) it was not to better until long after 1914.14 With the Cleveland Commission's data in its hands, the way was open for the University to attempt to tap college wealth. In 1874 All Souls, in its reply to an enquiry by the Vice-Chancellor, declared itself ready to contribute in principle but felt unable to commit itself further until it had considered its own future development. The consideration produced many and various suggestions, including the reception of Indian Civil Service candidates and the addition to the fellowship of professors of oriental languages and of law, senior students and scholars in modern history, and even undergraduates. C. H. Robarts's submission indicated two possible lines of development: one leading towards its becoming `a high-powered legal and literary institution', the other towards its becoming a mere `undergraduate lodging-house'. His own preference was for an All Souls that was `the equivalent of the Royal Society in relation to jurisprudence and legal studies'.15 However, a stop was put to the trotting out of these hobby-horses by the statutory commission of 1877. The Selborne Commission numbered two fellows of All Souls among its members: Mountague Bernard (who succeeded to the chairmanship when Selborne became Lord Chancellor in 1880) and Matthew Ridley (a future Home Secretary and Viscount). Their inclusion was a signi®cant and early indication of the bene®cent working of the 1857 Ordinance: twenty years earlier no fellow would have served (or have been invited or even competent to serve) on such a body. The Commissioners had in their hands full knowledge of the ®nancial resources of the University and the colleges, and were determined that the latter should subsidize the former by contributing to a Common University Fund. All Souls, a relatively wealthy college without undergraduates (save for its four Bible Clerks) was an obvious milch-cow for 14 RCOC (1872), Pt I, 200, 207. Total for the colleges includes tuition fees. If these are excluded All Souls comes ®fth. 15 Some of these separate proposals are conveniently brought together in a volume in the Bodleian Library (G. A. Oxon c. 268).

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a new collegiate pattern

the support of attached chairs and readerships, and its fellows accepted this obligation when they came to obey the Commissioners' order to colleges to recast their statutes. The 1882 statutes resulted from the deliberations of a committee which included two of the fellows, and which took account of the Commissioners' wishes. As amended from time to time, these statutes governed the life of the college for more than forty years.16 Within ®ve months of the sealing of the new statutes on 1 July 1881, Warden Leighton was dead. The succession was a matter of crucial importance. The ultimately successful candidate at the election which followed in November 1881 was Sir William Anson, a fellow since 1867, the Vinerian Reader in English Law and `the best teacher of English law in Oxford' (the commendation is Dicey's). He was not yet 40, of Eton and Balliol, third baronet since 1873, a liberal and a reformer. He was the college's ®rst lay warden, `a great ®nancier', and was (and remained) a wealthy and generous bachelor.17 Anson's ®rst task was to implement the new statutes which he (as one of the two All Souls representatives on the drafting committee) had helped to draw up. Among the changes which they introduced was the abolition of the examination (or prize) fellowship `for life': in future there were to be twenty-one seven-year fellowships of which fourteen might be awarded to Oxford bachelors of arts or civil law after examination in the ®elds of law and history (separate schools since 1872). The other seven were what might be described as seven-year renewable research fellowships: these might be awarded either after or without examination to Oxford bachelors who undertook to engage in some `de®nite literary or scienti®c work'. There was also provision for University and of®cial college fellowships and for professorial and honorary fellowships. Typical Ansonian features were the provision for up to three (increased to ®ve in 1912) non-stipendiary `distinguished fellows', and a new and unique category of up to a dozen fellows whose seven-year examination fellowships had expired, but whom `it was in the interest of the college to retain as fellows'. The latter were to receive an annual emolument of £50, and it was these `®fty-pounders' and `distinguished fellows', experienced in the worlds of politics, administration, and the higher reaches of the law, who were to bring to the governing body of All Souls a unique tone. Lastly, marriage (except in the case of pre-1877 life fellows) was no longer to be incompatible with an All Souls fellowship. The 1882 statutes charged All Souls with swingeing payments for University purposes. These included annual payments of £500 and £1,000 for the bene®t of undergraduate students and the Bodleian respectively. Three further All Souls-funded chairs were attached (the Vinerian chair of English Law, the Regius chair of Civil Law, and the Drummond chair of Political 16

Statutes (1882), 404±26.

17

Henson, Anson, 76, 86.

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Economy) and also three law readerships (one of them in Indian Law). Not all the readerships were ®lled but even so, in 1883 more than one-®fth of the college's income was being diverted to University purposes. Disposable income had in any case been much reduced by rises in expenditure on agricultural repairs (the result of a switch from bene®cial leasing), and by an unanticipated decline in agricultural rents: the strain on the college's ®nances was such that in 1886 its contribution to the Bodleian had to be cut from £1,000 to £300, and from 1887 to 1898 it was unable to contribute anything at all. The Commissioners had taken far too optimistic a view of the ®nancial future both at All Souls and in the University in general. All Souls had a golden key in its own hands: the college owned large estates in north-west London which were ripe for development. The implementation of a new policy of running-out agricultural leases and letting on building leases in this area dates from the very end of the 1880s and was probably due to Warden Anson himself.18 His developer ally was H. O. Wakeman, the new Estates Bursar, elected to of®ce in 1888 by a single providential vote. The policy was highly successful: building leases produced not much more than £400 in the following year (1889), but revenue from the leases accounted for six times as much ®ve years later, and nearly thirty times as much in 1909Ðthe year in which the college's gross revenue once again equalled the pre-agricultural-depression level of thirty years earlier.19 Looking back from the comfortable ®nancial vantage-point of 1914, the extraordinary progress made since the Ordinance of 1857 had set the college on the meritocratic road becomes clear. A searching annual fellowship examination had been established with special papers in history and law, translation papers, and an essayÐto which a general paper had been added in 1869. This examination proved to be such a severe test that the obligatory ®rst class or university prize requirement of the 1857 Ordinance became super¯uous and was omitted from the 1882 statutesÐcandidates in any case belonged to an intellectual eÂlite. As examples one can take the 1883 and 1912 elections. In 1883 there were twenty-two candidates and the future Lord Curzon and Sir Charles Oman were elected, with J. B. Atlay, W. H. Hutton, J. A. R. Marriott, D. J. Medley, and J. St Loe Strachey among the unsuccessful. The subsequent careers of CurzonÐViceroy of India and Chancellor of the University of OxfordÐand of OmanÐhardworking history tutor for twenty years and Chichele Professor of Modern History and an admirably proli®c historian for twice that periodÐmust have given Warden Anson much satisfaction as a vindication of his belief in the role of All Souls as 18 Through his Dickenson grandmother Anson had a substantial interest in the development of the Victoria Park Estate in Manchester (M. Spiers, Victoria Park, Manchester (Chetham Society, 3 ser., xxiii, 1976), 41±50). 19 For the development of the All Souls estates, see G. C. Faber, Notes on the History of the All Souls Bursarships (1950), passim and table on p. 92.

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a new collegiate pattern

the nurse of both politicians and academics. In 1912, when there were nineteen candidates, G. N. ClarkÐa future historian and President of the British AcademyÐand the future Solicitor-General, Lord Somervell, were elected in a ®eld that included C. K. Allen, Philip Guedalla, Austin Lane Poole, and L. B. Namier (the last making his second attempt).20 One of the speci®c aims of the 1857 Ordinance had been to associate All Souls with the Law and History School, but in spite of the fact that the special papers at the entrance examination were set in law and history only, Greats men dominated the entry until 1914: in that year there were among the fellows two Greats men for every Modern History man (see Table 8.1, section 3).21 The social stamp of the college showed remarkable persistence during the period: the last of the founder's kin fellows (Francis Compton, elected in 1846) survived until 1915, and the fellows as a body continued to differ socially from those of other colleges. The ten Honourables of 1850 had indeed shrunk to a single one in 1914, but in that year there were two Privy Councillors, two baronets, and four knights on the governing bodyÐat a time when elsewhere in the University only Magdalen could boast a single knight in its fellowship (see Table 8.1, section 5). This unique social stamp was also re¯ected in the scholastic origins of the fellows: in particular Eton and the other eight Clarendon `great public schools' (Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Harrow, Rugby, and Shrewsbury) claimed seventeen out of the forty®ve fellows in 1914, though men from the lesser public schools, grammar schools, and the Scottish academies were successful candidates in increasing numbers from the 1870sÐmany of them via Balliol (see Table 8.1, section 6). A change that was at least partly conditioned by social considerations is re¯ected in the college origins of the fellows. In 1850 eighteen of the forty fellows were Christ Church men, with only half as many coming from Balliol. In 1914 the ®gures were three and eighteen respectively. The only collegesÐother than Balliol and Christ ChurchÐthat could claim more than two or three fellows in the decade-years from 1850 were Magdalen (four in 1900) and New College, whose two alumni in 1880 climbed to a quantitatively and qualitatively remarkable seven in 1914 (see Table 8.1, section 7). In 1914 the fellowship had reached a total of forty-®ve after having fallen as low as thirty-one in 1870 (see Table 8.1, section 1). It was moreover far more diverse (see Table, section 8). Ten of the forty-®ve were not examination 20

On Namier's earlier failure, see p. 802 below. The special papers continued to be exclusively in law and history until a political philosophy paper was introduced in 1924. The college had earlier attempted to encourage `political economy' (as a concomitant of modern history) by arranging a special examination in the subject in 1909 when N. B. Dearle was elected. All Souls also accepted into the fellowship in the following year the Reader in (from 1912 the Professor of) Political Theory and Institutions, W. G. S. AdamsÐthe future Warden. See also pp. 814±15. 21

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TA B L E 8 .1 f e l l ow s o f a l l s o u l s c o l l e g e : d e c e n n i a l data , 1 8 5 0 ± 1 9 1 4 (o ˆ cat e g o ry n ot y e t e s ta b l i s h e d ;Ð ˆ n o n e i n t h e cat e g o ry. )

1 Fellows 2 Candidates 3 Degrees DCL BCL Lit. Hum. I Lit. Hum. II±IV Law±Hist./Law I Law±Hist./Law II Mod. Hist. I Mod. Hist. II 4 Founder's kin 5 Hon./bart/knight 6 School origins Eton Rugby Other Clarendonb Scottish Other Unknown 7 College origins Balliol Brasenose Christ Church Corpus Christi Exeter Hertford Jesus Keble Lincoln Magdalen Magdalen Hall Merton New College Oriel Pembroke Queen's St Edmund Hall St John's Trinity University Wadham Worcester

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

1914

40 21

33 7

31 Ða

32 18

35 22

32 13

42 15

45 14

7 3 2 8 0 o o o 29 14

8 3 8 10 2 3 o o 15 10

6 Ð 9 11 6 2 o o 10 6

6 1 14 6 8 Ð 3 Ð 6 5

6 2 16 5 6 Ð 8 Ð 5 4

5 2 19 6 4 1 4 1 3 3

5 5 19 Ð 3 1 9 1 1 7

5 5 20 Ð 3 Ð 10 1 1 7

11 3 6 Ð Ð 20

10 2 10 Ð Ð 11

9 Ð 9 Ð 3 10

12 2 3 2 8 5

8 1 7 3 12 4

8 2 4 3 13 2

8 3 7 3 20 1

11 3 6 3 20 2

9(3)c 2(3) 18(4) Ð(Ð) Ð(1) o Ð(Ð) o Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 5(3) Ð(Ð) 3(Ð) 1(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(2) 2(2) Ð(1) Ð(Ð)

13(4) 1 11(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) o Ð(Ð) o Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 2(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(1) Ð(1) Ð(Ð)

11(1) Ð 9(4) 3(Ð) 2(Ð) o Ð(Ð) o Ð(1) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) 2(Ð) Ð(2) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð)

15(5) Ð 7(Ð) 2(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(1) 1(1) 1(Ð) 2(Ð) 2(4) Ð(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(2) Ð(Ð) Ð(1) 1(Ð) 2(2) Ð(1) Ð(Ð)

13(4) Ð 10(2) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(2) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) 3(2) 2(5) Ð(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(2) Ð(Ð) Ð(2) 2(1) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(1)

15(4) Ð(2) 2(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð) 2(Ð) Ð(1) 4(2) 2(Ð) 1(Ð) 3(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(1) 2(1) 1(Ð) 1(1) Ð(Ð)

20(4) 2(Ð) 4(2) 2(1) 1(1) 2(Ð) 1(1) Ð(1) Ð(Ð) 3(1) 1(Ð) 2(Ð) 6(3) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(1) 2(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð)

18(5) 1(1) 3(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) 1(Ð) 2(1) Ð(1) Ð(Ð) 2(Ð) 1(Ð) 2(Ð) 7(3) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 2(1) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 2(Ð) 1(1) 1(Ð) Ð(Ð)

218

a new collegiate pattern

TABLE 8.1 (contd.) 1850 Non-Collegiate Non-Oxonian 8 Fellowship class Professor Distinguished Research Fifty-pound Other [Life] TOTAL 9 In holy orders 10 Parliamente Lords Spiritual Lords Temporal Commons, MPs

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

1914

Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 2(Ð) 2(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) Ð(Ð) 1(Ð)

Ð(Ð) Ð(1) 2(Ð) Ð(Ð)

o Ð o o 40 [40] 40 12 1 2 6

1 Ð o o 32 [32] 33 9

3 Ð o o 28 [28] 31 8

3 Ð o o 29 [28] 32 3

4 1 1d 4 25 [16] 35 3

5 1 Ð 4 22 [9] 32 4

6 1 1 8 26 [5] 42 2

8 2 1 9 25 [5] 45 2

1 3 11

Ð 5 5

Ð 4 7

Ð 2 7

Ð 2 5

1 2 4

1 2 5

a

There was no vacancy (and consequently no examination) in 1870; ®gures entered for candidates relate to 1871. b The nine `great public schools' which were the subject of the Clarendon Commission of 1861 were (apart from Eton and Rugby): Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Harrow, and Shrewsbury. c Figures in parentheses relate to the number of candidates in the year in question. d Though actually a research fellow, Gardiner was admitted in the `distinguished' class for technical ®nancial reasonsÐhis salary was not paid from college funds. e These ®guresÐunlike the rest of the statisticsÐinclude both fellows and quondams. Sources: All Souls records; Calendar, 1851, etc.

fellows and nine of these were professors or readers holding appointments in the ®elds of law, history, or political economy. The eleventh was the college's only research fellow, A. F. Pollard, the Tudor historian. The 1882 statutes had allowed for the election of up to seven `research fellows', but just as Greats men continued to swamp the history and law candidates in the entrance examination, so was the statutes' allowance for up to seven research fellows frustratedÐin this case in part for ®nancial reasons. In 1884, indeed, ®nancial stringency had overshadowed not only the college's Bodleian contribution but also the election of the ®rst All Souls research fellowÐS. R. Gardiner, the historian of seventeenth-century EnglandÐwhose fellowship was supported for a number of years by Warden Anson's private generosity. A hiatus followed on Gardiner's departure in 1893: C. H. Firth was not elected until 1901, and there was a four-year gap before A. F. Pollard succeeded Firth in 1908. But though the of®cial research fellows were few and far between, the professorial and examination fellows had been contri-

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buting notably to academic advance by teaching and research from at least as early as the 1870s. In 1906 All Souls was even accused of packing the Oxford Law Faculty Board;22 and in the History School fellows of All Souls were among the most active Oxford tutors and researchers: for example, A. H. Johnson (elected in 1869),23 Charles Oman (1883), Grant Robertson (1893), H. W. C. Davis (1895), and Kenneth Bell (1907). At the loftiest academic level the Warden and two of the fellows were among the ®rst fellows of the British Academy in 1902. Non-residence was no longer on the scandalous scale of the time before the 1857 Ordinance: fellows pernoctated during their probationary year, but thereafter many of them (especially the `London', that is, ®fty-pound and distinguished fellows) tended to be in college mainly at weekends.24 The number of fellows taking holy orders declined steeply between 1850 and 1914 (Table 8.1, section 9). Twelve fellows out of the forty were clerics in 1850 but between that year and 1914, of the 132 fellows elected only twentyone were ordainedÐno more than six of them between 1871 and 1914. However, the college remained uniformly Anglican despite the University Tests Repeal Act of 1871,25 and it is notable that of the six All Souls ordinands one became Archbishop of Canterbury, three became bishops, and one a dean. Participation by members of the governing body in the world of politics, law, and administration made remarkable headway. The college had a political tradition of long standing: fellows or quondam fellows had served in all but ®ve parliaments between 1536 and 1850. That tradition was more than maintained: twenty of the 132 fellows elected between 1850 and 1914 entered the House of Commons (Table 8.1, section 10). Lord Salisbury (fellow in 1853) became Prime Minister; cabinet ministers, other ministers of the crown, and holders of high judicial of®ce proliferated; only ®ve of the seventy-one fellows elected between 1881 and 1914 who reached middle age are unrecorded in Who's Who. One of the special features of this great-worldly development was a strong connection with South Africa and IndiaÐand with imperial issues in general. The South African connection probably started with the election in 1879 of 22 F. H. Lawson, The Oxford Law School, 1850±1965 (1968), 112±14. For the law (and other) All Souls professors, see J. S. G. Simmons, All Souls and Oxford Professorial Chairs (1987). 23 Johnson gave the ®rst course of Oxford extension lectures (in Birmingham in 1878) and was an early lecturer and tutor to Oxford women students (see L. Goldman, Dons and Workers (1995), 31±3; R. E. Eason and R. A. Snoxall, The Last of their Line: the Bible Clerks of All Souls College, Oxford (1976), 12±13). 24 For the `weekend' phenomenon and social life at All Souls see, for example, R. E. Prothero (Lord Ernle, fellow 1875), Whippingham to Westminster (1938), 66±76, and E. F. L. Wood (Earl of Halifax, fellow 1903), Fulness of Days (1957), 53±6. 25 Judging by names alone, there were at least eight non-Anglicans among the candidates for fellowships between 1872 and 1914, all of whom were unsuccessful. They included J. Solomon (in 1877), H. S. Q. Henriques (1890±2), H. Sacher (1904), and L. B. Namier (1911±12).

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a new collegiate pattern

James Rochfort Maguire, Cecil Rhodes's undergraduate friend and, later, con®dential agent in London. Other fellows with South African connections were J. F. Perry (1896), L. C. M. S. Amery (1897), Geoffrey RobinsonÐlater DawsonÐ(1898), and D. O. Malcolm (1899). T. R. Buchanan (1871) was Under-Secretary of State at the India Of®ce in 1908 and Amery and Sir John Simon (1897) played important roles in Indian affairs in the 1930s and 1940s. In India itself, Curzon (1883) was Viceroy from 1899 to 1905 and Thesiger (1892) and Wood (1903) were Viceroys (as Lord Chelmsford and Lord Irwin respectively) in the 1920s. M. L. Gwyer (1902) was Chief Justice of India from 1937 to 1945. The attachment to the college in 1906 of Hugh Egerton as the ®rst Beit Professor of Colonial History was an indication that this particular All Souls special interest was acknowledged by the University at large. The college's other special interest was foreign affairs. Before 1914 this was most powerfully expressed by the two `fellow-editors' of The Times: George Buckle (1887), who was editor from 1884 to 1912, and his immediate successor in of®ce, Geoffrey Dawson.26 By 1914 it is clear that All Souls had realized Warden Anson's vision of the college as an active and unique institution servingÐas he himself didÐboth academe and the nation. But in June of that year he lay dying in the lodgings, where for over thirty years he had dispensed hospitality with the help of his hostess-sister and the last liveried manservants in an Oxford college. He died on 4 June and was spared the horrors of a war which was to more than decimate the fellowship.27 It also marked the end of an age for the college of which he had been an `ideal warden' and its `virtual second founder'.28 26 For a satirical account of the All Souls in¯uence in public affairs, see [C. W. Brodribb], Government by Mallardry: A Study in Political Ornithology [1932]. For the political harvest in the 1930s, see A. L. Rowse, All Souls and Appeasement (1961) and D. J. Wenden's unpublished 1990 Chichele Lecture, `Appeasement and All Souls'. Geoffrey Robinson changed his name to Dawson in August 1917. 27 As elsewhere in Oxford, the war claimed some of the best: Sir Foster Cunliffe (1898), Raymond Asquith (1902), Patrick Shaw-Stewart (1910), and G. R. L. Anderson (1913)Ðthe ®rst Oxford athlete to hold an IAAF-rati®ed world record (440 yards hurdles in 56.8 seconds at the Crystal Palace, London, on 16 July 1910Ðas reported in The Times, 18 July 1910, 18b). 28 Henson, Anson, 233. The characterization of Anson as the `ideal Warden' of the college was the mature judgement of Sir Godfrey Lushington, the youthful reformer of the 1850s and 1860s (ibid. 104).

page

9 Christ Church j . f . a . m as o n Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church from 1855 to 1891, was the nephew of the Baron Ravensworth of the second creation and the cousin of the latter's successor, later the ®rst Earl; he came from County Durham and always retained something of a northern accent,1 though he spent his life in southern England, at Charterhouse, Christ Church, Westminster, Christ Church again, and Ascot. He returned to Christ Church in 1855 as the obvious choice to succeed Dean Gaisford, with useful and in general successful experience behind him as an undergraduate of the House for four years and a tutor for ten, for six of which he was Censor. Since 1846 he had been headmaster of Westminster, the pre-eminent source of young men for Christ Church. These years had been ones of success, the dif®culties which had arisen at Westminster being due not to Liddell's Carthusian origins but to the ravages of illness in the school.2 He was known as a leading Greek scholar, the famous lexicon which he edited with his Christ Church contemporary Robert Scott having already reached its fourth edition. He had been a chaplain to the Queen and a member of the ®rst Oxford University Commission. To John Ruskin he was `one of the rarest types of noblypresenced Englishmen'.3 Dean Strong said in his farewell address to the assembled House in 1920 that `the public mind is somewhat particularly attracted to this place'.4 During Liddell's time as Dean, Christ Church adopted a unique constitution, and its buildings reached a form which received no addition for a century; but its misfortunes came before two sections of the public on two separate occasions. On the night of 10 May 1870 a member of Loder's Club5 1

H. L. Thompson, Henry George Liddell, D. D. (1899), 103. Described in ibid. chs ii±iv. Next year Thompson published his Christ Church in the College Histories seriesÐstill an admirable account of the House, despite its inadequate index. Thompson had known Liddell for over forty years, and the House for forty-six; he was the brother-in-law of Dean Paget. 3 J. Ruskin, Praeterita ed. K. Clark (1949), 191. 4 Collegas Discipulos Amicos salutat abiturus Thomas B. Strong Decanus (1920): `for private circulation only, not published'. 5 More properly known as `The Christ Church Society', Loder's at this time was described by Sir Keith Feiling as `a small co-opted society in which for over a century sons of the country houses 2

221

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a new collegiate pattern

contrived to enter the library by a window in order to win a bet, and reported to his fellow-members outsideÐapparently with surpriseÐthat the library was `full of blooming images', that is, various busts and statues; to this the rejoinder was `Have them out,' and marble busts and a small statue were passed out and carried to one of the marauders' rooms. Later in the night the statuary was brought out into Peckwater Quadrangle and placed in a circle on the gravel surface. Bon®res were lit between the statues and the offenders retired to bed; the ®res joined up and in the morning the busts were damaged and the statue destroyed. On legal advice the offenders gave their names to the dean, who addressed the governing body in a speech which has been printed and begins with an observation which cannot be challenged: `the class of young men who have long been in the habit of resorting to this place are particularly dif®cult to deal with.' On 21 May Liddell announced the sentences: three graduates (including a nobleman) were expelled, two others (including a future baronet) were rusticated, two others were gated prior to later rustication.6 The incident caused great scandal in Oxford and London and received further unexpected publicity from a mention in the novel Man and Wife which Wilkie Collins published in 1870, partly as an attack on `hearties'.7 The dispute of 1882 concerning the re-election of R. W. Macan to his studentship8 was ill-seen by a narrower section of the public. Macan was a Student of Christ Church with responsibility for tuition in ancient history; on marriage he was obliged to seek re-election, but as he had published a work (originally his Hibbert Lectures) throwing doubt on the doctrine of the Resurrection, views on his acceptability as a tutor were not unanimous. Canons and Students were divided on the issue; at the meeting of the governing body on 15 June 1882 Dr Pusey came from his lodgings to speak against Macan, and carried enough Students with him for the latter's reelection to be lost.9 There was trouble over the succession to the Censorship in consequence at the end of 1882; Francis Paget found it advisable to leave his Studentship and take the living of Bromsgrove in 1883; and seventy years later older members of Christ Church, who had known survivors of that contentious time, would take a young newcomer aside and show him where Dr Pusey had stood to address the governing body on the occasion of his ®nal, and for once successful, attempt to hold back the advance of error.10 sacri®ced at their ancestral altars of fox-hunting, Church, and King'; In Christ Church Hall (1960), 188. Ruskin (loc. cit., 197) noted with quiet pleasure his own acceptance by the Society. 6 Account in W. G. Hiscock, A Christ Church Miscellany (1946), 97±101; see also the papers and correspondence in CA DP v.c.1. 7 See preface and appendix in Man and Wife. 8 See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part ii (1970), 447. 9 The voting was 16±11, with one abstention, CA GB ii.b.1 fo. 54. 10 Personal recollection. The last word was perhaps spoken by the late Dr T. B. Heaton in private conversation: `It didn't matter to Macan, you know: his wife had money.' But it did

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However, these dramatic episodes did not interfere with Liddell's attempt to lead Christ Church into an era of higher intellectual and artistic achievement. After 1855 he had ®rst to overcome ill-health; in the later 1850s the improvement of the interior of the Cathedral was his primary concern, as was the erection of Meadow Buildings (for which funds had been set aside ever since 1809) in the ®rst half of the 1860s.11 In 1867 came the Christ Church (Oxford) Act, the result of moves by the Students for admission to a share of power, though Liddell himself took no striking initiative in these events.12 From 1870 to 1874 he was Vice-Chancellor, and then and thereafter he was closely involved with plans for the improvement of Christ Church hall (within and without) and of the Cathedral. By the mid-1880s conservatively minded Students thought him too much in the hands of radicals.13 By 1891, when he was 80, he thought himself no longer able to continue in of®ce and resigned, to spend the remaining seven years of his life in retirement at Ascot. Liddell was a successful chairman of the new governing body, quelling discussion, according to tradition, with a cough;14 he was the ®rst ViceChancellor from Christ Church for nearly two centuries, and was deeply involved and interested in the problems of the City of Oxford, notably the river. His interests were not those of the Canons of his Chapter, in which in 1855 the great survivors were Dr Barnes, who was a Canon from 1810 until his death in 1859, and Dr Pusey, who had been a Canon since 1828. The latter was widely known among a large section of the clergy of England, many of whom lined the sides of Tom Quad for his funeral in 1882, a striking manifestation of Tractarian sentiment; ritualism found its great protagonist in Edward King,15 a Canon in the 1870s before his promotion to the see of Lincoln. But Pusey, King, and others did not represent causes which engaged Liddell's sympathies; and in the early part of his reign the Dean had only one powerful ally among the Canons in the person of A. P. Stanley, the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History,16 who is said to have inspired the young John Richard Green of Jesus College to undertake historical studies.17 matter to Lord Salisbury, who sent nearly all of his sons to University College rather than expose them to Macan at Christ ChurchÐunavailingly, because Macan became a fellow (and later Master) of University College. Cf. J. F. A. Mason, in Lord Blake and Hugh Cecil (eds), Salisbury: The Man and his Policies (1987), 13. 11 Thompson, Liddell (1899), 160±5. His illness kept Liddell away from Oxford `for many months' from the end of Sept. 1856. 12 E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform (1970), passim. 13 T. O. Wethered to Lord Cranbrook, 7 Dec. 1886, in MSS of 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. 14 Observation by T. B. Heaton (secretary of Ch. Ch. governing body in the 1920s) to the late C. H. Stuart. 15 Owen Chadwick, Edward King (Lincoln, 1968), esp. p. 9. 16 Thompson, Liddell, 183. 17 L. Stephen (ed.), Letters of John Richard Green (1901), 16±19.

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a new collegiate pattern

The canons mattered less to the Dean in the management of the House and its undergraduates than the Censors (who were Students); the Censors performed a multiplicity of duties, some of which were not hived off to other of®cers until the 1960s and 1970s. On the whole Liddell was lucky in his Censors; in the 1860s these were C. W. Sandford (later Bishop of Gibraltar) and T. V. Bayne, most urbane of men, who with an ex-Censor, T. J. Prout, between them managed the Students in the preliminaries to the 1867 Act. H. L. Thompson, a boy at Westminster under Liddell, and later his biographer, was Bayne's colleague in the 1870s. On the administrative side, responsibility fell to the Treasurer18 (successor to the Canon-Treasurer of pre-1867 days), and the Steward, whose of®ce was created in 1865; the curator of Common Room ran the most informal19Ðthough until the 1980s perhaps the least luxuriousÐSenior Common Room in Oxford. The Censors were drawn from among the tutors, and during Liddell's time as Dean there was a sea change among these. The great survivor from Gaisford's regime in 1855 was Osborne Gordon.20 Gordon was a member of a south-east Shropshire family, whoÐdisappointed, perhaps, of the canonry which in earlier times might have been hisÐleft for a Berkshire living in 1860; but among other tutors appointed before 1855 were some who in the manner traditional at Christ Church had progressed from Westminster School to Studentships in which they might train younger arrivals from Westminster to take their places as tutors in due course. Of others the neurotic Charles LLoyd21 died young, but T. J. Prout organized the agitation of 1865±7 before living on to 1909 as a ®gure with an ear-trumpet still remembered in the second half of the twentieth century.22 Under the Ordinances of 1858 a succession of new elections were made which equipped Christ Church with new tutors, sometimes from other colleges, notably A. G. Vernon Harcourt from Balliol in chemistry. Towards the end of Liddell's time Christ Church elected Arthur Hassall to teach for the new honour school of Modern History in which the House was to be particularly successful; but throughout the Dean's day the author within the walls of Christ Church whose works were most widely read outside was one who did not choose to make known his connection with the House except as the author of other books which were not widely read. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson came from Rugby to the House in 1851 and taught Mathematics 18

One treasurer, W. B. Skene of Pitlour, was Liddell's son-in-law. C. M. Blagden, Well Remembered (1953), 116. 20 See the memoir pre®xed to the printed edition of Gordon's sermons by his Censorial colleague, George Marshall, Osborne Gordon. A Memoir: with a selection of his writings (1885), and account of `Ossian Gainstone' in Watkins-Pitchford MSS at Shropshire Records Research Centre. 21 MSS of the Sanctuary family, descendants of one of LLoyd's sisters. He was the son of Charles, Bishop of Oxford 1827±9. 22 Recollections of the late R. H. Dundas (d.1959), who saw Prout when interviewed for a Studentship in 1908. 19

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there with limited success until 1880. His ®rst two names provided him with the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, under which he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Alice was the second daughter of Dean Liddell and the best known of many `child-friends' of this elusive and dif®cult personality, whose later works in the same genre failed to gain the same applause as the ®rst two.23 Dodgson also discussed contemporary events in Christ Church and Oxford in a series of `squibs', which did not fail to attack Dean Liddell's architectural activities in Christ Church.24 In 1891, however, it was of those achievements that Liddell could feel most proud.25 The appearance of the interior of the Cathedral was far worthier of the wider diocesan uses to which the Dean allowed it to be put; the pinnacles of the hall and the balustraded battlements of the remainder of Tom Quad made a coherent whole; Meadow Buildings re¯ected the in¯uence of John Ruskin through his follower T. N. DeaneÐand increased the number of rooms available in Christ Church by ®fty-seven. However, on the debit side must be placed the destruction in 1869 of delicate plasterwork by Henry Keene in the eastern end of the ground ¯oor of the library.26 Under Liddell the numbers of the House had held up well but the results in the Schools were not what he had hoped for. Lord Elcho, in congratulating the new Dean on his appointment in 1855, was con®dent that in his hands `Christ Church will hold out every possible inducement to us [sic] to send our sons there, in the full con®dence that you will turn them out gentlemen and useful members of society.'27 This was possibly a reference to Gaisford's notoriously rough and bear-like manners. Elcho was right in one respect: the sons of the gentry and nobility did attend Christ Church.28 Unfortunately their notions of utility to society did not in most cases involve 23 The literature is immense but not always sensible. For Dodgson's works see S. H. Williams, F. F. Madan, R. L. Green, and D. Crutch (eds.), The Lewis Carroll Handbook (1979); for his diaries, a new edition by E. Wakeling (in progress, 5 vols Luton 1993±9); for his letters The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton Cohen (2 vols 1979), for his life see Morton Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995) and (for a lay view) a typescript lecture in French by J. F. A. Mason, given at the Centre Pompidou, 11 Oct. 1983. Writers on Dodgson in French are handicapped by their language's lack of an equivalent for `Common Room': but see J. Gattegno, Lewis Carroll: une vie (Paris, 1974), esp. 51±63, 127±36. `Although the title-page bears the publication date 1872, Looking Glass appeared as a Christmas book for 1871': Morton Cohen, 132. 24 Edward Wakeling, The Oxford Pamphlets, Lea¯ets, and Circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 67±108. 25 Thompson, Liddell, 147 ff. 26 Building Accounts of Christ Church Library, 1716±79, ed. Jean Cook and J. F. A. Mason (Roxburghe Club, 1988), 8. 27 Thompson, Liddell, 132; Elcho later became 10th Earl of Wemyss. 28 Using information in J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883) Barbara English concludes that of 477 who had gone to both public school and university, 126 had gone to Christ Church from Eton, and 40 from Harrow, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 23: 1 (1991), 24. It must be admitted that a considerable majority of this somewhat odd sample must have matriculated before Dean Liddell's appointment.

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a new collegiate pattern

as much application to their books as Liddell would have liked, and the place of the House in the class lists showed no spectacular advance. A good example was not set by British royalty in its belated patronage of the House; the Prince of Wales came to Christ Church already fully inclined to selfindulgence, lived outside the college, and saw little of it; his younger brother Leopold, Duke of Albany, was apparently absorbed by the charms of Alice Liddell, who was later to give his name to one of her sons. Liddell was not impressed by the intellectual quality of the noblemen of Christ Church and as early as October 1862 ejected them from High Table which until then they had shared with the Canons.29 In that year the young Edward Talbot came up to the House: his comments years later were not favourable: `it was not then in a very stimulating condition'; the Dean was `a high-bred gentleman of lofty character, a man of unusual artistic sympathy and cultivation', but too aloof, reserved, and distant to have much in¯uence with the undergraduates, and `coldly averse' from the `High' or `Puseyite' connections to which Talbot and others adhered; to the serious-minded Talbot the gentleman commoners and noblemen `did not represent a high type of University life';30 the sight of tutors sitting below the steps and of noblemen sitting above them (until 1862) with the academic eÂlite of the English Church cannot have helped the well-born among the undergraduates to appreciate that their tutors were not wholly comparable with the domestic chaplains to whom some of them were used at home. At the end of 1891 Lord Salisbury lost no time in appointing as Liddell's successor one of the Canons, Francis Paget. Paget came from an East Anglian professional family, his father and other relatives being doctors. He had been to Shrewsbury School, did well as an undergraduate of the House and was elected at once to a Senior Studentship. After a few years he left, as already stated, for Bromsgrove, before returning as Canon in 1885.31 He was well quali®ed for preferment by his knowledge of the House; his wife was the daughter of R. W. Church, Dean of St Paul's, and for his ®nal two years in of®ce her death heightened his naturally austere and grave temperament. Paget had not completed his second year in of®ce when he and Christ Church were the subject of severe newspaper comment as a result of the `Blenheim Row'.32 In November 1893 some Christ Church undergraduates were invited to a ball at Blenheim Palace, but permission for any to attend was refused by the Dean and the Senior Censor (E. F. Sampson, successor of C. L. Dodgson in the teaching of mathematics). One night the walls 29

G. W. Kitchin (Censor) to C. C. Clerke (Censor Theologiae), 9 Oct. 1862, CA DP ii.c.3. E. S. Talbot, Memories of Early Life (1924), 31, 32, 33. Memories recalled in print much earlier by others leave a similar impression. 31 S. Paget and J. M. C. Crum, Francis Paget (1912), passim. 32 Ibid. 130±3. 30

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of Tom Quad were painted with legends such as `Damn the Dean', `Damn Sampson', and `Damn the Dons' in red; the doors of the deanery and of the Censor's staircase were painted red;33 and the bell-rope of Great Tom was cut, presumably as a symbol of protest against all restriction of hours, as the bell was used for the nightly striking of 101 strokes to signal the closing of all college gates at ®ve past nine. The perpetrator of these outrages, whose rooms had supplied the paint, was easily identi®ed and sent down, but the remainder of those responsible, persuaded by the father of one of them, refused to admit their guilt. Hilary term 1894 was spent in speculation and surmise; in Trinity term, after a dinner of the Bullingdon Club, all the windows in Peckwater were brokenÐan event not repeated for seventy®ve years. The members of the Bullingdon who had brought in those who broke the windows were rusticated for the remainder of the term. Sampson now felt he could resign the Censorship, which he had held since 1878. A correspondence in support of those sent down was started in The Times, which published an article criticizing the Dean; thereafter feelings slowly subsided, but in the Buttery of Christ Church, and in a few houses throughout England, a set of prints showing incidents from this story perpetuated some of its details for future generations; and henceforth no Censor held of®ce for more than six years in all.34 Paget was Dean for eight more years, in which, with T. B. Strong as Senior Censor and Arthur Hassall as Junior Censor, all went well and the life of the House was uneventful. As Paget's brother and biographer wrote, Liddell's had been `the Augustan Age of Christ Church' and there seemed little left to do.35 There were no great building projects, no great sporting or academic successes, and no riots or other troubles. In 1901 Paget was appointed Bishop of OxfordÐthe ®rst Dean since John Fell in 1676 to achieve that promotionÐand T. B. Strong succeeded him as Dean on the clear recommendation of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, an Honorary Student of Christ Church,36 among others. Tommy Strong37 was unlike any Dean of Christ Church before him, and in terms of his musical interests like only one since. He was a Londoner of humble origins who had been at Westminster before coming to Christ Church as an undergraduate in 1879. After his election to a Studentship he had quickly become Curator of the Senior Common Room, then Junior Censor. He was shy and reserved, disliked ecclesiastical ceremonial, had 33

For ill-treatment of the Dean's door on a previous occasion (1824), see Pt 1, 42. Some 19th-century Censors had held of®ce for ten years, but none had been Senior Censor for as long as Sampson. The late Sir Roy Harrod attributed the change to the 1893 affair. 35 Paget and Crum, Francis Paget, 129. 36 Sir M. Hicks-Beach to Lord Salisbury, 22 May 1901, Salisbury MSS. 37 The life by H. Anson, T. B. Strong (1949), does not perhaps at all points show full knowledge of the Christ Church background. 34

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a marked sense of humour, did not seek the company of women, and enjoyed that of undergraduates. He was a gifted musician with a keen eye for musical talent in others: he appointed Henry Ley, a Keble undergraduate, as Cathedral organist; and was a keen and generous supporter of the young William Walton. Strong always made undergraduates welcome in the Deanery. With Charles Fisher, who was to meet death cheerfully at Jutland, as Censor, order was well maintained, and Christ Church continued on its untroubled way; recollections of Strong's ®rst years bespeak a contented college, and two of his subordinates, C. M. Blagden who came in 1896, and (Sir) John Masterman, who arrived seventeen years later, have described his special if unorthodox talents.38 In 1920 he was nominated to the episcopate, after fortyone years in Christ Church; in Christ Church hall he bade farewell to the assembled resident members of the House in an address which is a powerful statement of his views of the recent history of Christ Church.39 From 1869 to 1903, as from 1792 to 1869, Christ Church was the college of the Chancellor of the University. Portland (1792) had been succeeded in this of®ce by William Grenville in 1809, Grenville by Wellington in 1834, and Wellington by Derby in 1852. Portland, Grenville, and Derby had been undergraduates at Christ Church, and Wellington's name was entered on the books of the House when he became Chancellor. (He was brother of Richard Wellesley, a distinguished undergraduate of the House.) All these were or had been Prime Ministers when elected Chancellor; Derby was followed in 1869 by Salisbury, who was not Prime Minister and not thought likely to be by many. His election was due to temporary circumstances, particularly the feeling of many conservatives in religion that they needed a ®gure who would oppose the abolition of the remaining tests.40 That issue was quickly lost, but Salisbury remained Chancellor. As there had been no contest in 1869 the solidity of the Christ Church vote in a cancellarial election had not been tested; but it was an important factor in the elections of the University's two Members of Parliament. Unfortunately it was also sometimes split. In 1865 the sitting Members were W. E. Gladstone and Sir William Heathcote, both Christ Church men, but the Conservatives put up Gathorne-Hardy, later ®rst Earl of Cranbrook, against Gladstone, and a campaign which divided the clergy of the kingdom ended in Gladstone's defeat. For twenty years (1878±99) the members for the university were Sir John Mowbray and J. G. Talbot, both Christ Church men. Talbot and Mowbray were the last examples of the 38 Blagden, Well Remembered, 146±52; Sir John Masterman, On The Chariot Wheel (1975), esp. 84±5, 114±15, 128±9, 373. For a further glimpse of Strong's Christ Church see pp. 806±7. 39 See n. 4 above. 40 J. F. A. Mason, `The Election of Lord Salisbury as Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1869', Oxoniensia, xxix/xxx (1964±5), 167±79.

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dominance of the House, with its powerful vote, in the election of Oxford University Members of Parliament. The national politics of the last two decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by two members of Christ Church, Mr Gladstone (from Dean Smith's day) and Lord Salisbury (from Gaisford's). Between 1880 and 1902, the only years (1894±5) in which neither was Prime Minister saw in that of®ce Lord Rosebery, another Christ Church man, from Liddell's day. After Salisbury there was no further Christ Church Prime Minister until 1955; but some leading ®gures did emerge in Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Walter Long, and the ®rst Earl of Halifax. In the academic life of Oxford itself late Victorian Christ Church provided several leading ®gures. The preaching of weekly Cathedral sermons and of the University Sermon by the Dean and Canons reached that great majority who attended services, especially when the preacher was Pusey or Stanley; another preacher with tremendous appeal was H. P. Liddon, Pusey's henchman and later biographer, who combined a Studentship with a Canonry of St Paul's. In the new School of Modern History the ®rst Regius Professor to make a name for himself on the international academic scene was William Stubbs, a humorous hard-working Yorkshireman who had come to Christ Church as a member of the despised class of servitors in 1844; he wanted to be Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and thus Canon at his original college, but found himself a professorial fellow of Oriel as holder of the Regius chair of Modern History itself. Stubbs marked almost every one of his sixteen years as Regius Professor by the issue of some important publication, and the totality of his work made him a leading ®gure among European historians. In the century since Stubbs ceased writing he has had strong critics but still excites staunch defenders.41 When in 1878 he was elected an Honorary Student of Christ Church it was with another great Christ Church historian, S. R. Gardiner; this was a triumph for both: not only had Stubbs been a servitor, normally a disquali®cation from any sort of Studentship, but Gardiner had been a member of the Irvingite Church (had indeed married Edward Irving's daughter) and had been deprived of his Studentship by Dean Gaisford for that reason. In thanking Christ Church 41 The most vehement critics have been H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh, 1963); the most recent is Reba Soffer, `Nation, Duty, Character and Con®dence, History at Oxford, 1850±1914', Historical Journal, xx: 1 (1987), 77±104, who gives credence and indeed ready support to Stubbs's doubts of his own success with tutors and undergraduates. There are important appreciations by Helen Cam, `Stubbs Seventy Years After', Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1948); J. G. Edwards (himself the research pupil of Stubbs's Balliol undergraduate pupil, T. F. Tout), William Stubbs (Historical Association pamphlet, 1952); and James Campbell, Stubbs and the English State (Stenton Lecture, Reading, 1987). The long chapter in J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent (1981), contains a commendation which should never be overlooked: `Stubbs made the history of institutions a far richer and more suggestive thing than any mere historical technician could have done' (p. 149). There is an outline in J. Cannon (ed.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (1988), 395±6.

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for his Honorary Studentship in 1878, Stubbs, in words which many could have echoed before and since, described the House as `the foundation to which I owe my education, in which the happiest years of my life were spent, and the closest friendships of my life formed, and to which almost every person, to whom in the course of my ``career'' I have been largely indebted, has belonged'. Among those whom he singled out were Archbishop Longley, Dean Gaisford, and (among tutors) W. E. Jelf, G. W. Kitchin, and E. Stokes.42 In art criticism the leading ®gure was John Ruskin, the friend of Liddell and Henry Acland, the teacher of Alice Liddell, and a contemporary of Liddell and Acland at the House many years earlier. In literature there were, as usual, few great names, but Dodgson drew on the Christ Church and Oxford of Dean Liddell's day for much that occurs in the works of Lewis Carroll,43 and the novels of Stanley Weyman, an early product of the Christ Church history school, long maintained their appeal, if chie¯y to a juvenile audience.44 Of the importance of Students in the Oxford social scene we get glimpses in the diaries of T. V. Bayne,45 Censor in the 1860s; he does not tell us what we would really like to know, such as the causes of acrimony at particular governing body meetings; but we gain a full notion of the life of the late nineteenth-century bachelor don. Bayne's diary for 1886 recalls walks round the Meadow or in the countryside with Christ Church friends (including some canons) and some from other colleges, the `lionizing' of people and places, especially churches, references to small dinner parties in his rooms, usually for four or six or eight people among his friends, excessively discreet reports of often contentious governing body meetings (the trouble in that year was the Treasurership), references to musical evenings with Violet Liddell, meetings with Gore Ouseley or (once) with Saint-SaeÈns (who played on Bayne's piano and on the Cathedral organ), and to meetings of other bodies such as the Christ Church Mission in Poplar. The picture is of a very pleasant and on the whole unintellectual life and, above all, of a partly non-resident one: for a large part of each vacation in 1886 Bayne was not in fact in Oxford at all, but in London (where his aged mother lived), Folkestone, or Brighton, or in France, which he knew well. His colleague Dodgson spent much time in Guildford with his sisters or in Eastbourne with child friends; and others were equally absent during vacations. Christ Church provided Oxford not only with those who had a ®xed place in the college's hierarchy, but also with others who were favoured with 42

Stubbs to T. V. Bayne, 16 Mar. 1878, CA GB xi.c.2. Mavis Batey, Alice's Adventures in Oxford (Andover, 1980). 44 See Weyman's own thoughts in his general preface to The House of the Wolf, in the collected edition of his works (24 vols 1922). To one reader, at least, his descriptions of weather and of early modern Paris and Geneva are still evocative. 45 Ch. Ch. Library MS 537/1±4. 43

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membership of the Christ Church Senior Common Room. Two in particular were considerable ®gures in the learned Oxford of the day. Friedrich Max MuÈller46 was elected a member in the 1850s, years in which the Common Room also welcomed Ormuzd Rassam, who in gratitude presented an Assyrian relief from Nimrud. The translation of Max MuÈller's Sacred Books of the East in many volumes was a major cause of `the new sense of reality of non-Christian religion' in late Victorian Oxford. It was Dean Liddell who persuaded the University Press to bear part of the cost of this lengthy publication. By giving a home to GuÂdbrandr VõÂgfuÂsson the House also played its part in the study of Icelandic as well as that of Sanskrit. Again it was Dean Liddell who proposed to the Delegates of the Press the publication (1874) under VõÂgfuÂsson's supervision of an Icelandic dictionary by another hand. This was one of those enterprises which, as VõÂgfuÂsson himself said, would have been better approached by means of a fresh start. But despite the other demands on his time the Dean gave daily help to the visitor. When presenting to Christ Church library in his lifetime various Icelandic books, VõÂgfuÂsson paid handsome tribute to the help he had received from the Dean, from G. W. Kitchin, and from Frederick York Powell, his friend since 1869.47 46 N. C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt Hon. Friedrich Max MuÈller, P.C. (1974), 95. 47 O. Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life (2 vols 1906), ch. 2; Thompson, Liddell, 207.

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NOTE The Christ Church Common Room Under Dodgson, 1883±1892 m o r to n n . c o h e n When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was elected Curator of Senior Common Room at Christ Church on 8 December 1882, his fame as Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice books (1866, 1872) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876), was well established. He none the less accepted his new of®ce and its arduous duties with no light heart: `there will be much trouble and thought needed to work it satisfactorily:' he wrote in his diary, `but it will take me out of myself a little, and so may be a real good. My life was tending to become too much that of a sel®sh recluse.'1 A fortnight later, he wrote that he had been `hard at work learning my new business, and planning forms of ledgers: the accounts have not been fully kept by any means'. Indeed he set up a battery of records and charts and kept them meticulously throughout his nine years as Curator.2 He also paid scrupulous attention to the members' comforts, added furnishings, improved the lighting, sought to achieve an aesthetically pleasing environment, established a members' complaint book, and recorded the proceedings of Common Room meetings. He also extended the wine cellars and ®lled them with the best and most economical vintages. Wine being central to all Common Room life, Dodgson gave it high priority. He went to great lengths to ensure that the cellars had proper temperature controls and did all he could to inform himself about the storing and ageing of wine. Soon after he took on the Curatorship, for instance, he wrote to a London wine merchant: The Curator. . . will be much obliged if Messrs. Barrett & Clay would give him the bene®t of their advice on 2 or 3 points in the treatment of wine, about which he ®nds much difference of opinion to exist. (1) What amount of damp is desirable in a wine-cellar? (2) Is ventilation desirable? (3) Should light be admitted?3

Dodgson was himself fond of wine, although, as one member recorded, not overwhelmed by its mystique: He held the view that amateur wine-tasters deceived themselves when they professed to distinguish one vintage from another, and that they really were guided by the label supplied by the wine-merchant. To prove this he once secretly interchanged the labels 1 The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (2 vols, 1953), 411±12. See also Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll (1995), 419±23. 2 These records have been preserved among the Christ Church muniments. 3 The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N. Cohen with the assistance of Roger Lancelyn Green (2 vols 1979), 476.

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on the bottles which the wine committee had met to taste, and maintained that his colleagues had reacted exactly as he had foretold.4

A crisis apparently occurred when Dodgson discovered that the cellars contained a large quantity of brown sherry and no port, a taste for port having re-emerged among members. Dodgson `solved the problem by sending out to the grocer for someÐ``Running the Common Room,''' an abstemious colleague complained, ```on the lines of a lower middle-class family.''' Dodgson took larger measures, in fact, and for years after he left of®ce, the port he laid down circulated after dinner in Common Room.5 Membership of Senior Common Room in Dodgson's time was not so exclusive as one might imagine. Resident dons were members, of course, but graduates of Christ Church were also eligible upon taking the MA. Dodgson often had to make the terms of membership clear to graduates, as he did, for instance in a letter to one about to leave Oxford to take up a clerical post in Hampstead: You have indeed a curious idea of the extent of that ancient Club, the Christ Church Common Room, to suppose it to consist of resident members only! We have about 40 resident members, who pay, as you know, 10s. 6d. a Quarter, and about 400 nonresident members, who pay, as you don't know, 1s. a Quarter. I hope this modest `Quarterage' will not prove too alarming an outlay, and that you will allow your name to remain on our books, and thus retain the rights of membership, to be exercised at all those times . . . when you give us the pleasure of seeing you in Oxford.6

In those latter Victorian days, Christ Church constituted `a very happy and animated society', one member recalled: `most of us who dined found our way to Common Room afterwards, and quite a number looked in there each day for afternoon tea. [Dodgson, in fact, introduced afternoon tea in 1884.] The life which we lived was very easy and informal . . . [with] astonishingly little ceremony about our proceedings.'7 Some ceremony inhered, however, and one member recalls the descent from dinner in Hall into the dim, religious light of the Common Room, with its panelled walls and its choice paintings by Cuyp and Franz Hals and Gainsborough, and its many engravings of Chancellors of the University and Governor-Generals and Viceroys of India, where Telling, the Common Room manÐwho, with his white side-whiskers and choker, looked as if he had come straight out of a Dickens portrait gallery, who never seemed to sit down or take a holiday, and who, if he were not waiting on us, would be acting as college postmanÐwould be seeing that the polished mahogany was in order, and asking whether any gentleman wished to drink claret.8 4 5 6 7 8

Claude M. Blagden, Well-Remembered (1953), 114. Ibid. Letters, 759. Blagden, 116. Ibid. 117.

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The same chronicler recalls that the Curator, elected by the free vote of the members, naturally presided if he were with us. We sat where we liked, not at little tables as in so many other colleges, but round one single table, all of us together; conversation was general if there were not too many of us there, and there was little risk of having the evening spoilt by a taciturn or grumpy neighbour. . . . [We had] some very good talkers, not the professionals who came with carefully prepared anecdotes and mots, but spontaneous exponents of the art of conversation, who delighted to toss the ball backwards and forwards between them, and to throw it to anyone else who wished to join the fun.9

Dodgson, while ef®cient and insisting upon proper decorum in Common Room, enjoyed good fellowship, as some of the members' reminiscences testify. One witness reports that evenings in Common Room `were much enlivened by the presence and conversation of such men as Dr. [Henry Parry] Liddon and Mr. Dodgson.'10 Others attest to Dodgson's natural sense of fun and whimsy that went beyond the bounds of his children's books. `Sometimes, if the audience was small and appreciative,' a member recalled, `he would sit in Common Room, and tell us stories in his own inimitable way. Then we realised what children must have found in him, and what supreme gifts he had to charm and hold them.'11 Throughout his Curatorship Dodgson deluged members of Common Room with printed notices, soliciting their opinions, announcing changes in rules or procedures, and even offering for sale marmalade that his brother's family produced according to a `genuine' formula. To signal his ®rst anniversary as Curator, he published a pamphlet, Twelve Months in a Curatorship by One Who Has Tried It (1884), which assures his colleagues that his essay is not a plagiarism . . . of `Five Years in Penal Servitude' but instead is `largely autobiographical (a euphemism for ``egotistic''), slightly apologetic, cautiously retrospective, and boldly prophetic: it will be at once ®nancial, carbonaceous, aesthetic, chalybeate, literary, and alcoholic: it will be pervaded with mystery, and spiced with hints of thrilling plots and deeds of darkness.'

The light touch remains throughout, as Carroll addresses the different subjects of his report.12 The pamphlet was soon followed by a Supplement and 9

Ibid. 116. Arthur Hassall, Christ Church, Oxford (1911), 136. 11 Blagden, 115. 12 All Dodgson's curatorial pamphlets were printed in Oxford. Selections from Twelve Months . . . and Three Years . . . appear in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (Nonesuch edn, 1939), 1060±70 (and frequently reprinted). The preface to Curiosissima Curatoria appears in Logical Nonsense, ed. Philip C. Blackburn and Lionel White (1934), 367. For Members of Common Room only appears in Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll (1954), 252±3, and in the revised edn, 1976, pp. 202±3. All the pamphlets mentioned in this note are included, in their entirety, in The Oxford Pamphlets, Lea¯ets, and Circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, ed. E. Wakeling (Charlottesville, Va. 1993). 10

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a Postscript, and then, two years later, by another report entitled Three Years in a Curatorship by One Whom It Has Tried (1886). Here again the mood is light and breezy. In the preface Dodgson declares that long and painful experience has taught me one great principle in managing business for other people, viz., if you want to inspire con®dence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them. A curator who contents himself with simply doing the business of a Common Room, and who puts out no statistics, is sure to be distrusted. `He keeps us in the dark!' men will say. `He publishes no ®gures. What does it mean? Is he assisting himself?' But, only circulate some abstruse tables of ®gures, particularly if printed in lines and columns, so that the ordinary readers can make nothing of them, and all is changed at once. `Oh, go on, go on!' they cry, satiated with facts. `Manage things as you like! We trust you entirely!'

Dodgson then turns to ventilation, lighting, and furniture, or, as he labels the section, `Of Airs, Glares, and Chairs' and towards the end of the report concludes: `Enough, enough! I have said my say, gentle reader! Turn the page, and revel, to your heart's content, in'Ðand he then provides a Table of the Present Stock of Wine. When Dodgson resigned the Curatorship in 1892, he presented his colleagues with a `parting gift' entitled Curiosissima Curatoria, the most serious and elaborate of his curatorial publications, containing a good deal of historical matter about Senior Common Room and a survey of resolutions passed by Common Room committees. But before circulating this ®nal report, he printed his farewell on a single sheet headed For Members of Common Room only. The epigraph is an adaptation of Horace: `And let him be oppressed until the ninth year.' In this letter, Dodgson re¯ects upon the Curatorship as `an of®ce very pleasant to the holder,' but one that takes a great deal of time. He must now confront the `disproportion [that] becomes more and more glaring between the remaining years of life and the work that I long to complete during those years'. As long as no successor could be found, he continued `gladly' to give his service to `my friends, who have shown to me such unvarying kindness', and now that a successor is available, he yearns to resume the position of an ordinary member of Common Room. Biographers have begrudged the nine years that Dodgson spent as Curator as years when, his desk piled high with accounts and ledgers and his mind so occupied with ®gures and facts, his imagination must have been dulled, even suppressed. Certainly no new children's classics and no other bravura performances emerged during those years. The record shows, however, that Dodgson did, in fact, write creatively during that period and produced as much as he had in earlier decades. But the lightning imagination that created the Alice stories and the nonsense verses of the Snark had vanished with Dodgson's youth, and he could not retrieve it.

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Dodgson never thought that the long hours he spent in the service of his fellow-men were wasted. If he gave pleasure to others by helping to maintain a congenial atmosphere in Common Room, if he helped contribute to the ease and the laughter there, that for him was more than enough.

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10 `In Oxford but . . . not of Oxford'*: The Women's Colleges j a n e t h owa r t h In January 1867 Emily Davies paid a visit to Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie, in the house in Cowley Place that was later to become St Hilda's Hall, in order to test opinion on her project to found a college for women. `I learnt a good deal from them and in other ways, at Oxford,' she told Barbara Bodichon. `I saw Mr. Mark Pattison, and he entered warmly into the idea. It grieves him that we look to Cambridge instead of Oxford, but Lady Brodie says they are not ready for it yet, and if we can do it with Cambridge ®rst, they will get up another by and by, perhaps at Reading.'1 Miss Davies's father and brothers were Cambridge men and there was good reason to believe that her scheme would ®nd more favour there. Cambridge had agreed in 1865, four years ahead of Oxford, to open its school examinations to girls. The attitude of friendly reserve that Miss Davies found in liberal Oxford circles merely con®rmed the wisdom of af®liating her college to the `other place'. But Oxford people brought home to her the dif®culty of introducing women students into a University with monastic traditions, rowdy undergraduates, a lively interest in gossip, and a large population of prostitutes. The decision to situate her college well away from CambridgeЮrst at Hitchin, then at GirtonÐwas taken in the light of their advice. `I have been told,' she wrote, `that at Oxford, unmarried ladies are obliged to be excessively cautious in their demeanour.' James Bryce told her bluntly that `we might as well throw our Programmes into the ®re at once, as propose a College in Cambridge.'2 She records his suggestion that an `Oxford' women's college might eventually be founded * George Brodrick's phrase [in The Due Recognition of Women by the University of Oxford. Papers against resolutions (1), (2), (3) and (4) to be submitted to Congregation on March 3 (1896), 9; Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c.34 (37)] see below, p. 266. 1 B. Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (1927), 150. Cowley House, built 1775±83, had just been extended and altered by Brodie, to designs by Woodward: now the Old Hall building of St Hilda's. 2 Ibid. 171, 203.

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`in the same place as the Cambridge one'Ðat a safe distance from both Universities.3 That Oxford was not yet ready to take up women's higher education was shown by the failure in 1866 of a scheme of lectures for ladies organized by Eleanor Smith, the sister of the mathematician Henry Smith and a trustee of Bedford College, London. There were few takers and much facetious comment. A cartoon by Sydney Hall depicted a Natural History lecture at which Professor Westwood instructs an inattentive audience on the cattle plague and vaccination: another showed William Sidgwick amorously construing Latin verse with a bespectacled student, named after Bianca in the Taming of the Shrew (see Figures 10.1,2).4 But Mark Pattison, who ®gured in a third caricature, and other victims of Hall's pen, represented a tradition that took women's education more seriously. Some professors had opened their lectures to women much earlierÐand not only scientists in need of an audience. It was reported that almost all the wives and daughters of heads of houses went to the popular lectures given by Thomas Arnold as Regius Professor of Modern History in 1842.5 The Bodleian Library admitted women scholars: the historian of the Queens of England, Agnes Strickland, pursuing her researches in the 1860s, was `treated as reverentially as if I were a queen'.6 As at the universities of Italy in earlier centuries, the exceptional woman intellectual received encouragement.7 Pattison's wife Francis gained recognition as an art historian (and an income from writing that gave her some independence when their marriage turned sour).8 His proteÂgeÂe Mary Arnold, later Mrs Humphry Ward, worked on early Spanish history before she made her reputation as a novelist: she became, as Taylorian scholarship examiner in Spanish in 1882 and 1888, the ®rst woman ever to examine men at Oxford.9 But Pattison, Bryce, and T. H. Green were also among the witnesses who pressed on the Schools Inquiry Commission (1864±7) the broader case for reform of middle-class women's and girls' education, a movement that depended on the universities for its success. Oxford was not in the forefront of that movement. It waited a decade before emulating the lecture scheme to prepare women for public examinations started at Cambridge in 1869 by William Sidgwick's more eminent 3

Davies to Bryce, 22 Feb. 1868, Bodl. MS Bryce 160, fo 5. Originals in St Anne's College. RCO (1850), evidence of H. E. Strickland, 100; M. J. Gifford (ed.), Pages from the Diary of an Oxford Lady 1843±1862, (1932), 18; M. C. Church, Life and Letters of Dean Church (1895), 35. 6 J. M. Strickland, Life of Agnes Strickland (1887), 289; cf. Mary Ward, A Morning in the Bodleian (Fox How, 1871), 2, 5±6. 7 L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989). 8 Born Emily Francis Strong, `Mrs. Pat' was generally known as Francis in Oxford and as Emilia after her second marriage to Sir Charles Dilke. 9 Mrs H. Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 1856±1900 (1918), 191; J. Sutherland, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Preeminent Edwardian (1990), 71±3. Bryce and T. H. Green were Assistant Commissioners. 4 5

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f i g u r e s 10.1 a n d 10.2 `The Natural History Lecture' and `The Ladies' Lecturer': caricatures (detail) by S. P. Hall of the lectures for ladies, 1866

brother Henry, founder of Newnham, nor did its early halls of residence for women aspire to the status of `colleges' modelled, like Girton, on the men's foundations. By the time Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall opened in 1879, with twelve and nine students respectively, over 300 students had passed through Newnham and Girton, while in the previous year London University had admitted women to its degrees. London and Cambridge were to educate many more women in the decades before 1914 (and by the turn of the century, of course, a majority of women in higher education in Britain were at coeducational universities or colleges in London and the provinces,

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Wales and Scotland).10 The supporters of women's education in Oxford did not, however, seek the role of pioneers; this was made clear by the historian of the movement that eventually won admission for women to degrees in 1920, that even-handed critic of both `feminism' and `anti-feminism', Annie Rogers.11 Rather, she claimed, the Oxford achievement was to integrate women smoothly into an ancient university, avoiding the ill-humour that they encountered at Cambridge, where women became by the early twentieth century one of the chief `bugbears' of University politics and where the MA degree was denied them until 1948.12 The story of successful appeasement told in Degrees by Degrees is one theme in the early history of women at Oxford. More complex to unravel is the effect on the women's communities themselves of their relationshipÐsymbiotic or `parasitic', depending on the point of view of the observerÐwith a university for men.13

o r i gins o f th e ox f o rd wom en's s oc ieties Outright opposition to the reform of women's education waned more slowly at Oxford than at Cambridge, possibly re¯ecting the conservatism of High Anglican tradition. T. D. Acland, gathering reactions in 1862 to Emily Davies's request that girls should be admitted to Oxford local examinations, found `in conversation with friends, ladies and gentlemen, great repugnance to your plans, especially to the competition of the two sexes'.14 Similar sentiments were voiced in 1884 against the opening of undergraduate examinations to women, whereas there was little controversy when tripos examinations were opened to Girton and Newnham students in 1881. More widespread in the 1870s, however, was the view taken by undergraduates in two Union debates: it was `the duty of the University of Oxford to resist any attempt to extend resident Membership to Women' (carried by 30 votes to 15 in January 1874), but the University was at the same time `bound to take a practical part in the higher education of women' (carried in December without division).15 H. P. Liddon's friend, Sidney Owen, believed himself `almost alone in Oxford' by 1879 in objecting to the higher education of 10 In 1900±1 there was a total of 3,284 women students in higher education in Great Britain, of whom 296 were at Cambridge and 239 at Oxford. 656 were at London University, of whom 243 were at women's colleges (Bedford, West®eld, and Royal Holloway) or the women's department of King's College. See J. Howarth and M. C. Curthoys, `The political economy of women's higher education in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain', Historical Research, 142 (1987), 210±11; C. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870±1939 (1995), 17±27. 11 A. M. A. H. Rogers, Degrees by Degrees (1938), 1±2. See also V. Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (1960); G. Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer: The Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth (1978); P. Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879±1993 (1996). 12 F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica (1908), 12; R. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (rev. edn 1998; ®rst published 1975). 13 [Percy Gardner], `Women at Oxford and Cambridge', Quarterly, clxxxvi (Oct. 1897), 537. 14 Stephen, Emily Davies, 85. 15 Proceedings of the Oxford Union Society 1871±78 (1878), 89, 114.

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women in principle, on `moral, social, physiological as well as religious grounds'.16 The real dif®culty, for university liberals as well as churchmen, was envisaging a place for it at Oxford. Max MuÈller felt that `almost any place would be more appropriate for a Ladies' College.'17 There was no need for one, according to Goldwin Smith, once London degrees were open to women.18 In 1876 New College and Balliol combined to found a coeducational university college at Bristol. But as late as 1878 T. H. Green and his wife Charlotte felt that the time was `hardly yet ripe' for an Oxford women's college.19 Jowett feared that it would `lead to complications'.20 It was not among the issues discussed by the Selborne Commission.21 An attempt to place the opening of undergraduate examinations and medical quali®cations at Oxford and Cambridge on the Commissioners' agenda had been defeated in the House of Commons, where there was support for the speaker who described the proposal as subversive of `the whole system of male and female education in the country'. England's tradition was `not of mixed and concurrent education for both sexes but distinctly of separate education'.22 The idea of a university as, above all, a place of exclusively male sociability was not, of course, con®ned to the ancient universities.23 These collegiate communities were nevertheless particularly forbidding places for women, conspicuously so while few dons could marry. Ladies invaded Oxford each summer for Eights week and Commemoration and added to the decorative appeal of Encaenia: ritually cheered by the undergraduates (until the custom died out in the 1870s), they occupied specially reserved seats in the Sheldonian (see Pt 1, Plate 7). But the number of women connected with the University was small andÐapart from the domestic entertainments, musical or theatrical, arranged by families such as the Liddells and Max MuÈllersÐ their role in Oxford life was marginal. The theological con¯icts of the midVictorian decades created an intellectual climate in which such academic 16

Liddon MSS, diary for 28 February 1879, P H L. I owe this reference to Anne de Villiers. G. Stephenson, Edward Stuart Talbot, 1844±1934 (1936), 36. Letter from Goldwin Smith in Oxford Chronicle, 30 May 1874, 7. 19 B. J. Johnson, `First Beginnings', in G. Bailey (ed.), Lady Margaret Hall: A Short History (1923), 32. 20 Personal reminiscences of M. Shaw Lefevre, SCA; see also Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii, 158±60. 21 R. W. Macan noted in his evidence to the Selborne Commission that mixed classes took place at Zurich and Cambridge `without dif®culty', but the point was not pursued; UOC (1877), Q. 4629±32. 22 Parl. Deb. 3 May 1877, ccxxxiv. 302. For this debate and that of 17 May see Ch. 2, n. 56, above. 23 See G. Sutherland, `The Plainest Principles of Justice. The University of London and the Higher Education of Women', in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836±1986 (1990), 35±51; S. H. Barnes, `Crossing the invisible line; establishing coeducation at the University of Manchester and Northwestern University', History of Education, 25 (1994), 41±3; Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 278±82. 17 18

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wives, sisters, and daughters as there were could play little part. Josephine Butler's interest in moral reform in the 1850s found dons frankly unsympathetic.24 But the chief and enduring problem, common to Oxford and Cambridge and a cause of continuing controversy at both places, was the potentially alarming consequences of admitting large numbers of young women to a community of mainly celibate men, at a time when professional and eÂlite careers were thought to depend on the postponement of marriage until the late twenties or thirties.25 The problem of supervising relations between men and women students was not shared to the same extent by universities in London and the provinces, where students normally lived with their parents.26 It was above all the prospect of increased contact between the sexes that made Pusey and Liddon regard the opening of women's halls as `one of the greatest misfortunes that had happened, even in our time, to Oxford'.27 Others used more discreet language to hint at the likelihood that undergraduates would be distracted from their work and the risk of scandal or meÂsalliances. Nor was it clear that women students would thrive in a university that increasingly recruited from boys' public schools and shared their cult of `manliness'. A more feminine counter-culture developed alongside the university as college fellows became free to marry and suburban development proceeded in North Oxford, where by 1881 women residents outnumbered men by almost three to one.28 Areas of common endeavour and cultural interests shared by men and women also emerged. The author and Church worker Felicia Skene, who pioneered rescue work and prison visiting in Oxford, now found herself consulted on cases involving prostitutes that came to the Vice-Chancellor's Court.29 Puseyite sisterhoods established North Oxford housesÐthe convent of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity (1866) in the Woodstock Road and Lydia Sellon's convent of the Holy Rood, which from 1870 to 1883 had premises in the Banbury Road.30 Eleanor Smith became the ®rst woman on the management committee of the Radcliffe In®rmary and a member of Oxford's School Board and of its Charity Organization Society. 24 J. E. Butler, An Autobiographical Memoir, ed. G. W. and L. A. Johnson (Bristol, 1909), 30± 6; B. Caine, Victorian Feminists (1992), 165±6. 25 C. Ansell (jnr), On the Rate of Mortality at Early Periods of Life, the Age at Marriage, the Number of Children to a Marriage, the Length of a Generation and other Statistics of Families in the Upper and Professional Classes (1874), 46, gives 30.51 as the mean age at marriage for bachelors in 1870. 26 Cf. R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College, Dublin, 1592±1982 (Dublin, 1982), 342±3, 347: the admission of women was delayed there until 1904 through similar fears that a mixed college would encourage imprudent marriages, thus alienating parents. 27 Letter from Liddon in the Guardian, 23 Apr. 1884, 612c. 28 T. Hinchcliffe, North Oxford (1992), 168. 29 E. C. Rickards, Felicia Skene: A Memoir (1902), 149±51. Jowett visited her to ask advice when he became Vice-Chancellor. 30 Hinchcliffe, North Oxford, 147±51.

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So active were university women in good works in the city that Mrs A. L. Smith, urged by her husband `not to let herself become a mere mother like Mrs. ÐÐ', had dif®culty in ®nding an organization `not already crowded with helpers'.31 The Oxford Browning Society, set up under Pattison's auspices, included women members and the sister of a fellow of Brasenose, Elizabeth WordsworthÐgreat-niece of the poet laureate and herself a minor poet of some reputeÐwas among those who offered papers at its meetings.32 Clara Pater, `always arrayed in some becoming shade of blue', represented with her brother the vogue for aestheticism and she was remembered, along with Mrs Pattison and the novelist and poet Margaret Woods, as an accomplished practitioner of the art of conversation, much cultivated in academic circles at that time.33 The dress and domestic deÂcor of `young married Oxford'Ð smocked Liberty gowns, old cabinets and chests, blue pots, and William Morris wallpaperÐexpressed aesthetic values that had appeal for both sexes.34 Women's higher education became another shared interest for young married Oxford in the 1870s. For University wives it offered both opportunities for self-cultivation and a `good cause', a means of helping needy schoolteachers. Extension lectures in provincial cities supplemented the incomes of married tutors, whose Oxford stipends rarely exceeded £500 a year, and many extension students were women. Mandell Creighton commented on the ability shown by girls in his lecture class in Plymouth: `I see I marked six of their answers as ®rst class.'35 In 1873 Mary Ward and Louise Creighton, with the help of Mrs Max MuÈller and a committee of dons' wives and sisters, launched a new scheme of lectures for ladies, not linked to any public examination but more successful than the experiment of 1866. Dons provided lectures on literary and historical subjects and language classesÐ some even set examination papers (`collections') for the more energetic ladiesÐand tickets were issued allowing participants to read in the Radcliffe Camera.36 Schoolmistresses and schoolgirls paid a reduced fee: demand was boosted by the opening of an Oxford Girls' High School, founded (with encouragement from University families) by the Girls' Public Day School Company in 1875. 31 A. L. Smith, Master of Balliol 1916±24. A biography and some reminiscences, by his Wife (1928), 94, 191. For these `helpers' see Pt 1, 452±3. 32 W. S. Peterson, Interrogating the Oracle: A History of the London Browning Society (Ohio, 1969), 97; Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 94±5. 33 E. Wordsworth, Glimpses of the Past (1913), 140; L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 113. Margaret Woods (neÂe Bradley) was the wife of Henry Woods, fellow and later President of Trinity. 34 Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 119; Wordsworth, Glimpses, 140. 35 L. Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols 1902), i, 84. 36 Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 152; Johnson, `First Beginnings', 26±7; `Women's Education at Oxford', Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. e. 537.

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These informal lectures for ladies, which continued till 1879, were part of the nationwide movement for women's higher education that gained momentum in the 1860s. Some of the young wives who came to Oxford in the following decade had personally bene®ted from itÐCharlotte Green (sister of the poet John Addington Symonds) had attended lectures in her native Clifton, while Bertha Johnson, wife of the historian A. H. Johnson, whose father was among the pioneers of nursing education in London, had studied at the Slade School of Art. Others came from families that belong in Gillian Sutherland's genealogy of educational reformers: Mary Ward, granddaughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew, Lavinia Talbot, neÂe Lyttelton, Rachel Vernon Harcourt, a daughter of Lord Aberdare who was later prominent among the founders of the coeducational University of Wales.37 At Oxford as elsewhere, moreover, a ®rst step towards formal provision for women's education was taken when the University ®nally agreed, in 1869, to open its local examinations to schoolgirls. Three years later Balliol and Worcester advertised exhibitions to be awarded on the results of these examinations, only to ®nd that top marks had gone to Annie Rogers, daughter of the controversial former Professor of Political Economy. Thorold Rogers, having failed (predictably) to persuade the Vice-Chancellor that he had powers to matriculate women, went on to organize a petition asking Council to admit them to undergraduate examinations. It responded by introducing in 1875 a new set of examinations `for women over eighteen' Ðan equivalent to the Cambridge Higher LocalsÐunder the auspices of the Delegacy for Local Examinations.38 This episode brought the University into consultation with Miss Beale and Miss Buss and opened the way for the argument that Oxford should provide lectures geared to the examinations. Annie Rogers, prepared by home tuition, was the only candidate for honours in 1877, but she was awarded a ®rst class. Historians have differed in their interpretation of the role of `feminists' in advancing reform of women's education in these years.39 But accounts of the foundation of the women's halls at Oxford agree on the weakness of links there with the women's movement. `My friends and I were all on ®re for women's education, including women's medical education, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was already far advanced,' wrote Mary Ward. `But hardly any of us were at all on ®re for woman suffrage, wherein the Oxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cam37 G. Sutherland, `The movement for the higher education of women: its social and intellectual context, c.1840±80', in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987). 38 Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 3±8; J. Roach, Public Examinations in England, 1850±1900 (1971), 121±2. 39 See, for example, Sutherland, `The movement for the higher education of women' and P. Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England (1990), 136±8, 142±6.

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bridge movement.'40 There is good authority for the claim that Oxford residents were wary of outside interference. Bertha Johnson recalled approaches from the `advanced' wing of the women's movement: Mrs Sheldon Amos, an associate of Josephine Butler's in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the group based on Moncure Conway's South Place Unitarian chapel in London.41 An offer was made through Conway in 1876 of £1,000 from Rose Mary Crawshay, the feminist wife of the Cyfarthfa ironmaster, towards the founding of a women's college. It was not taken up. Evidently, the patronage of `persons of views little acceptable to the Oxford world, would hardly commend a women's College to the University'.42 Yet women's suffrage did have its advocates within the university community. At meetings held in Lincoln College (by invitation from the Pattisons) and in the Corn Exchange, Thorold Rogers argued that votes for women would ensure them a share in educational endowments.43 In later years when `founding myths' were devised it became importantÐand not only for that leading anti-suffragist, Mrs WardÐto stress the distinctively conservative origins of women's higher education at Oxford. A contemporary observer might, however, have noted at both ancient Universities a minority who saw women's education as part of a broader feminist agenda, the difference lying perhaps above all in personalities. Henry Sidgwick's allies Henry and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, for example, despite their support for the suffrage agitation, were well-liked in Cambridge society.44 The same could not be said for Rogers or Pattison, while Francis Pattison was increasingly disenchanted with OxfordÐ`that hole', as she described it to a friend.45 Leadership in launching women's higher education in Oxford was unlikely to come from that quarter. More effective was the argument, voiced by socially concerned Anglicans of Scott Holland's `Holy Party', that Oxford and the Church were missing an opportunity to play their part in the education of schoolmistresses.46 On a visit to Girton in 1878 the Warden of Keble and his wife, Edward and Lavinia Talbot, conceived the idea of founding `a Keble in this sort of 40

Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 152. Con¯icting versions of Moncure Conway's approach are given in M. D. Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences (2 vols 1904), ii, 266 and Johnson, `First Beginnings', 31±2. 42 Johnson, `First Beginnings', 32. 43 Women's Suffrage Journal, 1 July 1873, 111; 1 May 1878, 73±4. The Pattisons and Thorold Rogers belonged to the central committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage. 44 For Mrs Fawcett's role in promoting Newnham see D. Rubinstein, A Different World for Women (1991), 26±7. 45 See her letters to Eleanor Smith, Dec. 1875, 15 Feb. 1882, Bodl. MS Pattison 118, fos 29, 72, and V. H. H. Green, Love in a Cool Climate: The Letters of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley, 1879±1884 (1985), 10, 17±19. 46 Cf. Archbishop Benson's comment, `What is wanted is for the Church to reach the teachers and how is she to do this if they are all to go to Cambridge?'; Elizabeth Wordsworth to her sister Dora, 25 Apr 1884, quoted in Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 92. The Archbishop, being Henry Sidgwick's brother-in-law, was well informed about agnosticism at Cambridge. 41

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Education'.47 On 4 June 1878 Talbot chaired a meeting in Keble at which the decision was taken `that it is desirable to attempt the Establishment in Oxford of a Small Hall or Hostel in Connection with the Church of England for the reception of women desirous of availing themselves of the special advantages which Oxford offers for higher Education'.48 Present at the meeting were Scott Holland and one or two sympathetic clergymen, University wives and other women prominent in the local Anglican community, including Miss Milman, sister of the late Bishop of Calcutta, and the wives of the Bishop of Oxford and of J. G. Talbot (Edward's elder brother), who was one of the University's Conservative MPs.49 A committee was set upÐthe Edward Talbots, Scott Holland, Bertha Johnson, and Miss Milman afforced by such University notables as Principal Harper of Jesus College, Professor Rolleston, Canons King, Ince, and Paget of Christ Church, W. A. Spooner of New College, and A. G. Butler of OrielÐto found and manage the hall. In November they appointed as Principal Elizabeth Wordsworth, daughter of a headmaster-bishop, and it was she who suggested naming the hall after Lady Margaret BeaufortÐgentlewoman, scholar, saint, and a benefactor of both Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Premises were found in a newly-built white brick house in Norham Gardens, the ®rst students arrived on 13 October 1879, and Lady Margaret Hall was formally opened by the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Mackarness, three days later. Talbot's initiative ®nally galvanized university liberals into action. An Anglican monopoly of women's higher education in Oxford was not acceptable. A committee was set up on 7 February 1879, including President Percival of Trinity, T. H. Green, A. G. Vernon Harcourt, and Mary Ward, to establish a hall `in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations'.50 The hall was named (at Humphry Ward's suggestion) after the mathematician Mary Somerville and the committee secured a short lease on Walton House, a survival from North Oxford's rural past, with three acres of land and a dilapidated coach-house and cottages. Somerville opened simultaneously with LMH. This was a disappointment for Talbot's committee which had agreedÐreluctantlyÐto adopt a conscience clause and accept non-Anglican students in the hope of staving off demand for `a secular, or unsectarian, or latitudinarian Hall for some time'.51 Various shades of opinion were represented in the party that founded Somerville. William Sidgwick, Henry 47

Talbot to Wordsworth, 23 April 1884, LMHA. LMH Council minute book, 1878±84, fo 1, LMHA. J. G. Talbot's wife Meriel was also a Lyttelton, Lavinia's elder sister. For his part in promoting the GPDSC, see the Journal of the Women's Education Union, 1 (15 July 1873), 121±3. 50 Somerville College General Meeting minute book. 51 E. Talbot to E. Wordsworth, 19 Nov 1878; L. Talbot to E. Wordsworth, 9 Dec. 1878, LMHA. 48 49

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Nettleship, and Vernon Harcourt attempted unsuccessfully to give it a secular constitution like that of Newnham.52 The Nettleships and Vernon Harcourts retained their connections with the hall, however, along with others whose beliefs were openly heterodox. A. H. D. Acland, Somerville's ®rst Treasurer, had renounced deacon's orders, while its Secretary Mary Ward followed T. H. Green in rejecting the miraculous aspect of Christianity.53 But liberal Christianity was the dominant ethos. Green's links with the Protestant Free Churches helped to attract daughters of dissenting families to SomervilleÐup to a quarter of its students in the early years were Nonconformists, rising to a third in the early twentieth centuryÐand President Fairbairn of Mans®eld College was elected in 1888 to its council. The ®rst President of Somerville's council was, however, an orthodox Anglican, John Percival, President of Trinity CollegeÐlike Edward Talbot, a future bishop, although a Low Churchman and a political RadicalÐand he found the hall its ®rst Principal, Madeleine Shaw Lefevre, sister of the Liberal MP for Reading, a pious churchwoman whose social acquaintance in Oxford (like that of Miss Wordsworth) was already extensive.54 Both halls were regarded at ®rst simply as hostels. Educational provision for their students was in the hands of a separate organization, founded to provide lectures for candidates for the Local Examinations Delegacy's certi®cate for women over 18. The Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Oxford (AEW) was set up on 22 June 1878 under the presidency of the Master of University College, G. G. Bradley.55 Both halls were represented on its committee, as were the organizers of the existing lectures for ladiesÐit was agreed that at least half the members would be ladies resident in OxfordÐand the association had the support of many university men.56 AEW lectures were intended not only for students at LMH and Somerville but were open also to the daughters of University and city families and women living with `hostesses' approved by the association. The only condition, signalling the academic seriousness of the project, was that students should work for examinations: if not those set by the Local 52 Somerville College, General Meeting minute book, 15 Feb 1879. Smith, A. L. Smith, 135, notes that A. G. Vernon Harcourt played games in the garden with his children `on principle, as it were' on Sundays. 53 Bertha Johnson's comments on Mary Ward's `vague religion' are recorded in J. P. Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (1923), 28. 54 W. Temple, Life of Bishop Percival (1921), 76. As Principal of Somerville, Miss Shaw Lefevre read prayers from the Anglican Prayer Book every morning at eight, and students were expected to attend. 55 Bradley was among the promoters of Oxford Girls' High School; Journal of the Women's Education Union, 3 (15 Feb. 1875), 26±7. Meta Bradley, whose intimate relationship with Pattison gave rise to gossip, was his niece; see Green, Love in a Cool Climate. 56 AEW Minute Book, 1878±82, Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. 45 d. 1046, fos 5, 8; AEW Report for 1879±80; MS. Top. Oxon. d. 1055. Early subscribers to the AEW guarantee fund included eight heads of HousesÐPattison gave £100Ðseven professors, and over thirty academic residents.

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f i g u r e 10.3 An undergraduate cartoonist's view of mixed classes: women students, accompanied by chaperons, attending one of J. F. Bright's inter-collegiate modern history lectures delivered during Michaelmas term 1882 in the hall of University College.

Examinations Delegacy, then for termly examinations set by the AEW on lecture subjects. Distinguished names appeared on the AEW's ®rst lecture lists in 1879/80ÐA. C. Bradley on English literature, Arnold Toynbee on political economy, and Henry Nettleship on Latin and Greek. It was agreed too, though not without some opposition, that `the Assoc[iatio]n does not object to the attendance of Students at lectures given to members of the University', provided special places were reserved for them and a lady representing the AEW acted as chaperon.57 The following year A. G. Vernon Harcourt became the ®rst lecturer to give mixed classes when he admitted association students to his undergraduate chemistry lectures in Christ Church.58 In 1882 the Master of University College, J. Franck Bright, and G. W. Kitchin, Censor of the Unattached Students, obtained permission, in one case from his college, in the other from his delegacy to open their lectures to women (see Figure 10.3). By 1897 only one college, Magdalen, denied this freedom to its tutors.59 The AEW continued to arrange its own supplementary lectures and classes as well as subsidiary schemes for women's educationÐa correspondence course was started in 1882, a teacher57 Percival and Jowett at ®rst objected to the idea of women attending college lectures, as did Miss Wordsworth and Miss Shaw Lefevre; Rogers to Butler [n.d. 1929], Rogers MSS, SACA; Green to Wordsworth, 14 June 1880, LMH. 58 AEW Minute Book, 1878±82, fo 42 (29 Oct. 1879). 59 Ibid., fo 61 (12 June 1880).

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training scheme in 1887, and English language classes for foreign students in the early twentieth century.60 The association's role in arranging tutorial teaching was soon challenged by Somerville, the ®rst hall to acquire tutors of its own, but it remained important as a link between the halls and in dealings with the University on matters concerning women. Provision for women's education at Oxford resembled the early years of Newnham, where many students prepared for the Cambridge Higher Locals rather than tripos examinations and women attended lectures either as `outstudents' or residents in a hall run on domestic lines. Advice from Miss Clough was sought by the hall principals and among the ®rst women to lecture at Oxford were Mrs Fawcett and the Newnham economist Mary Paley Marshall.61 The Sidgwick connection was strengthened when the youngest of the three brothers, Arthur, moved to a Corpus fellowship in 1879 after a period as schoolmaster at Rugby. Equally committed to `the great business of women's education', Arthur Sidgwick became Secretary of the AEW (1882±1907)Ðworking in tandem with its Lady SecretaryÐand later President (1907±15).62 He was also on Somerville's council and his daughters, Rose and Margie, read Modern History as home students. Henry and Arthur SidgwickÐand their wives Eleanor and CharlotteÐwere robust supporters of women's suffrage. Its opponents, according to Arthur, relied on the same arguments as were used against women's higher educationÐ `what were called the Bloom, the Sphere and the Health arguments'.63 But as members of an academic community the Sidgwick brothers were also alive to the sensibilities of their colleagues and the dif®culties of integrating women. They did not always take quite the same line. Henry was more passionately committed to modernizing the undergraduate curriculum: his efforts to protect women students from its worst features caused Newnham to be associated (to some extent misleadingly) with the principle of `separatism' or `difference' in women's education.64 Arthur's approach was more relaxed and empirical (see below, pp. 280±1). On the need for a conciliatory 60 The teacher-training scheme was not a success. From 1897 AEW students took the University's Diploma in Education, supervised by a tutor for women employed by the Delegacy in charge of the course. From 1897 to 1914 the post was held by Miss A. J. Cooper, formerly headmistress of Edgbaston High School. 61 Adams, Somerville, 24±5; R. McWilliams Tullberg, `Mary Paley Marshall, 1850±1944', in M. A. Dimand, R. W. Dimand, and E. L. Forget (eds), Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics (Aldershot, 1995), 160. Mrs Fawcett lectured in 1877 on `Certain points of political economy'; Ward, A Writer's Recollections, 153. 62 Sidgwick to Murray, 31 Dec 1904, Bodl. MS Murray 168, fo 61. 63 Speech at a debate held at the Union during the extension Summer Meeting; Women's Gazette and Weekly News, 17 Aug 1889, 661 (and see below p. 281). 64 S. Delamont, `The contradictions in ladies' education', in S. Delamont and L. Duf®n (eds), The Nineteenth-Century Woman, her Cultural and Physical World (1978); G. Sutherland, `Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the education of women in Cambridge', in R. Mason (ed.), Cambridge Minds (1994), 38±40.

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approach and the inadvisability of `uncompromising' demands for equality for women, voiced at times by Emily Davies and the London-based committee that ran Girton, the Sidgwicks were, however, at one. No pressures of that sort were experienced in Oxford. The Oxford scenario had other distinctive features, the most signi®cant being the patronage of in¯uential members of the Church party. Whereas Girton, though formally `Church of England', was widely regarded as `undenominational and non-religious', Lady Margaret Hall had an Anglican culture and commitment that was recognized within, and even beyond, the University.65 Despite its Tractarian associations it was never, as the general public supposed, a `hotbed of Ritualism'ÐElizabeth Wordsworth was a High Anglican of the plain, old-fashioned sort.66 But she shared Talbot's vision of the hall as `the servant and instrument of the Church': the higher education of women was to her `a prosy thing . . . without religion'.67 She herself founded a second Anglican hall, St Hugh's, in 1886 and installed another bishop's daughter, Annie Moberly, as its Principal. A third, St Hilda's, was opened by Dorothea Beale, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College, in 1893. These af®liations with Anglicanism both entrenched and complicated the position of the women's societies at Oxford. The women's halls were private ventures, dependent on goodwill for their survival. Although the committees that ran them included male dons, they had no claims on the University. Whereas Cambridge in 1881 of®cially recognized Newnham and Girton as colleges presenting students for examination, the Oxford halls remained extramural and unrecognized until 1910, when a Delegacy for Women Students was set up. Fortunately the Church connection, like Somerville's af®liations with University liberalism, secured them a base of support that extended beyond enthusiasts for women's higher education. The fact remained that many Anglicans viewed it with deep ambivalence, despite a growing awareness of the practical need to equip middle-class womenÐincluding clergy daughtersÐto earn a living. Miss Wordsworth's brother John, when she was invited to become Principal of a women's hall, had told her, `If I thought your not going would put an end to the whole thing, I should say, Don't go; but as I don't suppose it will, I think you had better accept.'68 Her father as Bishop of Lincoln made known his disapproval of `systems of Education which set before women the cultivation of the intellect and the attainment of knowledge as ends for 65 Leading article on `University Examinations for Women', Guardian, 23 Apr. 1884, 601a, b; see also M. C. Bradbrook, `That In®del Place': A Short History of Girton College 1869±1989 (1969). 66 Wordsworth, Glimpses, 160. 67 LMH Council minutes, 30 Apr 1910; E. Wordsworth to her sister Dora, 21 Feb. 1894, Wordsworth MSS, LMHA. 68 Wordsworth, Glimpses, 136.

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which they ought to strive'. `The only true ``higher Education of Woman''' was, for Christopher Wordsworth, `that which trains her to look upwards to God.'69 These were not, it must be remembered, opponents of the reform of women's education.70 Anglican discourse was shaped partly by a reaction against secular and materialist in¯uences that also affected the education of menÐnot least, the secularization of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. But Victorian domestic ideology, which idealized women's family roles and qualities of purity and gentleness that were fostered by a sheltered life, had deep roots in Church tradition.71 Miss Wordsworth herself recognized that `church people were naturally afraid that University life and studies might entail some loss of Christian womanliness.'72 The reputation acquired (however unjustly) by the Cambridge women's colleges for encouraging both free-thinking and bad manners enhanced such prejudice.73 `From all I hear the young ladies do not become very amiable or attractive members of society,' wrote Lord Salisbury. `I dare say these Colleges are useful as furnishing a diploma to ladies who wish to be Governesses: but for any other purpose I should do my utmost to dissuade any female relation over whom I had in¯uence from going there.'74 The close links between provision for women's higher education and the Church at Oxford created pressures to adapt to an ethos that was highly conservative, particularly in its mistrust of the idea of the women's college. The AEW continued to make a point of providing for non-resident students, whereas at Newnham the number of out-students dwindled. In 1893 a Society of Oxford Home Students was set up with its own committee and Principal, Bertha Johnson, and it lasted for ®fty years.75 The halls remained smallÐthe largest, Somerville, had fewer than eighty students in residence at the turn of the century and about a hundred in 1914. Early prospectuses advertised their domestic lifestyle: LMH modelled itself on a `Christian family', Somerville on an `English family'. They merged into the suburbs of the medieval city, as did the AEW with its rented lecturerooms, at ®rst above a bakery in Little Clarendon Street, then in a former 69

C. Wordsworth, Christian Womanhood and Christian Sovereignty (1884), 38±9, 44. As Bishop of Salisbury John Wordsworth was regarded as a progressive Churchman for his support of girls' public schools; Women's Herald, 24 Oct 1891, 843. 71 L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Classes 1780±1850 (1987), part 1; J. N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (1980), 99±115. 72 Letter from the Principal, LMH Council minute book, 1884±94, fo 144. 73 Pattison's claim that `in a large party, I could detect a Newnham or Girton girl at once' is recorded in Johnson, `First Beginnings', 29±30. 74 Salisbury to Lady John Manners, 7 Oct. 1883, P. Smith, Lord Salisbury on Politics (1972), 18. 75 In 1942 its name was changed to St Anne's Society and ten years later St Anne's became the ®fth Oxford women's college; M. Reeves, St Anne's College, Oxford: An Informal History (1979). 70

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Baptist chapel down an alleyway behind Pusey House. This modest scale of operation was dictated in part by shortage of funds. The Anglican halls, not surprisingly, were particularly hard pressed. A series of appeals to Church people produced little result at LMH. St Hugh's was fortunate in securing the patronage of a wealthy suffragette, Clara Evelyn Mordan, but the major benefaction which enabled the college to move to purpose-built premises came only after her death in 1915.76 Miss Beale, who was not a believer in educational endowments, left St Hilda's a mere £500 in her will.77 At various stages in the evolution of the halls, however, it was made plain that any growth in scale or academic aspirations challenged the basis on which some Oxford men were willing to countenance them. The point was hammered home in a notorious sermon by J. W. Burgon, a close friend of the Wordsworth family, revisiting Oxford from the deanery of Chichester to preach in New College chapel on 8 June 1884.78 Despite his textÐ`To educate young women like young men and with young men, a thing inexpedient and immodest'ÐBurgon confessed that he had at ®rst seen no objection to the opening of Somerville and LMH. The Halls were essentially private dwelling-houses. They existed quite independently of the University system. Many of us viewed them with sympathyÐ(I avow myself of the number)Ðbecause they seemed to provide the safeguard of a pious home for just a very few young gentlewomen who coveted access to some of the educational advantages of this place. Presided over by those whose names carry with them the savour of whatever is most admirable in Woman, the system pursued at the two Halls commended itself to our Christian chivalry, and won our con®dence. But already has the object of the Halls become a thing of the vanished past.79

The sermon was prompted by the University's decision to allow women to sit certain undergraduate examinations and its argument was partly addressed to that issue. Women would be exposed to the `obscenities of Greek and Roman literature' and the `irreligious system of philosophy' taught at Oxford, educated in a manner that was irrelevant to their future lives, and brought into competition with men in which they were bound to be the losers. `Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end of time you will remain.' But Dean Burgon was also troubled by the `essential immodesty' of introducing into a men's university `an ever-increasing body of marriageable and attractive young Women'Ðand equally by the danger that the university 76 P. Grif®n (ed.), St Hugh's: One Hundred Years of Women's Education in Oxford (1986), 31±4. Problems of fund-raising are discussed in Howarth and Curthoys, `Political economy of women's higher education' (n. 10), 213±15; for the rather more successful early appeals at Somerville see Adams, Somerville, 16, 21±4. 77 M. E. Rayner, St. Hilda's College: A Centenary History (1993), 21, 30. 78 Wordsworth, Glimpses, 159. 79 J. W. Burgon, A Sermon preached before the University of Oxford in New College Chapel, Trinity Sunday 1884 (1884), 25.

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woman would lose her femininity and become a `very disagreeable creature'. Elsewhere he claimed: `Already are men of re®nement in Oxford heard to express disgust at seeing young girls ape the manners, language, even the slang and swagger of the undergraduates.'80 These imputations were hotly denied by Thorold Rogers (among others) and Burgon's strong language made him a ®gure of fun.81 Yet the contradictory images evoked by his sermon are echoed in caricatures depicting women students in Shrimpton's series.82 Often they are represented as seductive and the `sweet girl graduate', stereotyped by Tennyson's Princess, is sometimes juxtaposed with the `fond undergraduate'. Other caricatures are less sympathetic, like W. S. Gilbert's parody Princess Ida, ®rst performed in 1884. Some images are sexually subversive or repellent. One caption reads: Where are you going to my pretty Maid? I'm going to lecture sir, she said And what is the subject, my pretty maid The total extinction of man, she said. Then nobody'll marry you my pretty maid Advanced women don't marry good sir, she said.

Women are shown illustrating the `John Stuart Millennium' in a variety of male undergraduate roles, or ¯ourishing their cigarettes in a manner that recalls Charles Dodgson's description of the `Girton Girl' as `fast and ``mannish''' (see Figures 10.4a, 4b, 5, 6).83 These were fantasiesÐor nightmaresÐthat caught the imagination in a celibate male community, as did another recurring image, the woman proctor in authority over men (she too may be either a seductive or a threatening ®gure). The remoteness of these caricatures from contemporary reality can be seen from the fact that female students are almost always shown wearing the undergraduate cap and gown (often portrayed as sexually provocative accessories), whereas Oxford women did not wear academic dress until they became members of the University after the First World War. A message came through clearly, however, in the late Victorian years when the women's societies were establishing themselves. Women in Oxford were a very `muted group'.84 Survival as a presence in Oxford would depend not just on the merits of their cause but on managing the evolution of women's academic communities in such a way as to reassure local opinion. 80

Letter in the Daily News, 24 Apr. 1884, 6d. Daily News, 28 Apr. 1884, 7f±g. 82 Shrimpton's Oxford caricatures (7 vols, c.1868±?), Bodl. G. A. Oxon 40, 412±15; Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 19. 83 Morton N. Cohen (ed.), The Letters of Lewis Carroll (2 vols, 1979), i, 565. 84 See S. Delamont, Knowledgeable Women (1989), 14±18. 81

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f i g u r e 10.4a a n d 10.4b A caricaturist's fantasies of women students in science and mathematics, c.1880

f i g u r e 10.5 `A Student of Somerville Hall gains a Fellowship': a representation of `sweet girl graduates' and women dons, c.1880

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f i g u r e 10.6 Women assuming male roles in a cartoonist's (John Stuart) Mill-ennium, c.1880. They are shown (clockwise from left) delivering a well-aimed punch in a town-gown `row' on Guy Fawkes night, rowing on the river, competing in athletics, smoking and carousing, sitting an examination, orating at the Union, and patrolling the High Street as Proctors. At the centre is an imagined scene in the Sheldonian Theatre at Commemoration where women are depicted occupying the undergraduates' gallery and, in a further reversal of contemporary custom, raising raucous cheers of appreciation for `The Gentlemen'.

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a new collegiate pattern c ol l e giat e de v e l o p m ent a nd r elations with the university

Four stages in that process of evolution belong to the decades before 1914Ð the opening of undergraduate examinations to women, the increasingly collegiate character of the halls, the move to open the BA degree (unsuccessful in 1896 but promising results by the eve of the First World War) and the establishment in 1910 of a Delegacy for Women Students, which largely superseded the AEW, bringing women under of®cial University supervision. Each stage brought improvements in the status of women within Oxford (while sometimes creating new anomalies) and each generated controversies, of which copious records were kept by participantsÐchie¯y by Annie Rogers, Bertha Johnson, and Somerville's second and third Principals, Agnes Maitland and Emily PenroseÐwho were conscious that history was being made. The outcome of these changes was to transform the experience of Oxford for women students and bring into being a class of women dons whose place in the movement had not been foreseen by the founders of the halls and AEW.85 The framework of women's lives became more professional and they gainedÐthough always within sensitive boundariesÐmore space for development. Miss Rogers's brisk and entertaining account of what was said and written at the time in encounters with the University brings out, however, the unreality of much contemporary debate about women. Opponents claimed and supporters denied that each step forward must eventually turn Oxford into a `mixed' (or `sexless', or `epicene') university.86 Positions were adopted for tactical reasons by the AEW in order to disarm critics, who were equally casuistical in disguising sentiment as principle. Nor was the AEW itself immune from con¯ict. What was really at stake from the women's standpoint in these controversies? The right to enter students for University examinations quickly became an issue of survival. The Oxford Local Delegacy's examinations for women, though supposedly of degree standard, were not accepted by employers as the equivalent of a class in the tripos or a London BA, and the halls found dif®culty in ®lling places and awarding scholarships. Early in 1884 122 resident MAs signed a petition organized by Arthur Sidgwick for the AEW, asking that `women may be admitted to some, at least, of men's Honour Examinations'.87 It was a modest request and the AEW gave hostages to fortune in order to secure it, pledging itself not to agitate for degrees and suggesting that residence in Oxford should not be a requirement for women candidates. A statute proposed by Council, permitting women to sit classical honour moderations and the honour schools of Mathematics, 85 See F. Perrone, `University Teaching as a Profession for Women in Oxford, Cambridge and London, 1870±1930' (unpublished Oxford D.Phil thesis, 1991). 86 [Gardner], `Women at Oxford and Cambridge' (n. 13), 538. 87 Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 15.

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Natural Science, and Modern History, was carried in Congregation (107 votes to 72) on 11 March 1884, but faced renewed opposition in Convocation where, at a crowded meeting in the Sheldonian on 29 April, invaded by undergraduates who greeted Burgon with mingled cheers and hisses, it ®nally passed by 464 votes to 321.88 The opposition was led by Canon Liddon, but his allies included some liberal heads of houses such as Sir William Anson and George Brodrick; it failed chie¯y because the clerical party split, exposing (to Talbot's distress) the rift between older and younger Tractarians on women's education.89 The sequel was intriguing, for admission to examinations treated in 1884 as less suitable for women was conceded in the following decade without controversy: Responsions in 1886, Greats in 1888, Jurisprudence in 1890, Theology and Oriental Studies in 1893, and all remaining examinations for the BA in 1894Ðincluding the pass schools which, at Henry Sidgwick's insistence, remained closed to women at Cambridge. The B.Mus. and D.Mus. examinations were also opened between 1885 and 1893. No attempt was made, for obvious reasons, to gain access for women to the examinations for the BD, a vocational quali®cation for clergymen. The only tussle came over access to medical examinations. Despite an initiative in 1890 by the Regius Professor of Medicine, Henry Acland, to open the BM examinations, the University was swayed by special pleading. If women are to study medicine in Oxford, they will have, in the midst of young men at the Museum and the In®rmary, to investigate those delicate matters which are of the very essence of medicine . . . The very existence of such a class of young women, and much more their intercourse with young men, will increase the dif®culty of dealing with the relations of the sexes in this place.90

The AEW did not revive the issueÐthere was no professional advantage for women in taking Oxford's BM examinations while they were not eligible for the degreeÐand medical examinations remained closed until 1917. The terms on which women were admitted to undergraduate examinations were highly anomalous but not without advantages. Partly as a concession to anxieties about the effect of examination work on women's health, they were not subjected to the rules that required male Schools candidates to pass qualifying and intermediate examinations and to complete the course in a set period of time. This was the ¯exible approach to women's higher education favoured at Newnham. But unlike Cambridge, Oxford also refrained from imposing any residence requirement on women candidates. In the following decades a trickle of candidates from the London women's 88

Daily News, 30 Apr. 1884, 5g. Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 92. Thomas Case, `Objections to the Proposed Statute for Admitting Women to the Examinations for the Degree of Bachelor of Medicine', 12 June 1890, Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 8 455(6). 89 90

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colleges chose to take Oxford examinations in preference to London degrees.91 Again unlike Cambridge, the University distanced itself from of®cial responsibility for women candidates. Technically, until 1910, they were still examined by the Delegacy of Local Examinations, which merely gained the right to make use of undergraduate examination papers. Not until 1890 did the University begin regularly to publish class lists for women, in the Gazette, which gave their results separately from the men's.92 In refusing to take of®cial note of the women's societies the University did, as Miss Rogers observed, allow them freedom to develop and proliferate.93 No sanction was requiredÐas it would have been at CambridgeÐfor the new foundations of St Hugh's and St Hilda's or the creation of the Society of Home Students. Nevertheless the curious constitutional arrangements governing the examination of women after 1884 signalled a profound uncertainty about the future of women in Oxford. Examinations were in themselves signi®cant less because they brought the sexes into competitionÐas Arthur Sidgwick pointed out, the men were not going to be governesses or teachers in girls' high schoolsÐthan because they brought men and women into formal academic contact in the Examination Schools.94 What new lines could be drawn to safeguard the `manly' life of the university? Thomas Case foresaw that numbers of women students would grow and he predicted the consequences. `A few women can be secluded in halls but, when there are many, the Universities possess no force which can prevent young men from mixing with young women. The fact is that the scheme is only manageable while it is on a small scale.'95 `Are women to be admitted eventually at Oxford to a position of complete academical equality with men?' asked Liddon.96 Similar questions arose in the controversy that developed over the relationship between the AEW and the halls. Would the women's societies evolve into colleges with tutors of their own, autonomous academic communities like the men's colleges? Somerville adopted articles of incorporation in 1881, when it bought the freehold of Walton House from St John's, and appointed its ®rst resident tutor, Lilla Haigh, as early as 1882. In 1894 its name was changed to `Somerville College' in order to `improve the educational status of Somerville in the eyes of the public' and show `the desire of the Governing Body to raise it above the level of a Hall of Residence'.97 91 At Royal Holloway about half the students in the 1890s took Oxford's examinations but fewer after 1900: C. Bingham, The History of Royal Holloway College 1886±1986 (1987), 82±3, 96. 92 Publication approved, 27 May 1890: Gazette xx. 429. 93 Degrees by Degrees, 25. 94 Sidgwick, letter to The Times, 28 Apr. 1884, 6f. 95 Letter of 29 Apr. 1884, repr. in R. B. Mowat (ed.), Letters to `The Times', 1884±1922, written by Thomas Case (1927), 34. 96 Letter to the Guardian, 23 Apr. 1884, 613a. 97 Adams, Somerville, 47.

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A porters' lodge and gatehouse put up on the Woodstock Road in 1891 were the ®rst distinctively collegiate buildings associated with women's education in Oxford.98 The model (pace Vera Brittain) was still Newnham rather than Girton.99 The domestic atmosphere was preserved as Somerville expanded by commissioning a separate building in the grounds, in the Queen Anne style of many North Oxford houses and with its own dining- and drawingrooms.100 But the two buildings were linked in 1904 by a handsome library, designed by Newnham's architect, Basil Champneys, and partly ®nanced by a grant from the Pfeiffer Trust.101 The regime of separate dining ended when the college ®nally commissioned a large panelled dining hall, opened by the Vice-Chancellor in 1913. Despite Miss Shaw Lefevre's lingering dread of `becoming like an institution', the logic of collegiate development was readily accepted at Somerville.102 This was not the case at LMH and Somerville's policy caused much tension. The more it became independent of the AEW's teaching arrangements by appointing resident women tutors of its own, the more LMH came under pressure to do likewise. Somerville's moves towards academic independence also con¯icted with the authority of the Association's Lady Secretary, a post held from 1883 to 1894 by Bertha Johnson and then by Annie Rogers (1894±1920), both of whom had helped launch women's higher education in Oxford and regarded it as their life's work. The collegiate development of the halls also threatened to undermine the home student system, which depended for its survival on the willingness of the other societies to subsidize its overheads and refrain from putting their own students in lodgings. As in the case of the men non-collegiates, moreover, the attractions of college life encouraged home students to migrate to a hall. A decisive moment came with the events that led to the resignation of Bertha Johnson as Lady Secretary in 1894. Mrs Johnson, a woman of ability and charm who continued to favour the Liberty gowns of the 1870s long after they had gone out of fashion, was an in¯uential ®gure in University society: wife of the secretary of the Modern History Association, herself secretary of LMH but with a circle of friends that included Charlotte Green, who sat on Somerville's council. Her policy was to maintain the role of the AEW as the body in charge of educational provision for all women students 98

Ibid. xii, plate 10 (this plate is wrongly labelled `the pre-1933 approach to House'). Brittain, Women at Oxford (n. 11), 36. 100 V. Farnell, A Somervillian Looks Back (1948), 6. 101 An endowment of £2,500 from the Pfeiffer Trust, originally given in 1892 to fund scholarships, was the largest benefaction received by Somerville before the twentieth century. The Trust was an important source of funds for non-denominational women's colleges, but the Anglican foundations were not eligible for its support. See B. Herbertson, The Pfeiffer Bequest and the Education of Women; A Centenary Review (1993); Adams, Somerville, 61. For work by Champneys in Oxford see p. 254±6. 102 Ibid. 42. 99

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and to insist on the Lady Secretary's responsibility for direction of their studies. Students were required to call on her at the start of each term for permission to attend lectures and she personally arranged the distribution of History students among men tutors at a termly meeting in her house in Merton Street. Discontent with this regime built up at Somerville, which in 1886 appointed as history tutor one of its own students who had taken a ®rst in schools, Eleanor Powell, only to ®nd that she was refused permission to lecture for the association. Mrs Johnson was not a good administrator and the claim that she, rather than the Principal, should oversee teaching arrangements had never been conceded. Relations deteriorated when Miss Shaw Lefevre was succeeded in 1889 by Agnes Maitland, a forceful newcomer to Oxford whose loyalties were solely to Somerville. Her policy of non-cooperation with the Lady Secretary was met by pointed remarks about `one . . . who is not yet accustomed to our Assoc[iation] methods of work'.103 But Somerville's council forced the issue. After some ill-tempered meetings the oversight of teaching arrangements was transferred from the Lady Secretary to a subcommittee of the AEW on which the principals also sat, and a new set of rules rede®ned the responsibilities of the association and the halls. The last straw for Bertha Johnson was Somerville's decision to appoint its own tutors in classics and modern languagesÐin her eyes a `dishonest and dishonourable' move that threatened the viability of collective teaching arrangements on which the poorer women's societies depended.104 Finances were patched up by an increase in the subsidy paid to the AEW by the halls and there was general relief when Mrs Johnson resigned. But as Principal of Home Students and a member of the AEW's committee she remained a power to be reckoned with and bruised feelings lingered on. `You really care far more than most people and therefore suffer moreÐof such is the army of martyrs,' wrote Charlotte Green.105 An issue only partly resolved by these developments was the status of women dons at Oxford. They had little place in Mrs Johnson's vision of the future of women's education in the University. She hoped that the AEW would be of®cially recognized as a Delegacy with various institutions under its umbrellaÐa teacher-training college and one for extension students as well as the women's hallsÐand with purpose-built premises including a common room for home students.106 Women would continue to be taught largely by male donsÐ`the most valuable part of the Oxford training for women', in her view. It was `often the student's one chance of real contact 103 Johnson to Maitland, 24 Oct. 14 Dec. [1891], Johnson to Ray Lankester (copy), 13 Dec. [1891], AEW ®le (box 2), SCA. 104 Rogers MSS, notes on Johnson to Rogers, Oct. and Nov. 1894, SACA; Butler and Prichard, Society of Oxford Home Students, 37±41. 105 Johnson MSS, Green to Johnson 6 May 1895, SACA. 106 Johnson, Scheme for AEW work with the halls, Jan. 1893, SACA.

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with minds very different from her own' and students told her `over and over again' how much they appreciated it.107 There is little evidence, however, of serious support for an expanded role for the AEW. The association had no funds of its own beyond one or two scholarships (although a loan fund for needy students was set up in 1894 to commemorate Mrs Johnson's work). In a collegiate University even men who regretted the way Somerville was developing could recognize the growth of `college feeling' in the women's halls as an irresistible fact.108 But there was tension between the mission of the AEWÐto adapt women's higher education to Oxford traditionsÐand the priorities of an emerging body of women academics. Annie Rogers, who succeeded Mrs Johnson as the AEW's Lady Secretary, found herself at the centre of this struggle. Miss Rogers believed that women's higher education must continue to draw on the in¯uence of University men and that an autonomous woman's college risked becoming like a girls' school.109 But she had taught classics for the AEW from the beginning and was also keen to expand opportunities for women tutors. She identi®ed with the interests of women in the academic profession whereas (as she later commented) `Mrs. Johnson was not a professional woman and her sympathies were with the student.'110 Miss Rogers was to ®nd, however, that the role of Lady Secretary brought her into con¯ict with hall tutors. They did not share her view of the importance of the home student system as part of the web that tied women's education into the fabric of Oxford society and they were critical of the continuing role of non-academic women as voting members of the AEW. Above all they disliked her own role, jealously guarded, as chief negotiator on behalf on the women's societies with the University, consulting selectively with principals but not at all with tutors. Relations between the association and the halls continued to be touchy. The events of 1894 highlighted differences between LMH and Somerville, which had hitherto made common cause on educational questions. A hostel for young ladies, small enough to ensure the personal in¯uence of the principal on each individual and with no staff but one or two vice-principals who did a little coachingÐthat was the picture of LMH originally shared by Miss Wordsworth and her council. It was now no longer viable. In 1894 a public appeal for £10,000 to ®nance the expansion of the hall was launched under the patronage of A. J. Balfour, Lord Cranbrook, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1895 LMH appointed its ®rst tutor, the historian Eleanor Lodge. The transition from hall to college was much more dif®cult than at Somerville. There were individual council members who welcomed it in 107 108 109 110

Bertha Johnson's notes for evidence given to Hebdomadal Council, Nov. 1895, SACA. Spooner to Johnson, 8 Dec. 1892, 27 Oct. 1894, SACA. Adams, Somerville, 52. Rogers MSS, Rogers to Butler (n.d. c.1928).

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principleÐsuch as A. L. Smith, who coached the hall's hockey team (and whose daughters went to Girton)Ðbut several who did not.111 Dr Ince resigned in protest against moves to acquire a hockey ®eld; Lucy Soulsby, headmistress of Oxford High School, regretted the trend in `woman's modern education' towards an emphasis on academic rather than spiritual development; the hall's second chairman, Warden Spooner, found himself `much out of sympathy with the more go-ahead party in the women's education movement'.112 Miss Wordsworth herself, despite lingering regrets at the loss of intimacy as the hall grew, emerged as a staunch advocate of increased provision at Oxford for the daughters of Church families. She fought a series of battles with her council over the building of a new block of student roomsÐWordsworth Building, completed in 1896Ðand the addition of a dining hall and library, opened by the Chancellor in 1910, a year after her retirement.113 The precariousness of the hall's ®nances made these projects genuinely risky. LMH was not incorporated until 1913, apparently through fear of jeopardizing its religious basis, and meanwhile council members remained personally liable for its debts. The search for benefactors remained unsuccessful.114 Even the corrugated iron dining hall which served as a makeshift from 1896 to 1910 was ®nanced only by a loan from Miss Wordsworth.115 The foundation of the two later Anglican halls took place against this background of worries about both the ethos of women's education in Oxford and how to fund it. St Hugh's began in 1886 as a private venture of Miss Wordsworth's: she used a legacy to rent and furnish a house in Norham Road for poor students, after the LMH council had refused to sponsor a hostel for this purpose. Whether it was originally intended to become an independent hall is not clear. In 1893, in a move to strengthen and expand LMH, Miss Wordsworth proposed to absorb St Hugh's, now installed in a neighbouring house in Norham Gardens and running at a pro®t. Annie Moberly, understandably dismayed, found the LMH council sympathetic to pleas that St Hugh's should keep its independence. Tribute was paid to her success in establishing the hallÐbut council minutes reveal that this was not the only consideration behind the rejection of Miss Wordsworth's scheme. `The presence of a number of poorer students in the whole body formed by amalgamation would to a certain extent lower the present proportion of Honour to Pass students in LMH' and it was `possible if not 111

Smith, A. L. Smith, 188; Bailey, Lady Margaret Hall (n. 19), 80. Ince to Johnson, 31 May 1894, LMH Council minute book, 1884±94, fo 151; Soulsby to Sewell, 18 Feb. 1888, quoted in E. L. Sewell (ed.), Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell (1907), 230; W. Hayter, Spooner: A Biography (1977), 89. 113 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 150±1, 177±8, 188. 114 LMH Council minutes, 1 July 1903. 115 Ibid. 28 Nov. 1895. 112

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probable that the tone and average standard would not be quite so select & high'.116 Ultimately St Hugh's, which was not burdened with such high aspirations, found the path of institutional development less problematic in the pre-war years.117 Re-established under an independent committee in 1894, it adopted articles of incorporation and the name `College' in 1911. A four-acre site (bordering the Banbury and St Margaret's Roads) for a new collegiate building, to which St Hugh's moved in 1916, was acquired shortly before the war.118 The early history of the latest Anglican foundation, St Hilda's, was rather differentÐit was the only hall to be started by an initiative from outside the UniversityÐbut here too the uncertain status of women at Oxford created dif®culties. Its founder, Dorothea Beale, was a Churchwoman with a recognized position as a pioneer in the education of girls and women. As Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College (CLC) she had developed a unique complex of institutions: a highly successful girls' public school, a senior departmentÐ St Hilda's, CheltenhamÐwhich prepared women for the London BA as external students and trained teachers, a kindergarten, and a settlement run by old Cheltonians in London's East End. Oxford men had assisted her as visiting lecturers and examiners at the college and members of its governing body. The idea for an Oxford hall that would complement the resources of CLC grew out of these associations. Secure in her reputation in the educational world, Dorothea Beale saw no need to conform to the rules laid down by the AEW. Her intention was that Cheltenham students and teachersÐ some of whom were already London graduatesÐshould attend lectures without the obligation to prepare for examinations. Oxford women were too insecure about the viability of their own enterprise (and perhaps too sensitive about Miss Beale's achievements as an empire-builder) to view this scheme favourably when it was ®rst proposed in 1889. It would, Miss Wordsworth argued, lower the standard of work and encourage `dilettantism'.119 She spoke for Somerville as well in deprecating the foundation of a new women's hall at a time when both halls were struggling to attract students.120 This time it was Miss Wordsworth who raised objections to making Oxford more accessible to poor women, referring to a rumour (in fact unfounded) that Miss Beale `intends to offer to take girls for £35 a year and possibly in the long run thus introducing [sic] a class of students who would add considerably to the dif®culty of keeping up a standard of good 116 Grif®n, St Hugh's, 18±19; Report of Committee on Question of amalgamation of St Hugh's Hall with LMH, LMH Council minute book, 1884±94, fo 152. 117 For the con¯icts that accompanied post-war expansion under its second Principal, Eleanor Jourdain, see R. Trickett, `The Row', in Grif®n, St. Hugh's 48±61. 118 Grif®n, St Hugh's, 33. 119 E. Wordsworth to B. Johnson, 27 Nov. 1889, quoted in Rayner, St. Hilda's, 4. 120 A. Maitland to B. Johnson, 27 Nov. 1889, SHiCA.

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manners'.121 St Hilda's was eventually accepted by the AEW in 1893, at ®rst as a hostel for home students (with its own Principal, Mrs Esther Burrows, but under Mrs Johnson's supervision) and from 1896 as an independent hall. The patronage of the Provost of Queen's, Dr Magrath, a member of CLC's governing body (who happened at the time to be Vice-Chancellor), appears to have been crucial in overcoming objections. But the idea of a hall for nonexamination students did not prove particularly attractive. Between 1900 and 1926 St Hilda's was something of an anomaly in the Oxford world, incorporated jointly with St Hilda's, CheltenhamÐa ¯ourishing institution that gave it ®nancial support.122 In the 1890s there were renewed efforts to put women's education at Oxford on a more of®cial footing butÐpredictablyÐopinions differed as to how this should be done. The ®rst tentative steps towards University recognition of the women's societies came in 1893. Hebdomadal Council made space for the AEW of®ce (and later its library and lecture-rooms) in the attics of the Clarendon Building at the centre of the medieval University and appointed a representative to sit on the association's committee.123 But an offer of Council representation on the governing bodies of the halls, accepted at Somerville, was turned down at LMH. The more momentous and complex question of opening degrees to women surfaced in 1895±6 at a time when national opinion was moving strongly in favour of equal opportunities for women to graduateÐthe opening of degrees at the Scottish universities was recommended by a Royal Commission in 1892 and after 1895 Oxford and Cambridge were the only British universities to exclude women from their degrees.124 No move had been made at Oxford in 1887, when Emily Davies made the ®rst bid to open the Cambridge BA, but the issue now became unavoidable. Once again, Somerville was united and LMH divided: a majority of its council followed Spooner and Mrs Johnson in opposing moves to open the BA, and Miss Wordsworth, who was in favour, came under some pressure not to take a different line in public.125 There were genuine dilemmas for supporters of women's education. One was the mis®t between the classical basis of the University's curriculum and the traditional emphasis on modern-language teaching in girls' schools. Some 121 Rayner, St Hilda's, 4. CLC excluded tradesmen's daughters and Miss Beale seems to have followed the same policy at St Hilda's (though it was abandoned after her death in 1906); see D. Beale to E. Burrows [n.d., May 1899], repr. in M. Clewlow (ed.), `Ammonites and Moabites. The letters of Dorothea Beale and Esther Burrows, 1892±1905' (unpublished MA thesis, University College London, 1995), 103. 122 Rayner, St Hilda's, 24±5. 123 The Nettleship library (known as the Nettlebed), started with a gift of books from Henry Nettleship's library by his widow, opened in the Clarendon Building in 1895; Fritillary, 6 (Dec. 1895); P. Adams, `The Libraries of the Oxford Women's Colleges', OM, 134 (1996), 6±10. 124 Dyhouse, No distinction of sex?, 12. 125 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 139±43; Wordsworth to Johnson, 6 and 7 Mar. 1896, Johnson MSS, SACA.

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headmistressesÐa minority, although Dorothea Beale was among themÐ continued to believe that girls' schools would be damaged, forced into adopting the archaic syllabus of the boys' public schools, if women became eligible for degrees at the ancient Universities while their graduates were still required to know the rudiments of Latin and Greek.126 There were also anomalies in Oxford's curriculum in the 1890s that made it particularly advantageous for women to have the option of reading an honour or pass school without going through the exercises imposed on men undergraduates. Above all Modern History, the most popular school among women, had no preliminary examination of its own: the full degree course still required students to begin by taking Moderations or the Jurisprudence Prelim. A case could be made that women's interests would be better served by a special University certi®cate or diploma than by admission to degreesÐ which would, in A. H. Johnson's words, place them `under that bondage which many of us think deplorable even in the case of men'.127 Most of the men tutors who taught for the AEW took that view. But the association's committee decided in December 1894 to go for degrees (11 votes to 2), arguing in a circular to the halls that the practical disadvantages of opening the Oxford BA `would be much outweighed by the general stimulus which would be given to the higher education of women'.128 There was, in Arthur Sidgwick's phrase, `a balance of gain and loss' to be calculated.129 By this stage Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick had come round to a similar view.130 Newnham and Girton were to combine in 1896±7 in a second bid to open the BA at Cambridge. Degrees by Degrees gives an insider's account of the Oxford campaign of 1895±6: the association's Lady Secretary was its main ®eld of®cer and an enthusiastic canvasser and propagandist. The campaign was launched at a public meeting of the AEW in the Examination Schools on 4 May 1895. 126

Rayner, St Hilda's, 21±2. The Association of Headmistresses voted in favour of opening Oxford and Cambridge degrees to women in 1895 by 60 votes to 23; see F. Gadesden to Rogers, 16 June 1895, Rogers MSS. 127 Due Recognition of Women, 26. For the Modern History syllabus see also Pt 1, 355±6. 128 Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 28: `The Recognition of Resident Students of the AEW', committee report, 6 Mar. 1895, Johnson MSS, SACA. 129 Sidgwick to Johnson, 13 Nov. 1895, Johnson MSS. 130 They would have preferred to hold out for the women's ¯exible curriculum until the MA and full membership of the university were within reach. This was not a serious possibility at either university in 1895±7. But whereas the Sidgwicks had offered open opposition to Miss Davies in 1887 they now resisted attempts to co-opt them to the anti-degree side. See E. Sidgwick to B. Johnson, 14 Jan. 1895 (Johnson MSS): `I should have preferred that the question should not [be] raised yet and do not think the gain of the mere BA at Cambridge would be worth the loss of the alternative preliminary examination which the women have at Cambridge. But if any one else raised the question I could not in my position oppose . . . I fear I shall seem to you a mere opportunist, but we have always regarded our present position of semi attachment to the university as necessarily transitory, and the question therefore is from my point of view only one of times and opportunities.'

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In an attempt at compromise, a petition was adopted asking that quali®ed women candidates should be admitted to the BA but that the University should also confer a special diploma on women who completed a three-year course including a ®nal schools examination. A committee of Hebdomadal Council, set up to collect evidence from the wider world of women's education as well as interested parties within the University, found opinion outside Oxford strongly in favour of opening the BA degree. Within Oxford, meanwhile, opposition mustered rather slowly. Early in 1896 an antidegree committee was formed, representing various shades of opinion: chaired by Anson, its secretaries were Arthur Johnson, the Conservative Thomas Case, and a leader of the University reform party, Lewis Farnell. In February when Council published resolutions to be put to Congregation on awarding the BA, or alternatively diplomas, to women, Anson's committee responded with a pamphletÐThe Due Recognition of Women by the UniversityÐto which six of its members, and Mrs Johnson, contributed papers. Some dwelt on the case for preserving Oxford as a University for men, stressing women's extramural status, others on the defects of the degree course or the intrinsic desirability of a different educational regime for women. According to the historian Edward Armstrong, among tutors `experienced in the tuition of both girls and men' resistance to the opening of the BA did not arise from a belief in the intellectual insuf®ciency of women, nor even chie¯y from their experience that the health of girls is less reliable, and that they cannot without risk be subjected to extra pressure . . . They argue rather from the merits than the demerits of their lady pupils, from their more de®nite intellectual tastes, their superior docility, their capacity for patient study and deliberate thought, their foresight and restraint when working for a distant examination.131

By this stage feeling ran high. An unprecented number of ¯ysheets was circulated.132 `Peaceful households were divided . . . and the subject had to be tabooed at social gatherings,' according to one don's wife.133 There was a record attendance in the Divinity School on 3 March 1896 when Congregation ®nally rejected (215 votes to 140) a resolution for opening the BA to women. An alternative proposal, to offer `BA diplomas' to resident women who had taken the full degree course, was also defeated, as were motionsÐstrenuously opposed by the degree partyÐto award diplomas on conditions specially tailored for women. 131

Due Recognition of Women, 22±3. One member of Congregation, writing just before the vote, claimed to have received `119 pages of printed matter. . . all of it gratuitously and most of it in the last four days'; if letters to the press were included, he calculated that `the total printed discussion amounts at the time of writing to over 50,000 words'; Journal of Education, Mar. 1896, 196. 133 Oona Ball, Barbara Goes to Oxford (1907), 45. In this ®ctionalized account of a visit to Oxford by two young women the local detail is wholly authentic. 132

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Miss Rogers recalls that the degree party were well pleased with this result and with the generally good-humoured tone of public exchanges.134 There were no rowdy undergraduate demonstrations against women of the kind seen at Cambridge the following year, when MAs were pelted with ¯our, rotten eggs, and ®reworks as they voted in the Senate.135 At the time she confessed to a friend to `a slight though wicked pleasure at seeing that things do not go quite so easily there'; but also that the degree controversy had shown `that we have more actual enemies to the ®rm establishment of women's education in Oxford than we thought'.136 `The real strength of the opposition,' she later wrote, `lay not in any alleged care for the education or health of women, but in a dislike and fear of their presence in the University.'137 The only criticism that might be made of her otherwise impeccable narrative is that it passes lightly over one proposal that deeply troubled supporters of the women's halls. The anti-degree party brought forward a motionÐapparently a concession to women but likely in practice to have a disastrous effect on recruitment to the hallsÐfor the award of BA diplomas to women without any residence requirement. `It will if carried deal a heavy and possibly a fatal blow to the education of women in Oxford,' wrote Somerville's chairman, Henry Pelham, to Bertha Johnson. `I cannot believe that there are many even of those most strongly opposed to giving the degree who wish to wreck the Halls.'138 It was said that there was talk at Somerville of `moving off Bodily to Cambridge' if the resolution passed.139 Miss Wordsworth agreed that it would be `most detrimental to the Halls'Ð there was a far from amicable exchange when it was put to her by Mrs Johnson that she ought not to oppose a proposal supported by a majority of the LMH Council.140 `I did ``lie low'' about the BA but I cannot ``lie low'' about the Diploma' she told Bertha Johnson. `£5000 of my patrimony is now locked up in the Hall. I have made its interests my own in a way no one 134

Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 53±4. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (n. 12), 115±16. For a fuller analysis of the terms of the debate at Cambridge, where opinion was polarized more sharply between supporters and opponents of the women's colleges, see R. D. Harvey, ```One More Step'': the Degrees for Women Syndicate, Cambridge, 1895±7', History of Education Society Bulletin, 57 (1996). 136 Rogers to Penrose, 1 Mar. 1896, SCA. 137 Degrees by Degrees, 52. 138 Pelham to Johnson, 6 Feb. 1896, Johnson MSS, SACA. 139 Spooner to Johnson, 8 Mar. 1896. It was believed at that stage that Cambridge was more likely to concede the BA degree; Johnson MSS. 140 Wordsworth to Johnson, 6 and 7 Mar. 1896, Wordsworth to Spooner, 7 Mar. 1896, Spooner to Johnson, 8 Mar. 1896, Toynbee to Johnson, 9 Mar. 1896; Johnson MSS. Mrs Johnson was backed by the hall's Treasurer, Charlotte Toynbee, but Spooner was critical, writing `I think you have put a somewhat severe strain on Miss Wordsworth's loyalty and gone to the extreme limit to which it is justi®able to restrain freedom of speech. Women, I know, ®nd it harder to be just than men do & tolerate differences of opinion, but even in the heat of ®ghting one should try to be fair and to see a little of people's dif®culties.' 135

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elseÐto the same extentÐhas done. I feel both with regard to it and St. Hugh's that it gives me not only the right, but the duty to speak . . . I am sorry to vex youÐbut I may say like Luther ``Here stand I, God helping me'' & I cannot say otherwise.' The non-resident diploma was in fact defeated very narrowly in Congregation by 140 votes to 136. This was a more traumatic episode than Annie Rogers admits and it did provoke moves to halt the development of women's residential education at the ancient Universities. The question was now openly posed, `what sort of organization for the women's colleges will de®nitely dissociate them from the Universities, and start them in a new direction . . .?'141 The idea of a separate women's university was not new: the founder of Royal Holloway had envisaged that his college would develop on these lines and others had aired the possibility of a federal women's degree-awarding university, perhaps named in honour of Queen Victoria.142 The Oxford anti-degree party considered various versions of this schemeÐone, entailing collaboration between Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, prompted some memorable verses from Charles Firth on the characteristics of such a `Trinity University'. Detailed plans for a `Queen's University' were worked out by the Balliol tutor J. L. Strachan-Davidson; it was backed by the anti-degree party at Cambridge and strongly urged at a conference summoned to consider the future of Royal Holloway in 1897.143 Although the scheme had the support of some well-wishers of women's educationÐ they included John Percival, now Bishop of Hereford and out of touch with SomervilleÐspokesmen for the women's colleges and headmistresses at this conference were all but unanimous in opposing it.144 Bertha Johnson, the only woman to defend Strachan-Davidson's scheme in the debate, dwelt less on its positive merits than on the strength of feeling against giving women equal status at Oxford and Cambridge. Here she spoke as the mother of two undergraduate sons. `University men are not willing that women should share fully in the life of the Universities . . . It may be right or it may be wrong, but the fact remains that we are no better liked than when we began.'145 Reaction against coeducation set in at some early twentieth-century American universitiesÐWesleyan University in New England stopped taking women students in 1910Ðand at Cambridge and some London medical 141

[Gardner], `Women at Oxford and Cambridge' (n. 13), 547. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, 98. 143 University Degrees for Women: Report of a Conference called by the Governors of Royal Holloway College and Held at the House of the Society of Arts on Saturday, 4 December 1897 (1898). A written submission from Thomas Case (pp. 26±9) sets out the details and history of the proposal. See also G. Sutherland `The Plainest Principles of Justice', 39±44. For Firth's verses, signed `Balliolensis', see Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c.34 (46). 144 W. Temple, Life of Bishop Percival (1921), 270±4. 145 University Degrees for Women, 52±3. 142

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schools after the First World War.146 The same thing could have happened at Oxford and Cambridge in the Edwardian era if the case for extending further privileges to women had been pressed. Funds were tight. Pressures to democratize Oxford's intake convinced some supporters of university extension that resources used on women's education could be put to better use. `The working classes are knocking loudly at our doors, and will inevitably before long lay additional burdens on our energies and revenues,' wrote one long-standing supporter of the AEW, W. W. Jackson, Rector of Exeter. `If the University were to place women here on the same footing as men, it would not be able ef®ciently to discharge its own proper functions.'147 The Cambridge women's colleges made no further move to gain access to degrees before the war and it is unlikely that the issue would have been revived at Oxford but for the initiative of its Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who included the opening of the BA to women in his programme of University reform in 1909.148 Even then the Chancellor's warning against agitation was scrupulously observed. A tentative suggestion from Miss Rogers that the AEW should lend support to demands for a Royal Commission on Oxford met with a ®rm rebuff.149 The discussions with the University that began in 1913 took place behind closed doors. The Delegacy for Women Students set up in 1910 was, however, an important step towards the ®nal acceptance of women within the University. They were now formally recognized as resident students. The Delegacy, which became responsible for registering them and entering them for examinations, was the ®rst to include womenÐsix of them chosen by an electoral board composed of women engaged in teaching or administration, the Principal of the Society of Home Students and two nominated by the Vice-Chancellor and proctorsÐalthough they were outnumbered by twelve members of Convocation. A committee of the Delegacy took over the functions of the home students' committee and responsibility for appointing their Principal: Mrs Johnson, con®rmed in of®ce, became Oxford's ®rst woman with a senior University appointment (although at her own insistence she received no pay). The creation of the Delegacy was not related to Curzon's proposal. It was the suggestion of H. T. Gerrans, Secretary of the Local Examinations Delegacy and an active AEW man, provoked by the University's failure to respond to a request that women should be allowed to work for the Certi®cate of Merit which quali®ed members of the University 146 D. B. Potts, Wesleyan University 1831±1910. Collegiate Enterprise in New England (Yale, 1992), 212±20. On the revival of proposals for a women's university in 1920 at Cambridge, see McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, 137±40. 147 W. W. Jackson to Rogers, 27 Oct. 1909, Rogers MSS, SACA. Another extensionist Head of House who took the same view was T. B. Strong of Christ Church; Strong to Rogers, 3 June 1914, Rogers MSS. 148 Curzon, Principles and Methods of University Reform (1909), 193±200. 149 Gerrans to Rogers, 30 May 1912, Rogers MSS.

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for the research degrees of B.Litt. and B.Sc.150 For tactical reasons, moreover, the Delegacy was presented as a means of tightening up control of the women's societiesÐespecially supervision of the rapidly growing numbers of home students, seen by some as a particular threat to the principle of segregation of the sexes. Friends of the women's societies were briefed to avoid the suggestion of any advance towards degrees. The Athenaeum's Oxford correspondent (husband of a Somervillian) duly told his readers, `It looks rather as if the star of Male Discipline were in the ascendant . . . The only insidious move on the part of Woman . . . is, possibly, that she is hereby enticing unobservant Man to take note that her mode of life is perfectly respectable.'151 The Delegacy statute passed Congregation on 14 June 1910 (106 votes to 53). Its most controversial feature, the inclusion of women as members, survived a hostile amendment by 110 votes to 85. Within the women's societies this was recognized as a measure that enhanced, in particular, the status of women dons, yet the way it was forced through had unfortunate repercussions. Bertha Johnson was unhappy that the home students had been used as a `cats-paw': alarm had been created by `a fallacious idea of the present lack of organization and all sorts of imaginary future dangers'.152 Elections to the Delegacy's home student committee were made acrimonious by her attempts to pack it with reliable supporters of the home student system.153 Unhappiest of all was Annie Rogers, who was not even nominated as a candidate in the ®rst elections for the Delegacy. `Services of AR entirely ignored by tutors, no consultation as to wishes or attempts to ascertain the intentions of the VC and Proctors,' she noted angrily.154 The women tutors felt, as Emily Penrose explained apologetically, that `you do not represent them.'155 Many had taken it for granted that she would become a nominated member of the Delegacy, and so, in fact, she did.156 But this rebuff con®rmed her mistrust of women colleagues and her preferenceÐ much advertised in her later yearsÐfor working with men.157 The issue of degrees for women was revived, aptly enough, by a proctor who represented `young married Oxford' just before the war. J. L. Stocks, Fellow of St John's, belonged to a circle of friendsÐSidney and Oona Ball, R. H. Tawney, William TempleÐthat supported both university reform and women's suffrage but had not hitherto taken a lead in advancing the position 150 151 152 153

MSS. 154 155 156 157

Degrees by Degrees, 63±5. The Certi®cate of Merit was opened to women in 1913. Athenaeum, 16 Mar 1910, 341. See Gazette xl. 792, xli. 135±7. Johnson to Rogers, 15 June 1910, Rogers MSS. M. Prichard to Rogers, 8 Dec 1910, Gilbert Murray to Rogers, 27 Jan 1911, Rogers MS note in `Letters about the delegacy', Rogers MSS. Penrose to Rogers, 20 Nov. 1910, Rogers MSS. C. Burrows to Rogers, 17 and 21 Nov. 1910, Rogers MSS. Rogers to Johnson, 21 Aug. 1922, Rogers MSS.; Degrees by Degrees, xv.

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of women in Oxford.158 In 1912 Stocks married and brought to Oxford a graduate of the London School of Economics, Mary Brinton, who became tutor in economics for the AEW. Coming from a college where women were treated as equals, Mary Stocks felt that at Oxford their `academic status . . . left almost everything to be desired'.159 The time for reviving the degree question did not seem particularly favourable to old Oxford hands: Council had other preoccupations, while Miss Penrose (Somerville's third Principal and by now the leading representative of the women's colleges) sensed that suffragette militancy had `put back the clock for us and alienated some possible supporters'.160 But Stocks persisted and in November 1913 Hebdomadal Council appointed a committee to pursue the decision, taken in principle in a resolution of 17 June 1909, to adopt the Chancellor's proposal for opening the BA degree to women. Miss Rogers's experience of pitfalls and technicalities that had arisen in the debate of the 1890s was exploited and she offered useful tactical advice: `Don't say too much yet about the privileges we want. It is very dangerous to go into detail before enemies and do not on any account underrate their intelligence.'161 She was involved in discussions between representatives of Council and the Women's Delegacy that continued throughout the war. But Mary Stocks recalled the advice of a former Vice-Chancellor to her husband: `When you need to talk to Annie Rogers . . . always go to her house, do not invite her to yours. It will thus be possible to end the conversation when you wish.'162 Council's committee, reporting in 1914, felt more able to recommend the absorption of women students than women dons. It recommended that women should be matriculated as members of the university and eligible for the BA degree. The issue of opening the MA was avoidedÐit carried the right to vote in parliamentary elections and there was some doubt about the University's legal power to confer the MA on womenÐso that women dons would play no part in University government. Council's committee was keen to exclude them from faculties and their boardsÐ`some taking the ground of propriety some that of expediency' according to Stocks. Rather more hesitantly, it also proposed to exclude them from examining, a new disability since examiners did not have to be MAs.163 There was still a long way to go between the settlement proposed in 1914 and the statute of 1920 that admitted women to full membership of the University. But the negotiations begun in 1913 smoothed the way for a rapid and uncontroversial victory after the war. 158 159 160 161 162 163

MSS.

Although university reformers of Ball's circle had campaigned for the Delegacy Statute. M. Stocks, My Commonplace Book (1970), 111. Stocks to Rogers, 13 Oct. 1913, Penrose to Rogers, 17 Nov. 1913, Rogers MSS. Rogers to Stocks, 10 Nov. 1913, Rogers MSS. See Gazette xxxix. 829 (22 June 1909). Stocks, Commonplace Book, 106±7 `Degrees for Women, Council Scheme', notes by J. L. S[tocks], n.d. [Mar. 1914], Rogers

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A comment by an opponent of the women's degree movement, George Brodrick, Warden of Merton, encourages re¯ection on the nature of that victory. The women's colleges, he argued, are in Oxford, but they are not of Oxford, and are no more known to the University, as such, than Holloway College, many of whose students pass University examinations but will be jealously excluded from degrees . . . In the case of young men, `residence at Oxford' means something de®nite, regulated by University statutes as well as by a collegiate tradition of centuries, subjected to Proctorial jurisdiction, and characterised by a freedom of social intercourse which, for good or evil, has a powerful in¯uence on all who go through it. In the case of young women it means something quite inde®nite, which can only be salutary under most judicious management, and must needs prove injurious if it were `under the same regulations as apply to Undergraduates'.164

This vision of Oxford as a place designed for men, with a hidden curriculum just as important as the intellectual training it provided, was reaf®rmed in 1927 when Congregation imposed a limit on the number of women students ± a decision backed by some men with close associations with the women's societies. Joseph Wells served on LMH's committee and married one of its more distinguished early students, Frances Mary Crawley. Defending the quota, he wrote: Oxford on the strictly educational side can receive and educate the ablest women. But Oxford is much more than a strictly `educational' body, and it is more than doubtful if women can ever share the full life, which centuries of students have gradually elaborated for men and for the development of English manhood.165

Admission to membership of the University conferred practical advantages on women, but in the discourse that de®ned Oxford as `an ancient University endowed for men' they would continue to be interlopersÐthere, and yet not there, always subsidiary to its main purposes.166 Before 1914 the women at Oxford were frequently reminded of their extra-mural status. The degree struggle of the 1890s led to complaints that they were overcrowding libraries and lecture rooms and brought to the surface currents of misogyny that were not con®ned to Senior Common Rooms. Isis, denouncing the `pestilent agitation', claimed that `at least seveneights of those by whom and for whom an University existsÐwe mean, of course, the UndergraduatesÐare bitterly opposed to this threatened inva164

Due Recognition of Women, 9. J. Wells, `Women at Oxford', English Review, 45 (1927), 444. Frances Wells (LMH 1891± 4) took a ®rst in Modern History, and taught at Cheltenham Ladies' College before marrying and becoming the Secretary of St Hilda's Hall and the Nettleship librarian. 166 See I. Carter, Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-war Years (1990), 159±76. 165

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sion of the Amazons.'167 An earlier episode, recalled by Miss Shaw Lefevre as the `Curzon incident', showed that even friendly gestures towards the women's societies might back®re. The Union's librarian made an unsolicited proposal in November 1879 that women students at the halls should be allowed to use its library. George Curzon, then a Balliol undergraduate, led the opposition `in terms which were neither courteous nor respectful'.168 Opinion was evenly divided and a poll of Union members produced a vote in favour of the proposal (254 votes to 238). The offer was declined with thanks but it prompted disagreeable comments in both Oxford and the national press.169 As Chancellor, Curzon made amendsÐand it is recorded that `at one of his luncheons . . . he offered his silver cigarette box to Miss Wordsworth herself. That very grande dame, who had a strong sense of humour, declined the cigarette, but did not repel the attention.'170 The moral of both incidents was, perhaps, the same: it was up to those responsible for the women's societies to know how ladies should conduct themselves. Whether the issue was invasion of male territory or preservation of feminine proprieties, the hegemony of men and masculinity within the University meant that questions about why women were there at all lurked constantly in the background. Could women bene®t from an Oxford education? And what did the education they received in Oxford really amount to? The anti-degree party represented a view of the University that foreclosed such questions. Oxford was designed to prepare classically trained public schoolboys for careers in Church, State, and EmpireÐand, above all, the lifestyle implied by `residence' was inherently unsuitable for women. Such views invited caricature. `A degree is merely a record of the LIFE OF THE PLACE. This is the important thing for young men, not mere results in examinations (no importance attached to these things in a College like Balliol)'Ðso the Oxford Magazine wryly summarized Strachan-Davidson's case against opening the BA.171 Miss WordsworthÐa Gilbert and Sullivan fanÐcommemorated the controversy in an operetta, The Apple of Discord, performed by LMH students. In one scene a chorus of conservative dons defend the `golden fruit of learning' from the touch of woman's hand, until they fall asleep `sipping sound port wine after Hall at ®ve-®fteen'.172 And yet the college experience, as understood at the ancient men's foundations, could not be quite the same for these generations of women. In Bertha Johnson's words: 167

`The Battle of the Blue-Stockings', Isis, 124 (22 May 1897), 266. Shaw Lefevre, `Personal Recollections', cited in Adams, Somerville, 32. 169 Oxford Union Library, Rough Minute Book 1876±84; `He Girls', in Saturday Review, 48 (29 Nov. 1879), 655±6. 170 L. Magnus, Herbert Warren of Magdalen (1932), 139. 171 OM, 4 Mar. 1896. 172 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 117. 168

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The life of the College woman is different in very essential respects . . . to the life of the ordinary undergraduate and even so has elements less exactly forming the complement of her previous experience and training, and less anticipating the life which the world, as a rule, afterwards expects her to lead.173

`Essential' differences in the Oxford experience for men and women were in fact the product of various in¯uences. The poverty of the women's colleges imposed a regime of strict economy: as at Keble, meals were taken in common and paid for in an inclusive termly fee. The typical undergraduate, by contrast, dined in his college hall but otherwise catered for himself. A more closely supervised lifestyle was thought appropriate for women and helped to allay worries about the effect of academic work on their health. At LMH, for example, a bell signalled bed-timeÐat ®rst at 10 p.m., later at 10.30Ðand there was a ban on smoking and on keeping alcohol in students' rooms. But the Oxford environment also had a pervasive, if complex, in¯uence on the life of the women's societies. On one hand it shaped them in its own image. Oxford was a collegiate University in which college men taught women and women worked, like men, to acquire a liberal education and professional quali®cations. On the other hand the proximity of women's and men's colleges tended to place women under special constraints. Women students were conspicuously less free than men undergraduates chie¯y because of rules imposed on them to restrict association between the sexes.174 Chaperons, who might be older women from the halls, or AEW or North Oxford ladies (often `armed with knitting') who charged a shilling an hour, were required on academic as well as social occasions.175 At ®rst even large groups of women were chaperoned at lectures. From 1893 a chaperon was required only when students attended college lectures alone and in 1911 it was agreed that the women principals might dispense individuals from this rule. But it remained irregular for women to `coach' unchaperonedÐeven in a pairÐin a man's college rooms, as Ernest Barker discovered when his growing family forced him to give up the practice normally followed by married tutors of teaching women at his home. `I believe that our understanding on the question has been rather slackly carried out . . . ,' wrote Bertha Johnson when consulted on the point. `I suppose we ought not to hold out about Mr. BarkerÐtho' I cannot say I like it!'176 Social contacts between women and university men were in some respects more strictly monitored in 1914 than in earlier years. Such matters were 173

MS of article for the Humanitarian, Mar. 1896, B. Johnson MSS, SACA. Cf. Sutherland, `Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the education of women in Cambridge' (n. 64), 43. 175 LMH Brown Book, 1928, 97±9; M. L. Lee, `A woman student at Oxford in the 1890s', OM, 131 (1996), 11. By 1914 the fee had risen to 1s/6d an hour; J. Evans, Prelude and Fugue: An Autobiography (1964), 70. 176 Principals' Meetings 1903±1917, fos 33±4 Johnson to Penrose (copy), 27 Oct. 1910, SCA. 174

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initially at the discretion of the principals who could, like the mother of a family, adapt rules or conventions to particular cases and introduce variations of their own.177 Miss Moberly, for instance, insisted that invitations could be accepted only from undergraduates known to a student's parents, after `a dif®cult experience with irate parents who found their daughter suddenly engaged to a most undesirable person'.178 But she did not insist on chaperonage when students received invitations from senior members, who were apt to be `sensitive'ÐCharles Dodgson in particular was allowed the privilege of teÃte-aÁ-teÃte tea or dinner parties.179 An LMH student of the 1880s, writing in Oscar Wilde's magazine the Woman's World, claimed that `beyond the fact that [students] vary their amusements with a good deal of really hard work . . . their life differs very little from that of any ordinary girls in society.'180 Miss Wordsworth was notoriously erratic in enforcing the hall's rules: Elizabeth Lea (LMH 1887±90) recalled that one of her contemporaries contrived to get engaged on the roof of the Radcliffe Camera and another in Holywell churchyard.181 But in the Edwardian era, when the degree question was revived, it was put to the women's societies that the University would want some reassurance on the effectiveness of their discipline. Annie Rogers and Emily Penrose were commissioned by the AEW in 1909 to compile a report codifying rules in force to prevent women students from mixing with undergraduates.182 The outcome was a more uniform and restrictive regimeÐSomervillians lost the freedom they had won in Miss Maitland's day to attend dances in term-timeÐand the ®ve principals now began to meet regularly to discuss points of interpretation. The Rogers±Penrose report on `Rules of Discipline' sought to allay anxieties by claiming that the regulations of the women's societies were in correspondence with the traditions of that class of society to which most of the Oxford students belong. A large proportion of the students in other Universities belong to a different class, and many of them are preparing to be teachers in elementary schools. There would be great dif®culty in enforcing rules which were in marked contrast with the habits of the students' homes.183 177

Adams, Somerville, 115. Discipline ®le, Moberly to Penrose, 16 Sept 1909, SCA. 179 Cohen, Letters of Lewis Carroll (n. 83), ii, 1008. For the privileged treatment given to Gilbert Murray at Somerville see Adams, Somerville, 118. 180 `The Oxford Ladies' Colleges', by a member of one of them [ Janet Hogarth], Woman's World, 1 (1887), 35. 181 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer 134; reminiscences of E. M. Wright (neÂe Lea): Oxford, xiv. 2 (May 1956), 78. 182 Notes of conversation with VC [T. H. Warren], 17 July 1909, Rogers MSS, SACA (copy in Somerville, Discipline ®le); AEW Report as to the Rules of Discipline in force for the Women Students at the University of Oxford (1909), Bodl. MS Top. Oxon d. 1048, fos 127±8. 183 There may be an allusion here to much publicized con¯icts over discipline at the Welsh universities; see Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 194±5. 178

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There was some truth in this claim. Daughters of genteel middle-class families were not allowed to `walk out' with young men. Yet some features of the Oxford regimeÐeven if students accepted them philosophicallyÐ were clearly by this stage more restrictive than conventions observed in such families. This was, in fact, spelled out in the letter sent to each new Somerville student by Emily Penrose. There were, she wrote, a number of unwritten rules or customs which belong specially to Oxford and which our students are very loyal in observing. Students never go into Colleges alone. They do not walk in College gardens nor attend College Chapels without permission and in some cases not without a chaperon. They do not walk `by the Barges' nor along the towing path. They do not take long country walks or bicycle rides quite alone . . . As a rule they do not walk much about the city alone. When attending College lectures they do not go in singly but two or three together. They sit all together and even if they have relatives or friends attending the same lectures it is understood that they do not speak to them. This is by the wish of the Colleges, which give us the privilege of attending their lectures.184

Mary Stocks, herself from an upper-middle-class professional background, was disconcerted to ®nd that Gilbert Murray's daughter Agnes (Somerville 1913±15) was deemed to require a chaperon when attending tea-time meetings of the OU Fabian Society. At the LSE men and women students had mixed freely and as a newcomer to Oxford, she recalls, `this sex apartheid seemed very odd to me.'185 LSE was, of course, unusually sophisticated; elsewhere chaperonage rules were still widely enforced in universities and it was only after the First World War that Oxford came under ®re for its conservative rules on association between the sexes.186 As in other university towns, moreover, conventions of ladylike behaviour were imposed partly to avoid criticism from local residents. It seemed to one Somervillian that women students and women dons alike lived in perpetual fear of shocking a curious body of opinion vaguely known as `North Oxford'. It was never discovered in the ¯esh, but it was understood to consist of the pussy element in dons' wives backed by the coerced support of their husbands.187

But the regime that evolved at Oxford owed its special quirks and rigidities to the fact that it was adopted, above all, in deference to University men. 184

Penrose to Lewis, 6 Sept. 1907, Discipline ®le, SCA. Stocks, My Commonplace Book, 113±14. 186 See The Twentieth Century, 361±4. Chaperonage at other universities is discussed in Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? and, from an anthropological perspective, in Delamont, Knowledgeable Women (n. 84), 76±7. 187 W. Meikle, Towards a Sane Feminism (1916), 64±5. 185

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The traditionally monastic ethos of the men's colleges came under threat as the female population of the city grew. Dons were anxious to defend it. The discipline exercised over undergraduates by college deans and proctors was not well adapted to this end, because the conventions of polite society assumed that it was for `ladies' to exercise restraint and accept the supervision of older women. For the proctors to accost a young lady in the streets and demand her name verged on impropriety. The only recorded brush between the proctors and a woman student before the war involved a home student who availed herself of a lady's right to refuse speech with strange men.188 Men undergraduates were subject to proctorial rules designed to keep them away from women. After 1905 they were prohibited from attending dances in term-time. An older rule made it an offence for an undergraduate to walk or talk with a woman, while sexual liaisons were treated as a grave offence and punished by expulsion.189 But proctorial practice was to challenge undergraduates only when they were seen with girls of a lower social class, reporting the man to his college and the girl to her parents, employers, or (in the case of prostitutes) the police.190 It was not a regime designed to cope with the middle-class girlsÐmany of them in fact unconnected with the women's societiesÐwho appeared in late Victorian and Edwardian Oxford. The bicycle and the motor car, the tennis court and the golf course, the cinema and the cafeÂ, all increased opportunities for mixed leisure pursuits in this generation. How to curb them? It was easy to put pressure on the women's societies while they were seeking recognition and hard to ®nd other ways of meeting the `vague fears' entertained by University men about the implications of a growing female presence for undergraduate lifeÐtraditionally celibate but characterized by a large degree of freedom. `It does not matter if boys will be boys so long as one can prevent girls being girls,' was a maxim cited by one fellow.191 Not until 1925 did the proctors grasp the nettle and impose rules on association between male and female junior members of the University that were binding on both sexes. A pre-war undergraduate, as Harold Macmillan recalled, could remain barely aware of the presence of women students in the university.192 Yet for the women from the earliest days there was a sense that their halls belonged there and that contacts with the University formed an essential part of the 188 OUA W. P. 7 (6), Senior Proctor's Manual, fo 111. At a meeting of the women principals in May 1914 it was `strongly felt to be undesirable that women students should interview the proctors alone'; Bodl. Dep. d. 759, 25. 189 A. J. Engel, ```Immoral Intentions''. The University of Oxford and the problem of prostitution, 1827±1914', Victorian Studies, 23 (1979), 79±107. 190 Senior Proctor's Manual, fo 111; Rogers, notes on a conversation with Mr Williams, 28 June 1912, Rogers MSS, SACA. 191 D. G. H[ogarth], `Oxford Degrees for Women', Anti-Suffrage Review, 6 (May 1909), 5±6. 192 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 7h.

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education they received. Miss Wordsworth and Miss Shaw Lefevre took some pains to `bring their students out' in Oxford society and visitors to the halls included local celebritiesÐsome of whom, like Ruskin, had not at ®rst viewed them with favour.193 A pattern was established of `At Home' days, garden parties, and the like at which members of the University were entertained in the halls, while married tutors and University families connected with the halls entertained women and men students together. Edward Caird and his wife gave `Balliol breakfasts' to which girls who had no family or friends in Oxford were invited. Those who did have undergraduate friends might entertain them, by permission, in the halls' public rooms, and St Hugh's began the custom in the 1890s of giving a mixed dance every third year in Commemoration week. Women sang in the Bach Choir and were admitted as chaperoned spectators at Union debates, OUDS performances, college concerts, and sporting events. Shortly before the war a new regime was inaugurated in which they could also be chaperoned participants in selected University societies, of which the ®rst were the Fabians and the OU War and Peace Society.194 An impression prevailed that they were better integrated in the University than Cambridge women, with their larger and more self-suf®cient colleges. An LMH student of the 1880s noted that the latter tended to say ```When I was at Newnham''' whereas `the Lady Margaret or Somerville woman [said] ``When I was at Oxford''.'195 Somervillians were equally happy with their lot: `mixed Colleges were deprecated, but mixed universities strongly advocated' by the Associated Prigs, a select college discussion society of the 1890s.196 An Oxford education gave women freedoms that were, for many students, undreamt of in their family homes. The study with a door that could be shut against interruptions was the prerogative of the father, while control of hospitality rested with the mother. Winifred Knox (LMH 1901±5) recalled the `glorious freedom of one's own kettle' and the novel experience of `privacy ensured by the simple expedient of putting up the notice ``Engaged'' on one's door'.197 They also had the freedom of the river, for restrictions on boating and walking applied only to the Isis, not the Cherwell. Their reading was not systematically censored, as it often was at home. Miss Wordsworth exhorted students to avoid `poor, cheap, silly books', but there was no support for a suggestion made by Mrs Johnson that the Clarendon Press should be asked to produce bowdlerized editions of Elizabethan literature 193

Adams, Somerville, 26±7; Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 80±1. Principals' Meetings, 6 Mar. 1914, Bodl. Dep. d. 759, fo 24. The women's branch of the Fabian Society in Oxford, ®rst founded in 1897, lapsed but was revived in 1907; see Fritillary, 12 (Dec. 1897); 44 ( June 1908). 195 C. G. Luard in LMH Brown Book, 1928, 96. 196 Associated Prigs minute book, 15 Mar. 1896, SCA. 197 W. Peck, A Little Learning, or a Victorian Childhood (1952), 156. 194

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for use by the younger women.198 Agnes Maitland stood up to the protests of one father who queried the suitability of the Modern Languages syllabus: `I do not at all think that because a certain book has had a bad effect on the mind of a young man that [sic] it will necessarily have the same effect upon a young woman. I regret that the Revd. A. J. Carlyle (nephew of T. Carlyle) should have advised your daughter to read ``Candide'' but I ®nd that all teachers of literature expect it to be read.' The works of Rabelais, Diderot, and Rousseau were read selectively, but such decisions must, she maintained, be a matter for academic judgement. `The real question is whether girls are to study literature at all. If they are to do so, whether it be French or English they must read certain things written some with coarseness, some with frankness painful to us.'199 Even Miss Wordsworth did not bother about students who experienced religious doubtsÐit was enough if they turned up in a tidy state at chapel.200 Dress codes remained important at the women's colleges but students recognized the rationale behind them. The Associated Prigs agreed that `we as women students should dress as well as possible, lest, among other considerations, carelessness in this matter should bring discredit on the cause of women's education.'201 Somerville principals simply discouraged `dressiness', whereas at the Anglican halls there was a more conventional concern with the wearing of hats and gloves. Oxford women acquired a reputation for dowdiness.202 Yet one St Hilda's student recalled with approval that Mrs. Burrows encouraged the sense that `anything slovenly. . . was almost as objectionable as failing in an important examination.'203 Fashions of the time remained physically restrictive, but a student of the 1890s maintained that they allowed women more room than men to adapt costume to personality and occupation, instancing `the ``London butter¯ies'' of Eights week; the coat and skirt of the typical Oxford woman; the masculine attire of the woman who aspires to masculine modes of thought. The large sleeves of the present day [were],' she claimed, `a sign of the desire for space in which to develope [sic] mentally and physically.'204 As for the academic regime followed by women students, it varied both over time and between the different societies. Except in the degree agitation of 1895±6, there was no public confrontation, comparable to the dispute 198 LMHA, Wordsworth MSS Boxes 5 & 6, sermons on Whitsunday 1892, May 18 1902, June 3 1906; SCA, Principals' meetings 1903±15, fo 40. On censorship of daughters' reading at home see W. Peck in LMH Brown Book, 1928, 101. 199 Maitland ®le, copy of letter from A. Maitland 7 Feb. [n.d.] (the recipient is not identi®ed), SCA. 200 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 81. 201 Associated Prigs minute book, 23 June 1895, SCA. 202 J. Courtney, An Oxford Portrait Gallery (1931), 218±20. 203 Reminiscences of B. Hamilton, SHiCA. 204 Fritillary, 8 ( June 1896), 152.

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between Emily Davies and Henry Sidgwick, between exponents of equality and difference in women's education.205 All parties represented in the AEW agreed that women should work for examinationsÐat LMH at ®rst this resulted in a crop of failures; yet Somerville could make room for a student like Margery Fry, whose parents stipulated that she should not take examinations, while Miss Beale's insistence on provision for non-examination students at St Hilda's was in the end accommodated.206 The curriculum women followed moved closer to that of the men undergraduates as University examinations were opened and, with the introduction of new honour schools in English (1895) and Modern Languages (1904), the Delegacy's women's examinations ®nally became redundant. From 1896 the AEW issued its own `BA diplomas' to women who took the full degree course.207 As at the men's colleges, improvements in secondary education made it possible to raise standardsÐcompetitive entrance examinations were held at Somerville from 1908 and LMH from 1913, a growing proportion of women read for honours, and it was increasingly expected that they would have passed Responsions or its equivalent before coming up.208 Women were still permitted to offer modern languages in these qualifying examinations, but in 1913 Emily Penrose, with the support of the women tutors and the Association of Headmistresses, initiated moves to make Latin compulsory.209 Although it was not suggested that Greek should become a requirement for women, Somerville moved towards the Girton approach: students who could take the full undergraduate course were increasingly encouraged to do so. Vera Brittain, who went up in 1914 with very little Greek, found to her alarm that she was `expected to take the Degree Course, espec. as the giving of degrees to women may not be far distant. This means doing the Responsions Greek in Dec. This can be done if my Latin is good enough to be more or less neglected this termÐ& is it?'210 Luckily it was. Supporters of the admission of women to degrees maintained that the idea of separate programmes of study for men and women had died a natural death. In Arthur Sidgwick's words, `we ourselves began with the notion 205 Delamont, Knowledgeable Women (n. 84), 106±14, provides a useful survey of `the uncompromising and the separatists' in the UK and USA but, following Vera Brittain, overstates differences between Somerville and LMH. 206 Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer, 84; E. Huws Jones, Margery Fry: The Essential Amateur (1966), 36. 207 Diplomas and certi®cates were also issued to students who had taken other courses until 1913; Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 50. 208 77% of students admitted to the women's colleges in 1911±13 took Honours in Schools or Moderations and a further 5% took one of the Diploma courses; only 4% aimed at no more than a pass. For the corresponding ®gures in the men's colleges after 1900 see Pt 1, 360, 372 (Fig. 11.1, Table 11.A3). 209 `Papers relating to my move to make Latin a compulsory subject for Women at Responsions', Penrose ®le, SCA. 210 V. Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: War Diary 1913±17, ed. A. Bishop with T. Smart (1981), 116.

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(being inexperienced and not having worked it out) of ``education adapted to women''; and the whole progress of our work has been towards realizing that the one thing wanted was systematic study as it had been laid down by long experience for men.'211 Women tutors were unanimous in favouring the opening of degrees in 1895±6: a structured course was felt to encourage hard work, while a knowledge of Latin was important for all students reading Oxford's arts schools.212 Among senior women it was Bertha Johnson who did most to resist the trend towards assimilation. Home students were often admitted before they had completed their qualifying examinations and she continued to encourage them to study at their own pace and within a ¯exible curriculum. Arthur Sidgwick found himself under `considerable pressure' to allow his daughters to take an extra year when they read the Modern History School. It was, he explained to a colleague, on educational rather than doctrinaire grounds that he insisted they should take `the regular course': They are just as well able to work as the average man: they live as regular a life, take exercise regularly, (& neither drink nor smoke): they are no doubt more ignorant than the best men, but not more than the bulk of the 150 men of any year. . . I am persuaded that the time-limit is (in the case of normally competent & healthy students) most salutary. To have clearly before them the obligation to do the work properly in the given time (as the men all do) is one of the most valuable lessons for them to learn. It strengthens their resolution, forces them to arrange their work, & do it in a businesslike way, and acts as a steady force against waste of time, dawdling work, & self-indulgence of various subtler sorts. It gives them self-reliance, and a certain healthy robustness, which girls too often miss.213

To a greater extent than at Cambridge or London, women gravitated towards the modern arts schools, particularly Modern History (see Table 10.1).214 Greats attracted very fewÐperhaps because of its function as an avenue to careers in public and professional life that were still closed to women, as well as its reputation as a formidably dif®cult schoolÐand of the classical intermediate examinations Honour Moderations remained less popular than the less taxing Pass Mods. The Modern History school offered an accessible version of the Oxford `liberal education', aiming in the words of one woman history tutor to produce `not trained historians, not even . . . 211 University Degrees for Women, 47, quoted in G. Sutherland, `The Plainest Principles of Justice' (n. 23), 42. 212 Admission of Women to the BA Degree at Oxford. Report on the Evidence contained in documents, or in answers to circular and other letters, collected by Miss ROGERS, Hon Secretary to the AEW. Sent to the Vice-Chancellor as Chairman of the Committee of Hebdomadal Council (1895), 13±15, Rogers MSS. 213 Sidgwick to Butler, 10 Mar. 1902, Bodl. MS Eng. Lett. c. 473, fos 41±2. 214 See J. Howarth and M. Curthoys, `Gender, Curriculum and Career: a case study of women university students in England before 1914', in P. Summer®eld (ed.), Women, Education and the Professions (History of Education Society Occasional Publication, 8, 1987).

282

a new collegiate pattern TA B L E 10 .1

f i na l e x a m i nat i o n s ta k e n s u c c e s s f u l ly b y ox f o r d a n d ca m b r i d g e c o l l e g e wo m e n , 1 8 8 1 ± 1 9 1 3 ( p e r c e n tag e s ) 1881±3 Ox Cam

1891±3 Ox Cam

1901±3 Ox Cam

1911±13 Ox Cam

Classics/Lit Hum Maths Nat Sc History English Mod Langs Other (Took 2 Triposes) Pass Finals No Final Exams

1.7 0 1.7 5.0 8.3 11.7 0 Ð 15.0 56.7

5.3 (1.2) 2.4 43.8

4.1 1.6 3.3 31.7 5.7 9.8 0 Ð 13.8 30.1

4.6 (2.3) 0.4 26.1

4.7 0 6.8 30.9 16.8 5.2 1.0 Ð 8.4 26.1

3.2 (2.9) 1.9 13.8

3.9 0 4.3 30.5 23.4 7.8 4.3 Ð 1.1 24.8

8.5 (5.1) 2.0 15.9

Total (N)

100 60

100 169

100 123

100 264

100 191

100 312

100 282

100 390

12.4 15.4 12.4 7.7 1.8

12.4 20.0 12.4 11.7 14.8

13.8 20.5 14.1 15.4 20.8

12.3 13.6 12.3 15.6 24.9

Note: The women in these samples are those admitted to Girton and Newnham Colleges (Cambridge) and Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville, St Hugh's and St Hilda's Colleges (Oxford) in the years speci®ed. Oxford's Home Students have not been included: the MS register of their Society gives little biographical information on most students admitted before 1914 and they included a disproportionately large number of overseas students who came to Oxford to do English language courses or postgraduate work rather than undergraduate courses.

trained teachers of history, but thoughtful, well-educated men and women, with a grasp of method, a power of ready literary expression, a disciplined judgement, and an intelligent interest in modern social problems'.215 As an established undergraduate course, it also offered better teaching facilities than English and Modern Languages. The latter were especially attractive to intending schoolmistresses (and drew some scornful comment on that account).216 They lived up to their reputation as `women's subjects'Ðwomen candidates sometimes outnumbered the men in the English and Modern Languages listsÐdespite the austerely philological syllabuses adopted by these schools.217 By contrast Mathematics and the Sciences, as noted in Chapter 19, proved even less attractive to women than to men at Oxford. At LMH they were steered towards the humanitiesÐ`Not mathematics, you simply can't come to Oxford and do mathematics,' Miss Wordsworth told 215 Beatrice Lees (Somerville History tutor 1896±1911), paper on `The preparation of girls for the Honour School of Modern History' read to conference of Headmistresses and University Teachers of women students, 1898; Rogers MSS. 216 C. Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford (1941), 238. 217 See Chapters 16 and 17.

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Edith Langridge.218 This was not the case at Somerville, where the Vernon Harcourts remained in¯uential and a series of science professors' wives sat on the council.219 But whereas the halls acquired their own specialist tutors in arts subjects, teaching provision in the sciences was sketchy. Women could work in the University and, by the early twentieth century, college laboratories, but supervision of the studies of scientists at all the women's societies was in the hands of one tutor, Jane Willis Kirkaldy (appointed in 1894), and it appears that they rarely `coached' with men tutors.220 The `tutorial system' in the humanities started rather unevenly. Margaret Lee, an early student in the English school, recalled a regime of lectures supplemented only by Joseph Wright's notoriously testing AEW language classes. `Nobody was coached either in Language or Literature unless they chanced to excite the interest of Prof. Napier, who would then invite them to his study on Headington Hill to ``discuss dif®culties''.'221 The philosopher Hilda Oakeley (Somerville 1895±8), on the other hand, counted among her Greats tutors Edward Caird, W. H. Hadow, J. Cook Wilson, Edwin Cannan, and Henry Pelham.222 In History and Lit. Hum. tutorial teaching was provided from an early stage. It offered an ideal mode of integrating women students into academic life, since the presence of women in mixed classes was not welcomed by some dons, who felt it caused the men to `become restrained and irresponsive, and [that] the sympathetic ``rapport'' that should exist between teacher and pupil tends to vanishÐthrough no fault on either side'.223 Men tutors free to concentrate on women pupils, who came to them usually in pairs or threes, often extended to them the same care they bestowed on undergraduates, taking their work seriously and pride in their later careers. `Mr. Armstrong has been writing me such sweet letters,' wrote Maude Royden, `urging me to get a 1st etc. etc. and all sorts of wild projects.' A. L. Smith, another of her tutors, told her twenty years later, `when I boast that you were once my pupil, I ®nd people a little sceptical, as when I make the same claim as to Herbert Fisher or C. G. Lang.'224 Tutors could be alarming. A St Hugh's student con®ded to her diary that she felt `in a somewhat headless condition hav[ing] had this part of the anatomy bitten off by A. J. C[arlyle]'. There were women dons who produced 218

LMH Brown Book, 1948, 48. Among them Grace Prestwich, Emily Poulton, and Ghetal Burdon-Sanderson. 220 On early science students see Adams, Somerville, 39±42. A science tutor appointed in 1885, Margaret Seward (Somerville 1881±5, later Mrs McKillop), who had taken a ®rst in chemistry, left after two years for a post at Royal Holloway. 221 Lee, `A woman student at Oxford' (n. 175), 11±12. 222 H. D. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education (1939), 58±64. 223 Lewis Farnell in The Due Recognition of Women, 29. He added, `Even greater trouble is said to attend the ``co-education system'' in the Museum laboratories,' but for this there is no supporting evidence. 224 S. Fletcher, Maude Royden: A Life (1989), 17, 21. 219

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the same effect, notably Annie Rogers, `the Vampire of the AEW, the fell tyrant of the classical students, the bully of all beginners'.225 But formidable tutors, whether male or female, often inspired affection in their pupils.226 By the turn of the century women dons had largely taken over the role of directing studies, and in English and Modern Languages especially it was they who provided most of the tutorial teaching. Mildred Pope (Somerville 1891±3) established herself as a scholar in Old French without bene®t of Oxford tutoring, for the university had no experts in the ®eld: she later studied at Heidelberg, obtained a doctorate at Paris, and as Somerville's Modern Languages tutor from 1894 placed tutorial teaching on a more satisfactory basis.227 Edith Wardale, a pupil of Joseph Wright's, also took a doctorate, in her case at Zurich, and became the association's Anglo-Saxon lecturer and English tutor at St Hugh's. Other women tutors with claims to distinction include the Homeric scholar Hilda Lorimer and Helen Darbishire (an early woman Fellow of the British Academy) at Somerville, Eleanor Lodge and Janet Spens at LMH, the St Hilda's historian Elizabeth Levett, and the social scientist Violet Butler at the SOHS.228 But this by no means exhausts the list of notable pre-war women dons. Eleanor Jourdain, Vice-Principal and later Principal of St Hugh's, though better remembered as co-author with Annie Moberly of the classic ghost story An Adventure, was also a doctor of the University of Paris and at the peak of her reputation President of the Modern Language Association (1921±2).229 Grace Hadow, English tutor at LMH, wore her scholarship lightly but became a leading ®gure in the Women's Institute movement.230 Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save the Children Fund and a ®rst-class graduate of LMH, was for six years English tutor at Somerville.231 Some dons' wives who were scholars in their own right also taught women studentsÐamong them Mary Stocks, Joseph Wright's wife Elizabeth Lea, and Lettice Ilbert (Somerville 1894±7), who married H. A. L. Fisher after a period as a research student at the LSE. Women tutorsÐnot unlike their male counterpartsÐvaried in academic quality. Some were recruited from schools or left Oxford for posts as headmistresses, or in settlements or teacher-training colleges. Their conditions of employment were markedly inferior to those of the men dons: the stipend of 225

Diary of Dorothy Hammonds (1904±7), 7 Nov. 1905, 2 May 1906, SHuCA. See, for example, E. M. Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (2 vols 1932), ii 132 and Barbara Gwyer's memoir of Annie Rogers in Degrees by Degrees. 227 Studies in French Language and Literature presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope (Manchester, 1939), xi. 228 On early Oxford women academics see Perrone, `University Teaching as a Profession for Women in Oxford, Cambridge and London, 1870±1930' (n. 85). 229 Grif®n (n. 76), St. Hugh's, 34±5, 49±50. 230 H. Deneke, Grace Hadow (1946). 231 F. Wilson, Rebel Daughter of a Country House: The Life of Eglantyne Jebb (1967). 226

the women's colleges

285

a resident tutor at Somerville, £120±£150 a year, compared with that of a graduate secondary schoolmistress.232 Within their own societies they had begun to acquire professional status by the early twentieth century. They gained the right to representation on the governing bodies of the halls and in 1909 formed a Society of Oxford Women Tutors to promote the views of academic women within the AEW and the Delegacy for Women Students. At Somerville old students subscribed to set up a research fellowship in 1903: its ®rst holder, Evelyn Jamison, went on to become a History tutor at LMH. A second Somerville research fellowship was endowed by Gilbert Murray's mother-in-law, Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, in 1912.233 But University men were wary of accepting women dons on equal terms. Although it appears that a rather high proportion of early women dons engaged in research of some kind, the scholars among them did not always receive encouragement.234 Miss Lorimer was informed by Professor Pelham that there was no need for her to do research because all advanced teaching was provided by `friends from the men's Colleges'.235 Some women did receive invitations to lecture just before the warÐEleanor Lodge to history graduate students, Edith Wardale and Helen Darbishire to English undergraduates, and Janet Spens as deputy for the Regius Professor of Greek (Murray). In the new schools of English and Modern Languages, however, there was at ®rst marked reluctance to use women as lecturers, and at one stage the AEW boycotted the lectures arranged by the Curators of the Taylorian.236 A further handicap was that women (though technically not ineligible) were not in practice invited to examine. A tutor whose pupils did not do well in schools was left wondering whether the reason was prejudice on the part of the examiners or her own lack of experience. `Mary tells me you are greatly disappointed about the English list,' wrote Murray in a wellmeant letter to Miss Spens. `I am so sorry, but I cannot believe it is your fault. After all there is only one First among the women. It is not as if Somerville had a whole row of ®rsts.' And the following year: My dear, don't be unhappy about the class lists or the examiners. The latter probably mean well . . . The best antidote is to re¯ect how good your teaching is and how much your pupils like you and are proud of you . . . But I think it is true that the system at Oxford is apt to be oppressive. It has often just grown up and not been thought out.237 232 See F. Perrone, `Women Academics in England, 1870±1930', History of Universities, 11 (1993), 352. 233 Adams, Somerville, 67, 77±8. 234 Perrone, `Women Academics', 354. 235 Dame Lucy Sutherland, `Women in Oxford', History of the University tape-recorded seminar, 5 June 1973, HUA, 7. 236 AEW Education Committee minute books, 1908±12, 1912±17; Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon d. 1051, fos 28±54, 100 and 1052, fos 22, 45. 237 Murray to Spens, 23 June 1913, 2 July 1914, Bodl. Murray MSS 170, fos 20, 22, 24.

286

a new collegiate pattern

`There were able women among the early students, but very few of conspicuous talent,' Annie Rogers recalled.238 It was acknowledged that they worked harder than men undergraduates and yetÐas in later generationsÐit became the norm for women to gain a smaller proportion of ®rsts, though a higher proportion of seconds.239 Opinions differed as to why that was so. Bertha Johnson subscribed to the common view that women were by nature less original.240 `A woman's intellectual horizons, her sense of humour, her imaginative power is apt to be so much narrower than a man's,' wrote Elizabeth Wordsworth; although elsewhere she acknowledged that a sheltered upbringing might be the cause and that girls would bene®t from a Wanderjahr between school and university.241 A. L. Smith reached the conclusion, after many years of tutoring, that Oxford's impact on women was blunted by their social conditioning: Everyone at the university knows who has had pupils of both sexes, that in many ways their methods and in some ways the results of their work are quite different . . . I think that women students here, to put it shortly, work too hard and are far too docile and they have not got what is a weakness with men, the power of throwing the whole thing off completely and going into something else . . . Most of the women students come from a more restricted range, more respectable and conventional, and so on. The difference may be partly due to that and partly due to the tradition behind their education . . . There is not quite so sound an independent tradition about women's education as about men's.242

How far was this the case at the Oxford women's societies? Experiences varied. Edith Olivier went up to St Hugh's with expectations formed by Tennyson's `Princess': `Instead I found a lot of young women who seemed to look upon their Oxford years as merely the prelude to a troublesome examination, which would in its turn be the prelude to the life of a schoolmistress.'243 Vera Brittain (though by no means uncritical of Somerville) found, by contrast, that `College, far from turning one out a type, seems if anything to emphasize what is individual & make one want to emphasize it one's self.'244 Yet Viscountess Rhondda remembered early twentiethcentury Somerville for its `cloisterishness' and its dowdy and oppressive 238

Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, 153. Adams, Somerville, 34; J. Bardoux, Memories of Oxford, trans. W. Barker (1899), 9. In the early years, when fewer women attempted honours examinations, a higher proportion of those who did got ®rsts (30 out of the 104 women classi®ed in the years 1881±90); but of 549 women classi®ed between 1901 and 1910, 74 (13.5%) had ®rsts; 271 (49.4%) seconds, 155 (28.2%) thirds and 49 (8.9%) fourths. 240 Notes for evidence to Hebdomadal Council 1896, Johnson MSS, SACA. 241 Wordsworth MSS Box 5, 26 Sunday after Trinity 1883, LMH; E. Wordsworth, First Principles in Women's Education (1894). 242 Report on Conference with Association of Headmistresses convened by the Society of Oxford Women Tutors at LMH, Feb. 1917, LMH, Tutors' Records, Lodge Box 1. 243 E. Olivier, Without Knowing Mr Walkley (1939), 168±9. 244 Chronicle of Youth (n. 210), 118. 239

the women's colleges

287

atmosphere: `the air of forced brightness and virtue that hung about the cocoa-cum-missionary-party-hymn-singing girls, and . . . the self-conscious would-be naughtiness of those who reacted from this into smoking cigarettes and feeling wicked'.245 As shown in Chapter 24, women students did come from a narrower social spectrum than Oxford undergraduates, and those from more prosperous and fashionable backgrounds, like Lady Rhondda, who left to get married after two terms, were perhaps least likely to ®nd college life liberating. For most, however, the `disciplined freedom' of the women's college offered the best route they were likely to ®nd towardsÐto borrow Martha Vicinus's phraseÐ`an independent intellectual life'.246 The lifestyle of the women's halls changed as they grew and developed corporate traditions. There were alwaysÐas in the men's collegesÐmarked differences between them. Miss Wordsworth set the tone at LMH: the weekly Bible class, her Sunday evening addresses (often dealing, at Talbot's suggestion, with aspects of ethics and spiritual life relating to the work and duties of women), the emphasis on genteel convention lightened by her own eccentricities and wit.247 Maude Royden found the atmosphere `churchy'.248 But the Somervillian Grace Hadow, who moved to the hall as English tutor, was struck by `a vivid impression of delightful casualness'. `Where Somerville had a reputation for professional ef®ciency, the Hall risked the epithet ``ladylike'' with the underlying values and enjoyed the joke,' wrote her biographer.249 Somerville's second and third principals established the college's professional image. Agnes Maitland, who had earned her living in a variety of jobs and as an author of indifferent novels and good cookery books, was the ®rst self-supporting professional woman to become head of an Oxford hall. Emily Penrose was the ®rst principal with academic credentialsÐa ®rst in GreatsÐand had served in turn as Principal of London's Bedford and Royal Holloway colleges before she succeeded Miss Maitland in 1907.250 But part of the professional style at Somerville was a belief in devolution of authority from the Principal to tutors, and the fact that many of its students did not come from conventional Church backgrounds also affected the ¯avour of college life. The country vicarage atmosphere at St Hugh's marked a society that included a great many vicars' daughters, though it also re¯ected the personality of Annie MoberlyÐshy, indifferent to creature comforts, scholarly in an amateur tradition that adapted easily to the professionalization of higher education, she was also an accomplished 245

Viscountess Rhondda, This Was My World (1933), 107. M. Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850±1920 (1985), 121±62. 247 Talbot to Wordsworth 13 Jan. 1880, Wordsworth MSS. 248 Fletcher, Maude Royden, 16. 249 Deneke, Grace Hadow, 41. 250 V. Farnell, A Somervillian Looks Back (n. 100), 21±50; Adams, Somerville, 70±104. 246

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a new collegiate pattern

musician who played for student dances and conducted the women's intercollegiate orchestra. At St Hilda's in Miss Beale's lifetime half the students came from Cheltenham Ladies' College; it was the smallest of all the halls and the `gracious' personality of Esther Burrows, who had formerly presided over a CLC boarding house, ensured that it would be the most domestic and genteel. But her daughter Christine, who succeeded her in 1910, was an LMH-trained history tutor and St Hilda's attracted its share of women intent on professional careers. The Society of Oxford Home-Students, although pervaded by Bertha Johnson's in¯uence before she retired in 1921, was the society that evolved furthest from its original character. It became an umbrella organization for all women pursuing academic courses in Oxford who might, if left unsupervised, have trespassed across the boundaries separating men and women students. These included increasing numbers of foreigners, most of them either taking English-language courses or doing research. (Foreigners also went to the women's hallsÐ7 per cent of their students in 1911±13 came from overseas, mostly North America or Western EuropeÐbut the proportion was much higher among home students.)251 Mrs Johnson's view that home students ought to be, literally, students living in private homes rather than hostels was also modi®ed before the war. The proprietor of one private hostel for women students, St Kentigern's, was persuaded to move away from Oxford in the 1890s.252 But when the Vatican gave approval in 1907 for Roman Catholic women to study at Oxford, living in the hostel at Cherwell Edge run by nuns of the Order of the Holy Child Jesus, the SOHS absorbed them without controversy. Pressures to become more collegiate were already apparent in the society before 1914: it acquired a common room, clubs and a magazine, a staff of tutors, and a motto borrowed from Mrs Johnson's familyÐ`Faire sans dire'.253 The idea of corporate life for women as an education in itself developed gradually but was well established by the turn of the century.254 A number of the early principals had connections with the world of reformed public schools for boys: Miss Wordsworth and her successor, Henrietta Jex-Blake, had, like Miss Moberly, lived in their younger days in schoolmasters' households, while Miss Penrose belonged to the Arnold cousinage.255 The value of corporate tradition and community life was adapted as a theme transcending gender, as in an address by Miss Penrose at the opening of Manchester University's ®rst residential women's hall. 251

Butler and Prichard, 61±3, 66, 77. SOHS Committee minute books, 6 Mar, 1 May, 5 June, 27 Nov 1896, SACA. 253 Butler and Prichard, 66, 77±8. 254 Vicinus, Independent Women, 136. 255 Annie Moberly's insistence that `her father's headmastership had governed her conception of what a ``Principal'' should be' is recorded in Helena Deneke's MS Memoirs, 27; S Hu CA. 252

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In a Hall of Residence, the student has all the independence and dignity of her own ®reside; but her relation to her room is not that of an ordinary tenant . . . Students of the past have sat and thought over her ®re . . . She is one of a series, and as she realises this it impels her to be worthy of her line.

The obligation to get to know one's contemporaries was `an excellent preparation for learning how to get into touch with our own age in after life'. By mixing with women from different backgrounds, and with unfamiliar standards and tastes, students could `win their way to their own convictions', although they were also touched by the corporate ethos of their communities. `Out of the best thoughts of the past and the present is built up a body of public opinion, something we think of as the ``feeling of the Hall'', which acts as a standard to be lived up to, not only while we are still students but for the rest of our lives afterwards.'256 The resemblance between Oxford women's and men's colleges was often closest at points where both displayed similarities to the public schools. College sport for women grew out of an initial preoccupation with keeping ®t through exerciseÐtennis, gymnastics, rowing, walking, even skipping and tug-of-warÐbut became increasingly competitive.257 Hockey was banned by the LMH councilÐto the annoyance of Miss Wordsworth who sympathized with youthful high spiritsÐafter an inter-hall match in 1885 in which a Somervillian was injured and the hall's victory was celebrated with an unseemly bon®re.258 The ban was lifted in the 1890s, however, and by the turn of the century there were occasional complaints about excessive gamesplaying in the women's as well as the men's colleges.259 As early as 1890 badges were awarded to those who played against Cambridge in the women's inter-university tennis match, and hockey and lacrosse also became before 1914 sports for which women could earn this equivalent of a blue.260 Sport reinforced communal loyalties and rivalries: `St. Hugh's Hall is feeling somewhat slighted by an impertinent proposal that it should play for a challenge cup with St. Hilda's,' Dorothy Hammonds noted in her diary: but a victory over the LMH second eleven was received with `huge chortlings'.261 St Hilda's, on the other hand, could pride itself as a keen rowing college and the possessor of a silver challenge cup `competed for by revolver shooting at the Volunteer ri¯e range. The reason given by the donor for this 256

Address on the opening of Ashburne Hall, Manchester, 1910; Penrose ®le, SCA. K. E. McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870±1914 (Kentucky, 1988). 258 There seems to be no evidence for the claim in McCrone, Playing the Game, 44, that hockey was also banned for a time at Somerville. 259 Principals' meetings 1903±17, fo 6, Maitland to Wordsworth, 13 Oct 1905, SCA. For the corresponding complaints see pp. 531±3, 535±7, 799±800. 260 McCrone, Playing the Game, 44. 261 Hammonds diary, 30 Nov., 7 Dec. 1905, S Hu CA. 257

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competition was that ``if any of our students go to the colonies they might ®nd that art useful''.'262 A magazine for the women's societies, the Fritillary, was started at the same time as the Isis and it records an internal social life in the women's colleges that echoed the more sober features of the men's: drama, discussion societies, debatingÐwhether in the informal `Sharp Practice' societies found in all colleges or more formal inter-collegiate debates.263 Somerville, like Newnham, had a Parliament in which dons as well as students took part: speakers were identi®ed as men, titles were bestowed on donsÐas in `Sir P[hoebe] Sheavyn, Bart.'Ðand Miss Penrose presided over the opening of Parliament as King.264 Old students' associationsÐespecially important in fund-raising as the halls expandedÐmaintained contact with Oxford through a familiar pattern of gaudies, college magazines, sporting ®xtures, and interaction with current students interested in settlement work, University missionary ventures (such as Mother Edith Langridge's sisterhood at Barisal, linked to the Oxford mission to Calcutta) orÐin later yearsÐthe women's movement.265 In other respects, of course, the halls bore a closer resemblance to women's communities elsewhere. Modes of interaction between women took distinctive forms. Rituals of family life sometimes lingered onÐMrs Burrows said goodnight to each student personally in her drawing-room. Miss Shaw Lefevre's model of the country-house party was perhaps nearest to the norm of college life for women at Oxford.266 Relations between staff and students remained more intimate than was usual in the men's colleges. Dons played games, acted, and made music with students and joined in their `sociables', while discipline remained the responsibility of principals and was not devolved to deans or college servants. Among students there was less family feeling, however, and a strong tendency to associate within `years' which contrasted with the undergraduate pattern of `sets' based on common tastes or schooling.267 Even in a small community like St Hilda's there was `great etiquette in the matter of calling, cocoa parties, and exchanging Christian names' between freshers and seniors.268 Such formalities were common in all women's colleges of the period (although, like all campus rituals, they 262

Christine Burrows' draft history of the College, quoted in Rayner, St. Hilda's, 40. Cf. Bardoux, Memories, 105: `If one forgets for a moment that the ladies' review is superior from a literary point of view, it is impossible to discover the least difference between the two papers.' 264 Fritillary, 34 (Mar. 1905), 554; 52 (Mar. 1911), 918±19. 265 The Women's University Settlement in Nelson Square was started by the Cambridge and Oxford Women's Societies in 1883. LMH's Anglican Settlement in Lambeth, modelled on Church House, opened in 1887. 266 Adams, Somerville, 105. 267 On the life of the men's colleges, see Chapter 4. 268 Reminiscences of B. Hamilton, SHi CA. 263

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291

were not universally observed).269 One explanation for the sensitivity of seniors was the presence at the women's halls of a signi®cant, if dwindling, number of mature students, often former schoolmistresses, who had to be kept in their place. As the writer of a `Fresher's Vade Mecum' put it: Be the Senior a lady of twenty, be the Fresher reached thirty or more No matter! for Seniors are senior, as Freshers are fresh, evermore.270

The feminine culture of the halls set them apart from the self-conscious `manliness' of undergraduate life and had begun by the 1890s to foster interest in women's issues. Annie Moberly was persuaded in 1898 to speak on `the women's movement at the present day in connection with Scripture'.271 How far this collegiate women's culture tended to subvert norms of sexuality is dif®cult to determine. Early Oxford women sometimes emerged in later life as publicly identi®ed lesbians, among them the journalist and author Christopher St John (C. G. Marshall, Somerville 1890±3) and the broadcaster Hilda Matheson, who had been a home student.272 A heterosexual radical, Stella Browne (Somerville 1899±1902), believed that `arti®cial homosexuality' (as distinct from `true inversion') was encouraged in women by the segregation of the sexes, but that it manifested itself only when they were in their late twenties or thirties.273 Wilma Meikle bears witness to the ignorance on sexual matters among college women of her generation, commenting `perhaps it is hardly understood how little the average school or university girl discusses such matters.'274 Oxford was, proverbially, a place where intimate, even romantic, friendships ¯ourished and in these generations such bonding was for the most part necessarily con®ned to young people of the same sex.275 Yet historians in search of `homoerotic' dimensions will ®nd little to compare with the well-documented relationships formed by Constance Maynard, Mistress of West®eld College, in the atmosphere of Evangelical religious intensity that characterized that college's early years.276 A Somervillian of the 1880s, Lilian Faithfull, wrote of college friendships as apt to `degenerate into a sentimental devotion' and of her own escape from this pitfall through a `strong and sane friendship' with a student who refused to allow the relationship to become exclusive.277 But partnerships between 269 Vicinus, Independent Women, 144±5; H. Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Culture from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1987). 270 Fritillary, 15 (Dec. 1898), 237±8. 271 St. Hugh's Club Paper, June 1898. 272 S. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880±1930 (1985); E. Hamer, Britannia's Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians (1996). 273 S. Rowbotham, A New World for Women: Stella Browne, Socialist Feminist (1977), 102. 274 Meikle, Towards a Sane Feminism (n. 187), 87. 275 See, for example, D. N. Dalglish, We Have Been Glad (1938), 110, 130. 276 Vicinus, Independent Women, 158±62, 194±203. 277 L. M. Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage (1924), 66±7. Miss Faithfull's later concern as headmistress with curbing schoolgirl `raves' doubtless coloured these memories:

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women dons who set up house togetherÐEleanor Lodge and Janet Spens or, more famously, Annie Moberly and Eleanor JourdainÐthat would attract comment from later generations did not do so at the time.278 Nor did the unselfconscious use of male nicknames and undergraduate slang among women students of Dorothy Sayers's circle (Dean Burgon's fulminations of the 1880s were apparently forgotten three decades later).279 The ®rst case of `inversion' for which records survive occurred during the First World War. A Somerville Exhibitioner, Dorothy Spencer, made passionateÐand sometimes unwelcomeÐadvances to various contemporaries and told them that she was `bi-sexual' (in modern terms, that is, lesbian).280 She was believed to have caused Enid Starkie to have a nervous breakdown and eventually provoked a crisis in the college.281 Students protested: `It seems to us to be a menace to the natural basis of all relationships between women. In Men's Colleges also such things are known, and, we believe, are seldom tolerated for long.'282 Emily Penrose took medical advice on a subject that was plainly outside her experience: the prevailing view was apparently that Miss Spencer's condition was `pathological' and `not a case for blame'.283 She was brie¯y banished to a hotel in Stratford-on-Avon and told that she should not apply for posts in girls' schools. She returned to Oxford to take Schools, however, and went on, after a brief period teaching in a boys' school, to a successful career as a Conservative party of®cial.284 Perhaps we may see this episode as marking the end of an age of innocence. At all events, retrospective interpretations of women's relationships in the light of discoursesÐ whether medical or feministÐthat had not impinged on pre-war Oxford are bound to remain controversial. A topic much discussed, on the other hand, was the effect of an Oxford education on women's prospects in `after life'. The tone was often anxious, see M. Vicinus, `Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870±1920' in M. Duberman, M. Vicinus and G. Chauncy, Jr (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Lesbian and Gay Past (New York, 1990), 226. 278 E. C. Lodge, Terms and Vacations (1938); L. Iremonger, The Ghosts of Versailles: Miss Moberly, Miss Jourdain and their Adventure: A Critical Study (1957); J. Evans, `An End to An Adventure: Solving the Mystery of the Trianon', Encounter, 47 (Oct. 1976), 33±47; T. Castle, `Contagious Folly: An Adventure and its Skeptics', in J. Chandler, A. I. Davidson, and H. Harootunian, Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (Chicago, 1994). See also E. Edwards, `Homoerotic Friendship and College Principals, 1880± 1960', Women's History Review, 4 (1995), 149±64. 279 B. Reynolds (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy Sayers, 1899±1936. The Making of a Detective Novelist (1995), 73 and (for comments on the `Vigger-Chagger' at Encaenia), 78. 280 Discipline ®le, SCA. `Bi-sexual ˆ sexual feelings of a man & the physique of a woman', according to the Human Anatomy demonstrator, Alice Chance; note by E. Penrose, 9 June 1919. 281 K. G. Wood to Hodgkinson, 7 June [1919], in Discipline ®le, SCA; J. Richardson, Enid Starkie (1973), 39. 282 K. M. Hodgkinson, K. M. Thomas, and 21 others to Penrose, 24 May 1919, Discipline ®le, SCA. 283 Penrose to M. M. Barber, 9 Mar 1918, Discipline ®le, SCA. 284 Somerville College Register, 1879±1971.

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293

and with good reason: the verdict of historians has been that higher education played a more important part in validating the notion of professional employment for women than in widening the range of career ®elds open to them.285 The women's colleges did not set out to divert students from the domestic life that would inevitably be the lot of many, but even Miss Wordsworth (who never quite lost her nostalgia for traditional family ways) urged students to expect that they would ®nd a vocation. `It is not possible that there should be, as the census tables tell us, so many women more than can well be absorbed by home life and home duties, unless God meant them to be of some use to the community at large.'286 The notion of the `redundant woman' was banished in her Sunday addresses. Yet to students at the turn of the century prospects often seemed bleak. `Are you going to teach when you go down, or be a Home Sunbeam?' they asked each other at cocoa parties.287 Secondary schoolteaching, the principal career of 38 per cent of women at the Oxford halls before 1914, offered opportunities for a structured and varied career and was increasingly viewed positively as a woman's profession.288 Students were aware, however, especially before the advent of the local authority grammar schools set up under the 1902 Education Act, of the competition for good posts and the risk of exploitation. The ®rst edition of the Fritillary records an imaginary conversation between a headmistress and an applicant for a teaching post: `we should be able to offer you nearly £70Ð perhaps £65Ðor anyway it would be raised to that after the ®rst few years.'289 Women of Margery Fry's circle at Somerville, who had no need to earn a living, were equally pessimistic. She and Eleanor Rathbone `came to the conclusion that Parliament was shut to us, and practically everything was shut to us. There was nothing that it was worthwhile to be ambitious about.' `Oh, Margery!Ðthe future does lie so nakedly before us,' wrote another of her friends. `The hard fact is that there is no cure but waiting and grabbing at everything that turns up.'290 Opportunities opened for this generation of women in later years and, as Lady Peck points out, some of those who seized them had begun their lives after college as Home Sunbeams. Among her own LMH contemporaries were the principal of a women's college, two well-known archaeologists, and other scholars who made `lasting contributions to historical research', an MP (Mary Pickford) and an unsuccessful Liberal candidate who was prominent in public life in Scotland, two missionaries, and a nun (Ethel Romanes) whose ®rst in Theology marked her out for high in¯uence in the Wantage 285 Vicinus, Independent Women, 23±30; J. C. Pedersen, The Reform of Girls' Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England: A Study of Elites and Educational Change (1987), 378. 286 Wordsworth MSS Box 5, 2nd Sunday after Trinity [n.d.], LMH. 287 LMH Brown Book, 1928, 101. 288 See A. Oram, Women, Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900±39 (Manchester, 1996), 14±38. 289 Fritillary, 1, Mar. 1894, . 290 Huws Jones, Margery Fry (n. 206), 47±8.

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sisterhood, except that she died young. `One cannot, of course, claim that an Oxford career was wholly responsible for these achievements,' she added, `but they themselves would have paid it a warm tribute.'291 Others were more criticalÐwitness the efforts of Lady Lascelles to help her step-niece `to get rid of her Oxfordy manner'.292 Early historians of the women's colleges were perhaps too ready to give them credit for the achievements of alumnae whose advantages came chie¯y from the families into which they were born or married. Such was the trio of LMH travellers and Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, Gertrude Bell, Susette Taylor, and Ella Sykes; or Archbishop Benson's daughters Eleanor and Margaret, known for their social and Church work and as authors on subjects ranging, in Margaret's case, from the philosophy of religion and Egyptian excavations to animal books.293 Somerville's reputation as a nursery of novelists is well-deservedÐ yet one of the most distinguished, Rose Macaulay (1900±3), was conscious of the legacy of ancestors `addicted to preaching, reading and writing': she left Oxford, morti®ed, with an aegrotat.294 Other careers were shaped by a combination of Oxford and family in¯uences. Maria Lathbury, who read Greats at Somerville (1888±91), had established herself as a lecturer in archaeology before the marriage to Sir John Evans that enlarged her opportunities in both scholarship and public life. Their daughter Joan, eventually to become the ®rst woman Director of the Society of Antiquaries, had already completed a book on English jewellery when she went up to read for the Diploma in Classical Archaeology at St Hugh's.295 Marriage was more important as a life-shaping event to women than to men, yet in the middle and upper classes in this generation women were much less likely to marry. Among women students, as at the Cambridge and London women's colleges, fewer than one in three did marry (see Figure 10.7). Marriages between men tutors and their women pupils were not uncommon (etiquette, according to one well-informed novelist, required that the proposal should be put off until the student had `got through the Schools').296 But it was only in the 1930s, as rules on the segregation of the sexes were relaxed, that Oxford itself became something of a marriage marketÐ40 per cent of the women graduates of that decade who married chose Oxford men as spouses.297 Before the First World War there was 291

Peck, A Little Learning (n. 197), 165. Florence, Lady Bell (ed.), The Letters of Gertrude Bell (1989 edn), 21. Particularly disconcerting, Lady Bell explains, was Gertrude's tendency `to proffer. . . her opinions [and] . . . criticisms, to her superiors in age and experience'. 293 For example, Bailey, Lady Margaret Hall (n. 19), 125±30. See also Chapter 24. 294 Adams, Somerville, 360±1; S. Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (1909); J. Emery, Rose Macaulay: A Writer's Life (1991), 11. 295 J. Evans, Prelude and Fugue (1964), 22±3, 67. 296 M. L. Woods, The Invader (1907), 12. See also Mrs Humphry Ward, Lady Connie (1916), for a romance between a home student and her tutor; Adams, Somerville, 115. 297 The Twentieth Century, 353, 362. 292

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f i g u r e 10.7 Oxford students and marriage: Women 1881±1979, Men 1930±79.

nothing to discourage the widespread impression that an Oxford education reduced a woman's chance of ®nding a husbandÐor, alternatively, her interest in marrying.298 What advantages did it give her in the job market? The expansion of secondary schooling for middle-class girls in the later nineteenth century created what June Purvis has termed a `cyclical relationship' between academically ambitious public and grammar schools and the women's colleges, which recruited their pupils as students and provided them with staff.299 In this `renaissance of girls' education', celebrated by the Girtonian Alice Zimmern, Oxford was not especially prominent, chie¯y because its women's colleges were relatively late foundations.300 The best known of the founding headmistresses of major girls' schools were products of Queen's College Harley Street (Miss Beale and Miss Buss) or, in the next generation, Girton and Newnham (Miss Lumsden of St Leonard's, Miss Dove of Wycombe Abbey, the Lawrence sisters of Roedean). The smaller girls' private schools founded by some Oxford womenÐJulia Arnold's Prior's Field, Godalming, Margaret Lee's Wychwood School in Oxford, or 298

142.

299

Howarth and Curthoys, `The Political Economy of Women's Higher Education' (n. 10),

J. Purvis, A History of Women's Education in England (1991), 120. A. Zimmern, The Renaissance of Girls' Education in England: A Record of Fifty Years' Progress (1898). 300

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a new collegiate pattern

Corran School at Watford, run by Eleanor Jourdain before she became Vice-Principal of St Hugh'sÐwere outside the mainstream of educational reform, which emphasized the advantages for girls of large high schools or public boarding schools.301 In schools of that kind the Oxford women's colleges did, of course, come to enjoy much prestige: a grammar-school girl who won an open scholarship might, as at Blackburn High School in 1904, earn the school a celebratory day's holiday.302 But it was a matter of debate whether Oxford-educated schoolmistresses were handicapped, nevertheless, by the lack of a degree. The value of a class in Schools was, some argued, understood by `the Head Mistresses of all the schools one would wish to go to': Cheltonians who took the London BA felt that headmistresses preferred women from Oxford or Cambridge.303 Yet Oxford womenÐincluding Lilian Faithfull and Eleanor JourdainÐfound themselves passed over in favour of candidates for teaching posts with `letters after their name'.304 In the ®rst four years (1904±7) when ad eundem degrees at Trinity College, Dublin, were open to women who had taken degree courses at the ancient English universities, 54 Oxford women took the BA degree and 56 the MA.305 Others took London degrees after leaving Oxford. As shown in Table 10.2, just under one in ten students found openings in higher education, where the number of posts held by women, though small in absolute terms, was increasing rapidly, especially in the Oxford and London women's colleges.306 Here the specialized nature and cachet of honour schools work may have been an advantage, in the arts at least. Of the tiny band of women appointed to chairs before 1914, twoÐCaroline Spurgeon of Bedford College and Edith Morley of Reading University CollegeÐhad gained ®rsts as external candidates in the English School.307 The range of opportunities open to women in coeducational universities and colleges, where pastoral posts as hostel wardens or tutors to women students were sometimes linked with more straightforwardly academic appointments, has 301 On academically successful girls' private schools, see J. Howarth, `Public schools, safetynets and educational ladders; the classi®cation of girls' secondary schools 1880±1914', Oxford Review of Education, xi (1985), 59±71. 302 P. Summer®eld, `Cultural Reproduction in the Education of Girls', in F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850±1950 (1987), 158. 303 Parsons to Johnson, 17 May 1895, Lees to Johnson, 19 May 1895, Johnson MSS, SACA. 304 Faithfull, In the House of My Pilgrimage, 73±4; Jourdain to Rogers, n.d. [1895], Rogers MSS, SACA. 305 Curzon, Principles and Methods of University Reform (n. 148), 197. 306 By 1913/14 32 women held teaching posts (full or part-time) in Oxford, 69 at the London women's colleges, and 27 at Newnham or Girton (the latter were almost all Cambridgeeducated); of the two coeducational London colleges, LSE employed 5 women academics and UCL 14. See Perrone, `Women Academics', 345. 307 Both were students at King's College Ladies Department and the Oxford tutor Ernest de Selincourt visited to lecture and coach them; H. E. Bell, `First Woman Professor', OM, 127 (1996), 2±3.

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TA B L E 1 0. 2 p r i n c i pa l ca r e e r s o f ox f o r d wo m e n s t u d e n t s , 1 8 8 1 ± 1 9 1 3 ( p e r c e n tag e s ) 1881±3 1891±3 1901±03 1911±13 All N generations Nuns, Missionaries Professions (doctors, architects) Nursing Higher education Other academic research, libraries, archives Educational administrators Teaching (school or private) Central or local government Welfare work (paid) Authors, journalists Secretarial or clerical work Voluntary work War work Commerce Not known Total N

2

5

4

4

4

(40)

0 2 3

2 2 10

1 1 8

2 1 9

1.5 1 9

(14) (11) (82)

2 2 28 2 0 7 2 18 0 3 30

31 3 35 1 3 5 2 7.5 0 1 24

4 1 38 2 1 4 1 9 2 0 24

2.5 2 33 3 4 2 3 3 4 2 25

3 2 34 2 3 3 2 6 3 1 25

(26) (18) (330) (23) (26) (30) (22) (61) (25) (12) (239)

100 (174)

100 (251)

100 (474)

100

100 (60)

(959)

been charted by Carol Dyhouse.308 The `dif®cult careers' experienced by many early women dons belied the claim that such institutions made `no distinction of sex'.309 Oxford made no such claim. But there, as elsewhere, through the expanding functions of the University and the patronage of individual men, modest openings for women appeared in the world of male scholarship. Women librarians were employed at the Bodleian (and at Manchester College).310 Men dons recruited former women students as private secretaries or for literary or research work, sometimes for such collective projects as the Victoria County Histories or Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. Eleanor Lodge and Elizabeth Levett became keen 308

Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 62±83, 134±77. Edith Morley was among the women with Oxford connections who experienced career setbacks, as did Phoebe Sheavyn (English tutor at Somerville, 1897±1907, subsequently a lecturer at Manchester University), a founder member of the British Federation of University Women, and Hilda Oakeley; Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 46±7, 75±6 156±61; and (for Hilda Oakeley) N. L. Blakestad, `King's College of Household and Social Science and the Household Science Movement in English Higher Education, c.1908±1939' (unpublished Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1994). 310 For the American-born Lucy Toulmin Smith, librarian at Manchester College 1894±1911 and the ®rst woman in England to be in charge of a public library, see DNB, 1901±11. 309

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a new collegiate pattern

members of Professor Vinogradoff's seminar. The beginnings of collaborative work between men and women in the smaller science departments are discussed in Chapter 20. The new diploma courses offered the ®rst university teaching posts to womenÐAlice Cooper, tutor to women studying for the diploma in education, was appointed in 1897 and Nora MacMunn became demonstrator in Geography in 1905Ðbut in 1910 Alice Chance became assistant demonstrator in the Department of Human Anatomy. It was, however, the women's colleges themselves that played the crucial role for students with academic ambitions, as gatekeepers to the profession as well as employers and patrons of women scholars. In medicine, second in importance to education as a profession for women, Oxford had, by contrast, little to offer, although a handful of prospective doctors studied there before proceeding to LondonÐand one of these, Doris Odlum (St Hilda's 1909±13), became a well-known pioneer of psychiatry in the inter-war years. In the law and the Churches, less promising career ®elds for women, a few individuals were able to exploit Oxford's advantages. Cornelia Sorabji (Somerville 1889±1892), allowed to take the BCL by special decree, became India's ®rst woman barrister and adviser to the purdanaschins. Ivy Williams, who read Jurisprudence and the BCL as a home student, was in 1920 the ®rst woman called to the English bar. Another home student, the Prussian-born Gertrude von Petzold, studied at Manchester College and became in 1904 the ®rst woman to serve as minister responsible for a Unitarian church in England. Yet another, M. I. Atchison, crowned her career in the Order of the Holy Child Jesus as Mother-General, with an of®ce in Rome. The ®rst woman ordained to the Christian ministry in the UK was the Somervillian Congregationalist, Constance Mary Todd, who trained as Mans®eld College's ®rst woman ministerial student and was ordained together with her husband-to-be, Claud Coltman, on 17 September 1917.311 Maude Royden, the most eloquent churchwoman of her generation, became in 1917 the ®rst woman to preach in the Congregationalist City Temple and subsequently a regular preacher at the Anglican church of St Botolph's, Bishopsgate. But moderate `Church feminists', such as Louise Creighton (who joined LMH's council in 1906), were still opposed (as was Miss Wordsworth) to her call for opening the priesthood to women.312 311 E. Kaye, `Constance ColtmanÐa forgotten pioneer', Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 4 (1988), 134±46; id., `A turning-point in the ministry of women: the ordination of the ®rst woman to the Christian ministry in England in September 1917', Studies in Church History, 27 (1990), 505±12. For Gertrud von Petzold see Keith Gilley, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, xxi.3 (Apr. 1997), 157±72. Mary Atchison was already a nun when a Home Student. As Mother General of her Order, 1924±1946, she established its African Province, and its Irish convents and convent schools. For Cornelia Sorabji see p. 714 below. 312 B. Heeney, The Women's Movement in the Church of England 1850±1930 (1988), 89±93, 135±7.

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In social and welfare work, new developments of the period that enlarged the woman's sphere were well represented in Oxford. Women were electedÐmore readily than in Cambridge, it was claimedÐon to Boards of Guardians and other local government bodies.313 Bertha Johnson, for many years vice-chairman of the Oxford branch of the Charity Organization Society, took students with her on visits to the Headington workhouse. C. V. Butler published a survey of poverty in Oxford. Lettice Fisher started an Oxford Health and Housing Association and in 1918 went on to found the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child. Here were role models for aspiring welfare workersÐalthough students, who often came from homes where the duty to perform charitable work was taken for granted, also ran schemes of their own for hospital visiting, a play centre for poor children, and the like.314 Settlement work in London and elsewhere provided training that might lead to paid employment as, for example, a hospital almoner or local government child-care or social worker. A course of training in Oxford for social workers was started in 1913, at ®rst run by the Social and Political Studies Association in conjunction with Barnett House, but taken over by the University in 1918.315 Other Oxford students made careers outside the education sector as opportunities for paid work expanded, slowly and haphazardly. Janet Courtney (neÂe Hogarth), regarded as a pioneer at LMH, was among the university women recruited as clerks to the Royal Commission on Labour (1889±92) by its Secretary, Geoffrey Drage, moving on to become in turn supervisor of women clerks at the Bank of England, librarian of the Times Book Club, and head of the indexing staff at the Encyclopedia Britannica, before marrying and forming a literary partnership with a former Oxford tutor, W. L. Courtney, editor of the Fortnightly Review. Edith Deverell (Somerville 1892±5) and Dorothy Hammonds became inspectors of schools, Henrietta Escreet (Somerville 1903±6) became a factory inspector; others, like Maude Marshall (LMH 1892±5), obtained posts created in connection with legislation on juvenile and women's work under the Board of Trade. Dorothy Sayers and Cecil Woodham Smith (neÂe FitzGerald, St Hilda's 1914±17) became advertising copy-writers, Florence Lorimer (Somerville 1902±5) was for some years buyer for the Oriental carpet departments of Peter Jones and John Lewis. But an Oxford education did nothing to privilege women in such ®elds. Neither government service nor the commercial sector offered structured careers to university women, although the war brought openings of a temporary sort. Miss Penrose was among the witnesses who urged on the Macdonnell Commission the case for admitting them as competitors for 313 The Cambridge Poor Law Guardian, Mrs Rackham, reported in Oxford Chronicle, 10 Mar. 1911, 9b. 314 Huws Jones, Margery Fry (n. 206), 42. 315 Norman Chester, Economics, Politics and Social Studies in Oxford, 1900±85 (1986), 130±2.

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entry to the higher civil service (conceded in 1919). It is dif®cult to deny the charge that less thought was given to promoting business careers for women.316 It was only to be expected, ®nally, that Oxford-educated women would play a part in the leadership of the women's movementÐboth in the suffrage agitation that reached its climax, attracting powerful support from professional women, shortly before the war and in the more fragmented pattern of feminist politics that characterized the inter-war years.317 The point of entry for a numberÐincluding Eleanor Rathbone, Maude Royden, Kathleen Courtney, Ida O'Malley, and Lettice FisherÐwas the central executive committee of the main constitutional suffrage organization, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), to which Mrs Fawcett made a point of recruiting Cambridge and Oxford women.318 Suffragette militants with an Oxford background were rare and the two best knownÐ Viscountess Rhondda and the movement's martyr, Emily Wilding Davison (who spent a term at St Hugh's but took the English School as an external candidate)Ðwere at college there only brie¯y.319 How far did the Oxford experience, at least for those who stayed the course, encourage feminist consciousness? The answer is elusive. As Olive Banks has noted, higher education appealed to women who were already feminists, just asÐin these generationsÐfeminism appealed to educated women.320 Eleanor Rathbone was remembered as a `®erce feminist' in her Somerville years, which coincided with the 1895±6 degree controversy: it does seem likely that she acquired these convictions at college and she used the old Somervillians' magazine to urge the formation of local suffrage societies.321 For Vera Brittain, on the other hand, the formative in¯uence was a Newnhameducated schoolmistress who awakened her interest in feminist ideas before she went to Oxford.322 And what are we to make of Janet Courtney's claim 316

See Wilma Meikle on `The Buss-Beale Blunder', Towards a Sane Feminism, 21±34. Florence Lorimer's contribution to Sir Aurel Stein's expeditions is addressed in Helen Wang, `Stein's Recording Angel', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3, ser. 8, 2 (1998), 207±28. 317 About a ®fth of the women listed in the Suffrage Annual and Women's Who's Who (1913) had been to university; J. Park, `British suffrage activists of 1913', Past and Present (1988), 147±62. 318 Eleanor Rathbone succeeded Mrs Fawcett as leader of the NUWSS in 1919, Kathleen Courtney became its secretary, Maude Royden and Ida O'Malley in turn edited its periodical Common Cause. Other Oxford women who served on the central executive were Evelyn Atkinson (Somerville 1896±9), who was on Somerville's council; Winifred Haver®eld (neÂe Breakwell, Somerville 1900±3), the wife of the ancient historian F. J. Haver®eld and a tutor at St Hugh's; and Mary Stocks. 319 J. Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914±28 (1989), 30±2, 137±41; L. Stanley et al., The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (1988). 320 O. Banks, Becoming a Feminist (Brighton, 1986), 13. 321 M. Stocks, Eleanor Rathbone (1949), 63; J. Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (1996), 16; SSA Reports (1898), 32, Somerville College. 322 D. Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (1996), 19, 22±3.

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that the ethos of LMH under Miss Wordsworth made it `impossible to grow up a feminist'?323 The ideal of `Christian womanliness' did not, it is true, encourage agitation. Yet the Oxford women's societies existed in a world in which `women's issues' were much discussed. Local opinion was less conservative than has sometimes been suggested, despite the prominence of ladies with Oxford connections among the signatories of Mrs Humphry Ward's `Appeal against Female Suffrage', published in the Nineteenth Century in June 1889.324 A dramatic local riposte was the debate staged on 1 August during the extension Summer Meeting at the Oxford UnionÐthe ®rst occasion when women were admitted to the ¯oor of its debating hallÐwhen a motion for women's suffrage, proposed by Arthur Sidgwick and seconded by Hudson Shaw, was carried by 373 votes to 129.325 A handful of women active in the movement for higher educationÐAnnie Rogers among themÐmade no secret of their support for women's suffrage.326 Bertha Johnson presided over the committee that collected signatures in Oxford for the Women's Suffrage Appeal of 1893±4.327 The Oxford Women's Liberal Association was divided on the issue, but in the 1895 general election the Women's Emancipation Union was said to have been successful in lobbying Lord Valentia, Conservative candidate for the city.328 It was a paper read to that society by Miss Rogers in 1897, on the position of women at Oxford and Cambridge, that attracted the interest of the St Hugh's benefactor, Clara Evelyn Mordan, a keen suffragist, who became a close friend of Miss Moberly's.329 Links between the women's colleges and the national women's movement were less controversial at that time than they became in later years, when the term `feminism' acquired connotations of hostility towards men.330 Agnes Maitland was a vicepresident of the National Union of Women Workers, while the Women's 323

J. E. Courtney, An Oxford Portrait Gallery (1931), 243. They included Mrs. Max MuÈller, Charlotte Toynbee (Arnold Toynbee's widow and Treasurer of LMH), Margaret Woods, Lucy Soulsby, Lavinia Talbot, Louise Creighton, and Charlotte Green (although the last two later changed sides and Mrs Creighton in particular became an active suffrage speaker); Nineteenth Century, xv ( June 1889), 781±8. 325 Women's Gazette and Weekly News, 12 Aug. 1889, 661. 326 See Women's Suffrage Journal, 1 June 1885, 99, for a petition signed by Rachel Vernon Harcourt; Fortnightly Review, 271 ( July 1889), 133, for the counterblast to Mrs Ward's manifesto, signed by Eleanor Smith, Charlotte Sidgwick, and Dorothea Beale; Women's Penny Paper, 23 Mar. 1889, 2, for a meeting of the CNSWS attended by Charlotte Sidgwick and Miss Rogers. 327 Englishwoman's Review, 17 Jan. 1894, 20, 22. 328 Women's Gazette and Weekly News, 7 Dec. 1891, 3±4; Women's Herald, 28 May 1892, 6 and 19 Nov. 1892, 3, 13; C. Hirsch®eld, `Fractured Faith: Liberal Party women and the suffrage issue in Britain, 1892±1914', Gender and History, 2 (1990), 173±97; Bardoux, Memories of Oxford (n. 239), 93. 329 A. M. A. H. Rogers, `Historical Reminiscence', St Hugh's Chronicle (1926), 14; Grif®n, St. Hugh's, 32. 330 See, for example, S. K. Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, 1993); Butler and Prichard, 31. 324

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Institute in Grosvenor CrescentÐfounded by the family of a Somervillian, Elsbeth Philipps (1893±5), as an information centre for women engaged in professional and public workÐrecruited the Cambridge and Oxford women principals (Miss Wordsworth included) as vice-presidents.331 Female suffrage, of course, remained a highly controversial issue and Oxford laggedÐas alwaysÐbehind Cambridge in organizing local supporters. A Cambridge Society for Women's Suffrage, combining town and gown, was founded in 1884: it was twenty years before an Oxford equivalent, a branch of the NUWSS, was set up.332 Better known, in fact, are the University's associations with the Edwardian anti-suffrage movement: its historian goes so far as to describe it as `one of Oxford's ``lost causes'''.333 Prominent campaigners included, besides Mrs Ward, several Oxford men who were friends of women's education: Lord Curzon himself, James Bryce, and A. V. Dicey, and also the Mans®eld theologian John Massie, whose wife was on Somerville's council and who succeeded Arthur Sidgwick as chairman of the city's Liberal party in 1912.334 And yet it may be doubted whether in the decade before 1914 the balance of opinion differed signi®cantly in the two Universities or in their women's colleges. The founders of the Oxford Women's Suffrage Society (OWSS) wereÐmuch like the founders of the halls and AEWÐUniversity families with a keen interest in women's education. Two daughters of its President, Sir John Rhys, had been home students and one, Olwen, was French tutor to the AEW. Its chairman was Jessie Margoliouth, an independent Syriac scholar and the wife of one of Annie Rogers's closest allies, the Professor of Arabic.335 Mary Ward's view that women should stay out of imperial politics and cultivate other channels of in¯uence, through local government, philanthropy, and the family, had a diminishing appeal for Oxford women.336 Grace Hadow and Elizabeth Levett, both apparently late converts (like Newnham's Jane Ellen Harrison), employed such arguments against extending full civil rights to 331 Fritillary, 11 (June 1897), 185±6; The Women's Institute (1898), Bodl.; Women's Institute Reports, 1897±1912, Fawcett Library; D. Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women's Emancipation in the 1890s (1986), 225. 332 Women's Suffrage Journal, 1 Dec. 1884, 262±3; Mrs Henry Sidgwick, The Progress of the Women's Suffrage Movement (1913), 4; NUWSS 5th Annual report of Oxford Society for Women's Suffrage (founded 1904), Bodl. 333 B. H. Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain (1978), 99. 334 Ibid. 94, 99±101; on Massie see Oxford Chronicle, 19 Dec. 1911, 7. 335 At a meeting of the women students' debating society the following year Mrs. Margoliouth invited all present to join the OWSS; Fritillary, 35 ( June 1905), 572. Women's suffrage and related issues were regularly debated from 1900 onwards and pro-suffrage majorities became increasingly large from 1907. 336 Among the founders of the women's societies, Mrs Max MuÈller and Charlotte Toynbee were active anti-suffragists in the Edwardian years but they appear to have had little support from the younger generation of academic wives (one exception was Mrs Clement Webb (neÂe Joseph), Somerville 1893±6).

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women in 1907.337 But in later years the women's inter-collegiate debating society had to look outside Oxford to ®nd speakers to oppose suffrage motions.338 Somervillians not only turned down an offer of a lecture by Mrs Ward but asked hostile questions at one of her meetings in the city.339 By the last years of the Edwardian agitation, which peaked just after the movement for university reform described in Chapter 32, Oxford was regarded as a `stronghold' of non-militant suffragism.340 Women who passed through it on the Watling Street route during the NUWSS Suffrage Pilgrimage of 1913 were surprised, after the hostility they had met in Thame and High Wycombe, at the relative friendliness of their reception.341 Support at the women's colleges mobilized rather slowly. Student suffrage societies were formed at Somerville and LMH in 1907 and at St Hugh's and St Hilda's in 1910.342 But from 1908 Oxford women were represented at all major non-militant suffrage demonstrations in LondonÐthe St Hugh's contingent led by Eleanor Jourdain and Edith Wardale in their doctoral robes.343 In 1911 past and present students of all the women's societies combined to form an Oxford Women Students Women's Suffrage Society (OWSWSS), which by 1914 had 450 members.344 Student suffrage activities followed much the same pattern as at other women's collegesÐfund-raising `selfdenial weeks', speaker meetings, and the like. A new development in Oxford, however, was the willingness of the authorities to sanction mixed social events in connection with the movement. Here a precedent was set by the Union in 1908, when for the ®rst time it invited a woman, Mrs Fawcett, to speak at a debate.345 Somerville raised 28 shillings at a mixed tennis tournamentÐthe prize was John Stuart Mill's Subjection of WomenÐand afterwards the men undergraduates stayed to dinner.346 On 21 February 1912 the 337 Fritillary, 42 (Dec. 1907), 704±6; J. E. Harrison, `Homo Sum'. being a letter to an anti-suffragist from an anthropologist (1909). For Miss Hadow's later work for the suffrage movement see Deneke, Hadow, 54±5. 338 Representatives of national anti-suffrage organizations invited as guest speakers included Mrs Arthur Somervell and Gladys Pott; LMH Brown Book, Nov. 1910, 42±3; Nov. 1913, 26. 339 Adams, Somerville, 78, 80. 340 Oxford Chronicle, 31 Jan. 1913, 7. 341 Ibid. 25 July 1913, 7. For an entertaining account by a pilgrim, Mrs Duf®eld of Manchester, who stayed with the Sidgwicks and was shown round Oxford by R. W. Raper of Trinity, see D. H. Burden, `A College story partly authenticated', Trinity College Report, 1990/1, 69±71. The story that turns out to be a myth claimed that Raper was asked to show a party of militant suffragettes round Trinity and took them round Balliol instead. 342 LMH Brown Book, Nov. 1908, 39; SSA Reports, 1908, 45±6; Fritillary, 51 (Dec. 1910). 343 Grif®n, St Hugh's (n. 76), 32; Rayner, St Hilda's, 39; L. Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907±14 (1987), 83±4. For a description of the Women's Coronation Procession by Annie Rogers see Oxford Chronicle, 23 June 1911, 7. 344 Suffrage ®le, Somerville archive. 345 Rubinstein, A Different World (n. 44), 155±7. Her motion to remove the electoral disabilities of women was defeated by 329 votes to 360. 346 Fritillary, 53 (June 1911), 936±7; Adams, Somerville, 79.

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®rst mixed student debate took place, between the Somerville Parliament and Balliol's Arnold Society: the outcome was a majority of 86 to 26 in favour of equal suffrage for men and women.347 The escalation of suffragette militancy in that year polarized opinion in both University and city, provoking anti-suffrage demonstrations but also ¯ushing out support for the `lawabiding' suffrage societies. At an NUWSS meeting in the Town Hall in March, addressed by the Newnham classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, women dons were represented in force, among them the Principals of LMH and St Hilda's.348 With the exception of the geographer Nora MacMunn, who supported the WSPU and Tax Resistance League, academic women were non-militant, but they were none the less active participants in the agitation.349 Miss Rogers found herself (as she commented acidly in a local paper) at the receiving end of a `small stone' when a lantern procession of Oxford suffragists was mobbed in St Giles on a January evening in 1913.350 Among the dons who became `suffrage pilgrims' that summer, Eleanor Lodge walked `every step of the way' from Oxford to Hyde Park.351 Oxford women were bold too in associating not just themselves but also their colleges with the movement. `Here at Newnham, at least, we have always kept the questions of education and the vote so carefully apart,' wrote Eleanor Sidgwick, in a `cold watery' response to the suggestion that the Oxford and Cambridge women's colleges might combine to give it their of®cial backing.352 LMH, on the other hand, hosted the meeting that set up an Oxford branch of the Church League for Women's Suffrage; St Hilda's lent its gardens for NUWSS meetings, and at SomervilleÐdespite protests from the MassiesÐthe annual meetings of the OWSS took place in the gymnasium.353 It was, as Somerville's historian has noted, an extraordinary episode in the history of women at Oxford.354 They would hardly have departed so far from their usual cautious habitsÐespecially at a time when admission to degrees seemed at last to be in sightÐwithout the knowledge that they had in¯uential backing from Oxford men. University dignitaries and their wives were certainly to be seen on anti-suffrage platforms (although it was not, in fact, until June 1913 that a University branch of the Anti-Suffrage League 347

Ibid. 136±7. Oxford Chronicle, 15 Mar., 6. Christine Burrows and Henrietta Jex-Blake, who succeeded Miss Wordsworth in 1910, were both vice-presidents of the Conservative and Unionist Women's Suffrage Society. 349 Suffrage Annual and Women's Who's Who (1913). 350 Oxford Chronicle, 17 Jan. 1913, 7. 351 Ibid. 1 Aug. 1913, 7. 352 E. Sidgwick to M. Pope, 24 Oct. 1912, Suffrage ®le, SCA. Newnham dons, herself included, were of course no less active in the movement as individuals. 353 Oxford Chronicle, 18 Nov. 1910, 9; NUWSS 9th and 10th Annual Reports of OSWS, 1913 & 14; Adams, Somerville, 79, 81. 354 Ibid. 81. 348

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was formed).355 But the suffrage movement also had strong advocates across the political and religious spectrum: from Lord Hugh Cecil, Unionist MP for the University, to the young hotheads of the militant Men's Political Union, led by the socialists G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski; and from the Free Church League for Women's Suffrage (which met at Estlin Carpenter's invitation in Manchester College) to the Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, and the Regius Professor of Divinity, Henry Scott Holland, both stalwarts of the CLWS.356 Local Liberals remained divided but Massie's support came chie¯y from the city and county rather than the University: families that withdrew their support from local anti-suffragist candidates in 1912±13 included the Sidgwicks, the Rhys family, Gilbert and Lady Mary Murray, and Sidney and Oona Ball.357 Nowhere was it more natural to regard the movement as embodying humanist rather than exclusively feminist values. Signi®cantly, whereas the Cambridge alumnae suffrage banner displayed the daisies and irises that were emblems of Newnham and Girton, the banner of the OWSWSS, worked to a design by Edmund New, simply showed the spires of Oxford.358 The `sex war' that accompanied the later stages of suffragette militancy had less impact in Oxford than ideals associated with the agitation that appealed to the Edwardian mood.359 Particularly effective were speakers who stressed the movement's broader goalsÐthe af®rmation of women's responsibilities as citizens, the ®ght against their oppression as sweated labour and victims of the double standard, the need to work for `a whole moral revolution rather than the mere attaining of the political franchise'.360 Oxford gave them a good hearing. Nearly a thousand members of the University were present at the meeting, chaired by Scott Holland in the Examination Schools in February 1913, when Maude Royden spoke movingly on the evils of the white-slave traf®c.361 That was the year when suffragette outrages reached OxfordÐprinter's ink poured into pillar boxes, 355 Oxford Chronicle, 13 June 1913. For a demonstration at the Town Hall, addressed by Mrs Humphry Ward, at which six heads of houses and six professors sat on the platform, see ibid. 22 Mar, 1912, 8. 356 See, for example, ibid. 31 July 1911, 7; 21 June 1912, 9; 28 June 1912, 7; Oxford Times, 21 Feb. 1914; and on Lord Robert Cecil, L. P. Hume, The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, 1897±1914 (1982). R. E. Prothero, bursar of All Souls, who succeeded Anson as the University's second Unionist MP, was also an active suffragist. The Anti-Suffrage League deputation which met Lloyd George in Nov. 1913, when he was staying in the Christ Church Deanery for his Union speech (Ch. 31, n.162), consisted entirely of women, the NUWSS deputation (like the one from the Men's Political Union) entirely of men: Oxford Review, 22 Nov. 1913, 3. 357 Oxford Chronicle, 2 Feb. 1912, 7e, 16 Feb. 1912, 7e, 12 Dec 1913, 7f. 358 For the Cambridge banner, see Tickner, Spectacle of Women, plate xii; the Oxford banner is reproduced in black and white in Deneke, Hadow. 359 S. K. Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860±1914 (Princeton, 1987), 157±83. 360 Kathleen Courtney's phrase; Fritillary, 59 ( June 1913). 361 Fletcher, Maude Royden (n. 224), 102; Oxford Chronicle, 28 Feb. 1913, 5e.

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arson attacks on a boathouse and a timber wharf.362 The NUWSS did not escape reprisals. Its of®ces, on the ground ¯oor of Miss Kirkaldy's house in Holywell Street, were wrecked by undergraduates.363 But May 1913 saw a narrow victoryÐ199 votes to 190Ðfor a women's suffrage motion at the Union.364 The proposer, L. F. Urwick of New College, urged votes for women as part of a larger movement for moral and social reform: Harold Macmillan, seconding, claimed that `all the best women' were now in favour of women's suffrage.365 It is, in one sense, ironic that inter-war historians of the women's societies chose to say little about an episode that, at the time, seemed to draw women closer to the heart of the University.366 If the struggle to establish women's higher education at Oxford had been entirely about straightforward issues of principle, it would have been easier to tell the story as part of a larger movement for women's emancipation. To the Newnham-educated feminist Ray Strachey the admission of women to the ancient Universities was indeed part of that cause; and to Vera Brittain, looking back from a longer perspective, it `represented the quintessence of the whole movement for women's emancipation, the contest for the equal citizenship of the mind'.367 There is no doubt that Oxford women of earlier generations made these connections even if they did not dwell on them when they wrote for posterity. But seen from inside the University, the story was complicated by their relationship to a community of men, from whom they wanted not simply justice but acceptance. In this endeavour victory would remain elusive. Across the spectrum of University politics there were men who were willingÐfrom time to timeÐto empower women in a common cause, whether religious or secular, University or moral reform. It was, 362

Ibid. 21 Feb. 1913, 7e; 6 June, 1913, 7c,d; 21 Nov. 1913, 12, b,c. Ibid. 21 Nov. 1913, 12c; Harrison, Separate Spheres, 189. This vote has been overlooked by historians. Sheila Fletcher mentions that Maude Royden's nephew spoke in the debate but assumes that the motion was lost (Maude Royden, 95); and see Brian Harrison on the Union as a nursery for anti-suffragists (p. 101). For a survey of voting on women's suffrage in undergraduate debating societies (in the vast majority of cases, hostile), see J. Draper, `An Educated Male Elite: Oxford University Undergraduate Behaviour in the Formative Years of the Women's Colleges' (Oxford BA thesis, 1994), copy in SCA. 365 Oxford Chronicle, 16 May 1913, 9; OM xxxi (1912±13), 356±7. A. P. Herbert spoke against the suffrage: Israel Zangwill, the guest speaker, made the closing speech for it. For the favour usually shown to the cause supported by the guest, and for Mrs Faweett's Union visit, Nov. 1908, see p. 809 below. 366 We should remember that early histories of the colleges and SOHS were privately printed and written for a restricted audience, as was Miss Rogers's posthumously published book. Later historians have been misled by their silences; see, for example, P. Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian Britain: Private Lives and Public Commitment (1990), 145, for the statement that Annie Rogers and Bertha Johnson `constantly reiterated their rejection of other current women's rights issues'. Contemporary readers would have been under no such illusions. 367 R. Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Britain (1928); Brittain, Women at Oxford (n. 11), 16. 363 364

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perhaps, the accessibility to women of Oxford's ideals that was its greatest attraction. And yet, just as at Cambridge, the dominant discourse continued to de®ne it as a University for men. Women would inevitably remain the `second sex', gaining `only what men [were] willing to grant'; and also vulnerable to suspicions that, by encroaching on an essentially masculine culture, they would in the end destroy it.368 In choosing to focus her narrative on the parochial dimensions of the degree movement, the shifts and inwardnesses of University opinion, Annie Rogers was merely being true to her own perception of what it was ultimately about. `The really strong motives of both sides were sentimental, or as I believe people now call them spiritual,' she con®ded to an old stalwart of the anti-degree party after the war. `The men opponents thought that it spoilt their university if women were members, and the women supporters felt that they cared too much for Oxford to be treated as likely to do it harm.'369 368 369

S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1988 edn), 19. Bodl. G. A. Oxon c.34/3 fo 129: Rogers to Madan, 6 Sept. 1923.

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11 The Zenith of Greats w . h . wa l s h The term Literae Humaniores was used in Oxford's examination statute of 1800 to designate a major constituent in the new requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. According to the University Calendar for 1813, the ®rst to give such details, the examination was to comprise the following: 1 The Rudiments of Religion, under which head is required a suf®cient knowledge of the Gospels in the original GreekÐof the 39 Articles of the Church of England,Ð and of the Evidences of Religion, natural and revealed. 2 The Literae Humaniores, under which head is required a competent pro®ciency, not only in the Latin and Greek languages, but also in Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, as drawn from the Greek and Roman writers,Ðin Logic,Ðand in Latin Composition. 3 The Elements of the Mathematical Sciences and of Physics.1

Provision was made in 1807 for the names of candidates adjudged worthy of honours to appear distributed in two classes and arranged in two columns, one for `the Literae Humaniores', the other for `Disciplinae Mathematicae et Physicae', though it was not until 1825 that separate examiners in the two ®elds were appointed. At this stage nothing was said about any special weight being attached to performance in Logic when it came to awarding honours, as was to be the case later.2 If we ask what Logic was doing in an otherwise straight classical curriculum, the answer is that it had been a recognized part of undergraduate instruction under the Laudian statutes; the same was true of Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy. It is possible, however, that the regulations give a misleading impression of what was demanded in the school in these early days: according to Pattison, writing admittedly almost half a century later, Aristotle's Ethics was originally read just as `so much Greek'.3 1

Calendar, 1813, 70. See The Eighteenth Century, 513. Logic was `indispensably required from all candidates for the ®rst, second, or third Classes' according to the 1831 Calendar (p. 91). Under the 1850 statute it had `to be tendered' by all those seeking a ®rst or second class, and it was to `have great weight in the distribution of Honours' (Calendar, 1851, 127). 3 `Oxford Studies', originally published in the composite volume Oxford Essays (1855); reprinted in vol. I of Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, ed. H. Nettleship (2 vols 1889), 462. The accounts of Peel's viva in 1808 make it clear, however, that even at this early date some 2

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In 1830 two changes were made which were to be of major importance for the development of Lit. Hum. One was the addition of Greek and Roman History to the list of stated subjects, which meant that the course assumed for the ®rst time the tripartite character it has had ever since. In the original Examination Statute of 1800 History, along with Metaphysics and Hebrew, had been reserved for the proposed examination for the degree of MA, an examination which appears never to have taken place and which was formally abandoned in 1807. By introducing Ancient History into Lit. Hum. the University ensured that the scope of classical studies as pursued at Oxford was refreshingly wide. Or rather it made wide-ranging classical studies a theoretical possibility; in fact History was for long to remain a Cinderella subject in Greats. As late as the mid-1870s it was judged to be `markedly inferior to Philosophy in prestige and attractiveness'.4 The second important change of 1830 was the permission given to `illustrate' ancient with modern authors, `if need be'.5 This meant, of course, that the newly introduced History papers could be prepared for not just by reading the ancient historians, but also by consulting modern authorities like Niebuhr, and presently Grote and Mommsen. That Ancient History at Oxford had this slant perhaps explains why it was taught so much with modern comparisons in mind. But the most signi®cant effect of this change was in the area of philosophy: it ensured that, in the end, Greats philosophy could become a study of philosophical issues for their own sake, rather than a mainly textual and historical study of what ancient writers had to say on the subject, as in the study of philosophy as part of the classical tripos at Cambridge. It was, in fact, quite a time before much freedom in the teaching of philosophy was achieved (many years after this innovation the writings of modern authors were still `admitted but not required').6 Yet it remains true that to open this door was to prepare the way for a school one of whose components was classical only in a marginal sense. Perhaps the 1850 University Commissioners had some inkling of this possibility when they suggested in their report the setting up of an independent school of Mental Philosophy and Philology, one department of which was to be philosophy studied in what was shortly to become the Cambridge manner. The Commissioners were not just for making philosophy a separate subject; they wanted to carve up Greats generally. Ancient History was to be transferred questions were asked about the subject-matter of Aristotle: see N. Gash, Mr. Secretary Peel (1961), 57±8. Compare also the story of Hamilton having offered more books of Aristotle than any other candidate (J. Veitch, Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart. (1869), esp. 56±61). 4 L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 43; compare the remark of the Roman historian Warde Fowler that in his time (1866±70) `lecturer and student alike were ignorant of history' (quoted by M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain (1959), 119, quoting R. H. Coon, William Warde Fowler (1934), 27). 5 See Calendar (1832), 94. 6 See e.g. Calendar (1878), 89.

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to the newly created School of Jurisprudence and Modern History, `for the division of History into Ancient and Modern is rather matter of convenience than reality'. The study of the Latin and Greek languages was to be pursued in an altogether deeper way in a new school of Philology, where they would take their place alongside Sanskrit, the Oriental languages, and the languages of modern Europe.7 However, the University had only recently introduced major changes in its examinations, and these recommendations were all for the moment disregarded. By a new statute of 1850 it had been laid down, ®rst, that no one should get the BA degree without at least passing in two schools, one of which must be Lit. Hum.; secondly, that in Lit. Hum. itself the teaching of the Latin and Greek languages should henceforth be concentrated in the ®rst part of the course, after which it would be the subject of a separate examination, `Moderations'. According to the preamble of the statute, one object of the change was `that Greek and Latin literature may be more accurately cultivated among us'.8 In fact introducing it meant that purely literary and linguistic classical studies were put at a disadvantage in Oxford for more than a hundred years, while the range of literary texts taken up for examination was markedly reduced. When Greats was ®rst examined under the new regulations in 1853 it was still very much a classical school, even though Aristotle was by then studied in a more philosophical manner and Plato was beginning to be taken seriously.9 Butler, brought in as a Christian counterpart to the heathen moralist Aristotle, was the only modern philosopher to be prescribed. Logic was now said to be indispensable for those who aimed at ®rst-or second-class honours, though what exactly it was remained obscure. In practice the answer seemed to be concern with a number of marginal conundrums about the logic of Aristotle. But standards were rising even in this unpromising subject, thanks mainly to the introduction of Mill's System of Logic as an informally required book. There was also a book by an Oxford author on the theory of logic, in the shape of H. L. Mansel's Prolegomena Logica (1851). To what extent was Oxford equipped to teach this ambitious course? As regards bare knowledge of the classical languages we can perhaps assume that resources were adequate, though of course they were not then pooled as they were later, while specialist familiarity with particular authors varied enormously (Pattison reports that one of his fellow examiners in 1847 knew just one book, Horace's Odes).10 With philosophy and even ancient history the position must have been very different. J. M. Wilson, Professor of Moral 7

RCO (1850), report, 74±6. See also p. 42 above. Quoted in the translation, RCO (1850), report, 64. 9 Cf. Pattison, Essays (n. 3), i. 465±6, Memoirs, 134. William Sewell, Professor of Moral Philosophy, is said to have been the ®rst to lecture on the Republic in 1830, Jowett to have got it accepted as a set book: see Clarke (n. 4), 101±2. 10 Pattison, Memoirs, 121. 8

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Philosophy, told the ®rst Commission that those who taught the philosophical subjects had mostly not made a special study of them; he added that, despite this, the examiners were drawn from the ranks of tutors.11 The old system in which a college fellow was expected to guide a group of pupils through the whole degree course was totally inadequate for specialized honours work. There were signs in the 1850s of transition to a more rational arrangement at Balliol,12 though even there Jowett taught Latin and Greek Composition and the Rudiments of Religion as well as philosophy. Meantime, undergraduates reading the school had a variety of expedients for making up the de®ciencies of their tutors. One was to take essays to Jowett, who (presumably in his capacity as Professor of Greek) made himself freely available to members of all colleges. A second was to go to the professorial lectures given by Henry Wall and Wilson on Logic and Moral Philosophy respectively. Wall told the ®rst Commission that he lectured in Balliol hall on general doctrines of logic to an audience of 200;13 Wilson had an average of forty to ®fty at lectures which took the form of expounding and criticizing some ancient or modern text.14 Curiously, these two were ful®lling in unreformed Oxford the role which reformers thought should fall to professors in the better days to come. By contrast, Edward Cardwell, Camden Professor of Ancient History, could get forty auditors only for his `popular' lectures; the unpopular ones drew an average of only ten.15 A third possibility, widely resorted to, was for an undergraduate to put himself in the hands of a private tutor. These came in two shapes: bright young men who had themselves recently come through the schools with ¯ying colours, and experienced college fellows who were renowned for their teaching. Caird in the early 1860s was an example of the ®rst, Pattison in the mid-1850s of the second.16 Bywater was exceptionally lucky in getting private instruction from three eminent, or about to be eminent, persons, Robinson Ellis, James Bryce, and T. H. Green.17 It would be intriguing to know if F. H. Bradley, scholar of University College, was ever coached by Green; he appears to have had the opportunity of hearing a course of Green's 11

RCO (1850), evidence, 262. G. C. Brodrick, Memories and Impressions (1900), 78, says that the leading tutors at Balliol in his time (1850±4) were Woollcombe, a classicist, Lake, a historian, and Jowett. In the 1868 Calendar the list of fellows of Balliol includes W. L. Newman, described as `historical lecturer', T. H. Green described as `ethical lecturer', John Purves, described as `philological lecturer' (Calendar (1868), 183). (Wall is also described as `logical lecturer'.) 13 RCO (1850), evidence, 151, 287. 14 RCO (1850), evidence, 262. 15 RCO (1850), evidence, 264. 16 William Hayter, Spooner: A Biography (1977), 40, for Caird as private tutor to Spooner; Pattison, Memoirs, 151, for Pattison being sent private pupils by Jowett. 17 W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater (1917), 196 (for an autobiographical statement by Bywater himself). Bywater also attended lectures by Jowett and `availed himself of the Professor's invitation to bring essays to him'. 12

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lectures at a time before inter-collegiate lecturing was instituted.18 According to Joseph Wells, later Warden of Wadham, from the beginning down to about 1870 `it was almost an invariable rule for the future ®rst-class man to ``coach''.'19 This was written in 1887, by which time, Wells added, it was `quite unusual . . . to seek any further help than that of his tutor and of public lectures'. What had happened in the meantime was that colleges had begun to make specialist or semi-specialist teaching appointments. Thus Caird was the ®rst philosophy tutor at Merton in 1864, to be followed by Wallace when Caird returned to Glasgow in 1867. But demarcation lines between subjects were not as yet drawn very tightly: Bosanquet taught Ancient History as well as Philosophy for University College in the 1870s, Bywater lectured on Aristotle's Poetics for Mods, as well as on the Republic for Greats, while W. A. Spooner at New College was prepared to teach any of Greek History, Roman History, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy `up to a moderate level'.20 Bywater also taught Political Economy, using a work by Auguste Comte as his text. The institution of inter-collegiate lectures in the late 1860s and early 1870s was obviously a move of major importance in the development of Oxford teaching; in the end it broke the old isolation of colleges. It is interesting to observe that Bosanquet, in the preface to the ®rst edition of his Logic (1888), pays tribute to `a course of Logic lectures which I had the good fortune to hear about twenty years ago, the lecturer being Mr. Alfred Robinson, of New College, Oxford'.21 Bosanquet must have been among the ®rst to pro®t from an arrangement between Balliol and New College as a result of which lectures in each college were thrown open to students in the other. A more general pooling of talent followed soon after, with a common lecture list supervised by a Board of Studies for the Final Classical Examination (1872). But this arrangement met with more dif®culties in Greats than in other schools, no doubt because of the number of tutors involved and the fact that many wanted to do their own lecturing on at least some of the stated subjects.22 It is time to turn to the question of what candidates for Lit. Hum. actually read. Originally the answer was `A lot of Greek and Latin, plus bits of Butler'; later the picture was more complex. Spooner, Warden of New College 1903±25, wrote the following in 1912 in an un®nished autobiography; he had come up just ®fty years before and taken Greats in 1866. 18 Notes on a course on the history of moral philosophy, re¯ecting Green's views but not attributed to him, are to be found among Bradley's papers in Merton College library. Both the fair copy and such of the original notes as survive are in Bradley's hand. 19 Wells in A. M. M. Stedman (ed.), Oxford, its Life and Schools (1887), 262. 20 H. A. L. Fisher, An Un®nished Autobiography (1940), 49. For Bywater see Jackson, Bywater, 66 and 162. 21 Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge (2nd edn 1911), vii. 22 Jackson, Bywater, 65±6; cf. Farnell, 270±1. See also pp. 26 and 49 above.

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Our reading for [Greats] was in some ways narrower and more restricted, in other respects wider and more complete, than that usually followed to-day. On the one hand our knowledge of the books we offered, Herodotus and Thucydides, the Republic and the Ethics, Livy and Tacitus, Aristotle's Logic and Bacon, and of the great commentaries on them, Grote's History of Greece, Mommsen's and Merivale's Histories of Rome, Stallbaum on Plato and Sir Alexander Grant on the Ethics, was, it seems to me, much more systematic and complete than anything which is attempted now. To them we added a careful study of the Pre-Socratic philosophers (Jowett's great hobby at that time), a knowledge of the general history of philosophy as set forth by Schwegler as well as a speaking acquaintance with Kant's Critique and Hegel's Philosophy of History. Our Logic we worked at principally in Mill, which many of us knew with great thoroughness, supplementing it on the critical side by reading his work on Hamilton, Mansel's Prolegomena Logica and his appendix on Aldrich's Logic; and Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic. On Ethics we read besides Butler's Sermons, which we knew well, Mackintosh, Mill's Utilitarianism and a few of the earlier English moralists, such as Price and Adam Smith, and Jouffroy either in French or English. Our Political Philosophy we studied in Hobbes, in Locke, in Maine's Ancient Law, and to some extent in Guizot. Very few of us were specialists according to the modern standard either in History or Philosophy, but we gained from our reading an exceedingly complete view of ancient thought and civilisation regarded as a whole, to which few of the modern generation, who are all more or less specialists, attain. On the other hand the modern generation both probes more deeply into and reads more widely on the problems of philosophy than any of us were able to do.23

This passage suggests a variety of re¯ections. Perhaps the most important is that, despite the large number of modern works cited, Spooner thought the upshot of reading the school at the time was to give the student a wide knowledge of `ancient thought and civilisation as a whole'. In other words, Lit. Hum. was very much what it proclaimed itself to be, comprehensive instruction in the classics. Yet within this framework undergraduates were compelled to stretch their minds to a remarkable extent, so that they covered not only the thought of the ancient world and its history in the conventional sense, but further, its social and economic arrangements, with some familiarity with their modern counterparts thrown in for good measure. This was the time when examiners in Political Philosophy came forward with questions like: `How far was the want of Poor Laws recognized and supplied by ancient states?'; `Estimate the social and political effects of the absence of professions in a state'; `Specify some of our political ideas and institutions to which it is impossible or dif®cult to ®nd analogues in Greece.'24 These questions and others like them, which continued to be set for the rest of the century, show that in practice Greats was not restricted to Latin and 23

Hayter, Spooner, 42±3. Taken from the papers set respectively in Easter term 1865, Michaelmas term 1867 (Greats was examined twice yearly until the end of 1882). 24

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Greek, History and Philosophy, but took in parts of Politics and Economics as well. No doubt this was not unconnected with the fact that many of those who took Greats were also candidates for the recently instituted civil service examinations. But the intellectual boldness with which the school was conceived must on any account rank as remarkable. Spooner's remarks about his philosophical reading also deserve comment. They suggest ®rst that while Greek philosophy still had pride of place in the teaching, it was increasingly supplemented by the reading of modern books. The list given covers a wide range of authors and includes some very recently published items (Mill on Hamilton came out in 1865, a year before Spooner took ®nals). Oxford philosophy generally remained largely parochial, above all in Logic, of which subject neither then nor later was there any clear de®nition. To ®nd out what `Logic' comprised you had to look at past papers, a procedure that was in any case strongly commended by some tutors.25 It is not clear in what paper a candidate might hope to ®nd questions on Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic, an eccentric treatise which looked back to Berkeley and pointed forward to Green: certainly not in the paper on `The History of Philosophy' which, despite its name, was given over to questions about the Pre-Socratics as treated in Jowett's lectures. Neither the Continental Rationalists nor the British Empiricists had as yet made good their place in the Oxford philosophical curriculum. Nevertheless Oxford philosophy was on the move in the mid-1860s. In the ®rst half-century of its existence Lit. Hum. had produced no philosophers of more than local importance. The idea persisted that almost anyone with the degree of MA and a college fellowship was quali®ed to hold a philosophy chair: J. H. Newman was an unsuccessful candidate for the professorship of Moral Philosophy when Hampden got it in 1834. About 1850 Mansel made himself a certain reputation as a writer on logic and more generally a follower of Hamilton, who had himself taken a ®rst at Balliol in the early days but did all his teaching in Edinburgh. Jowett and Pattison were successful teachers, but not men of any deep philosophical convictions: neither contributed much to the subject. But things began to change as interest in the German Idealists of the ®rst part of the century developed. As early as the 1840s26 Jowett had gone to Germany and returned with, among other things, a strong interest in Hegel. He told his pupils about Hegel's ideas and even began a translation of Hegel's Logic. Jowett was still commending Hegel when Green was his pupil in the late 1850s, though at a later stage his enthusiasm diminished. Meantime T. C. Sandars, a former 25 Compare a handout on Literae Humaniores for members of Trinity College (undated but not earlier than 1882): `What is important you must learn from lectures and from old Examination papers. Use the latter early and constantly. Answer for yourself on paper the questions set.' I am indebted to Mrs J. H. Howarth for sending me a copy of this document. 26 See Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, i. 90±2.

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fellow of Oriel, had produced a surprisingly good reÂsume of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and the appearance of Sibree's translation of the lectures on the philosophy of history had made available a text which undergraduates had some chance of understanding. There is plenty of evidence to show that bright young men took advantage of the opportunity. Spooner reports that, for him and his friends, Hegel on history proved a useful foil to the materialism of writers like Buckle: it showed that ideas could be effective in history, even if the particular evolution Hegel purported to trace `proved in the last resort incredible'.27 Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was an undergraduate at Balliol from 1863 to 1867, studied the Philosophy of History in his last term and has left a student essay on what the philosophy of history might be.28 F. H. Bradley's surviving undergraduate essays contain more than one passage expounding the general Hegelian view of history as the march of Reason. Soon after he became a fellow of Merton in 1871 Bradley was studying Hegel's Phenomenology, a work which Walter Pater had learned German to read some ten years earlier.29 Clearly Hegel's was a name to conjure with in advanced circles in the Oxford of the 1860s, much as Wittgenstein's was in the Oxford of the 1930s. In both cases, however, a cynic might wonder just how many of the great man's ideas were properly understood. It cannot be said that those who tried to make sense of Hegel at this time found it very rewarding as far as the schools were concerned: examiners set an occasional Kant question (as far back as 1854 a board which included Mansel asked whether `Universality' and `Necessity' could be regarded as conclusive evidence of `a priori principles' or `laws' of thought), but did not venture into Hegelian topics. In fact, the amount of encouragement given to this variety of unorthodoxy tended to vary with the composition of the examining board. One reason why Bradley got his second in 1869 could be that the papers then were disappointingly uncongenial. Next year, when Green was on the board, he might have done much better. By this time Green himself was well on the way to producing his own version of Hegelianism, one which re¯ected the spirit of the original, but was worked out in terms and on lines which Green thought out for himself, with the criticism of native doctrines in mind. Green was by far the most in¯uential teacher of philosophy in Victorian Oxford; through his work philosophy in the University acquired not only great prestige, but also a separate identity. His career and ideas must accordingly be considered at some length. 27

Spooner's autobiography in Hayter, Spooner, 46. Carl Schmidt, `Classical Studies at Balliol in the 1860s: the undergraduate essays of Gerard Manley Hopkins' in John Prest (ed.), Balliol Studies, 1982, 181±2. Some 20 of Bradley's undergraduate essays survive in Merton College. See especially the essays on the `Connexion between Law and Philosophy' and `Is the opposition between Reason and Conscience real?' 29 Compare the preparatory notes for his ®rst book The Presuppositions of Critical History in Bradley's papers. For Pater see Jackson, Bywater, 79 (quoting a draft letter of Bywater's about Pater). 28

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First, some biographical details. Thomas Hill Green was born in 1836; like Bradley, he was the son of an Evangelical clergyman. After being at Rugby School he came to Balliol, where he was a pupil of Jowett and duly got a ®rst in Greats to atone for his second in Mods. He spent most of the rest of his life teaching philosophy. In 1878 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University; two years earlier he had been the ®rst Oxford don to be elected to the City Council. He gave energetic support to a project to found a new high school for boys in Oxford, his general aim being to extend opportunities for higher education to the poorer classes. He prosecuted the same aim in the University, trying to devise arrangements by which students with slender means could avoid the substantial expenses of college life. On the national scene he was active in the temperance movement (one of his brothers was an alcoholic) and more generally in Liberal politics. Green died prematurely in 1882, just before what would have been his forty-sixth birthday. Green's philosophical preferences and antipathies are displayed most clearly in an early essay of his, published in 1868 under the title `Popular Philosophy in its relation to Life'.30 By `popular philosophy' he meant not a well thought-out philosophical standpoint but a set of ideas and doctrines which constituted the conventional wisdom of the intellectual avant-garde of the time. As Green saw it, the popular philosophy of the Victorians was a survival of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and its defects were those of eighteenth-century thoughtÐtoo great con®dence in certain seemingly clear distinctions, a tendency to acquiesce in the facts of consciousness without going behind them, an external attitude to, and hence a failure to comprehend, the realities of morals, law, and religion. The cure for these defects was to be found in paying serious attention to things the enlightened had written off all too easily: the claims about nature made by the Romantic poets, Evangelical religion with its abiding sense of sin and demerit, the nature of social ties as displayed not in abstract theory but in the actual functioning of society. Eighteenth-century thought was naturalistic, individualist, utilitarian; a sound philosophy was needed to overcome super®cialities of this sort and penetrate to a deeper standpoint. Green illustrated this point in particular from the case of morality, treated all too readily by Enlightenment thinkers as a matter of public behaviour and social approval or disapproval, instead of something involving categorical obligation, constant temptation, and feelings of guilt when the temptation was not resisted. In this early essay Green manifested a general dissatisfaction with Enlightenment philosophers, without examining any at all closely. He made up for this defect handsomely in the only book he published, an edition of Hume's 30

Green, Works, iii. 92±125. Originally North British Review 48 (Mar. 1868), 133±68.

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Treatise produced in collaboration with T. H. Grose and for which Green wrote the lengthy introductions (370 pages in all).31 It was Green's thesis that behind `popular' philosophy lay erroneous doctrines developed by more serious writers; his aim in the introductions was to examine Locke and Hume at length, with a view to unmasking their errors. But though Green's attitude to the subjects of his concern was thus profoundly hostile, it is not correct to think of him as involved in mere denunciation. He treats Hume in particular as a serious philosopher who has unwittingly rendered a service to philosophy by taking a certain view as far as it can be pressed. And though Green's style of writing seems heavy and unattractive to philosophical readers today, the points he makes against his opponents are often acute and in some cases unanswerable. The works of Hume were not much studied at this time in Oxford or indeed in Britain; one result of Green's interest in them was paradoxically to give them wider currency in the form in which they appeared to greatest advantage. At the same time it was made clear to what extent `advanced' nineteenth-century thought depended on doctrines taken over uncritically from Hume and others. Mill's Logic, for example, appeared in a new light when read against this background, though Mill himself had regarded Hume with more criticism than admiration. Green gave lectures on Mill's Logic and Kant's epistemology and ethics as well as writing about contemporary English thinkers such as Spencer and G. H. Lewes.32 But his most important work as a teacher was his attempt to produce an alternative to the views he was criticizing. He did this primarily in his lectures on moral philosophy, the basis of his book Prolegomena to Ethics, which he left almost ®nished at the time of his death (it was published in 1883).33 The book began by sketching a metaphysical position. Reality, Green argued, could not be independent of mind, since it consisted of items in relation, and there could be no relations without a relater. But the relating subject was not this or that ®nite mind, but rather an eternal consciousness in which different ®nite minds participated each in its limited way. This secular equivalent of God was seen by Green as necessary to explain not only the facts of enquiry but those of conduct as well. Generally speaking, action was the result of desire, and desire was always an attempt to obtain satisfaction for the self. But though action was thus all self-interested, to satisfy the moral self was a very different matter from achieving sensual objectives. Thanks to the participation of each ®nite consciousness in the eternal consciousness, morality could take the form of a search for a good common to different minds. Green and his followers made much of this notion of the 31

The introductions were reprinted in vol. I of Green, Works. See Works, vol. I for Green's essay (in effect a short book about Spencer and Lewes), vol. II for his lecture courses. 33 The editor was A. C. Bradley. 32

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common good and put great stress on the obligation decent people should and did feel to make it real. As well as the un®nished Prolegomena to Ethics Green's literary executors brought out his lectures on political obligation, a substantial treatise on the nature of the state and the rights of citizens.34 Green was in a special dif®culty here because, though inclined by theory to hold that individuals are nothing when considered apart from the community to which they belong, that is, the state, he was himself a severe critic of some of his own state's acts. Actual states indulged in activities, such as starting colonial wars, which could not possibly ®nd moral justi®cation. Yet despite this Green saw them as broadly legitimate in so far as they gave expression to a general will and engaged in the pursuit of common good. And though critical of many state activities, especially those that had to do with other states, he was no supporter of the doctrine that the less the state did, the better. In an essay written only a few months before his death, `Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract',35 he argued at length that there are circumstances in which the state should interfere with personal freedom, for example, to prevent people working in conditions detrimental to their health and safety even when they have agreed to do so. We can see here, if we choose, an anticipation of the idea of a welfare state, though Green's sense of personal responsibility might have prevented his being altogether happy with that notion as it was later given reality. Green is important for our purposes in two particular ways: for the immediate effects he had on pupils and colleagues, and for the long-term consequences of his philosophy from what might be called a professional point of view. There can be no doubt that the theories he propounded, obscure though they were, gave expression to a world-view that was highly congenial to those who heard it, one which diverged unhesitatingly from the fashionable materialism and the utilitarianism of the school of Mill without requiring its supporters to accept uncritically the dogmas of established religion. Green's metaphysics amounted to a substitute for religious dogmas: they purported to show that the universe is the self-expression of spirit, but did not involve their adherents in dubious claims about the historicity of Jesus or the reality of miraculous events. Green was personally a deeply religious man who could not bring himself to accept some orthodox beliefs or to take seriously the everyday controversies of Church affairs;36 in these respects his appeal to intelligent youth was considerable. There was also the fact that his philosophy demanded of those who accepted it not only that they change their views, but further that they make strenuous efforts to make the world better: the activities of his pupils and associates in Toynbee 34 35 36

Green, Works ii. 335±553. Ibid. iii. 365±86. See Nettleship's memoir of Green in Works, iii. xxxvi and c.

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Hall and elsewhere among the poor of London show how seriously the demand was taken. It is easy now to dismiss voluntary work of this kind as quite inadequate for the task it set itself, doomed to failure in an area where only the state can act successfully. But that was not how things seemed in the Oxford of 1880, which was just beginning to take seriously the idea that gilded youth had duties as well as privileges. Green is sometimes said to have been more of a preacher than a true philosopher. This is gross misrepresentation, as anyone who reads his works without prejudice can testify. The scope and detail of his philosophical work are both remarkable. Nor is it true that Green tried to eke out defective argument with ®ne writing: there is little or no rhetoric in his published or posthumous works, but only a complex argument painstakingly and often clumsily set out. C. D. Broad37 described Green as `a thoroughly second-rate thinker', who turned undergraduates into prigs; his example of a ®rst-rate thinker was Henry Sidgwick. To some extent this is just Cambridge sniping at Oxford; it ignores everything that Green's students and friends said about his teaching, and dismisses his works with a simple ipse dixit. There is, however, an important difference between Green and SidgwickÐthat Sidgwick was primarily what Broad called a `critical' philosopher while Green was mainly `speculative'.38 Despite this, Green was perfectly capable of making careful distinctions and elucidating concepts: being `speculative' does not exclude being `critical'. And the impact he made on his subject at Oxford was far from being that of someone second-rate. It was Green above all others who transformed philosophy in Oxford from a mere component in a predominantly classical School into a discipline seen as having its own standards and worth pursuing for its own sake. The ultimate effects of this may not have been to the advantage of Lit. Hum., as will shortly become clear. Meantime, the credit or discredit for making the change must largely fall to Green. One way in which Green's in¯uence was felt was through younger colleagues who accepted his ideas or at least his general outlook. An interesting letter39 dating from 1872 and preserved in the Balliol archives bears witness to the high esteem in which he was held by bright young men just embarking on their careers; its signatories include Nettleship and the two Bradleys. By the time of Green's death Nettleship was an established Balliol tutor, though he was said not to obtrude his own (or Green's) ideas on pupils, but to favour the Socratic method of teaching.40 A. C. Bradley had by this time 37

C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), 144. C. D. Broad, `Critical and Speculative Philosophy' in J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, ®rst series (1924). 39 Reproduced in Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience (1964), 159±160; cf. 392. 40 R. R. Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford (1941), 82. For H. H. Asquith's comment on Nettleship's reluctance to `obtrude his own ideas' see above, Ch. 1, n. 336. 38

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gone off to be Professor of English in Liverpool, discouraged by lack of support from Jowett, while his brother was prevented by ill health and personal inclination from seeking a teaching post in Oxford. F. H. Bradley did, however, exercise a powerful in¯uence on teachers and learners alike through his philosophical writings, which presented Green's ideas with a difference and were composed with a literary skill Green never commanded. Bradley rejected Green's argument about relations presupposing a relater; in his view neither relations nor qualities were independently real. But he stuck to the view that what ®nally exists constitutes an all-embracing whole and is of the nature of spirit, merely urging these conclusions with less con®dence and more subtlety than Green. Bradley was troubled about the relation of thought to reality as Green never was.41 He was furthest from Green and closest to Hegel in his polemical writings on ethics and politics, where he called not so much for reform as recognition of the rationality of the system as currently established. Bradley's thought at its best has a force and a clarity superior to anything achieved by Green; as a result he enjoys a much higher reputation among professional philosophers. But by the same token he appealed less to a wider public, and in any case could hardly have treated topics with the ¯uency he developed had not Green pioneered the way. How much of a Green school was there at Oxford? The answer is probably not very much. In addition to those mentioned already we know that Wallace, Green's successor in the Moral Philosophy chair, was a consummate Hegel scholar and that Bosanquet published the ®rst version of his work on logic in a memorial volume for Green.42 Other Oxford contributors to the volume were D. G. Ritchie and the future English scholar, W. P. Ker. Even Cook Wilson, who was to be one of the sharpest and most persistent critics of Idealist doctrines, is said to have been under Green's spell for a time.43 Caird's return to Balliol as Master after Jowett's death in 1893 gave powerful reinforcement to the Idealist cause. Young men like J. A. Smith and H. H. Joachim, both to be philosophy professors in Oxford, saw themselves as Idealists from the ®rst. Yet though the Idealists were strong, they were far from being all-powerful. It was still possible to do well in Greats if you largely ignored this way of thinking and concentrated your philosophical attention on Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Mill.44 You had perhaps to understand, or at least to parrot, a certain amount of Idealist 41 See especially the discussion in The Principles of Logic, ch. II and in Appearance and Reality, ch. XV, XXVII. 42 Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (1883). Bosanquet's essay was entitled `Logic as the Science of Knowledge'. 43 A. S. L. Farquharson (ed.), Statement and Inference (1926) I, pp. xvi, xxiv, L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian looks back, 45. 44 The Trinity handout referred to in note 24 recommends reading and topics, but makes no mention of Idealist authors or doctrines.

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jargon, but need not have studied Idealism at all closely. The direct re¯ection of Green and Bradley in the examination papers of 1880±90 was less than might have been expected; theories Bradley thought he had de®nitely refuted in his trenchant Principles of Logic (1883) continued to interest the examiners. One suspects that quite a number of tutors, as well as quite a number of undergraduates, were secretly convinced that Mill, whom Bradley had attacked savagely, was not so wrong after all.45 And there certainly were teachers of philosophy at Oxford who, like Bywater, `were not tempted by any modern philosophical school'.46 Bywater's own interests were more philological than philosophical, but he apparently had no dif®culty in reconciling this with being philosophy tutor at Exeter, merely supplementing his own efforts by getting some bright recent graduate to give his students a ®nal polish. There were some too who viewed the Idealists' claims with nothing but disapproval. Cook Wilson, Professor of Logic from 1889, has already been mentioned; his criticisms of Bradley on judgement, based on re¯ection on geometry and sympathy with the Aristotle of the Posterior Analytics, were too far from their target to have much effect. More potentially dangerous, and far more polemically expressed, were the attacks on Idealism launched by F. C. S. Schiller, fellow and tutor of Corpus, and one of the few philosophers in the country to have embraced the doctrines of pragmatism. Schiller sniped at Bradley, whom he portrayed as a bankrupt sceptic, for many years from about 1890; unfortunately Bradley failed to take up the challenge, thinking Schiller's strictures too unoriginal in content and too uncivilized in expression to deserve a serious reply. Anything important in Schiller's case would already have been dealt with in the course of Bradley's controversy with William James. It was unfortunate that pragmatism in Oxford had as its main champion one who could be dismissed as eccentric, for pragmatism has many doctrines in common with Idealism, making it of especial importance to investigate the points on which the two differ. By a curious irony the period which saw Lit. Hum. philosophy enjoying its greatest prestige also witnessed a long-delayed increase of interest in ancient history. Writing in 1887 Joseph Wells, himself a well-known teacher of history, stated that though ten years before Greats had been `primarily philosophical', the importance of the historical element was now much increased; indeed, it was possible to get a ®rst for excellence on that side of the school alone. Wells explained that examiners were now appointed `for one or other side of the work', and declared that standards generally had 45 Cf. H. A. L. Fisher, An Un®nished Autobiography, 50; Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 43 (on Bywater). 46 Jackson, Bywater, 36. For the point about a bright recent graduate see Marett, Jerseyman at Oxford, 109: `never felt tempted to spend labour on the advocacy of any modern philosophical system'.

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risen appreciably, thanks among other things to `combined lectures'.47 The twentieth century was already on its way. More surprising still, it could be argued that high in the list of distinguished Greats men in Victorian times was at least one in whom philosophical understanding and historical comprehension, though both needed and present, were subordinated to pure scholarship: Ingram Bywater, acclaimed for his work on Heraclitus and Aristotle. Originally a philosophy tutor, Bywater became Professor of Greek in 1893. In this capacity he exercised a considerable in¯uence on the school generally, particularly through the meetings of the Oxford Aristotelian Society, of which he was long president. The strong interest in Aristotle shown in late nineteenth-century Oxford, an interest which eventually led to the publication of a complete translation of Aristotle's works, together with scholarly editions of some of the most important individual treatises, owed more to Bywater than to any other single person.48 Yet though Bywater's career showed how much could be achieved by Lit. Hum. as originally conceived, he was already a man of the past in his own time. Men who bore the impress of the whole school were now a rarity; specialists in philosophy or history alone were taking their place. As the new century dawned Greats had the appearance of a smoothly functioning and highly successful institution. Numbers were high, interest among students undimmed, specialization increasing but without as yet excluding those who favoured synoptic study. The only point of serious controversy appeared to be whether to encourage or discourage the taking of special subjects, attempted by a small minority of candidates with strangely varying results. Some said this was because special subjects were chosen not out of academic interest, but in the belief that they would help in the civil service examinations (this perhaps explains the relative popularity of economics as a special subject). Yet beneath the surface things were far from quiet. Wells in 1887 was already reporting that the `philologists' feel bitter because `in what calls itself the ®nal classical school the least important place is taken by knowledge of Latin and Greek.'49 Percy Gardner, Professor of Classical Archaeology, made repeated attempts to have his subject accepted as a major option in Greats; he argued that without it students got no `adequate training in historic method'.50 On one occasion it seemed as if the attempt would be successful: a committee of senior members voted in 47

In Stedman, Oxford, 248. The Oxford translation of the Works of Aristotle was originally edited by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith; later Smith dropped out. The work was published with support from the Trustees of the Jowett Copyright Fund. Among individual commentaries were W. D. Ross on the Metaphysics (1924) and H. H. Joachim on De Generatione et Corruptione (1922). 49 In Stedman, Oxford, 263. 50 P. Gardner, Oxford at the Cross Roads (1903), viii and 29. For an assessment of Gardner's place in Oxford archaeology see pp. 350±1 below. 48

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favour of the proposal, only to see it shot down by the ancient historians (if chosen, Classical Archaeology would have displaced either Moral Philosophy or Roman History). The only real upshot of Gardner's efforts, which included his writing a passionate book, deeply critical of the status quo, was to add more items from art and archaeology to the list of special subjects. But the ®ssiparous properties of Greats were not to be contained. It occurred to many that the consolations of philosophy should not be denied to those ignorant of Greek: one remedy proposed was that it should be permitted to do the Lit. Hum. Greek texts in translation, with the Latin requirements unchanged. Another idea canvassed around 1912 was that there should be a School of Philosophy and Natural Science, the latter term being taken to cover Psychology, Politics, and Sociology as well as the real natural sciences. By the time war broke out in 1914 agreement had apparently been reached by scientists and philosophers over this proposal, but its implementation was put off for obvious reasons. When peace came there were yet more debates on the general issue: suggestions included a separate three-year classical school and a school of pure philosophy (back to the ®rst Commission!). Meantime the scientists had got cold feet: they decided that no one could be admitted to the School of Philosophy and Natural Science unless he had passed Science Prelims in mathematics and another science. This had the effect of killing the whole project, and when philosophy for the Greekless became a reality it was in the form of the School of Philosophy, Politics, and EconomicsÐan outcome which was not unsuitable, since Greats had long taught both Politics and Economics in a somewhat rudimentary way, but not one to please all parties. It is interesting to observe that PPE too was originally conceived as a unity, but presently became three loosely connected subjects externally juxtaposed.51 51 For the information on this last page I depend heavily on the minutes of the Literae Humaniores board, and am indebted to the Chairman for permission to peruse them. For these developments see also pp. 816±17, 867±8 below, Norman Chester, Economics, Politics, and Social Studies in Oxford, 1900±85 (1986), 31±2, and The Twentieth Century, 143.

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12 Classical Studies, 1872±1914 r i c h a r d j e n ky n s In 1872 some minor reforms were made to Moderations.1 For the ®rst time `set authors' were decreed; this was a signi®cant move, even though the average undergraduate's reading is likely to have changed little in practice. The big four, Homer, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Cicero's speeches, were now compulsory for honours; Aeschines disappeared from the list, and the Hellenistic poet Theocritus was added to it; on the Latin side, Propertius and selections from Catullus were admitted. Candidates were also given the option of what we should now call a special subject: either the history of Greek drama or the literary history of the Augustan age. This was a signi®cant step, even though the paper in literary history was only a small part of the examination, and no one was absolutely required to offer it. Dissatisfaction persisted. T. L. Papillon, who examined Mods in the 1870s, concluded, `Its main defects at present seem to be, that it requires too much time to be given to minutely accurate preparation of the text of special set books, and gives too little encouragement to wider reading and more general cultivation.'2 In 1886 a more substantial reform was brought in.3 Candidates now had to offer a range of authors selected according to a formula designed to ensure breadth as well as depth of reading, and it was speci®ed that questions would be set upon their `contents, style and literary history'; there was a compulsory `general paper' in grammar, literary criticism, and antiquities. In a guide to the new examination F. G. Brabant spelled out the change: Such questions [on style and literary history] were, indeed, under the old statutes considered an integral portion of the examination. But they were only set in the general critical papers; while now every paper on a special book contains two or three general questions. Thus those questions now occupy a far more important place in the examination.4

However, the reformers made one strange blunder. The big four, the `necessary books', as they were called, were now set in their entirety, and 1 2 3 4

E. Hatch, The Student's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Oxford (1873), 118±21. T. L. Papillon, Oxford Scholarship and Honour Moderations (1880), 8. Handbook (1887 edn), 138±44. A. M. M. Stedman (ed.), Oxford: Its Life and Schools (1887), 222.

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candidates would be required only to translate them; no critical questions would be set. It was not of course expected that any candidates would read the whole of these authorsÐan impossible task. Indeed, the impossibility seems to have been part of the intention: the aim was that candidates should be encouraged to read widely in these authors, but also to cultivate an understanding of Latin and Greek generally and of the style of these authors in particular, so that they would be able to translate those parts of them which they had not read.5 In reality, the practice was bound to be very different. Brabant, a supporter of the reform, is already providing hints on how to get through: read half at least of the Iliad and Odyssey; learn up the tricky legal terms in Demosthenes; it is probably better to stick to the beaten track with Cicero, though some may prefer to read the less known speeches in the hope that they may come up. It is hard to imagine a system more likely to encourage reliance on bluff, luck, and cramming. As Brabant observed, `An accurate study of Virgil, in Conington's edition, can no longer be considered a part of the Oxford classical curriculum. No longer has the student time to study those discursive notes.'6 But this reform, which went some way to counteract the new stress on the critical approach to lesser authors, was to have an enduring effect. The orators fell from favour in the course of time; but in the early 1960s three-quarters of Homer and Virgil were still prescribed, and for translation only. It is hard to judge how greatly the new examination changed the way in which Mods was taught, or how rapidly any alteration came about. It is always easier to change syllabuses than the mental habits of teachers. Discontent is heard in a letter written by R. W. Livingstone to Alfred Zimmern in the early twentieth century after examining Mods: The shocking thing is that real understanding of the Classics counts for so very little side by side with the gobbets. Scholarship and hard work count most for a ®rst. And (I thought) hardly anyone had really felt the spirit of Greece and Rome. Perhaps they had, but nobody thrilled me: one man who had a rather nice and true passage about Virgil and brown faced Italian village children had it ruthlessly underlined by a fellow examiner.7

These remarks indicate the problem: Livingstone's alternative to barren annotation is a vapid sentimentality, and indeed he did himself go on to write emptily self-indulgent books about the glory of Greece and its imperishable legacy (`Surely of Oxford and Cambridge most of the Funeral Speech of Pericles is still mutatis mutandis true').8 There could be no reconciliation between scholarship and belles-lettres on this basis. What was needed was 5

Handbook (1887 edn), 142; Stedman, Oxford, 225f. Ibid. 234. 7 R. W. Livingstone to A. E. Zimmern, n.d. (c. Mar./Apr. 1910), Bodl. MS Zimmern 75, fo. 1. 8 R. W. Livingstone, The Greek Genius and Its Meaning To Us (2nd edn 1915), 138. For this aspect of Livingstone's scholarship see also p. 867 below. 6

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someone who could combine linguistic mastery with a liberal humanity of interpretation. In 1908 Oxford got such a man. In the period under our consideration three classical dons had an in¯uence outside the University upon the general literary culture of their times, and the ways in which they ®tted or failed to ®t into the Oxford of their day are instructive. The ®rst of them is Jowett. Actively interested in dogmatic theology, New Testament study, modern Idealist philosophy, ancient philosophy, and ancient history, he represents from one point of view the liberal breadth of Victorian Greats. But it is signi®cant that though he occupied the Regius chair of Greek from 1855, he saw no need to work on Greek literature as such, nor is any of his classical work scholarship in the full sense of the word. Notoriously suspicious of research, he devoted himself instead to translating Thucydides and Plato, one very dif®cult and one voluminous author, and also Aristotle's Politics. He provided prefaces to the Platonic dialogues, designed to persuade the educated public of their continuing relevance. Jowett's ideal was to train and sharpen young minds, using the body of knowledge already existing; it was a ®ne ideal, but if everyone had acted like him, classical study would eventually have died from lack of new growth. The second man is Pater. His in¯uence can hardly be exaggerated, and not only upon obviously aesthetic persons (John Buchan, of all people, chose Brasenose because it was Pater's college).9 Though that in¯uence was literary, some of his work, including the famous conclusion to his Renaissance, is cast in a philosophical form, and in professional academic terms he seems to have considered himself a philosopher. He gave college lectures on problems in Plato and Aristotle. It is not easy to imagine what these contained: he could hardly have treated Aristotle in the aesthetic-cum-biographical manner which he turned upon the older philosopher in Plato and Platonism, and perhaps within the walls of Oxford he handled Plato too rather differently. The importance of Pater in the context of classical studies lies in his lack of importance: this literary demigod, who wrote what Yeats was to call the sacred book for his generation, seems to have made no impression at all upon the study of classical literature within the University. Part of the reason for this can be attributed to the reticence of his personality, more to his limitations: though most of his writings are in some sense concerned with Hellenism, he wrote rather little directly about the ancient world, and that of indifferent quality. His picture of Greek society in Plato and Platonism is both naõÈve and self-indulgent; the polished surface of his essay on Euripides' Bacchae conceals some startling crudities of judgement.10 Still, one may well 9

J. Buchan, Memory Hold-The-Door (1940), 47. Greek Studies (1895); `The Bacchanals of Euripides', Macmillan's Magazine, 60 (May 1889). 10

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feel that a more congenial atmosphere might both have drawn his remarkable talent more towards classical literature and sharpened his rather hazy view of it. As with Livingstone and his fellow examiners, the problem was that no one knew how to occupy the middle ground. It has to be said that in the middle of the nineteenth century there was no classical scholar in Britain of true originality of mind, that is, someone who could transform the understanding of an author or a topic. By contrast, for the twentieth century one can readily think of ®ve such men in Oxford alone, and perhaps the list could be extended. But dons did of course pursue literary and linguistic scholarship, some of it important. Thomas Gaisford, Jowett's predecessor in the Regius chair, had worked on the texts of Byzantine lexicographers, a subject remote from undergraduate concerns. Henry Liddell, later Dean of Christ Church and father of Lewis Carroll's Alice, and Robert Scott, later Master of Balliol, published in 1843 their Greek lexicon, based upon an earlier German dictionary; vastly expanded and revised, this remains the standard Greek dictionary in the Englishspeaking world. The mid-century sees the ®rst ¯owering of the commentary, an art form at which British scholars have excelled. Probably the most distinguished Victorian example was the commentary on Lucretius by H. A. J. Munro, the ®rst Professor of Latin at Cambridge. Victorian Oxford can offer no commentary as impressive as this, nor any as ambitious in scope as the volumes on Cicero's letters produced by Tyrrell and Purser of Trinity College, Dublin, or the commentaries on Sophocles by Sir Richard Jebb, professor successively at Glasgow and Cambridge. But John Conington (1825±69), the ®rst Oxford Professor of Latin, produced a commentary on the whole of Virgil which is still of use, and another on the knotty satirist Persius, besides editing two plays of Aeschylus; this was a substantial achievement for so short a life. Among ®gures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mention should be made at least of Ingram Bywater, Jowett's successor in the Greek chair, a distinguished scholar who worked on the text of Aristotle, upon which austere subject he lectured, and the Homeric scholars D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen. The scholarly interests of tutors must have affected the subjects that were prescribed and the manner in which they were taught; but no doubt the in¯uence went the other way too. Brabant noted how little secondary literature was read by Mods candidates;11 Oxford dons wrote few books of interpretation or `background'; who could untangle the relation of cause and effect in all this? Brabant commends Social Life in Greece by John Mahaffy of Trinity College, Dublin, which could be used to cast light from a new angle upon (for example) Attic drama, and the shrewd and sensitive books on Republican and Augustan poetry by W. Y. Sellar of Glasgow. 11

Stedman, Oxford, 237, 240f.

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Brabant could ®nd few home-grown works of comparable character to recommend, the most notable exception being the Lectures and Essays on Subjects Connected with Latin Literature and Scholarship (1885) of Henry Nettleship, who had succeeded to the Latin chair. Perhaps the new Mods stimulated Oxford dons in a new direction; at all events, The Attic Theatre (1889) and The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896) by A. E. Haigh of Corpus are examples of substantial work in a more interpretative mode. The third man who had an in¯uence upon the general culture of his time is Gilbert Murray, who came to the Greek chair in 1908. In him various strands of scholarship come together. No one could doubt his auctoritas: he composed Greek prose and verse with exceptional grace, and he edited the Oxford texts of Euripides and Aeschylus; but he was also an evangelist for Hellenism, both within Oxford and to the wider world. He did not write articles, and his books on (for example) Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes have not worn well: though beautifully written and informed by a liberal intelligence founded on an intimate knowledge of Greek literature, they seem in the end lacking in ®bre. Here perhaps one sees the persistence of a Victorian habit of thought: the feeling that for the discussion of literature an essayist's elegance may suf®ce. But parts of Murray were newer. He was in¯uenced by the `Cambridge ritualists', and though most of their work has not stood the test of time, this interest enlarged the range of his understanding. His aim was to ®nd a middle way between the serenely noble Greek of Winckelmann and Goethe, reincarnated in more ¯eshly form in the pages of Pater and Symonds, and the anthropological Greek of Frazer's school, `the foster brother of the Ka®r and the hairy Ainu'.12 One fruit of this interest was The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907) which, though put out of date by the dramatic advances in Homeric scholarship made in the 1930s, contains things that can still be read with pro®t. Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912), later (1925) revised as Five Stages . . . , contains much that paves the way for E. R. Dodds's masterpiece, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). Dodds dedicated the book to Murray, with the inscription tropheia, the Greek word for an offering made in hero cult. Though it is now easy enough to pick holes in Murray's work, he may properly be regarded as one of the culture heroes of Oxford classics, combining the best of the Victorian tradition with scholarship of what we can still recognize as a modern type. 1914 does not mark the end of an epoch as far as classical studies in Oxford are concerned: new prospects were beginning to open wide. 12

Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897), preface.

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13 Ancient History, 1872±1914 o sw y n m u r r ay

s t ru c t u r e s `It is said that the ®rst question a well-known Oxford tutor always puts to his pupils is, ``Do you want really to learn any Philosophy, or do you want simply to know enough of it, not to spoil your class in History?'''1 According to Joseph Wells, it was in the seventies that Greats changed from being pre-eminently philosophical to possessing a strong historical bias: the decade marked a time of great change in the organization of Ancient History at Oxford, and for the next thirty years it led the way as the best established subject among the arts faculties for teaching and syllabus reform. The new Board of Studies for Literae Humaniores created in 1872 took the decisive conceptual leap of establishing Ancient History as a discipline separate from the authors listed for study. Periods of history were prescribed in the New Examination Statutes, with a choice from two Greek and two Roman. These were to be studied through selected texts: Polybius supplanted Livy, and the early history of Rome disappeared, to be replaced by the late Republic and early Empire.2 This last change undoubtedly re¯ects the belated in¯uence of the young Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome. Written under the impulse of the events of 1848, the work began to appear from 1854, and the third edition was translated into English in 1862±6, with a preface by the veteran translator of Niebuhr, Leonhard Schmitz. Mommsen despised `die NiebuÈhrsche Wahnkritik'; his early history of Rome ignored Livy, and dealt in the generalities of language, institutions, religion, and customs. His narrative history began with Pyrrhus and the Roman uni®cation of Italy in the third century b c ; it culminated in an unforgettably vivid picture of the fall of the Roman Republic: `those who have lived through historical events, as 1 J. Wells in A. M. M. Stedman, Oxford: Its Life and Schools (1887), 249; L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 42, records that at Exeter in 1876±80 philosophy had not yet given way to historyÐthough the competition there was between two of the best tutors in the university, Ingram Bywater and H. F. Pelham. 2 Pt 1, 536±7. Compare the Modern History choices in 1872, where the undergraduate chose between four General History periods and Six Special Subjects.

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I have, begin to see that history is neither written nor made without love or hate.'3 Mommsen's portrait of Caesar is as important a contemporary political tract as the Eighteenth Brumaire of Karl Marx, and `took the world by storm'. It has been called the greatest feat of German literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. Literature it certainly wasÐa consummate specimen of the historical art; I use the word art intentionally, for Mommsen himself has elsewhere insisted that the writing of history is not a special business or trade, but essentially an art.4

It was this book that won him the ®rst German Nobel Prize for literature in 1902, an honour unique among historians. Even in England, Mommsen's grasp of the realities of political life and of the institutions of Rome were immediately apparent, and justi®ed the ®nal triumph of narrative political history over the earlier tradition of social history. In the National Review of 1859, E. A. Freeman already described the work as `beyond all doubt, to be ranked among those really great historical works which do so much honour to our own day. . . the best complete Roman History we have'.5 Mommsen continued to dominate the late nineteenth century; despite the fact that his master work, the RoÈmisches Staatsrecht (1871±88), was never translated into English,6 by the eighties his view of the importance of the constitution for Roman republican history was established; and, if such legalism had less appeal in a country which preferred Bagehot to the formalities of constitutional law, his work on the provinces of the Roman empire (1885) was immediately translated into English and declared the foundation of ancient and modern imperial history, with far-reaching consequences.7 The only rival in Roman history was Wilhelm Ihne,8 whose authority was declared great in constitutional matters, but in whose work `Roman history is made as uninteresting as it can possibly be; while the style, as may be expected of a German writing in a foreign language, is slovenly and dull.'9 3

G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (2nd edn 1952), 462. W. Warde Fowler, Roman Essays and Interpretations (1920), 259. 5 Reprinted in E. A. Freeman, Historical Essays. Second Series (2nd edn 1880), 290. 6 Vol. i appeared in 1871, vol. ii in 1877, vol. iii in 1887±8. A French translation was begun in 1887, with a new edition of 1893±4. 7 Mommsen's Provinces of the Roman Empire was (rather crudely) translated in 1886 `by or at least under the supervision of' W. P. Dickson, who had translated the History of Rome twenty years earlier; there was a corrected edition by Francis Haver®eld in 1909. Mommsen visited Oxford in 1886 and 1888: he was surprised to discover that the Bodleian did not open at 7 a.m. and had to be fetched to dinner at 7 p.m.: Warde Fowler, Roman Essays 251±2, Farnell, Oxonian 128. 8 Ihne's History of Rome (English edn, 5 vols 1871±82) was published in both German and English. He regarded himself as a successor to Arnold (see preface, i. p. vii), and his work is a curiously old-fashioned response to the new world of Mommsen. 9 Stedman, Oxford, 248; Wells in Stedman, 259 is kinder. 4

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Greek history remained dominated by Grote, with occasional reference to Curtius, `as untrustworthy as he is brilliant'.10 The main aspects of teaching and examining had been established over the preceding twenty years. The tutorial system was in general use; and, with the reforms of the college statutes, from 1877 onwards teaching fell increasingly into the hands of professional college tutors. Intercollegiate lectures had begun in Greats in the late sixties on the model of Modern History arrangements, and within a decade the colleges were organized into two large groups; among the successful early inter-collegiate lecturers who obtained large audiences were Jowett and T. H. Green in philosophy, and W. L. Newman and H. F. Pelham in ancient history.11 Because of the large number of tutors involved, the Literae Humaniores arrangements were never as tidy as those in Modern History, but by the eighties the main faculties were publishing regular lists of lectures open to all; and although `most of the lectures are only attended by the men of the college at which they are delivered . . . the more prominent and successful lecturers have their classrooms thronged by a crowd of men from all Colleges.'12 In the eighties the examination system had clearly come of age, for there was considerable criticism of the mechanical nature of the teaching for it and the predictability of questions. Hence there was an increasing importance for additional or Special Subjects for outstanding pupils: in 1887 Wells says that about one man in twelve takes one of these up,13 and in 1907 sixteen subjects are enumerated in Ancient History; but it is hastily added that `Most of these have never been offered'; only four are mentioned as speci®cally encouraged.14 In addition it was possible to offer other subjects with six months' notice and approval by the Board of the Faculty. Charles Oman records how he made use of this provision: By 1882 I made up my mind that I knew enough about Greek coins to justify me in soliciting the academic authorities to permit me to offer `Greek Numismatics' as a special subject for Literae Humaniores. The point had never been raised before, but (to my joy) the boon was conceded, and I was the ®rst undergraduate who was permitted to add an archaeological special subject to the classical curriculum of the ®nal schools.15 10 Wells in Stedman (1887), 257. E. Curtius, excavator of Olympia, was the ®rst historian of Greece to base his work on detailed knowledge of the country; his ®ve-volume History of Greece (1857±67) was translated by A. W. Ward (1868±73). 11 See in general Engel, 81±93; for Lit. Hum., Abbott and Campbell, i. 376. The list of lectures presented by J. R. Thurs®eld of Jesus to the 1877 Commission (UOC (1877), Appendix, 398) as open to members of Merton, Oriel, Queen's, Lincoln, Magdalen, Brasenose, Jesus, Wadham, and Corpus, comprised in Ancient History lectures by Sayce (Queen's) on Greek History, Warde Fowler (Lincoln) and Allen (Magdalen) on Roman History, and Ward (Brasenose) on Tacitus. 12 F. G. Brabant in Stedman, Oxford, 124f; repeated in J. Wells, Oxford and Oxford Life (1892), 67. 13 Stedman, Oxford, 262. 14 Handbook, 1906±7, 159f. 15 C. Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford (1941), 95.

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But within the extraordinary stability provided by periods and set texts, historical approaches and the educational aims of tutors continued to develop. The Student's Handbook for 1906±7 lists the reading of modern authorities expected: A candidate's reading for History will be largely directed by his Tutors and by the lectures which he attends. It may be suggested that in Greek History a student may read with advantage those parts of Maspero's Histoire Ancienne de l'Orient (or, still better, E. Meyer's Geschichte des Alterthums) as bear on Herodotus, and should certainly read the narrative of Grote for the period after the Persian Wars. Hicks and Hill's Greek Inscriptions is most valuable as a supplement. Holm's Greek History16 is perhaps the best continuous narrative for the whole of the periods. In Roman History whatever else is read, Mommsen's History and his Provinces of the Roman Empire should certainly be read as well. No special book can be recommended for the period of the Roman Empire; but the introductions and appendices in Furneaux's edition of Tacitus's Annals are very useful.17

Not all the signs were promising. In Balliol, the departure on grounds of ill health of the charismatic ®gure of W. L. Newman for ®fty-three years of productive retirement coincided with the election of Benjamin Jowett as Master in 1870. Jowett had once been at the forefront of the new classical learning and one of the few Oxford subscribers to the Classical Museum; but during the next twenty-three years he con®ned his scholarly work to translating Plato and Thucydides with learned notes in the manner of Rawlinson, and by in¯uence and example directed his colleagues and disciples towards teaching rather than research. Newman had deplored the absence of any teaching in archaeology, ancient art, or numismatics,18 Jowett championed such activities only in so far as they could be harnessed to the teaching of Greats: he ridiculed the discoveries of Schliemann; `he was not attracted by antiquarian or archaeological researches, and would often dwell on the uncertainty of the results derived from them.'19 `The ®rst beginnings of classical archaeology, that he saw arising in Oxford, aroused his contempt and dislike: for to him as to so many early Victorians knowledge seemed only attainable in books.'20 When in 1883 a new professorship of Archaeology was proposed, Jowett was an elector. E. A. Freeman wrote to his sonin-law Arthur Evans about the possibility of his applying: Delendus est Jowett . . . Every ass knoweth his master's crib, and they do it for what they call Greats. Of course all those people will make a stand against you, just because you know more than they do and go beyond their wretched narrow circle. 16

Translated between 1894 and 1898 by the publisher Macmillan. Handbook, 1906±7, 155, I have chosen this particular year from among the annual handbooks, because it represents the situation at the death of H. F. Pelham. 18 Pt 1, 541. 19 Abbott and Campbell, ii. 145. 20 Farnell, Oxonian, 116. 17

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They are the obscurantists and answer exactly to the Trojans of the 16th century. As men fought then for the knowledge of Greek and the Jowetts of that day opposed them, so we ®ght for the use of Greek, for the proper place of Greek in the history of the world, and the Jowetts of this dayÐthe cribmongersÐoppose us . . . Of course they will have some narrow Balliol fool, suspending all sound learning at the end of his crooked nose, to represent self-satis®ed ignorance against you, but I would go in just to tell them a thing or two.21

Instead in 1884 Evans became Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and once again found Jowett as Vice-Chancellor seeking to frustrate his schemes for new benefactors and new acquisitions: `It is hopeless to expect such a man to sympathize with archaeology. He is besides a master of intrigue.'22 But the story of the ®ght for the Ashmolean Museum is told elsewhere.23 Thus despite his general espousal of university reform, Jowett emerged as against archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and any form of research, a dangerous force for reaction in the classics. The inadequacies of his translation of Thucydides (1881) `showed how little Greek a Professor of Greek at Oxford was expected to know'.24 The second volume of notes revealed an equal disregard for modern historical scholarship. The biographer of the contemporary Corpus epigraphist E. L. Hicks remarked on `those curiously depreciatory sentences about the inability of Greek archaeologists to ``add to our knowledge'' more than ``a few facts''';25 the oddity of Jowett's detailed yet dismissive essay on the unimportance of epigraphy is indeed explained by the fact that the information was compiled for him by an assistant, while the judgements are his own. He abandoned his scheme for a third volume of detailed essays.26 He began to seem out of touch with the younger tutors: `They want to marry, and they have no money. They want to write, and have no originality. They want to be scholars, and have no industry. They want to be ®ne gentlemen, and are de®cient in manners.'27 Evelyn Abbott (1843±1901), who replaced his teacher Newman in Greek History at Balliol, was a typical Jowett tutor.28 He matriculated in 1862 and had been a pupil of Jowett; in his last Easter term he tripped on a hurdle, but continued to play cricket throughout the summer, until he had so damaged his spine that he was unable ever to set foot on the ground again. He made a career as a schoolteacher, and returned to Balliol in 1873, where he 21

Quoted in Joan Evans, Time and Chance (1943), 261±2. Ibid. 269. 23 Pt 1, Ch. 19. 24 G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 81, quoting F. W. Walker, High Master of St. Paul's. 25 J. H. Fowler (ed.), The Life and Letters of E. L. Hicks (1922), 73. Hicks was writing his Manual of Greek Inscriptions (1882) at the time. 26 Abbott and Campbell, ii. 182±3. 27 Ibid. 154. The remark seems to have been made in 1879. 28 There is an excellent notice of Abbott in the DNB by his devoted friend StrachanDavidson. 22

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remained unmarried and con®ned to a wheelchair, a conscientious tutor in classics and Greek history until his death in 1901. Abbott was one of the authors of `Abbott and Mans®eld', still the standard Primer of Greek Grammar, and a translator of eight volumes of ancient history by the longforgotten Max Duncker (1877±86). His historical ability and his devotion to his mentor are revealed in his sensitive account of the later life of Benjamin Jowett, in the second volume of the Life and Letters (written with Lewis Campbell). Abbott was also the general editor of a once famous series, Heroes of the Nations, which he inaugurated with an outstanding portrait of Pericles (1891) as a villain of the nationÐbecause he was a democratic leader of a democratic city; this was the ®rst anti-Periclean tract since Plato: It will be seen that I have ventured to form an opinion about the part which Pericles played as a practical statesman widely different from the estimate presented by Grote and Curtius. It is, so far as I can judge, impossible to deny that he destroyed a form of government under which his city attained to the height of her prosperity and that he plunged her into a hopeless and demoralising war. These are not the achievements of a great statesman. And so far as legislation goes, the Age of Pericles is a blank in the history of Athens. In what then did his greatness lie? The answer is, that it lay in the ideals which he cherished. He saw what a great city might do for her citizens; and what citizens might do for their city. In the years of peace his dreams took shape, and the result is before us in the Parthenon and the great Funeral Speech; but against the hard obstinacy of facts, which followed the outbreak of the war, he struggled in vain. His visions of empire faded away, and he lived long enough to see the treasury impoverished, the people more than decimated, the most faithful of Athenian allies shut up to certain destruction.29

This was at least an original if eccentric view to publish in the year of the discovery of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens. But his very boring three-volume History of Greece (1888±1900) was simply a reactionary rewrite of Grote, and inevitably lacked contact with geographical realities: `sometimes, you know, I begin to wonder whether there was a Battle of Marathon at all.'30

th e t rium p h o f ro m an h is tory 1877±1914: h e n ry f r a n c i s pe l h a m a n d t h e n e w p ro f e s s i o na l i s m By the 1870s, despite the impermanence of a system where long-term positions were con®ned to bachelors still for the most part in holy orders, Oxford possessed a dedicated group of tutors, whose learning, though derivative from German scholarship, was deep and well organized. The great 29 30

E. Abbott, Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens (1891), v±vi. A tutorial remark by Abbott to his pupil R. R. Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford (1941), 85.

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change came after 1877, as the secularization of fellowships and the gradual removal of the bars on marriage for fellows created the possibility of a professional community committed for life to an academic career of teaching and even research.31 The architect of this change in Ancient History was Henry Francis Pelham, whose career well illustrates the opportunities in the new professionalism.32 He came from an aristocratic family and possessed independent means; elected a fellow of Exeter College in 1869, he married in 1873 and under the statutes had to resign his fellowship. Nevertheless he remained a college tutor, and regained his fellowship when the college statutes were changed in 1882. He was appointed Reader in 1887, and when in 1889 George Rawlinson `closed his undistinguished tenure of the Camden Professorship of Ancient History, Pelham, now aged forty-three, was called, per consensum universorum [the words are those of a recently discovered autobiographical inscription of the emperor Augustus], to succeed.'33 According to Francis Haver®eld, in the next twenty years, with Strachan-Davidson of Balliol and Warde Fowler of Lincoln, he made Oxford a centre of intellectual excitement in Roman History. And yet only Warde Fowler succeeded in escaping from the shadow of Mommsen; the scholarly work of the other two was derivative and consisted mainly of fragments. Pelham had been a fellow of Exeter in its intellectual heyday, when Exeter followed the tradition of Pattison rather than Jowett, together with Ingram Bywater, Henry Tozer the Greek explorer, and William Ramsay, the epigraphist and explorer of Asia Minor.34 Even as a tutor Pelham was an outstanding exponent of Roman history; his Outlines of Roman History began as an Encyclopedia Britannica article in 1886, and he was one of the ®rst successful inter-collegiate lecturers, ®lling Exeter hall from 1882 onwards. Pelham possessed a mastery of modern parallels, although his lecture delivery was plain. As Professor, Pelham provided for the ®rst time the leadership that the discipline had lacked. Every student in Literae Humaniores attended his lectures, and he took responsibility for organizing the subject as a whole. A succession of vulnerable young scholars were protected. The talented and industrious A. H. J. Greenidge, author of many still useful handbooks, had been required to resign his fellowship at Hertford on his marriage in 1895, and was unable to return to it later because he could no longer subscribe to the religious conditions which applied in that college; despite his hard work as a Brasenose tutor, he was refused a fellowship there because he was 31

Engel, passim. For Pelham's life see introduction by Francis Haver®eld to Pelham's Essays (1911); DNB; Farnell, Oxonian, 42 and 103±5; cf. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, 86±7. 33 Haver®eld in Pelham, Essays, xii. 34 L. R. Farnell, Bibliography of the Fellows and Tutors of Exeter College in Recent Times (1914) is impressive reading from a particularly intellectually active college. 32

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suspected of `a tendency towards research'. In 1905 Pelham persuaded St John's to elect him; but, worn out by poverty and anxiety, he died within a year, aged 41: his wife (for whom Pelham then obtained a Civil List pension) died soon after of a broken heart.35 Greenidge's pupil, G. B. Grundy, after beginning as a schoolmaster at an army crammer's, had worked his way to Brasenose in 1888 at the age of 27; he owed his `®fty®ve years at Oxford' to being appointed by Pelham as his lecturer in Greek history in 1897.36 Pelham's achievement was summed up by Farnell: he `was a potent teacher and an inspiring leader, and he founded a living and productive school of ancient-history studies at Oxford.'37 His impressive library, rich in German, French, and Italian scholarly works, was presented to Brasenose College, which possesses a list of the books.38 The major institutions of classical scholarship in Britain still bear the imprint of Pelham's statesmanship. In 1889 he was the chief ally of his school friend Arthur Evans in the building of the new Ashmolean Museum.39 From 1897 to 1907 he was simultaneously professor and President of Trinity. He was one of the founders of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in 1879, and a member of its ®rst committee (along with Oscar Wilde). He was active in the founding of the British School at Athens and on its ®rst council in 1895; from 1899 he was the ®rst chairman and chief force behind the establishment of the British School at Rome which was opened in 1901. Finally he was a tireless promoter of the study of Roman Britain, and ensured that his successor in the Camden chair, Francis Haver®eld (who took his place in creating the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies in 1910 and became its ®rst president), would be the ®rst expert on the classical antiquities of Britain to hold the position since its foundation in 1622 with a benefaction from the author of the ®rst work on Romano-British antiquities, William Camden. It was poor eyesight that turned Pelham from research to administration: `had his eyesight allowed, he would have written more and administered less. But both in his intellectual and his practical work he would have remained what he really was, an administrator who had the scholar's control of research.'40 In the University he was a great liberal and leading member of the group of reformers known as `The Club',41 the inventor of the organization of subjects of study into Faculties, the founder of the School of Geography, and the champion of modern languages, science, and English. In 35

Grundy, Fifty-Five Years 80. For Hertford College's fellowships see pp. 118±19 above. Ibid. 86. Farnell, Oxonian, 105. 38 `Catalogue of the Pelham Library of Ancient History, 1907' (MS book, Brasenose College Library). 39 Evans, Time and Chance, 283. 40 Haver®eld in Pelham, Essays, xxi. 41 See pp. 627±30. 36 37

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women's education he was a founder member of the committee for Somerville College from 1879, and its president from 1894 to his death: `no-one carried more weight in the counsels of the University, whether as a member of Hebdomadal Council or of Congregation than he.'42 In one debate he is said to have asserted to liberal cheers, `Better a leap in the dark than to stand still.' A ®ne portrait by Hubert von Herkomer (1893) hangs in Trinity.43 In 1907, the year of Pelham's premature death, the university teachers in ancient history are modestly listed as a Professor of Ancient History, a Professor of Archaeology, a Reader in Ancient History, and two Lecturers in Archaeology.44 But alongside these was a group of college tutors whose intellectual eminence surpassed that of the teachers in any other academic subject. The lecture lists for the three terms of 1907/8 record lectures given in Greek History by R. W. Macan (Univ), E. M. Walker (Queen's), M. N. Tod (Oriel), G. B. Grundy (Corpus), J. A. R. Munro (Lincoln), G. Wood (Pembroke), W. W. How (Magdalen), G. E. Underhill (Magdalen), J. Tracey (Keble), J. Wells (Wadham) F. L. Grif®th (Ashmolean), B. W. Henderson (Exeter), A. D. Lindsay (Balliol), H. J. Cunningham (Worcester), A. E. Zimmern (New College); in Roman History, F. Haver®eld (the new professor), E. G. Hardy (Jesus), G. H. Stevenson (University), W. Warde Fowler (Lincoln), J. L. Strachan-Davidson (Balliol), P. E. Matheson (New College), C. F. Balleine (Exeter), G. L. Cheesman (Christ Church), P. V. M. Benecke (Magdalen); in archaeology P. Gardner (Lincoln), and the two lecturers, L. R. Farnell (Exeter) and J. L. Myres (New College)Ða total of 78 lecture series given by 27 different lecturers, all but six of whom made substantial contributions to scholarship.45 It was Pelham's achievement to have formed and been the ®rst leader of what was, and still remains, the largest group of professional ancient historians in any university of the world. Of these college tutors, Warde Fowler was perhaps the most original scholar. A contemporary at Lincoln of J. A. Stewart and the Roman social historian Samuel Dill, his love of birds and country pursuits made him a con®dant of the normally aloof and morose Mark Pattison in the last eighteen years of Pattison's life. He became a fellow of Lincoln in 1872, and was sub-rector from 1882 to 1904. He found common-room life tedious, and would reside in Oxford only during the week and in term; his love of the piano caused him to settle in the Cotswold town of Kingham, where he could practice without disturbance. His history of Kingham and books on country life were combined with a series of scholarly works, which show a deep love of Virgil and a rare understanding of Roman social history; he stands with H. J. Rose as one of the two British scholars to have possessed 42 43 44 45

W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater (1917), 43. Marett, 141. Portrait, engraved, Plate 39. Handbook, 1906±7, 161. Gazette, xxxviii (1907±8); Handbook, 1906±7, Appendix, 53f.

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real insight into ancient religion, as being more than a mere subject for antiquarian research.46 It was in the period from 1880 to 1912 that Oxford set its permanent stamp on the teaching of ancient history in the English-speaking world; for it was then that many of the standard university textbooks which are still in use, or at least their ancestors, came into existence; and for the most part they were created by Oxford tutors for the Oxford Greats course. StrachanDavidson's Selections from Polybius (1888) was the prescribed text at Oxford until 1984; Hill's47 Sources for Greek History between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars (1897, 1907) was replaced by a major revision only in 1951 (`Meiggs and Andrewes', still in use); Hicks and Hill's Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions (1882, 1901) is the model for the standard collections of Marcus Niebuhr Tod, descendant of the great Niebuhr himself (1933 and 1946±8), and again of `Meiggs and Lewis' (1969); Rawlinson's Herodotus was replaced by How and Wells's Commentary on Herodotus (1912, still in print); Watson's Cicero, Select Letters (1874, fourth edn 1891) was replaced by How's Cicero, Select Letters (1925), which was in use until 1998 as a set text for Roman History; Greenidge and Clay's48 Sources for Roman History 133±70 b . c . (1903) was revised only in 1960. Tacitus was similarly sorted out for all time (or at least until Sir Ronald Syme added his own touch to the Oxford tradition in 1958): Henry Furneaux of Corpus published editions of the Annals (i, 1884 and 1896; ii, 1891, revised by Pelham and Fisher 1907), which are still the best commentaries available in any language; in 1894 he edited the Germania (replaced by the edition of the Camden Professor, J. G. C. Anderson in 1938) and in 1898 the Agricola (replaced, again by Anderson, in 1922, and by Richmond and Ogilvie in 1967). E. G. Hardy's edition of Pliny, Correspondence with Trajan (1889) was not abandoned until the full edition of Pliny's letters by A. N. Sherwin-White (1966). For a century thereafter, by its example, by its publications, and by its training of university teachers, Oxford dominated the study of ancient history in English-speaking universities throughout the world. But it was a tradition which had its weaknesses. Pelham and his team had created an academic industry based on the production of books for undergraduate teaching as much as research; the handbook, the epigraphical collection, and the historical commentary became the hallmark of Oxford scholarship, a scholarship which was always better at elucidating old problems than ®nding new ones. It was a tradition based on ancient texts, not on the discoveries of archaeology. Great works of history, narrative or theoretical, 46 W. Warde Fowler, Reminiscences (privately printed 1921); R. H. Coon, William Warde Fowler, an Oxford Humanist (1934). 47 (Sir) George Francis Hill read Greats at Merton and took a ®rst in 1891 but, failing to gain a fellowship, entered the department of coins and medals in the British Museum. 48 Agnes Muriel Clay, who took a ®rst in Greats in 1900, was a tutor at Lady Margaret Hall.

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were not forthcoming; collections of articles based on the typical conundrums of the undergraduate course were more commonÐ`studies in' and `essays on', dedicated `to my pupils past and present', which left the subject much as before, and simply served to adorn a reading list for future students. Success and strength bred parochialism; free at last from German in¯uence, Oxford failed to see that the continental professorial tradition was yet capable of producing greater insight and originality than the conscientious grind of weekly tutorials on central topics. The archaeologist Percy Gardner claimed that the tutorial system was detrimental to both pupil and teacher: The man who gives all his days in personal attention to pupils has no leisure for work of research himself, has no time and no opportunity for more broadly considering the tendencies of study. . . . If there is one thing certain as regards university education, it is that he who would teach freshly and effectively must carry on advanced studies of his own in the subject on which he lectures. And without leisure and stimulating reading a teacher entirely loses his enthusiasm and force.

Oxford had become a closed circle: There is probably nowhere a more able, conscientious and devoted set of teachers than are the Oxford tutors. But their horizon is usually limited. Those who pass from a public school to the university, and are set to teach directly after their degree, have no chance of coming into contact with a wider world. Devotion to Oxford traditions is apt with them to become a superstition, and their very conscientiousness keeps them bound to the routine under which they have grown up. Their conservatism has become a log which stops all the wheels of progress.49

John Myres in his inaugural lecture as ®rst Wykeham Professor of Greek History in 1910 put it even more forcibly: Yet the fact that at present we know so much more in detail about certain aspects of the literature than we sometimes seem to care to know about others, and (still more) than we can possibly know yet about the vast ®eld of evidence outside ancient literature, appears to be regarded as a reason for concentrating the attention of the next generation of students upon these comparatively worked-out aspects, and deepening the groove which is already worn in the broad surface of the subject. I confess that I cannot follow the process of thought which has led to this result. I refuse to believe, until I have clearer evidence than at present, that this concentration of study on limited periods is due either to laziness or to incapacity. . . . The wheel has turned full circle; Oxford has bred up a generation of specialists in the history of the centuries adjacent to the ®fth; she gives them, for their daily work, the teaching of the same limited periods; she has manned the public schools with their pupils, of the same strict outlook and specialist habit; and we cannot be surprised at the result. It would have been as inevitable in Paris or Berlin, if the history of their teaching had been the same. Now specialism of this kind is bad for the pupil, and it is bad for the teacher. . . what would be thought of a system of education for law or 49

P. Gardner, Oxford at the Cross Roads (1903), 34±5.

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medicine, or any handicraft, in which men who `read with' an expert in chambers or laboratory were withheld by a mushroom etiquette from the study of English law after Blackstone, or of the human body below the waist?50

The Sub-Faculty of Ancient History began as a dining club on 19 November 1903, like the organization of modern historians thirty years earlier.51 The ®rst dinner was summoned by Pelham, and Haver®eld was made secretary. Early members of the group were Gardner, Greenidge, Grundy, Henderson, Macan, Munro, Myres, Tod, Walker, and Zimmern, together with A. D. Lindsay and G. M. Young. It was essentially a business meeting; from March 1905 there is evidence of the lecture list being discussed after dinner. Another early discussion was the principle whether marked excellence in either Ancient History or Philosophy, together with adequate knowledge of the set texts on the other side, should be suf®cient for a ®rst class: this became part of the Examination Statute in 1907. Other proposals took longer: that to omit Herodotus Book II on Egypt from the set texts, ®rst mooted in 1907, was not actually accepted until Michaelmas term 1962; while the suggestion of 1911 for an alternative Greats for those without Greek was not accepted until 1995. These dinners led to the formation of a formal Sub-Faculty on 5 March 1914, at which all lecturers were entitled to attend. Much later this resulted in the awkward question, should women tutors be admitted to the dinner beforehandÐa proposal rejected in 1922, and ®nally permitted only after Hitler's war `and the collapse of standards that followed' (as one of the ®rst bene®ciaries, Mrs Isobel Henderson of Somerville, ironically put it).52 There were other instances of the typical Oxford habit of clubbism. The Oxford Philological Society was founded in 1870 by D. B. Monro of Oriel two years before that at Cambridge; it always included ancient historians and archaeologists. It published transactions from 1879 till 1890; for a time (1900±7) summaries of papers were published in the Classical Review.53 Even in those days meetings were not often a great success; despite having on paper between ®fty and a hundred members, Farnell records arctic evening sessions attended only by the President (Monro, who clung on to of®ce for thirty years until 1900), Robinson Ellis, Henry Nettleship, and himself, `keeping the cold vigil' till midnight; and Percy Gardner lamented its `languishing condition' in 1903.54 The Oxford Magazine of 26 November 50

J. L. Myres, Geographical History in Greek Lands (1953), 5±7. Engel, 83. The above information is taken from P. A. Brunt, `Ancient History Dinners', OM 28 Nov. 1963, 112±13, who was able to use the Sub-Faculty archives; these were unfortunately destroyed in 1985 through the carelessness of the then chairman. The dinners are now purely ceremonial, but the tradition of business conducted at evening meetings survives. 53 See Classical Review, 14 (1900), 289. 54 Farnell, Oxonian 120±3; Gardner, Oxford, 52. 51 52

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1902 carried an anonymous description of a meeting to hear A. C. Clark on the Cluny manuscript of Cicero: As one looked round the room, one could not help re¯ecting upon the pathetic futility of modern culture. Here was an assemblage of highly educated men, of more or less intelligence. Their very presence bore testimony to a common ideal, a common interest in knowledge; but so far as any real intercommunication of ideas was concerned, they were a mere collection of watertight compartments.55

The ®rst two original minute books in the possession of the Secretary cover 1870±1907 and 1907±26; they were almost as laconic then as now, and give little information away apart from elections and titles of papers, together with (from 1900) lists of those present; occasionally there are items of substance, such as reports of Schliemann's and later Evans's excavations, or discussions of the pronunciation of Latin, or of the desirability of a British School in central Turkey. In 1884 an Oxford Ancient History Society was formed, modelled on the Oxford historical seminar founded two years earlier; its aim was to encourage research and introduce the best undergraduates to it. It included senior members and up to twenty undergraduate members, and ran successfully for ®fty-seven meetings until 1893, with sometimes as many as thirty members attending meetings. Pelham was its nominal founder with Haver®eld; but the young Charles Oman, just elected a fellow of All Souls, was its `original begetter' and secretary throughout its existence. In it archaeology and ancient history were fully integrated: senior members included A. C. Clark, Arthur Evans, L. R. Farnell, H. A. L. Fisher, E. A. Freeman, Warde Fowler, Percy Gardner, A. H. J. Greenidge, W. R. Hardie, E. G. Hardy, D. G. Hogarth, W. W. How, W. R. Inge, H. H. Joachim, R. W. Macan, J. G. Milne, J. A. R. Munro, G. C. Richards, C. McN. Rushforth, A. H. Sayce, J. L. Strachan-Davidson, G. E. Underhill, J. Wells. Undergraduate members included A. C. Headlam, F. G. Kenyon, J. Burnet, H. S. Jones, E. R. Bevan, W. A. Craigie, B. P. Grenfell, and J. L. Myres, many of whom later became senior members. Two typical meetings were the ninth, of 25 May 1885, when Sayce talked on `Recent discoveries in Egypt' and Flinders Petrie's discovery of the site of Naucratis, and the seventeenth of 26 May 1886, when Macan read a paper on `the newly discovered papyrus of the Politeia toÅn AthenaioÅn of Aristotle.'56 Despite its success and very different aims, the society was amalgamated with the Oxford Philological Society in 1893.57 There was an 55

OM 26 Nov. 1902, 98. Two new papyrus fragments of this work were published in Berlin in 1880: the main discovery came in London ten years later: see p. 352 below. 57 Oman, 139; minute book (complete and excellently kept), Cordeaux and Merry, no. 4145; Oxford Philological Society Minutes for Nov.±Dec. 1893, recording the amalgamation of the two societies. 56

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attempt by Francis Haver®eld in 1908 to create a similar informal meeting for senior members and the more serious undergraduates.58

t h e n e w ro m a n e m p i r e In late Victorian Oxford, Roman History had the advantage not only of a more ®rmly established professionalism and more dynamic leadership; it also corresponded more to the needs of education for ruling an empire. The Essays of Pelham show how much the government of the Indian empire made Roman imperial history a topical concern. Once again it was Germany that provided the model, in the form of Mommsen's later interest in imperial administration. His Provinces of the Roman Empire had been translated in 1886 within a year of its German publication,59 and Roman provincial administration became a major subject. But the relation between ancient history and the government of the British empire was more indirect and later than is usually supposed. Until 1877 only a few of the entrants to the Indian Civil Service had university degrees. From 1878 to 1892 many of the probationers were admitted to Balliol under the supervision of the elder Arnold Toynbee; but they followed a special course which did not include ancient history. It was only in 1892, when the age limit for entry to the ICS was raised to 23 and the marking system in the examination was revised to suit Oxford and Cambridge (and especially Greats) that the domination of Oxford Greats began: in the period from 1892 to 1914 almost half the entrants to the ICS were Oxford graduates, with the consequence that by 1938 six out of the eight provincial governors in India were Greats men who had taken their degrees between 1897 and 1910. From 1896 the ICS and Home Civil Service examinations were combined,60 and the system was extended to other Far Eastern posts in 1906. The architect of this neo-Roman imperialism was J. L. Strachan-Davidson, tutor and later Master of Balliol (1907±16); he fought hard battles to establish and defend the new examination system and analysed the results each year in the Oxford Magazine, from which not unnaturally he concluded that Greats was indeed the best 58

Circular letter in Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 140 (301/5); it is unclear whether this was successful. Revised by Haver®eld, 1909. A typical career is that of the fourth son of James Murray the lexicographer, Sir Oswyn Murray, GCB (1873±1936): matric. Exeter 1891, BA 1895 with a triple ®rst in Mods, Greats, and Jurisprudence; Vinerian Law Scholar, 1896; ®fth in the Home Civil Service examination, 1897. He lost election to All Souls against the future Lord Simon `by one vote', on the grounds that his father was teetotal and might come to dinner. He refused a law fellowship at St John's to enter the Admiralty; Director of Victualling, 1905; appointed by Lloyd George permanent secretary of the Board of Admiralty 1917±36; described as `a modern Pepys' and `the great man who did more for the Navy in his time than, perhaps, anyone else' (Admiral Sir William Fisher). See Lady (Oswyn) Murray, The Making of a Civil Servant: Sir Oswyn Murray, G.C.B. (1940). 59 60

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training for success in the competition.61 As the younger Arnold Toynbee put it: At my college in Oxford, Balliol, before 1914, any freshman who had no clear idea of what he wanted to do after he went down was put down for the Indian Civil Service by the dons as a matter of routine. An I.C.S. career was assured to any Balliol man who could not do better than that. And the contract that a successful candidate for the I.C.S. concluded with the Government of India gave the new recruit security for the rest of his life.62

According to Farnell the consequences for the study of classics were serious: Strachan-Davidson's authority was powerful with the framers of the Civil Service Examination, and he was able to frame it so as to suit our existing Honours-drill, in which Balliol was pre-eminent. He was therefore able to exclude from the Government programme all recognition of archaeology; and as our classical scholars furnished the majority of the Indian Civil Servants, we sent out our young administrators without any training that might awaken a sympathetic interest in the ancient monuments of the land in which so much of the soul of the people is embodied. Also, a reform in our own curriculum was liable to be countered by the objection that it would diminish our best men's chances in the Civil Service Examination.63

Whether the relationship between Roman and British imperial administration was wholly bene®cial to either side can indeed be disputed. One casualty was certainly Strachan-Davidson's blighted career as a scholar; for (apart from a biography of Cicero as a hero of the nation) he published only two tedious volumes of Problems of the Roman Criminal Law (1912), which were an extended critique of Mommsen's Strafrecht, and which exhibit no sign of his alleged power as a teacher.64 `Learning, however, was only Strachan-Davidson's recreation.'65 In Roman history the connection with India had the advantage of turning attention away from political history towards the administration of empire; even the Roman Republic was seen through the eyes of the later Mommsen, as a series of problems in constitutional law rather than a struggle for political power. In 1903 the study of the Roman empire was formally established, with a new period in Lit. Hum. 61 R. Symonds, below, Ch. 28; see his Oxford and Empire (1986), 190±3; cf. `Oxford and India' in F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (eds), Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth (1982), 49±72. 62 Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (1969), 106. 63 Farnell, Oxonian, 268. Gardner took a similar view, Oxford at the Cross Roads, 21f; compare the correspondence between a tutor and his pupil who had been unsuccessful in both Greats and the ICS examination, W. Warde Fowler, An Oxford Correspondence of 1903 (1904). 64 For Strachan-Davidson, see the hagiographic Memoir by J. W. Mackail (1925); his papers are in Balliol Library, and include the typescript of an unpublished book on Magisterial Power in Roman Procedure, in the preface to which he typically characterizes himself as `a disciple of Mommsen defending the views of Mommsen'. 65 H. W. C. Davis in DNB.

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from Caesar's dictatorship to Trajan. The prospect of practising real provincial government gave a modern context to the otherwise tedious study of Roman Provincial Administration; and it is perhaps arguable that the best available education for a modern proconsul at the time was indeed close analysis of Pliny's Correspondence with TrajanÐto quote the titles of two contemporary works.66 The parallels between the Roman and the British empires were seen as early as Sir George Cornewall Lewis's Utilitarian treatise An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841).67 Lord Bryce's essay on `The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India' was not published until 1901, but represents ideas formed in the period 1870 to 1893. It is based on a thoroughly modern understanding of the nature of Roman imperial organization, and shows indeed that our great increase in factual knowledge during the twentieth century has brought no corresponding intellectual change to the conception of Roman imperial history, which remains essentially today as it was a century ago. It also offers a perceptive analysis of the close parallels between the two empires in terms of organization and strategy, noting, for instance, the similar size of the armed forces employed, the identities in frontier policy, and the equivalence of Roman military roads with railways. It uses these skilfully to point out the respects in which British imperialism falls short of that of Rome, comparing the ideals of government, but contrasting the two conceptions of citizenship and the absolute separation of rulers and ruled in British India due to the barriers of colour and religion. But the ®nal conclusion is positive: if the British empire in India collapsed, it would be India which would suffer; for Britain gains no ®nancial bene®t from her possessions: To be mistress of a vast country whose resources for defence need to be supplemented by her own, adds indeed to her fame, but does not add to her strength. England was great and powerful before she owned a yard of land there, and might be great and powerful again with no more foothold in the East than would be needed for the naval fortresses which protect her commerce. Happily, questions such as these are for the moment purely speculative.68

A generation later, in Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912), Sir Charles Lucas, of the Colonial Of®ce and All Souls, showed more anxiety about the future; to him the British empire was based on the idea of family, and the mother country should recognize the inevitability of its members evolving towards a looser unity, in which the two contrasting types of imperial control, the sphere of the ruled and the sphere of settlement, would 66 W. T. Arnold (1879; third edition 1914); E. G. Hardy (1889). In what follows I con®ne myself to the effect of the Empire on the study of Roman history; for the opposite effect see Ch. 28 below. 67 New edn 1891, ed. C. P. Lucas. 68 J. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (2 vols 1901), i. 84.

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progress in different ways; but he too used his knowledge of Roman history to argue that the problem of British imperialism lay in its substitution of race and colour rather than class as the justi®cation of rule.69 Yet the virtues of ®rm, paternalistic, non-Christian government were not the only legacy of Greats: the opponents of imperialism were also inspired by ancient history. One of the most prominent of the group of leader-writers gathered at the Manchester Guardian by C. P. Scott was W. T. Arnold, brother of Mrs Humphry Ward. As an undergraduate he had won the Arnold Historical Essay, founded in memory of his grandfather Dr Arnold, with an essay on `The Roman System of Provincial Administration to the Accession of Constantine the Great', which became the standard handbook on the subject. Precisely because of his critical engagement, Arnold's posthumous Studies of Roman Imperialism (1906) is the most interesting of those historical works in¯uenced by the fact that in the study of the Roman empire `the English historian is irresistibly reminded of the British Empire, and especially of its great Indian dependency.'70

t h e tr av e l l e r s an d l at e v i c to r i a n p h il h e l l e nis m In this development Greek history and archaeology were poor relations. The ®rst Professor of Archaeology, William Ramsay, resigned after a year to go to Aberdeen, because the University had made no provision for a salary: Oxford to glorify its Lapidarium Made a Professor minus honorarium. The new Professor ®nding stones and bread Were not convertibleÐdiscreetly ¯ed . . . Be tutorized, and keep along the groove! Tread as a man the beaten paths the boy did; Let all Professors' lectures be avoided; Research is hugely out of place in College, Examination is the goal of knowledge . . . InscriptionsÐExplorationsÐArchaeology

69 Compare the views of the President of the Classical Association, Evelyn Baring, ®rst Earl of Cromer, in Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910), 117f, that (in contrast to ancient Rome and other modern imperialist nations) to the question Quo vadis? only an Englishman `would be puzzled to give a de®nite answer, for he is in truth always straining to attain two ideals, which are apt to be mutually destructiveÐthe ideal of good government, which connotes the continuance of his own supremacy, and the ideal of self-government, which connotes the whole or partial abdication of his supreme position'. See Symonds, Oxford and Empire, chs 2 and 5; P. A. Brunt, `Re¯ections on British and Roman Imperialism' (1965) in Roman Imperial Themes (1990), 110±33. 70 W. T. Arnold, Studies of Roman Imperialism (1906), 5.

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teaching and scholarship Are incompatible with true philology. A Chair for such upon our Course encroaches, Confounds our primers and upsets our Coaches. So having trespassed thus on our urbanity, Let Ramsay go, and teach the Scots humanity.

Thus wrote Arthur Evans;71 but he was not sympathetic to Ramsay's successor, Percy Gardner, who was a numismatist and a museum rather than a practical archaeologist, and wanted to collect vast numbers of plaster casts72 and store them in Evans's museum. `Together we reigned, he as Keeper and I as Professor, over the new Museum, without any friction or jealousy':73 one can sense how infuriating such platitudes must have been to the man who had actually caused the Museum to be built. From 1887 Percy Gardner struggled hard to get Greek archaeology into Greats; as he saw, `it is not possible to plant a study at Oxford except by means of an examination.' He bemoaned having to lecture at 9 a.m., and looked for parity with the other subjects as at Cambridge, which places the four studies of ancient philosophy, history, philology and archaeology on a perfect equality as regards the Classical Tripos . . . There ought to be as many lectures on branches of archaeology as there are on various periods of ancient history. At Cambridge there are, or recently were, more lectures announced in the lists in the former subject than in the latter.74

A `Committee on Professor Gardner's Motion' was established, which included Gardner himself and such radicals as Pelham and Farnell; it reported in 1890, recommending a special subject on Greek Sculpture in Honour Moderations, and that Classical Archaeology be available in Greats as an alternative to either Modern Philosophy or Roman History. The ®rst proposal was passed, but nothing more is heard of the second (which had to wait for another century until 1995). A later attempt to replace Greek Prose with Archaeology was opposed in May 1900 by G. B. Grundy, who argued instead for a Diploma in Classical Archaeology.75 The only other element of archaeology permitted in Lit. Hum. was a second special subject, apparently invented by J. L. Myres and entitled `Homeric Archaeology', which ran under the same rubric from 1911 to 1990, through all the discoveries of Evans, Blegen, Ventris, Popham, and others, unaffected even by the discov71 `Lines by an Oxford Hack', ®rst published in J. Boardman, `100 Years of Classical Archaeology at Oxford', in D. Kurtz (ed.), Beazley and Oxford (1985), 45f. 72 The collection of casts was begun in 1884; it is now housed in the Cast Gallery. 73 P. Gardner, Autobiographica (1933), 59. 74 P. Gardner, Classical Archaeology Wider and Special (inaugural lecture 1887). 75 Flysheets in Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 140; this proposal was again made in 1907 by Gardner and the two lecturers in archaeology, with the support of Pelham, Bywater, Grundy, Warde Fowler, How, and Tod (Bodl. Firth b. 36, 199); it was passed, and the ®rst candidates were examined in 1910.

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ery that the language of the Mycenaeans was Greek with the decipherment of Linear B.76 But as Gardner himself said at the end of his life, It would be tedious to relate the course of my struggles, continued for thirty-eight years, to secure some due recognition of archaeology in the course of Literae Humaniores at Oxford, in my opinion, in spite of some weaknesses, the best existing school of education in the world.77

The fault lay not only with the tutors in Greats; the archaeologists themselves had no coherent view of their discipline, and (as his ally Warde Fowler said) Gardner, `the Gracchus of Oxford', `unluckily had a way of irritating unconsciously the class of persons whom he was addressing for their good'.78 His relentless enthusiasm for evolutionary Christianity was regarded as eccentric; and although he was a dedicated teacher, whose records of 757 men and 129 women to whom he gave personal instruction still survive, Joan Evans (who was a pupil) said that he `had always been slow and sad';79 and he had a somewhat limited view of the subject: `what is archaeology? I always thought it meant Greek sculpture, and Gardner. . . seems to think so too.'80 Greek History remained an important part of the undergraduate course; but as an academic discipline it was long weakened by this split from archaeology. Twenty years after Warde Fowler's strictures,81 Grundy wrote of lectures in 1889: The Greek History lectures of my time were of two kinds. Some I sampled were merely preÂcis of Grote. Others were of a fashion which then prevailed at OxfordÐ and elsewhereÐdevoted to destructive criticism of Greek authors much of which seemed to me to be founded on evidence more slender than that of the authors themselves. The Minotaur tradition was a solar mythÐwhatever that might be: the Trojan War was legendary, and so forth. Nearly all of this destructive criticism has been proved to be false; but at that time it was regarded as showing great mental acumen on the part of the critics. One series of Greek History lectures which was very unpopular with undergraduates I attended throughout, that of Macan on Herodotus. His language was rhetorical, so much so that he took three times as long to make a point as another lecturer would have taken. His ideas as expressed followed the course of an Ionic volute, going round and round the subject in an ever narrowing orbit until they arrived at the centre, where resided the idea. But I found the ideas good and helpful for the understanding of that Greek author.82 76 Information supplied by Nicoletta Momigliano, who was responsible for formally changing the subject. 77 Gardner, Autobiographica, 59f. 78 Warde Fowler, Oxford Correspondence, 20; see Gardner, Autobiographica, 75 for an incident in 1903 provoked by the publication of his polemical work, Oxford at the Cross Roads (1903). 79 Joan Evans, Prelude and Fugue: An Autobiography (1964), 73. 80 The undergraduate in Warde Fowler, Oxford Correspondence, 46. 81 Pt 1, 540. 82 Grundy, Fifty-Five Years (n. 24), 66.

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In fact the continuing translation from the German of full-length Greek histories, from Curtius (1868±73) to Duncker (1883±6) and Holm (1894±9), suggests the dif®culty in escaping from Grote, or establishing an independent focus for research in Greek history. Towards the end of the century there was clearly an attempt to produce a new edition of Herodotus to replace Rawlinson: A. H. Sayce's sceptical commentary on Books 1±3 (1883) was followed (without reference to Sayce) by ®ve volumes on the remaining books by R. W. Macan (1895, 1908). The publication in 1891 of a papyrus of the lost Aristotelian work, On the Constitution of Athens (acquired for the British Museum with the help of Sayce) should have meant that for the ®rst time Greek historians could attempt to rival their Roman colleagues in the study of constitutional history and source criticism, as Wilamowitz showed in his magisterial Aristoteles und Athen, published two years later. But Britain had already decided the issues in the absence of evidence, and responded with a translation in 1895 of Gustav Gilbert's Constitutional Antiquities of Sparta and Athens, whose second edition of 1893 did indeed contain an introduction on the new discovery, but otherwise showed little sign of understanding the need to reconsider the nature of Greek constitutional history. So Greenidge's Handbook of Greek Constitutional History of 1896, reprinted in 1902, simply used Aristotle as another source. Rapidly it became possible to ignore the new text on the grounds that it was probably not by Aristotle himself but by a pupil, and had for that reason no historical importance. This curious view had a long history: Macan was an early sceptic; and even as late as 1952 Charles Hignett of Hertford College was defending the principle that the Aristotelian treatise should be ignored, and Athenian constitutional history should be written as if it had never been discovered.83 It is salutary to contrast W. L. Newman in deep retirement in Cheltenham, who published the ®rst two volumes of his edition of Aristotle's Politics in 1882, and the last two in 1902, and in the interval had evidently recognized the importance of the new discovery.84 The fact is that Greek History did not undergo its conversion to the methods of German scienti®c scholarship until the late 1930s with the arrival of the refugees from Nazi persecution, when Felix Jacoby, the editor of the fragments of the Greek historians, passed through Oxford. So the long and to some extent justi®ed dominance of George Grote over Greek History lasted for almost a century, ensuring an approach based on political narrative rather than archaeology or institutions. R. G. Collingwood noted the relative situations of Greek and Roman history in his time as an undergraduate (1908±12): 83 A History of the Athenian Constitution (1952): `But there is a minority view, held by Hignett' as one A-Level candidate put it in the 1960s. 84 See The Politics of Aristotle, vol. iv (1902), index, 585Ðregistering only one reference to the work before the discovery, and 84 in the last two volumes.

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To the inquiring mind of youth it made a piquant contrast that Greek historical studies, in those days, were strictly scissors-and-paste. Greek archaeology existed; had we not Percy Gardner? but it only served to adorn the tale told by the authorities, except when some bold revolutionary like D. G. Hogarth hinted that it might here and there ®ll in a gap. But, according to the orthodox view, the last event that had happened in Greek historical studies had been the discovery of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens; . . . the great lecturer of the day on Greek history, E. M. Walker, was elaborately polite to archaeology in the way which only Pope has described, but lesser men can quite well understand, and weep if Atticus were he. So Greek history was left high and dry by the tide of new methods; and for many years after this, until what I hope will long be remembered as the archonship of Alan Blakeway, it was notorious that able young men at Oxford, when devoting their lives to ancient history, specialized almost unanimously in the Roman Empire and left Greece to the scissors-and-paste men.85

In the same period perhaps the most original of Oxford's pre-war classicists, the aesthete and poet friend of James Elroy Flecker, John Beazley, passed through Balliol Greats without showing any interest in Greek history, to become the greatest expert on Attic vases of all time; part of his achievement rests on the fact that he was able to consider the objects of his study as art, independently of their social context.86 This was long re¯ected in the public provision made for the two branches of ancient history. Rawlinson was the last Greek holder of the Camden chair. When he came to resign, the proposal of the 1877 Commissioners to divide `the subjects of the present Chair of Ancient History' between two chairs of Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman History had not been entirely forgotten.87 The year after Pelham's election the Greek historian R. W. Macan was appointed University Reader, and held the post until 1910.88 In that year a revival seemed in prospect with the creation of the Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History. Its ®rst holder was the charismatic J. L. Myres, pupil of Arthur Evans, whose inaugural lecture has already been quoted. He had excavated in Cyprus, and was not just a classical historian and archaeologist; he had wide interests in anthropology and geography, and later became President of the Folk Lore Society. Signs of change seemed to follow with the new generation of Toynbee and Zimmern, but these were cut short by war, and the sad fact is that the Wykeham chair has had little in¯uence on research in Greek History: after Myres it is noticeable that, for whatever 85

R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939), 82±3. Philippe Rouet, Attribuer/Classer: sur l'historiographie moderne des vases attiques XVIIIe±XXe sieÁcles (TheÁse, Paris 1995). 87 Stedman, Oxford, 290. 88 A university readership in Ancient History had been established in 1868 with a stipend of £200 from the revenues of Brasenose. Its holders were successively W. L. Newman (Balliol), 1868±70; W. W. Capes (Queen's and Hertford), 1870±87; H. F. Pelham (Exeter), 1887±9; R. W. Macan (University), 1889±1910. 86

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reason, none of the great and original Greek historians of Oxford (such as Alan Blakeway, T. J. Dunbabin, Russell Meiggs, Geoffrey de Sainte Croix, or David Lewis) have held it. In this age it was the travellers who saved Greek history from total mediocrity: the importance of travel and of Near Eastern studies for the understanding of Greek history had already been demonstrated by the founders of Near Eastern and Egyptian archaeology in Britain, Gardner Wilkinson, Henry Rawlinson, Layard, and Flinders Petrie. Henry Tozer, fellow and unsuccessful tutor of Exeter from 1850 to 1893, travelled widely in Asia Minor, Greece, Turkey, and the islands `en grand seigneur with an armed escort where this was desirable; and on one occasion the wild peasants ¯ed before him as from a brigand-chief, a natural mistake for the simple barbarian who saw a grim signi®cance in his Piccadilly whiskers.' Unfortunately his books re¯ect only too clearly his teaching, which `was without imagination or light or warmth of literary feeling, respectable, accurate within narrow limits, but wholly arid'.89 William Ramsay began his travels in Asia Minor with a scholarship from Oxford in 1881 and an introduction to Sir Charles Wilson, consul-general in Anatolia; in 1882 he was elected a fellow of Exeter, and for the next twenty years he continued to explore the hinterland under the auspices of the Asia Minor Exploration Fund. The loss to Oxford of his ability to combine classical with Christian and Byzantine studies has already been mentioned.90 A. H. Sayce's nine decades (1845±1933) were dogged by ill health, which caused him to travel incessantly. As a child he avoided school and was reading Greek authors by the age of 10; before he arrived in Oxford he had tackled the Hebrew, hieroglyphic, and cuneiform writing systems, and studied Assyrian, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. In his ®rst term as an undergraduate he began a lifelong friendship with Max MuÈller. Elected a classical fellow of Queens in 1869 on the recommendation of two ill-matched Queen's men, Ingram Bywater and Walter Pater, he was himself an aesthete, but `consistently stood for the encouragement of original scholarship, and the result of his lifelong endeavour is that his own college has a great number of profound scholars and is renowned for its contribution to learning.'91 After being saved from execution by the French as a German spy in Nantes in 1870, the next year, at the age of 25, he wrote an article which laid the foundation of Sumerian philology, and three years later identi®ed the Elamite language on the Behistun inscription; his ®rst book was a Comparative Assyrian Grammar (1872). From 1872 he spent much time travelling, espe89 90 91

Farnell, Oxonian, 38f. See above, pp. 349±50; DNB. S. H. Langdon in Expository Times (reprint), 6.

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cially in Greece; he was one of the founders of the Hellenic Society in 1879. He wrote many books on Near Eastern history; but his commentary on Herodotus i±iii (1883) proved `the inaccuracy of the Greek historian', and was not well received. In 1890 he resigned his fellowship to live in a Nile boat ®tted out with a library, founded the Alexandria Museum, and began exploring the Sudan; but a year later he was back at Oxford as extraordinary Professor of Assyriology, a post which he held until 1914. He was one of the ®rst to recognize the importance of Schliemann's discoveries for the preclassical civilizations of Greece, and earned much ridicule for his own discovery of the importance of the Hittites. `A raconteur of delightful tales, he possesses a mild humour which is rare in our day.'92 There were three tendencies in the scholarship of Edwardian Oxford after the death of Pelham. The ®rst was represented by Francis Haver®eld and the coming of age of Romano-British archaeology. Despite Grundy's characterization of Haver®eld as a slipshod excavator, whose supervision `tended to begin late in the morning and end early in the afternoon',93 he is generally regarded as the founder of the discipline. Deprived of a ®rst in Greats by his lack of interest in philosophy (1883), he became a schoolteacher at Lancing. He was inspired by Mommsen's Provinces to become a Roman historian, and met Mommsen, who invited him to contribute to the Corpus of Latin inscriptions; he returned to Christ Church as a Student in 1892, and was elected Camden Professor in 1907; his Ford's lectures of the same date proudly summed up the state of Roman British researches: `Today the spade is mightier than the pen; the shovel and the pick are the revealers of secrets.'94 Between 1907 and 1914 he excavated Corbridge; he never wrote a work of synthesis, for as he said: Roman Britain has no history of its own . . . Britain under the rule of the Roman Empire was merely one province, and in general an unimportant province, of a vast and complex state which stretched over three continents from the shores of ocean to the sands of the eastern sea.95

Nevertheless his bibliography of 500 items96 shows how he transformed the subject of Roman Britain from `the playground of the amateur' to a situation where he could say, `our scienti®c knowledge of the island, however liable to future correction and addition, stands by itself among the studies of the Roman Empire.' His vision of Roman history is described in his inaugural address to the newly founded Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies in 1910. He recalled the traditional uses of Roman history: `Its republican 92

Ibid.; a judgement well borne out by Sayce's charming Reminiscences (1923). Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, 156. 94 H. H. E. Craster, `Francis Haver®eld' English Historical Review, 35 (1920), 65. 95 VCH Norfolk i. 129. 96 C. Macdonald, `Professor Haver®eld, a Bibliography', Journal of Roman Studies, 8 (1918), 184±98. 93

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constitution offers the one true analogy to the seeming waywardness of our own English constitution. Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn.' But he added a more sinister note: Another and even vaster achievement of Rome may seem today less important. We know that by desperate efforts it stayed for centuries the inrush of innumerable barbarian tribes, and that the pause insured to European civilisation not only a survival but a triumph over the invading peoples. We know also, or fancy we know, that our own civilisation is ®rmly planted in three continents and there is little fear from yellow or other peril. Yet, if the European nations fall to destroying each other, such dangers may recur; we have still to look into the pit whence we were digged. The man who studies the Roman frontier-system studies not only a great work but one which has given us all modern western Europe.97

Haver®eld's world indeed disintegrated with the break from his German colleagues and the collapse of international scholarship at the start of the war, and with the death in battle of his closest friend and favourite disciple, G. L. Cheesman; he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in 1915, from which he never fully recovered, and died in 1919. The second tendency in Edwardian scholarship is more often connected with Cambridge and the in¯uence of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (which grew from two to twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915) on the `Cambridge ritualists', such as the charismatic but unscholarly fantasist Jane Harrison, Francis Cornford, and others. But there was a more ®rmly grounded contemporary movement in Oxford. L. R. Farnell had been a protagonist of the importance of archaeology and comparative studies for the history of ancient religions since the eighties, and Gilbert Murray was a strong exponent of the importance of anthropology for the classics, as he showed in his Harvard lectures of 1907 on The Rise of the Greek Epic. The Oxford department of Anthropology owes its origins to classical scholars: although E. B. Tylor had been appointed Reader in Anthropology in 1884, and was later made Professor, no formal course in the subject existed until his retirement in 1909. Meanwhile a Committee for Anthropology had been formed in 1905 with J. L. Myres as its ®rst secretary; and a Diploma in Social Anthropology was sanctioned by Convocation nem.con. in June. Myres was succeeded by the ®rst lecturer in the subject, R. R. Marett in 1907, and formal teaching began the next year with a set of six public lectures on `Anthropology and the Classics', delivered under the auspices of the Committee and organized by Marett; the lectures were given by Arthur Evans, Andrew Lang, Gilbert Murray, F. B. Jevons, J. L. Myres, and Warde Fowler.98 The Diploma was ®rst examined in 1909. 97 98

Journal of Roman Studies, 1 (1911), xviii±xix. R. R. Marett, Anthropology and the Classics (1908).

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The origins of the School of Geography are equally closely connected with the continuing importance of travel and geography in classical studies. Pelham had been a strong protagonist of the new discipline of geography; J. L. Myres was a lifelong exponent of the importance of the interrelationship between geography and history;99 and his in¯uence was responsible for one especial strength of twentieth-century Oxford scholarship in ancient history, the importance of geographical history from Alan Blakeway and T. J. Dunbabin to Ronald Syme and G. F. Chilver. With geography we return to the Oxford tradition of travel and the late ¯owering of philhellenism in the Edwardian age. In 1892±3 G. B. Grundy, already an inveterate traveller and geographer, prospected the battle®elds of Plataea, Leuctra, Trasimene, and Cannae; and in 1900 he was responsible for the best maps ever produced of the ancient world, still in general use as Murray's Classical Atlas. It was in fact Grundy's maps which introduced to Britain the modern system of coloured contours, which he had taken from the maps of the Austrian empire. From 1896 he was lecturer in ancient geography in the new School of Geography. His memoirs give a vivid picture of travel in the mountains of Greece infested by brigands and civil war, between 1880 and 1913.100 By the end of this period it was common for young tutors to travel in the Balkans in order to improve their understanding of ancient history: before he took up his post at Balliol, Arnold Toynbee spent the academic year 1911±12 at the British Schools of Rome and Athens, and especially travelling in rural Greece, where he caught dysentery so badly that he was later declared un®t for military service, and so survived the war.101

e p il o gue : ancie nt h i s to ry at wa r The story of the study of Ancient History at Oxford is remarkable. It is the only academic subject to have had a continuous presence as a serious intellectual discipline throughout the period from 1800 to the First World War, and it therefore re¯ects more clearly than any other subject the whole development of scienti®c methods and professional study in the nineteenth century. In this sense it is a great success story, with a continuity of advance across the century superior to any other academic subject in British education. It exempli®es more clearly than any other discipline the virtues and the vices, the quirks and the dependence on German models, of Victorian and 99 See his collected essays, Geographical History in Greek Lands (1953). He was the ®rst chairman of the Honour School of Geography when the undergraduate degree was ®nally instituted in 1933. For his connections with the establishment of geography at Oxford see D. I. Scargill, `The RGS and the Foundations of Geography at Oxford', Geographical Journal, 142 (1976), 438±61, at 449±51. 100 Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, ch. xii: a serious account has no space for his most famous traveller's tale, and a blind must be drawn over the affair of the English traveller and the naked Serbian ladies of Nish (193±4). 101 Toynbee, Experiences, 18±40.

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Edwardian education and scholarship. The college tutorial system had multiplied the number of teachers, and increased professionalism had created for them an ethos of research: by 1914, although there were only ®ve university posts in all (including archaeology), there were over twenty college lecturers: and `there are few among them who have not made their own special study, and many have made larger contributions to learning than a list of their publications might suggest.'102 Because of its tradition of travel and geographical study, Greek history ®nally came into its own in the First World War, when it proved at last to be a more useful subject than Roman history. In 1893 John Myres had collaborated with W. R. Paton (who married the daughter of the mayor of Calymnos) in a survey of the archaeology of the Carian coast; this experience led him to be appointed in 1916 to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, with the task of organizing Greek irregular forces raiding the Turkish coast. So successful were these operations that they actually made a pro®t from stolen Turkish livestock, while 6,000 Turkish troops were held down defending the coastline. But the operation went wrong when Mrs Paton found that her dowry house on the coast at Myndos (in which Myres had been entertained in 1893) had been destroyed, and her brother-in-law ruined and abducted: thereafter, whenever Mrs Paton saw Myres coming down the street in Samos, she would rush onto her balcony and scream that `Myres was the man who had ruined her life, that he was a murderer, a thief, a brigand and I don't know what more in voluble Greek.'103 Not long afterwards Myres's command was terminated and operations abandoned, on the grounds that they were damaging Greeks more than Turks; his out®t was subsumed into the intelligence organization euphemistically known as the International Passport Control Of®ce, which was run by another Oxford man, Compton Mackenzie; in 1917 Myres succeeded Mackenzie as its head:104 `There was indeed something irreconcilable between Myres the Assyrian pirate and Myres the purveyor of information to the Commercial Department, between Myres the Blackbeard of the Aegean and Myres the Gladstone Professor of Greek at the University of Liverpool.'105 Other uses were found for Greek scholars. D. G. Hogarth, the discoverer of the Dictaean Cave on Crete, Keeper of the Ashmolean and intrepid ®eld archaeologist, was appointed Director of the Arab Bureau in Cairo in 1916, from which he `ran' T. E. Lawrence, his former Oxford colleague; R. M. 102

J. L. Myres, The Provision for Historical Studies at Oxford (1915), 6. Compton Mackenzie, Aegean Memories (1940), 166. Paton read Greats at University College, 1876±80. 104 J. N. L. Myres, Commander J. L. Myres, R.N.V.R., the Blackbeard of the Aegean (10th Myres Memorial Lecture, 1980). 105 Compton Mackenzie, First Athenian Memories (1931), 253; cf. Aegean Memories, 136. 103

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Dawkins (then Director of the British School at Athens) shaved his orange moustache and became Lieutenant R. M. Dawkins, RNVR.106 G. B. Grundy was responsible for the Admiralty Handbook of Macedonia, and later for requisitioning timber supplies from landownersÐtasks that were to engage ancient historians also in the second war, when Myres wrote the Admiralty Handbook to the Dodecanese, and Russell Meiggs was in the Timber Production Department of the Ministry of Supply. From the earliest days of the nineteenth century it had been held that Ancient History was an excellent preparation for public life; and that perception is surely true throughout this period, in comparison with other subjects available. As the power of the Church diminished, the practical nature of historical study meant that ancient historians also increasingly made their mark in university life. The foundation of `The Club' in 1889, `to maintain the character of the University as a home of Learning and Science', and its activities in pursuing the ideas of Pattison against Jowett, are described elsewhere;107 but it is noticeable that many of its members were ancient historians or archaeologists: Farnell, a founder member, mentions Pelham, Arthur Evans, Macan, Greenidge;108 and later members were Gardner, Haver®eld, Myres, and Zimmern: when the group split in 1906, Myres, Haver®eld, and Zimmern took the moderate view against Evans, Gardner, and Farnell. The success of Ancient History as an intellectual training in practical affairs led to the seductions of administration. Good scholars in an earlier generation had left for canonries, headmasterships and ultimately bishoprics; in the new age of professionalism they became heads of colleges, until it seemed as if the University was virtually run by ancient historians; to speak only of the best, Pelham (Trinity, 1897), Macan (University, 1906), StrachanDavidson (Balliol, 1907), Farnell and Joseph Wells (Exeter and Wadham, 1913), J. A. R. Munro (Lincoln, 1919), and E. G. Hardy (Jesus, 1921) were important and successful college heads and University politicians, to the detriment of their research.109 Others found the daily tutorial round too tedious after the alarums of travel and war. The two outstanding young Greek historians of the Edwardian period were Alfred Zimmern and Arnold Toynbee. Fifty years later Toynbee could still remember the restrictions of his fellowship at Balliol; not only were there strong taboos against marriage, but the prospect of forty-six years of undergraduate essays, with only a retirement dinner at the end, was too much in 1915 for someone involved in war-work: 106

First Athenian Memories, 255; Aegean Memories, 101f. See Ch. 25. 108 Farnell in O. Ball (ed.), Sidney Ball (1922), 91±7. 109 The domination long continued: of the 69 heads of colleges in post between 1914 and 1945, 53 had studied ancient history in their ®rst degree (The Twentieth Century, 82). 107

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The rhythm of educational work is, and seems bound to be, cyclic. Each year the conveyor-belt brings to a teacher, for him to educate, a new annual batch of pupils of the same age as the batches that have passed and the batches that are still to come; and the teacher has to give each successive batch the same instruction. For each generation of pupils in turn, this instruction is novel, but, for the teacher, it inevitably becomes staler and staler with each accumulating year. . . . Cyclic motion is the nearest kind to stationariness. Circling and standing-still resemble each other in ruling out, as they both do, the possibility of directional movement from some starting-point towards some goal. If life has no direction, nothing happens in it; but, when nothing happens in life, time does not stand still; time ¯ows on, but ¯ows imperceptibly. One ®nds that it has gone before one knows where one is.110

Yet throughout his long life Toynbee remained fascinated with ancient history; and deep into old age he was still writing major and revolutionary works; Hannibal's Legacy (1965), Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World (1973), and Some Problems of Greek History (1979) have a freshness which is lacking in most modern works. Toynbee's older contemporary, Alfred Zimmern, was fellow in Ancient History at New College from 1904 to 1909; in 1911 he published The Greek Commonwealth, the most important work on Greek history to emerge from pre-war Oxford. It was a book that for the ®rst time took ancient slavery seriously, and considered the agrarian basis of Greek civilization in relation to the geography of Greece. But Zimmern had already left New College for `the Labour intelligentsia' before the war; during it he served in intelligence for the Foreign Of®ce, writing the memorandum which became the foundation document for the League of Nations. When he ®nally returned to Oxford, it was as the ®rst Montague Burton Professor of International Relations (1930±44).111 Death took others: among those who had already made a name for themselves, G. L. Cheesman, Haver®eld's disciple and the author of The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army (1914), would have been `the most eminent Roman historian in the world without dispute since the deaths of Fraccaro and De Sanctis', if he had not been killed at the Dardanelles.112 Post-war Oxford was a place of smaller and not necessarily more learned men; the great days were over. 110 Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (1969), 65±71. I ®rst read this in 1969, when I had just been appointed to Toynbee's position in Balliol; thirty years later its truth is con®rmed. 111 D. J. Markwell, `Sir Alfred Zimmern revisited: ®fty years on', Review of International Studies, 12 (1986), 279±92. For Zimmern as `the voice of Edwardian collectivism and ef®ciency' see also F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), 259±63. 112 Toynbee, Experiences, 10. Others to die during the war included Guy Dickins and H. J. Cunningham (see H. Stuart Jones, Fresh Light on the Roman Bureaucracy: An Inaugural Lecture (1920), 5).

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14 Modern History r e ba n . s o f f e r In both curriculum and styles of teaching, the Oxford School of History set the standard which was imitated in Cambridge and throughout the British sphere of in¯uence. Modern History was introduced to Oxford in the 1850s and established on its own as an honours degree course by 1872. Beginning (at the latter date) with the fall of Rome and concluding for England at 1847, elsewhere at 1815, history was a subject that was hardly `modern', nor was it an innovative or experimental study of recent, let alone contemporary, issues and events. Instead, the study of history began and continued as an epic illustration of the qualities required of England's governing eÂlite. Within a rapidly changing society that wanted to ®nd the future more compelling than the past, Modern History organized history, politics, economics, and law as testaments to the enduring qualities of individual character and national institutions. Oxford historians saw their curricula as meant essentially to empower a generous conception of intelligent citizenship rather than to further a professional discipline. The professors and the tutors, struggling to ®nd satisfying roles within a transformed University and an expanding society, tried to de®ne professionalization and specialization. These vague and changing concepts re¯ected the debates within disciplines as well as questions of social status and economic position. There was considerable uncertainty about the degree and kinds of specialization that should be taught within disciplines, and the positions taken by various tutors and professors were not always clearly drawn. The history professors and the college tutors agreed that the study of the past revealed personal patriotism and political institutions that had made England a great nation. But while the tutors concentrated largely on English constitutional history to meet the demands of the examination, the professors wanted undergraduates to receive a more `professional' education. The professors de®ned `professional' in at least two meanings of the word. First, they maintained that public of®cers who made decisions about, for example, Indian agriculture or British policy towards Germany should be specially or professionally instructed in Indian or German languages, history, politics, society, economics, and culture. And, secondly,

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the professors wanted the History Honour School to equip students with those precise techniques of original research that distinguished the academically trained historian on the Continent and in the US from the amateur writer outside the University. Instead of becoming professional historians, in either of the de®nitions adopted by professors or foreign historians, the history tutors became professional or career teachers. They found evidence in the past for the ef®cacy of self-sacri®ce, devotion, rationality, obligation, and duty. As college teachers, they believed that their calling exempli®ed those qualities. While the professors were expected to do research, the tutors kept for themselves the teaching of largely national history by means of those materials that could be made most readily accessible to their students. This division of labour, never absolute but rather a result of the early organization of history teaching in the colleges, was far more acceptable to the tutors than it was to the professors. From the 1850s and continuing well into the 1920s, the professors' research, publication, and interpretative conclusions became the basis of the curriculum. Although the lists of books preserved or recommended changed over ®ve decades, textbooks remained an essential guide to students hard pressed for reading time. Most had only two years to prepare for the exam and some took it in one year after taking honours in Greats. The study of modern history began modestly in 1853 as part of the School of Law and Modern History. Created by the Examination Statutes of 1850 as one of two new courses, the new school could be taken only after completing the classical school of Lit. Hum. successfully. After 1864, when this requirement was abolished for those obtaining at least third-class honours and students were permitted to specialize solely in Law and Modern History, the school concentrated increasingly on country gentlemen and notoriously idle passmen who needed `a valuable educating in¯uence upon their minds'. Between 1853 and 1872, 800 men were awarded honours in Law and Modern History under that in¯uence.1 Then, in 1872, the uneasy alliance between the two disciplines was dissolved and independent schools emerged. Initially, some colleges pushed their students into reading for a fourth class in History, originally considered easier than a pass degree. But within a decade, the new subject was drawing `large numbers of really able men, especially among those who looked forward to a political career'. Within one more decade, students were taking an honours degree in History because it implied ability and the `acquisition of a solid body of de®nite knowledge'.2 Within a generation, the honours school of Modern History had transcended its limited origins and, by the turn of the century, held great expectations for 1 Quoted from the evidence of Montagu Burrows SCOC (1867), Qs 3690, 3744. For these developments see Pt 1, 352±3, 370. 2 W. J. Ashley, `The Study of History at Oxford', The Nation, 60 (1895), 274.

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its students, who, in numbers, rapidly overtook and then surpassed those in Greats. In response to the almost exponential growth in opportunities for public careers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the school of Modern History set out to prepare graduates to ®ll in¯uential positions at home and abroad by creating and maintaining a remarkably cohesive discipline with substantial in¯uence throughout the universities not only of Britain but of the entire English-speaking world. In the civic universities and the public schools, the dominance of Oxford graduates meant that history became a course in responsible citizenship. Even those graduates such as T. F. Tout, James Tait, W. J. Ashley, Ramsay Muir, and A. F. Pollard, who criticized the way history was taught at Oxford, conceded that history documented national character, free institutions, and moral obligations. Tout and Tait created the important Manchester school of administrative history, where George Unwin, A. G. Little, and Maurice Powicke taught. Ashley introduced the ®rst degree of Commerce in Britain at Birmingham, where the history faculty included C. R. Beazley. Muir went to Liverpool to shape their History school and to win a charter for the university in 1903. R. S. Rait, the ®rst Professor of Scottish History and Literature at Glasgow, became Vice-Chancellor and Principal of that university. Pollard launched the London School of History and the Institute of Historical Research as a centre for postgraduate study. Within the public schools, where the future governing eÂlite were ®rst exposed to the assumptions which affected their adult decisions, some of the most effective teachers, such as C. K. Marten, a history teacher at Eton and later its Provost, were proselytizing believers from the Oxford school. Oxford graduates also dominated the Historical Association, the Archives, the Public Record Of®ce, the Dictionary of National Biography, the English Historical Review, the Victoria County Histories, and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. History's early partner, Law, bequeathed a quasi-judicial method of testing evidence by placing it within a set of precedents and consequences that together constituted a discernible tradition. A school of history, the ®rst Chichele Professor of Modern History told his inaugural audience in 1862, must form `the judicial mind for the purpose of dealing in the best manner with all the problems of thought and practical life'.3 Juridical metaphors were used commonly by the Oxford school, and especially by William Stubbs, to connect the study of history with the training of sound judgement by understanding history as an `endless series of courts of appeals' ever `ready to reopen closed cases'.4 Lawyers believed that truth was best recovered by the cross-examination of testimony. A search for truth, because of its intrinsic value, became a higher, more serious end than ambition, wealth, or 3 4

Montagu Burrows, Inaugural Lecture delivered 30 Oct. 1862 (1862), 16. Stubbs, `England under the Stewarts' (1889, 1899), Seventeen Lectures, 465.

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power. Since truth was ascertainable, a self-denying devotion to its pursuit followed, intellectually and morally. In addition, the austerity of the historical method was congenial to the lingering asceticism which gave even secular Oxford a monastic character. More practically, the study of law taught that legislation was embedded in historical circumstances. But some Oxfordtrained historians, especially those who advocated more specialized study such as Horace Round, T. F. Tout, and A. F. Pollard, saw that the lawyer's reverential approach to the past violated a proper understanding of history as the study of actual development. Law, like classics, was regarded as a static subject and the lawyers, like the classicists, treated the texts they studied with veneration. `The lawyer's vision is bounded by his ``books'',' Round wrote, but `the historian goes behind his books and studies the facts for himself.' Even more seriously, law distinguished between private and public morality, a distinction which the historians found fundamentally immoral.5 It was not the model of law that gave historical studies their moralistic content, but classical works which illustrated desirable qualities of character, philosophical ideals, standards of behaviour, and analytical thinking. The most telling complaint against classics was that it was set in a dead and alien world. Even if classics had dealt with a world genuinely analogous to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, history could have grown only at the expense of classics. Stubbs contrasted modern history with classics: a study of the ancient world was the study of `death' and of the `skeleton' while modern history studied `life' and the `living body'.6 Classical scholars, whether concentrating upon Homer or ®fth-century Athens, found spiritual qualities and institutions among the ancient Greeks which they believed also in¯uenced their own lives. But historians like James Bryce protested that arguments drawn from classical experience were inapplicable to modern life because each country had its own national character. Unlike classics, modern history was intended to be more than a source of ethical and psychological inspiration. Classics studied a world that was irretrievably ®nished to demonstrate that the important qualities in human nature and society were the timeless, unchanging truths that had moved the ancients. History, which also tried to reveal truth, concentrated instead upon the dynamic, evolutionary process by teaching object-lessons drawn from continuous, developing, and successful traditions. History was taught ®rst by Oxford and Cambridge tutors and later by public-school teachers, preparing their students for the Oxford and Cambridge examinations, as part of ordinary and familiar experience. It was the student's own past recorded 5 J. Horace Round, preface to Peerage and Pedigree (2 vols Baltimore, Md., 1910), I, ix. See also P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, 1978), 260±2; A. V. Dicey to James Bryce, 23 Mar. 1911, Bodl. MS Bryce 3 fo. 87. 6 William Stubbs, `Inaugural' (1867) in Seventeen Lectures, 13±15.

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vividly in local records, agricultural patterns, and architectural remains evident still in every village and town. Narrative English history demonstrated continuity between traditional standards of thought and behaviour, the past and the future. The teaching of history began and continued with an appreciative study of English heroes, laws, institutions, and politics. Although the differences between history and classics may have been more important to the historians than the similarities, especially since they were attempting to establish an independent degree course, what is striking in retrospect is the common assumptions and purposes shared by both disciplines. The historians, like the classicists, studied societies with ®xed and laudable values. Greek and Roman society was thought to resemble British society in an essential permanence of structure and form. Even though historians believed in the progress of their society, they expected changes to occur in accordance with well-delineated traditions established as the constitution had been perfected. Historical authorities were consulted in the same way as classical authors had beenÐto reveal the processes by which stable development and enduring qualities of character and mind had developed. While the historians repudiated any static treatment of ideas, events, and institutions, they accepted the pedagogical strategies used by teachers in classics. When the subject of history was ®rst taught in the 1850s and 1860s, there were no generally accepted books and no agreement about the methods most appropriate for teaching the new subject. Since almost all the new teachers of history had received their degrees in classics, it was natural for them to rely upon the methods they knew best. History teaching established itself in dependence upon catechetical instruction in a limited number of set texts which were considered authoritative. But while students in classics studied the whole text, history students tended to be given selected extracts collected in `authorities'. An `authority' in history was understood either as a compilation of primary sources, generally interpreted by the compiler, or as a secondary synthesis, generally of constitutional and political narrative. While primary sources, including even a few current ones such as J. S. Mill's Political Economy, were recommended to students, reliance upon authorities became the distinguishing characteristic of teaching and the central text remained Stubbs's collection of Select Charters (1870), supplemented by selections from his three-volume Constitutional History (1874±8). When history teachers wrote their own authoritative texts for students, as they did in the Essays Introductory to the Study of Constitutional History (1886), they relied almost wholly on Stubbs's Constitutional History for their `foundation'.7 In 7 Essays Introductory to the Study of Constitutional History by Resident Members of the University (Oxford), ed. H. O. Wakeman and A. Hassall (1886), preface. Later editions 1891, 1901. Stubbs's three volumes take the constitution to 1485. For a modern critique see James

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the new historical teaching `the interleaved and underlined ``Charters'' found a congenial place by the side of the interleaved and underlined ``Ethics''.'8 But while Aristotle's Ethics was closely read from cover to cover, Stubbs's Charters was assigned in bits and pieces. From the date of publication, the Charters became, as Charles Oman recalled, a `sort of bible, from which a candidate was expected to identify any paragraph without its context being given'. Instead of studying the whole of the book, students in Oxford attended A. L. Smith's lectures on the `Steps to Stubbs': this taught which parts were of primary importance.9 William Stubbs, Regius Professor from 1866 to 1884, shaped the History school for at least three generations. Unlike his predecessor, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs was a recognized scholar who brought the historical school at Oxford three attributes essential to its success. First, Stubbs maintained the status of History within the University and the fame of Oxford as a `nursery of historic study among the Academies of Europe'.10 During seventeen years as Professor, his publication of a major work every year, except 1877 and 1881, gave the new school credibility throughout Britain and abroad. Secondly, he insisted that historians practise a disinterested neutrality that would distance the school from the political controversy characteristic of Goldwin Smith's tenure. Stubbs was chosen by the Derby±Disraeli government over E. A. Freeman and J. A. Froude because he was a `moderate Conservative' whose `teaching on religious questions would be thoroughly trustworthy' and whose `ability and knowledge would make the appointment unobjectionable'.11 The interpretation of history that Stubbs pursued was suf®ciently `moderate' to satisfy both Liberals and Tories, all of them Anglicans in religion, who were his colleagues and students. And ®nally, his corpus of historical work became the heart of Oxford's history curriculum around which a consistent and enduring scheme of teaching and examining could be organized. Of all the Professors of Modern History, Stubbs had the least cause for bitterness or disappointment because he had trained most of the teachers, writers, and administrators responsible for original research, editing, and producing comparative collections of documentsÐwho founded History schools all over Britain to provide professional study of their subject. These Balliol men, largely Brackenbury Scholars, came to Stubbs by the accident of Campbell, `Stubbs and the English State', Stenton Lecture, University of Reading (Reading, 1989). 8 W. J. Ashley, `The Study of History at Oxford', 275; OUA FA4/11/1/Z p. 67, Modern History Faculty Board Minutes, 2 May 1898. 9 Charles Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford and of Some Early Years (1941), 105. 10 Stubbs, `A Last Statutory Public Lecture' (1884), in Seventeen Lectures, 442±3. 11 Memo from the Earl of Carnarvon to the Derby±Disraeli Cabinet and letter from H. L. Mansell to Carnarvon, 15 July 1866, quoted in N. J. Williams, `Stubbs's Appointment as Regius Professor, 1866', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXXIII (May 1960), 123.

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his being an honorary fellow of Balliol from 1877 and its chaplain from 1877 to 1879. They included W. J. Ashley, Tout, J. H. Round, R. L. Poole, Richard Lodge, and Charles Firth. Stubbs's unique achievement was to produce `scholars', not `statesmen'.12 But in 1876 he complained publicly that he had `sometimes felt a little hurt that, after preparing and advertising a good course of lectures . . . I have had to deliver them to two or three listless men' because the most junior assistant tutor was offering a course on the same subject at the same time.13 Stubbs had no objection to college tutors preparing students for the honours examination. But he had hoped that the best of those students might come to him as well. Privately, he wrote to his successor Freeman to warn him against the `tutorial bias' which, since 1874, had prevented him from getting any of the better men.14 Stubbs gave the school an ordering, unifying principle of study in the systematic and organic narrative of constitutional history which he de®ned as the `unravelling' of the `string which forms the clue to the history of human progress'.15 He wanted the study of national history in the schools and universities to prepare the new voters, along with the old, to understand the mutual relations of Church and State, of the legislative and the executive, of the Crown and Parliament, of the several courts of justice, and of the estates of the realm. To provide a foundation for such studies until 1485, his Constitutional History (1874, 1875, 1878) integrated parliamentary government, local communities, political liberties, progressive order, circumstances, and institutions to reveal a vital, unitary organism. Critics of the Oxford school, such as the economic historian W. J. Ashley, wanted constitutional history to be taught rather as the meaning of related institutions which grow and decay. But the critics readily accepted Stubbs's premiss that the whole of history moved `to some goal'.16 Frederick Pollock, a lawyer with historical interests, was unique among these critics in charging that any study of institutions as entities that are `growing' concludes inevitably in a `speculative optimism which tries to see that whatever is becoming or is continuously in a way to be, is best'.17 When applied to the English constitution, this evolutionary optimism confounded an understanding of its actual historical development. On the historical stage the constitution was the constant backdrop for throwing into relief the growth of legal and social institutions based upon 12

Paul Fredericq, The Study of History in England and Scotland (Baltimore, Md., 1887), 44. Stubbs, `On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study' (1876), Seventeen Lectures, 35±7. 14 Stubbs to Freeman: Stubbs, Letters, 264. 15 Stubbs, `On the Purposes and Methods of Historical Study' (1877), Seventeen Lectures, 86. 16 W. J. Ashley, letter to his future wife Annie, in William James Ashley: A Life . . . with a chapter by J. H. Muirhead, etc. (1932), 33. 17 Frederick Pollock, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence from 1883 to 1903, in An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (1890), 119. 13

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liberty and consent. Through changing political scenes, the actors portrayed the disappointments of pursuing power, authority, or wealth without a principled dedication to country, law, and justice. Social and economic controversies were usually explained within a larger context of high politics. In the twelve-volume Political History of England, by pre-war Oxford historians, the volume on 1760±1801, published in 1905, and the one on 1801±37, published in 1906, ®nd that the heroes were Burke and Pitt rather than Price and Fox; that the Reform Act of 1832 was a remarkably peaceful `completion of the earlier English revolution provoked by the Stuarts'; and that the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 `permanently' improved `the condition of England'.18 Ironically, the relatively unchanging curriculum in the Oxford History school remained at odds with the evolutionary reading of history which it enshrined for so many decades. One explanation for the ¯ourishing state of political and constitutional history at Oxford is that it appealed to a wide spectrum of both Liberals and Conservatives as a conclusive demonstration of the values each thought most important. Remarkably, it transcended even strongly held political differences. For Tories who saw themselves as the national party of patriotism, the inherited constitution was to be protected from unwise changes, advocated especially at the century's end by Irish nationalists, radicals, and every species of socialist. Liberals, welcoming extensions of individual opportunities within a secure society, read the constitution as a historical record of political, economic, and social progress. Although constitutional debates changed after the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 had stirred fears in all the political parties about the coming of democracy, Whig, Liberal, and Conservative historians could still believe that the constitution had demonstrated a historical ability to accommodate social groups, political con¯ict, and institutional change. Stubbs produced a grand historical scheme that was both didactic and complacent. History was a theodicy in which moral forces always triumphed over the immoral. Although Stubbs acted, as he readily conceded, upon `clerical and Conservative principles', he thought that he could write history without ecclesiastical or political bias.19 Dedication to truth and justice was often mediated by his unexamined theological, psychological, ethical, and political commitments which concluded in a combination of High Church Anglicanism, Whig history, and civic responsibility. His Christian conservat18 William Hunt, The History of England from the Accession of George II to the Close of Pitt's First Administration (1760±1801) (1924), esp. 328±9; and George C. Brodrick (completed and revised by J. K. Fotheringham), The History of England from Addington's Administration to the Close of William IV's Reign (1801±1837) (1906), 307, 342. 19 Stubbs, `On the Present State and Prospects of Historical Study', 53±4. See also J. R. Green, `Professor Stubbs's Inaugural Lecture', Saturday Review, 2 Mar. 1867, 268. Green's private comment on the Inaugural is given above, pp. 43±4.

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ism minimized human capacities for understanding, but some historical lessons were transparently clear to him: next to theology, the study of modern history was the `most thoroughly religious training that the mind can receive'.20 He was a true believer who concealed his biases, even from himself, behind the facËade of a dispassionate historian translating original documents into magisterial prose. For him, success was `certain to the pure and true; success to falsehood and corruption, tyranny and aggression, is only the prelude to a greater and irremediable fall.' History justi®ed `the workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world'; and the best historian, which Stubbs genuinely tried to be, bore witness by scrupulously marshalling evidence of the divine designer's `hand of justice and mercy. . . ever leading the world on to the better, but never forcing, and out of the evil of men's working bringing continually that which is good'.21 At the end of his tenure, Stubbs admitted that he had `more dread of making enemies, than is at all consistent with a properly constituted moral courage'. As titular head of the dominant History school in England, he remained publicly neutral within the University and without. Stubbs never reviewed books and `abstained from controversy, religious, political, or historical'. It is hardly surprising that one of Stubbs's legacies to the History school was the insistence that contemporary history, because it was controversial, had to be avoided. As Regius Professor, Stubbs never lectured beyond the early seventeenth century.22 Those Oxford historians who wanted history to address current problems tended, as A. L. Smith did, to lecture occasionally on subjects such as the trade unions, which were only marginally useful for the examinations, or to organize present-minded historical lectures for the university extension movement, the WEA, and other extra-curricular audiences outside the university. Stubbs established the discipline of history in his University and none of his successors, until perhaps the 1930s, left so de®nitive an imprint on the meaning and teaching of the subject. Stubbs was followed in 1884 by E. A. Freeman, who returned to a reformed Oxford after a hiatus of thirty years. Ill health, his own remote position as Professor, and the unfamiliar curriculum, teaching, and examinations so alienated him that he withdrew essentially from the school's activities. The Regius Professor appointed in 1892 was J. A. Froude, rejected years earlier by Stubbs and attacked violently by Freeman. Then 74, Froude returned enthusiastically to an Oxford that had 20

Stubbs, `Inaugural', 16. See also `England under the Stewarts', 465±8. Stubbs, `Inaugural', 27. See also `Address on Church History to the Oxford Diocesan Church History Society' (1890), Seventeen Lectures, 452. 22 Stubbs, `A Last Statutory Public Lecture', 442±3. For Stubbs's expression of relief in 1876 that some of his colleagues had been bolder see p. 45 above. In 1914 General History period 8 ended in 1878, and six of the nine special subjects fell later than 1680. In 1912, 41 candidates took the ®rst four General History periods, 198 the last four. The limit for English History was advanced to 1885 in 1915. 21

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repudiated him forty-three years earlier as the apostate author of The Nemesis of Faith (1849). Although his reception, especially by those interested in research, was less than enthusiastic, Froude gave a vigorous inaugural defending his own relativistic, moralistic, and dramatic interpretation of history. But the three books based upon his lectures, two of them published posthumously, Erasmus (1894), English Seamen (1895), and The Council of Trent (1896), further eroded his reputation as a sound scholar. Froude's successor in 1894, the least successful of all the Regius Professors, was Frederick York Powell, appointed by Lord Rosebery after S. R. Gardiner refused. Although contemporaries thought of Powell as the `chief in¯uence among the younger students and teachers of history at Oxford', even his admiring biographer, Oliver Elton, concluded that Powell had no effect upon teaching or students. Charles Oman's harsher verdict was that as `far as the School of Modern History was concerned', Powell `might as well never have existed'.23 Charles Firth, appointed by Balfour to succeed Powell in 1904, was, as the tutors recognized, eminently suited for the chair. A scholar of Balliol, President of the Historical Seminar, and the winner of the Stanhope Prize of 1877 for his essay on The Marquess Wellesley, Firth became a lecturer at Pembroke, a research fellow of All Souls, succeeding S. R. Gardiner, and Ford's Lecturer at Oxford in 1900±1. Among the regius professors until the 1930s, he was the most proli®c both in the discovery of new documents and evidence and in the writing of original works of historical interpretation, concerned essentially with the seventeenth century. But he was also the ®rst holder of the of®ce to campaign relentlessly, as he had done when a lecturer, to make a professional study of history supplement existing teaching. Firth never understood that external fame, based on scholarship, had little to do with the reputation of history tutors, which was con®rmed rather by the national careers of their former students. In his inaugural lecture Firth argued for advanced training because an Oxford History student never acquired `the mental habits of a scholar' and instead `remained too long the passive recipient of other men's knowledge', learning `results instead of methods; not how to ®nd out, but what to remember'. Although he never disputed the tutor's assertion that a liberal arts education was the essential purpose of a history degree, he did not want that education mistaken for the specialized discipline that should be required for awarding fellowships and other teaching positions. As Firth wrote to R. H. Hodgkin, A. L. Smith's son-in-law and a fellow of Queen's and history lecturer there, `I have had no professional training myself except the School, 23 `Obituary', OM 18 May 1904. O. Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life and A Selection from His Letters and Occasional Writings (2 vols 1906), i. 195; Oman, Memories, 206. See also Firth to Tout, 25 Nov. 1894 and Powell to Tout, 1894, Tout Papers, the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.

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and have found it a very inadequate training.'24 Twenty-three tutors and lecturers, including Hodgkin, repudiated Firth's Plea in a rousing manifesto that defended the college tutor's position. With the generosity which comes most easily to those who know that their position is unassailable, the teachers conceded that teaching should be combined with research and original work, when possible. Moreover, they were `anxious in every way to strengthen the machinery for instruction,' of those few students who wanted professional careers as historians. But there was no doubt that their priorities lay in ®rst-degree honours teaching where history was part of a broader liberal education. They maintained that an aptitude for ```getting on with the men' was . . . desirable in any form of teaching, and indispensable in that very intimate and personal form called the college system'.25 While this controversy between Firth and the tutors was occurring, Frank Aydelotte, subsequently President of Swarthmore College and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. In Aydelotte's personal copy of the tutors' printed letter to Firth, he wrote marginal comments. When the tutors argued against Firth that students already dealt with original sources in `special subjects consisting of wholly original authorities and offering a wide option as to periods and topics', Aydelotte observed: `what these Dons fail to see here is the difference between going back to certain prescribed authorities, following someone else's track, and really exploring for one's self and forming new or unpublished opinions.' To the tutors' argument that a trained researcher or archivist might not necessarily be a good teacher, Aydelotte wrote: `Right for undergraduate work, but very wrong for training men who are past that stage.' What Aydelotte did not recognize was that there was no postgraduate training for those reading history, although some did stay an additional year to compete for prizes or college fellowships. To implement Firth's recommendations for recruiting postgraduate students, the tutors suggested printing an explanatory pamphlet about the B.Litt. for circulation in the US and the empire. But, as Aydelotte observed, no pamphlet would be effective in encouraging graduate students to come to Oxford without the `better training needed for the tutors & Profs. who are to give this Post-grad. instruction'.26 Firth replied to the tutors in a printed letter that denied he had intended to make the History school exclusively professional. What he wanted was both general education and an elastic curriculum which would provide more opportunities for the specialized teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate 24 Firth, preface to A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History (1904), 5; Firth to R. H. Hodgkin, 14 Nov. 1904: A. L. Smith Papers, iv. Misc., Balliol. 25 A Letter to the Regius Professor of Modern History on the Teaching and Study of History at Oxford (1905), 4±8. The tutors suggested increased publicity for the B.Litt. 26 Ibid. 7, 9±10. Aydelotte's copy was very kindly lent to me by his son, the distinguished historian William Aydelotte. For tutors' research training see pp. 54, 619±20.

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students who wanted careers as practising historians. But the teaching and curriculum remained substantially unchanged. The few new classes offered in palaeography and diplomatic, sources, bibliography, and historical methods, did not attract students because specialized training was not required for a career as a history teacher, archivist, tutor, or fellow. Firth introduced a thesis option for undergraduates in 1908, but it was in addition to the required work rather than a substitute for any part of it. The result was that few candidates in History ®nals submitted a thesis. During the whole of Firth's tenure until 1925, only two postgraduate seminars were regularly conducted at Oxford: one on the seventeenth century by Firth himself, and the other on the social and legal history of the Middle Ages by his closest ally in the school, Paul Vinogradoff. If Firth had been supported by the Chichele Professor of Modern History, he might have been more successful. But the Chichele Professor from 1905 was Charles Oman. Twenty-one years as a tutor persuaded Oman that his loyalties were to college teaching and liberal education. In his inaugural he attacked Firth's Plea for representing the researcher's view rather than that of the `professional University teacher'.27 Only after he had become Chichele Professor did Oman learn about the loneliness of professorial of®ce. The only professor to defend the primacy of the tutorial tradition, he found as the years passed that his chair excluded him from teaching and in¯uence and he thought again about the relative merits of tutorial and professorial functions within Oxford. But Oman continued to support a Modern History school that ®rmly trained the good citizen through a study of political history. For the tutors, with whom Oman originally identi®ed, a heavy burden of teaching, in addition to personal supervision of undergraduates throughout their college careers, left little time for analytical scrutiny of the historical materials they used. History tutors were appointed by the colleges, since there was no university control of staf®ng, and initially only the larger colleges had a history tutor. After the 1870s, these newly secular tutors justi®ed themselves as college teachers concerned with their pupil's character, intellect, and subsequent careers, rather than as historians studying original historical materials. Their competence was not tested in terms of technical pro®ciency. When choosing new history tutors in the self-perpetuating college elections, they usually appointed men as like themselves as they could ®nd in temperament and ability: those selected would have a greater commitment to their college duties than to their academic discipline. Some admired the German ideal of scholarship, but their careers as teachers rarely allowed them to pursue it. The subject was growing so rapidly that, as A. L. Smith complained, the tutors had great dif®culty in keeping up with the new 27

Charles Oman, `Inaugural Lecture', in Lectures on the Study of History (1906), 23±4.

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literature.28 They were too busy with teaching to launch a collaborative workshop and keep abreast of more specialized work, as their Cambridge colleagues did. Even those engaged in research were prepared to move towards a more professional discipline only if they could move slowly. The `immense power of accumulated tradition in the Oxford system' was a formidable obstacle which few overburdened tutors could surmount, and the reluctance of potential examiners to cope with new subjects was an even more serious restriction.29 More by the force of circumstances than by choice, the University's historians became guides to an already existing past where motives, causes, forces, consequences, tendencies, and institutions could be observed as if they were ®xed in amber. Even when tutors were able to read recent scholarly writing, they did not usually see it as the basis for new interpretations of history. The tutors used critical evidence for the same ends as the professors. Authorities were compared to see whether they agreed rather than to examine their underlying assumptions or unstated intent. Comparative method established what happened, illustrated historical patterns, or demonstrated England's essentially sound development in comparison to that of other countries. For A. L. Smith, the `comparative method has shown that not derivation but development is the law among nations'. Charles Boase, the history tutor at Exeter from 1855 to 1894, began his lecture on `French Constitutional History' by pointing out that France, unlike England, had no continuous constitutional history. Neither Smith nor Boase appear to have changed their lectures for the two generations they taught. Marjorie Reeves received a ®rst-class honours degree in Modern History in 1926 and went on to become a productive, original, and distinguished historian of the Renaissance and of higher education, and an Oxford tutor in the very best traditions of tutorial teaching. Her notes on Smith's lectures in 1924 show that he had scarcely changed any of them from his earliest lectures in the 1870s. The Boase Papers in Exeter College library reveal the same unchanging patterns. Those students who passed through the Oxford School from the 1860s until the First World War, to become teachers and writers of history throughout Britain and the English-speaking world, were likely to have heard the same lessons.30 By the twentieth century many colleges had both a medievalist and a modernist who were expected to teach not only all of English History but many of the options in the Foreign Periods and Special Subjects. While 28

A. L. Smith to F. W. Maitland, 17 Nov. 1905, BCLP, A. L. Smith Papers, IA. 2.3i. R. L. Poole to Tout, 21 May 1906, Tout Papers. H. W. C. Davis at Balliol worried that `most potential examiners' would `shriek aloud at the prospect of examining a hundred men annually in theses on variable special subjects': Davis to Tout, 12 June 1906, Tout Papers. 30 From 1877 to 1914, Smith taught 81% of those receiving ®rst-class honours in Modern History at Balliol and 72% of those receiving a second. Balliol College Registers, 1833±1933, 1916±67 (see n. 49 below). In addition to his Balliol students, Smith taught women and many students from other colleges. See also Boase Papers, ECA J.I.8. 29

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honours students in Greats tended to choose the same options of the Roman Republic and ®fth-century Athens, candidates for honours in Modern History were faced with proliferating choices. Whether all these subjects were being taught competently at a particular time was a matter of chance. As early as 1869 the history tutors recognized that the contents of a rapidly developing discipline could not be mastered by any single college lecturer. Robert Laing of Corpus and Mandell Creighton of Merton agreed to open their lectures to one another's pupils. By 1877, without any of®cial recognition from the university, this voluntary association included all the colleges except Worcester and Hertford, and the Unattached students. By the First World War there were nearly 100 authorized teachers in modern history, including those in geography, palaeography, diplomatic, political science, political economy, Indian history, military history, political theory and institutions, and anthropology. But there was no single prospectus for a school of History and information on lectures had to be collected and collated from term announcements by the several faculty boards. As the numbers of honours students grew, University Lecturers were appointed to supplement the more general teaching of the college tutors. These `specialists' were usually recruited from among the tutors. Charles Boase was University Reader in Modern History from 1884±1894, but his only scholarly work was a translation of Ranke's History of England, Principally in the 17th Century (6 vols, 1875). The ®rst Reader in Indian History, from 1875 to 1913, was Sidney Owen. Although he had spent two years as Professor of History at Elphinstone College, Bombay, he had never studied Indian history. Eight years after becoming Reader, he wrote India on the Eve of the British Conquest (1872), which described the `moral turpitude of most of the prominent personages that occupy these sheets', and was, as he admitted, based entirely on secondary sources.31 Those Oxford history tutors to whom students felt the greatest debts from the 1870s until the 1920s were James Franck Bright of University, Arthur Johnson of All Souls, H. A. L. Fisher of New College, and, above all, A. L. Smith of Balliol. Smith taught the greatest number of history students at Oxford from 1877 to 1916. Nearly every one who became a teacher of history at Oxford, and many distinguished statesmen, were his students. Among them were three Regius Professors at Oxford: H. W. C. Davis, Maurice Powicke, and V. H. Galbraith; a Regius Professor at Cambridge, G. N. Clark; the prominent historians A. G. Little, Ernest Barker, Richard Lodge, Lewis Namier, Ramsay Muir, F. D. Acland, R. C. K. Ensor, R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, and C. H. K. Marten of Eton and John O'Regan of Marlborough, as well as statesmen such as Elgin and Herbert Samuel. In his responsible eÂlitism and his liberal social conscience, Smith represented the 31

Quoted in Richard Symonds, Oxford and the Empire (1986), 113.

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Oxford ideal generally and the Balliol ethos in particular. His entire adult life, ®rst as a teacher and after 1916 as Master, was spent at Balliol teaching that ideal as the essential lesson of national history. There is no doubt that he was an inspiring teacher and a model for his students, but to dismiss Smith as merely an effective tutor sells him considerably short. He was a scholar who was also actively engaged in educational movements and in public service outside Oxford. His 1905 Ford's Lectures on The Church and State in the Middle Ages (1913) and his two published lectures on Maitland (1908) demonstrated `brilliant . . . thinking and writing and original research'.32 Instead of devoting himself to original scholarship, he attempted to persuade Oxford students and audiences of working people that history proved conclusively the ef®cacy of moral character and will. It never occurred to him that the historian should be objective. On the contrary, history was both a testimony to individual effort and a spur. Although he tried to help students prepare for their examinations by providing simple `hand-outs' summarizing examination questions, his lectures revealed subtle historical imagination and dedication to research, as well as a view of history as a subject which taught moral imperatives, social obligation, and the meaning of nationalism. His enormously popular lectures, explicitly moral lessons, were also complex and full of ambiguities and quali®cations. In his `Political and Social Questions', as in his more traditional courses on Stubbs, English constitutional history, and the Popes in the thirteenth century, he went beyond the limited authorities formally recommended by the Board of Modern History and required his students to read a wide variety of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. In addition to an optimistic af®rmation of historical directions, Smith provided speci®c, current sources of information to enable future leaders to attack problems successfully. Smith saw history as instruction for a life of dedicated leadership, conducted reasonably, imaginatively, and knowledgeably. The skill required to answer historical questions involved the kind of economical thinking that could be transferred to every aspect of life. To Smith, history `consisted in giving the right answers to the right questions'.33 He never doubted that he knew both. The lessons taught by Smith are the same as those to be found in the large collection of Charles Boase's notes, in Richard Lodge's `hand-outs', and in odd bits of work prepared for students by the Balliol history tutor, H. W. C. Davis. In Lodge's `handout' on `The Tudor Period', a four-page summary of the salient features of 150 years, the ®nal sentence is: `A nation's character is 32 V. H. Galbraith, quoted in Hartley, `Successors to Jowett': H. W. C. Davis, A History of Balliol College (1963), 242. 33 A. L. Smith, `The Teaching of Modern History', in C. Cookson (ed.) Essays on Secondary Education (1898), 178, 192.

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the product of its history.'34 Davis read a paper to the members of the Balliol History Club in 1907 on `The Meaning of History'. We `resort to history,' he said, `for a con®rmation of our faith in the value of human effort; we go to it for examples' and learn `the duty of spending ourselves in order that the toils of those who preceded us may not be in vain, and that the ages to come may not reproach us with a careless stewardship of human destinies.'35 The ethos of social, political, and educational activism was hardly a Liberal or a Balliol preserve. The Conservative tutor, J. A. R. Marriott, as a university extension lecturer from 1887 to 1939 and as Secretary of the Oxford University Extension Delegacy from 1895 to 1920, was also moved by the Oxford historian's impulse to improve. Although the college remained the immediately secure centre of a tutor's life, the increasingly specialized study of history inevitably drew teachers like A. L. Smith into a wider inter-collegiate life. During the late nineteenthcentury expansion of the history school college history teachers were brought together in the Modern History Association, dominated from 1891 to the 1920s by Arthur Johnson. While Johnson was in charge, the college tutors determined `every question connected with the study of Modern History exactly as they pleased'.36 And, perhaps most important, the tutors virtually controlled the nomination of examiners in History. It was no accident that Arthur Johnson served the longest number of years as an examiner.37 Stubbs was elected Chairman of the ®rst university-wide Modern History Board in February 1883, and for the next decade a Regius or Chichele Professor sat in the chair. But they never led the board. In 1893, when Arthur Johnson was elected to the chair, the last ®ction of professorial in¯uence was abandoned. Johnson remained a vigorous chairman until 1912, supported by the truest, most aggressive believers in the tutorial ideal, A. L. Smith and Edward Armstrong of Queens. In January 1908 the association was divided into a larger Modern History Association of professors, readers, tutors, and lecturers, responsible for the lecture list and all ordinary business; and a smaller Tutors' Association, which met to discuss matters concerning only college tutors and lecturers. Then, in February 1913, the Modern History Association's functions were transferred to the new Faculty of 34 The undergraduate, Oliver Wardrop, labelled these printed hand-outs to students on the Tudor and Stuart periods `Lodge's Lectures'. BCA: uncatalogued manuscript; J. O. Wardrop: `English constitutional history: outline of lectures delivered at Oxford by A. L. Smith of Balliol College and other members of the university, 1889±90', `The Tudor Period, 1485± 1603', 4. 35 H. W. C. Davis, `The Meaning of History', 20, typescript in box, BCA. 36 C. H. Firth, The Faculties and Their Powers: A Contribution to the History of University Organization (1909), 12. 37 Johnson was an Examiner in 1878, '79, '87, '88, '89, '90, '98, '99 and 1900. During those years he examined 1,076 students. The only other examiner to approach that number was Richard Lodge, with a total of 750 students.

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Modern History, which was now to elect the board. After the First World War, the Tutors' Association became a social dining club. Tutors taught students receptive to a reading of national history that made harmonious institutions depend upon individual capacity and responsibility because it con®rmed and justi®ed their eÂlitist place within society. Those seeking a ®rst- or second-class degree as a direct avenue to important careers appreciated the orderly teaching of digestible facts which could be assimilated from narrative textbooks, demonstrated in compilations of illustrative sources, and applied ®rst to examinations and then to real life. The majority of honours students at Oxford had largely an `examining' interest in history; their studies were shaped and limited entirely by the requirements of the Final Honours Examination. Examinations were governed by the examiners who, as Goldwin Smith had predicted accurately in 1868, became the `most important of®cers of the University'.38 Honours examinations were devised to judge ®rst-degree quality. The history tutors in Oxford, who were examiners generally for at least one three-year period during their teaching careers, controlled their subject by setting its examination standards and by their in¯uence in nominating its examiners. The only professor to serve as an examiner between the 1850s and 1900 was Stubbs. E. A. Freeman complained that examinations had `degraded teaching into a trade'.39 But the examiners' annual three-week meeting, lasting at least ®ve hours a day to discuss hundreds of papers, provided a rare opportunity for common re¯ection upon their subject with outside examiners from other British universities. However, since the outside examiners were nearly all Oxford graduates, there was considerable unanimity of perception and purpose even though there was often criticism of the methods by which History was taught at Oxford. After the middle of the century, for most tutors and for the students they guided, examinations became a disciplinary force regulating how both groups spent their time. While many history tutors disapproved of `cramming', which relied more upon memory than upon `re¯ective or logical faculties', they felt that they were driven to it. Until 1913 the Oxford requirement that students take Classical or Pass Moderations meant that many undergraduates had only two years in which to complete the entire history syllabus.40 A. L. Smith encouraged students to think independently. But his `hand-outs' for all the papers in the examination indicated unequivocally which authorities were wrong, the acceptable interpretations, and the judgements to be drawn. Both the curriculum and the examinations, controlled by the tutors, largely excluded contemporary scholarship, histor38

Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 3, 7. E. A. Freeman, `Oxford after Forty Years', Contemporary Review, li (1887), 618±20. J. Thorold Rogers, Education in Oxford: Its Methods, its Aids and its Rewards (1861), 45. For the failure to secure Modern History Honour Moderations in 1886 see Pt 1, 355±6. 39 40

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iography, and evaluations of historical method and meaning. Even in the Special Subject, which focused on a narrower ®eld or a particular ®gure, the student did not investigate his topic but instead mastered an existing, already organized body of knowledge. Part of the rationale for giving students convenient texts was that they were untrained in modern foreign languages. Although candidates for the History honours exams were required to read original sources and foreign languages in the Special Subject, in a number of the subjects set all or some of the books prescribed were available in English, and some of those in foreign languages included only selected portions. Some even among the best students avoided those Special Subjects that required them to use a foreign language, or studied summaries rather than the sources themselves. From at least 1903, the examiners complained to the History Board about the neglect of both original and foreign-language authorities. In 1905 the examiners regretted that `so many candidates seek to obtain a knowledge of their special subjects by other means than a study of the prescribed texts, and the following year they noted further that there `is a distinct falling off in the knowledge of the authorities in the Special Subjects'.41 They attempted consistently and unsuccessfully to make the language requirement more stringent. Because students were showing insuf®cient knowledge of foreign languages, which meant they could not read recommended foreign authors for their Special Subject, a required paper of unprepared translation was set in 1908, but the results were disappointing. Moreover, in their lectures on the Special Subjects, some tutors discussed the foreign and original sources in such detail, including an analysis of their major points and weaknesses, that a student might do well in his examinations by simply repeating what he heard in lectures. The examiners complained consistently that lectures, because they were so comprehensive, were hardly an incentive to independent study. Nearly every examiners' report also found that knowledge of English political history, the heart of the Oxford history curriculum, was inadequate. Given the broad and demanding requirement of continuous English history, it is hardly surprising that undergraduates failed to master it. The opportunity for writing a thesis made little difference: the standard, among the few students who chose to submit one, was variable. What remains of the undergraduate work of thousands of History honours students from the 1870s to the 1914 are a few tutorial essays; only one script, containing six answers, by an anonymous candidate in 1873, who achieved a second class; and, two students' lecture notes, one set from 1870±4 and the other from the mid-1880s. Some of the `hand-outs' which 41 OUA FA4/11/2/1, pp. 38, 46, Modern History Faculty Board reports. Before the turn of the century, two reports by the examiners appear in the Modern History Board Papers (see the report of 10 July 1889, in OUA FA4/11/1/1 p. 142) but it was not until 1903 that the Board decided to print reports.

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A. L. Smith provided for his students survive and re¯ect the values he taught. In one, prepared for those studying General History, Period 3 (919±1273), on Archbishop Engelbert, Smith expressed his admiration for the Archbishop's `strong sense of justice' and his rising `above vulgar class prejudices', so as to `see men and things in their true light and just relations . . . The great hated him, but he found his satisfaction in the love of the people.'42 The qualities ascribed to Engelbert were those Smith wanted his students to learn and act upon. The one remaining script reveals similar processes of thought and judgement. In his answer to question 2, which asked for a discussion of the constitutional dif®culties faced by William III and the Kings of Brunswick in relation to their continental dominions, the candidate compared the liberties and sovereignties of the English under William to the subservience of the Dutch. In England, William `was a limited constitutional sovereign, without control of the public purse from which all other power naturally ¯ows; and besides this he was the nominee of the English people, his claim resting not on hereditary right, but on election by a popular Parliament liable therefore to deposition in case of his actions being displeasing to the sovereign people, or by contravention of the terms upon which he was appointed.' In the Netherlands, the `people could not get on without him and were therefore obliged to acquiesce in whatever he might do'.43 In the two surviving sets of lecture notes by M. E. G. Finch-Hatton from 1870±4 and by E. W. Watson for 1882±3, there is a similar reading of the meaning of history. Finch-Hatton was an undergraduate at Balliol who studied English history with A. H. Johnson, the most persistent advocate of the broad tutorial tradition of teaching, and then took a ®rst class in Modern History. He entered public service as High Sheriff in Lincolnshire and was also a member of the Kesteven County Council and MP for South Lincolnshire, before becoming the twelfth Earl of Winchilsea. To FinchHatton, English history revealed a linear development of English virtues from Edward I to 1874: `All previous English History converges to, all subsequent diverges from his reign in Bravery, patriotism, consummate Statesmanship, domestic values, religion and chivalric feeling, trained in adversity, nursed in War.'44 E. W. Watson, later Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, in his notes from the lectures of J. F. Bright on the `Social History of England till the Conquest', describes the early political 42 BCLP, A. L. Smith Papers I. A 12/4i. See also essays by J. H. Burrows and K. M. Thomas, ibid., I. B4/7iii and 3/5ii. 43 Peter Slee has included this script in his `History as a Discipline at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1848±1914' (Cambridge unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1983), Appendix II, together with the Constitutional and Political Paper, Michaelmas Term, 1873, that the script answered. See his Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. 1800±1914 (Manchester, 1986), 111±13. 44 Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. d.842 fo. 135, M. E. G. Finch-Hatton.

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unity of a national Church with the state, one of Stubbs's favourite themes. In his notes from A. L. Smith on Stubbs's Charters, Watson emphasized the importance of the shire and the prevention of too rapid centralization in English government.45 The classroom was only one milieu in which students learned about history. Outside of the curriculum and formal instruction, one of the most effective new educational traditions was the inter-collegiate student history society which attempted to explore examination subjects more deeply and, at the same time, transcend the constraints imposed by the curriculum. Opportunities for ful®lling an ideal of friendship were greater within these clubs than in any subsequent adult encounter and attachments made here, often in heated controversy, became enduring personal alliances which survived party allegiances or socially incompatible backgrounds. Within these societies, which idealized honourable camaraderie based upon inquiry and honesty, young men, and subsequently women, learned the skills of debate, discussion, and re¯ection which encouraged them to emerge as national ®gures. The Stubbs Society was a proving ground for future leaders and for the founders of new ®elds of inquiry. In these bodies, students and the dons who joined and encouraged them attempted original scholarship and the criticism of historical materials. They weighed evidence, judged conduct, agreed upon canons of interpretation, and debated conclusions. The result was an intellectual curiosity and eÂlan conspicuously rare in the work done even for the honours degree. At the meetings, inquiry into historical subjects became examinations of human nature, motivation, causality, and accident. The social attributes of tact and sympathetic discrimination which they cultivated as a communal ethic led them to believe that if they could trace problems back to their origins and then separate them into their component parts, they could then understand, explain, and ®nally resolve them. That ethos reinforced personal good will and it provided for intellectually exciting evenings. But it also created con®dent expectations that were bound to be confounded within the real world. An older American undergraduate at Balliol, Samuel Brearley, who had been in Germany, introduced the idea of a `seminar' to undergraduates reading Modern History in 1882. His `Brearley Improvement Society' became ®rst the Oxford Historical Seminar, and then, upon Stubbs's promotion to a bishopric in 1884, the Stubbs Society.46 In 1883 Freeman presided over the Seminar, which included Cosmo Gordon Lang, subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury; Herbert Hensley Henson, later Bishop of Durham; J. A. R. Marriott, Ryland Adkins, T. E. Ellis, and Charles Oman, who all sat in the House of Commons at some point in their careers; William Holden 45

E. W. Watson, undergraduate lecture and reading notes, Bodl. MS. Top Oxon. e. 378. Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. e.195, fo. 135 The Oxford Historical Seminar (Rules) (1882); Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. d.20, minute book of the Oxford Historical Seminar. Oman, Memories, 106. 46

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Hutton, later Dean of Winchester; Sidney Cooper, later Canon-Treasurer of Truro; Alexander J. Carlyle, a distinguished historian of political thought; and W. J. Ashley. Three years later, James Tait was elected as the sixteenth or ®nal member, Firth was in the chair, and York Powell had become an active participant. Although the papers delivered to the Stubbs Society generally followed the questions in the Final Honours examination, they also included such recent movements and events as Socialism, Chartism, and the Industrial Revolution; theoretical questions about the character of history; and discussions about historiographical interpretations.47 The detailed minutes of each paper and of the ensuing debates reveal a sustained view of history as moral judgement. Throughout the thirty years before the First World War, the Stubbs Society consistently praised `national virtues' and condemned `national vices'. `Vulgarity and mediocrity' were the personal qualities held in the greatest contempt. The unswerving con®dence with which these opinions were delivered was due partly to the arrogance of the young and privileged, but even more to the fundamental assumptions characteristic of the School of Modern History at Oxford. The issues that preoccupied a generation of undergraduates who were to become eminent leaders in every ®eld are evident not only in the extensive minutes of the Stubbs Society, but in the papers of the Balliol History Club and the Brackenbury Society. Until the First World War the Brackenbury Society debated the decay of patriotism, the proposed federation of the British empire, the decline of national sentiment, and the in¯uence of the public school on character and conduct in after life. The minutes and remaining essays of all the student societies display a view of historical events consistent with the political and ethical lessons taught by teachers and textbooks. Some students joined societies because they were ambitious for distinction. A surer way was to win a University prize. Beginning in the 1860s with A. V. Dicey and James Bryce and continuing into the pre-war years with Lewis Namier and Harold Laski, Oxford History Prize winners tended to go on to conspicuously successful academic careers. George Curzon, although he read Greats, won the Lothian in 1883 and the Arnold in 1884 and became one of comparatively few Prize winners who left the academic world. Curzon became Viceroy of India, but he never severed his ties with Oxford and he returned as a particularly active Chancellor in 1907. The prize system was a compromise between the goals of the History professors and those of the tutors. By the 1880s the prize essay encouraged original scholarship among a few students and conferred recognition beyond an honours 47 Minute books of the Stubbs Society, Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. d.292/2 fos 28±9, 56 (6 Mar. 1896, 7 May 1897).

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degree. Students could try for the Chancellor's Prize, the Arnold, the Stanhope, the Lothian, and the Beit. Prize winners had strong claims for college fellowships.48 When the generations educated in history eventually came to positions of power, they had undergone many experiences that could have modi®ed or altered what they had learned as undergraduates. Whatever evidence remains con®rms that history teachers, whether tutors or professors, intended their graduates for the most important places in any profession they chose, and especially in those professions serving the public good. The demonstration of those intentions is independent of what students actually did with their lives. But it appears that a considerable number of the best students preferred careers, including education, where they could constructively carry out the lofty ideals taught at Oxford. The ablest chose those careers which ful®lled the ethos taught by historians. While it is impossible to discover what in their university years most affected their subsequent judgement, it is not unreasonable to assume that as increasingly large numbers of history graduates went from the University into central positions in the English-speaking world, they took with them at least some of the historical lessons they had learned. Among those lessons, perhaps the most important was that in the historical crucible, England's institutions and the directions of her development had proven sound. After 1901, the honour school of Modern History produced more graduates than any other degree course and their numbers continued to grow. They entered distinguished, generally multiple, careers dedicated either to in¯uencing people or to affecting public affairs, at the highest levels of the civil, foreign, imperial, and diplomatic services; politics; the Church; the military; law; journalism; letters; publishing; banking; economics; industry; and university and secondary-school teaching and administration. It is instructive to follow additional data drawn from Balliol graduates in history between 1873, the date of the ®rst honours examination in modern history, and 1914.49 During those two generations, there were more students reading history at Balliol than at any other college, and, except in 1896, they accumulated the greatest number of ®rst and second classes in every History 48 Papers of the Balliol History Club, 1907±1909, BCA. The minute books of the Brackenbury Society are available from 1890 to 1940. Christ Church had a historical society too. See also the Society for the Study of Social Ethics (renamed the Social Science Club in 1897); the Oxford University Branch of the Christian Social Union; the Cabinet Club, the Edward Lhuyd Society; and the Oxford Economic Society: Miscellaneous Papers, 1889±1914, Bodleian Library. For a list of some of the University prize winners see Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870±1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1995), 263±4, n. 60. 49 The information on the careers of Balliol history graduates is drawn from The Balliol College Register, Second Edition, 1833±1933, ed. I. Elliott (1934); The Balliol College Register, Fourth Edition, 1916±1967, ed. E. Lemon (1969). For a detailed statistical analysis, see Soffer, Discipline and Power (n. 48), ch. 8.

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®nal examination. These young men led the country and empire in almost every ®eld. The greatest number chose multiple careers devoted largely to public service and education, which enabled them, if they wished, to exercise decisive authority. It was characteristic of the standing of Balliol men in public service that ten of the college's history graduates were among the delegates at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919.50 The careers of law and religion, traditional conclusions for a Victorian university education before the introduction of the school of Modern History, were rejected by the majority of Balliol graduates in History. But even among the minority who selected these older, narrower careers, many worked towards social and ethical ends within them.51 The working lives of Balliol History graduates demonstrate a strong sense of obligation to the public good. Emphasis upon character as the principal requisite for public responsibilities usually took precedence over accumulating the particular and essential knowledge necessary for the actual government of actual places. History graduates could choose to augment their honours degree by other, possibly more `professional' studies. But in Balliol, most of those reading History trusted in the value of their degree and concentrated exclusively on their subject. Ignorance of contemporary history, geography, economics, and languages did not prevent History graduates from venturing intrepidly into many different ®elds at home and in inhospitable countries abroad. Facing formidable obstacles, usually without any other preparation than an honours degree in History, they rarely recognized inadequacies either in what they knew or were expected to do. It is impossible to know whether these graduates would have been more or less successful in their work if they had been more critical of their own education or more introspective about a national history larger than the life of any other people. Whether tutors or professors, the Oxford historians were the moral haberdashers of the governing eÂlite. They rarely saw history with ironic detachment. Instead, they constructed a narrative in which accomplished solutions were always more important than intractable problems. The ambiguous issues which troubled the political, social, and economic life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received far less attention than the earlier, more satisfying, political and constitutional achievements. Although differing about the importance of particular historical individuals or events, they found moral truths ordering the behaviour of powerful 50 They were J. H. Morgan, E. Wright, G. D. Knox, T. A. Spring-Rice, F. B. Bourdillon, H. G. Nicolson (who read Modern History, but did not take honours), J. L. Palmer, F. Clarke, M. Sadleir, and W. H. Shepardson. 51 See the argument of A. G. L. Haig in `The Church, the Universities and Learning in Later Victorian England', Historical Journal, 291 (1986), 187±201. See also John Jones, Balliol College: A History, 1263±1939 (1988, 2nd edn 1997).

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people and anonymous groups, the development of law and institutions, and the character of time and place. Until well after the Second World War, the continuity of history in Oxford as an essentially conservative study of constitutional and institutional development may be explained in part by the creation in 1920 of the new degree course in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, or `Modern Greats', which addressed theoretical and contemporary political, social, and economic issues. Those students and tutors who might have questioned the scope and contents of History were attracted instead to the new discipline where there was more ¯exibility and traditions had still to be established. Moreover, the percentage reading History diminished, as it grew in PPE. In History, an enduring whiggish reading of a supposedly objective historical record af®rmed that welcome change occurred continuously in England, even though that change might be slow, sometimes imperceptible, and rarely, retrograde. Pre-war Oxford graduates such as R. H. Tawney, L. B. Namier, and Harold Laski, whether trained in Modern History or Greats, later became historians who rejected this tradition. It is signi®cant that they were not asked to remain at Oxford. Not only in England, but in the United States and Germany too, History became a discipline which emphasized continuity and consensus more than change and con¯ict. But unlike the `professional' German historians who confused their privileged status within the state with genuine power, and imagined that scholars could aggressively decide history as well as describe it, or American historians, who offered to analyse and solve foreign-policy problems, most English historians did not seek to play a central role themselves. Instead they were content to teach a higher style of thought and behaviour which would prepare their students to act decisively in leading England into a future consistent with the historical values of her past.52 52 Tawney and J. L. Hammond took seconds in Greats, Namier a ®rst in Modern History. For the latter's failure at All Souls see p. 802 below. For a more complete discussion of the development of History at Oxford see Reba N. Soffer, `The Cloister and the Hearth: The Emergence of History as a University Profession in England', Occasional Paper 31 (May 1982), Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley; `The Modern University and National Values, 1850±1930', Historical Research, lx ( June 1987), 166±87; `Nation, Duty, Character, and Con®dence: History at Oxford, 1850±1914', Historical Journal, xxx (1987), 77±104; `The Development of Disciplines in the Modern English University', ibid., xxxi (1988), 933±46 and Discipline and Power. (n. 48).

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15 Jurisprudence1 ba r ry n i c h o l as

t h e s tate o f le ga l e d u cat i o n i n 18 5 0 The state of legal education in England had been a cause for public concern for some twenty years before the creation of the school of Law and Modern History at Oxford in 1850.2 Such concern was greatly overdue. Until, in 1828 and 1829, John Austin and Andrew Amos began lecturing at what was to become University College London, there had been for many years no effective public teaching of law anywhere. In 1833 the Incorporated Law Society was moved to begin the provision of courses for articled clerks. But there was little else.3 It was in these circumstances that in 1846 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the state of legal education in England and Ireland. It reported in the same year and the evidence which it heard made plain, among other things, the emptiness of even such legal education as Oxford ostensibly provided. Dr Joseph Phillimore, who had been Regius Professor of Civil Law since 1809 (and was to occupy the chair until 1855), admitted in his rather evasive replies to questions that his subject had not been taught for nearly a century.4 His colleague, Dr J. R. Kenyon,5 who had been Vinerian Professor of English Law only since 1843, said that in each of the past two years he had ful®lled his obligation of giving twentyfour lectures and that he intended to devise a coherent course,6 but this intention was evidently never put into effect. Long before he vacated the chair by death in 1880 he had ceased to lecture. The Registrar of the University, Dr Philip Bliss, said that there were no examinations in any `legal science'. The degree of Bachelor of Civil Law was indeed still awarded, but the `disputations' which purported to justify the award had long been an empty form.7 1

This section draws heavily on F. H. Lawson, The Oxford Law School 1850±1965 (1968). W. S. Holdsworth, History of English Law (1903±66), xii, 78±101. Holdsworth, History of English Law, xv, 232±3. 4 PP 1846 (686) x, 109±10; cf. RCO (1850), evidence, 254±5. 5 H. G. Hanbury, The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (1958), 90±7. 6 PP 1846 (686), x, 109±10. 7 Ibid. 108; cf. G.V. Cox, Recollections of Oxford (2nd edn 1870), 377±8. There had been an abortive attempt to institute an examination in 1844; see Lawson, Oxford Law School, 10. 2 3

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The lack of teaching and the lack of examinations were not unconnected, of course. Professor Phillimore in his evidence made the point that the introduction of the new examination system at the beginning of the century had been prejudicial to the study of law `because that study forms no part of the examinations by which the attention of all diligent students is engrossed'.8 Moreover, neither professor was paid a stipend which would justify an expectation that he would reside in Oxford. The Vinerian Professor received £200 p.a. and the Regius Professor less,9 whereas the Oxford University Commission of 1850 regarded £800 as a reasonable, if minimal, stipend for a resident professor.10 The Select Committee recommended11 a division of functions between the universities and the professional bodies, which remains a characteristic feature of English legal education. The universities should teach law and should give degrees in the subject, but the legal education given by them should be `comparative and philosophical' in character, whereas the Inns of Court and the Law Society should establish a system of professional education. The response of the Inns of Court was immediate, though a further inquiry by a Royal Commission in 1854 proved to be necessary.12 The Law Society was slower to act, but we have seen that some steps had already been taken. The Select Committee's report was made at a time when moves in Oxford to widen the range of the honour schools had already begun, but it was not until three years later, at the last stage of the debates on the new schools, that Law was added to what was previously to have been a school of Modern History. The response, if response it was, to the Select Committee's recommendation was therefore slow. It was also very limited.

l aw in t h e s c h o o l o f law a n d m o d e r n h i s to ry Though the new school included law in its title and indeed gave precedence to it (perhaps for the sake of euphony), it was, it has been said,13 more like what would now be called a school of modern studies. One of those who launched it spoke of it as `a School of Social Science' intended for the better education of the aristocracy and the gentry.14 This is re¯ected in the choice of the legal elements in the syllabus.15 All candidates, whether for pass or for honours, were required to offer either a part of Blackstone's Commentaries 8

The professors of science made the same complaint: Ward, Victorian Oxford, 16. RCO (1850), Appendix F, 58±9. 10 RCO (1850), report, 109. 11 PP 1846 (686), x, xlvii; Holdsworth, History of English Law, xv, 235±7. 12 Ibid. 237±9; PP 1854±5 xviii. 345. The Royal Commission was appointed on 5 May 1854, and reported on 10 Aug. 1855. 13 Lawson, Oxford Law School, 21±2. 14 Goldwin Smith, Lectures on Modern History (1861), 13±17; cf. Sir Charles Firth, Modern History in Oxford, 1841±1918 (1920), 7. 15 Quoted in Lawson, Oxford Law School, 20. 9

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or Justinian's Institutes. If they chose Blackstone they could offer either the part dealing with the law of Real Property or that dealing with the rights of Persons and the law of Personal Property. These topics were presumably chosen as being those most appropriate to the concerns of the aristocracy and the gentry. If candidates chose Justinian, they had ostensibly no similar choice, but in practice a quite disproportionate number of questions was set on property and succession.16 Candidates who aspired to honours had to offer in addition Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations. The prescribing of set texts in the shape of Blackstone or Justinian's Institutes no doubt made the new subject more acceptable to Oxford opinion, for three reasons. It conformed to the pattern familiar in the dominant classical school; it met the speci®cally Oxford need that, in a system in which candidates were (and are) examined for the most part by persons who have never taught them, the subject should be de®ned in as objective a way as possible; and it provided a protection against the then current fear of the importation from Germany of professorial indoctrination. In these respects Law was less open to conservative attack than Modern History. Since the papers on Blackstone or Justinian's Institutes were common to passmen and to classmen, it is perhaps not surprising that the questions set were of a type which would now be regarded as appropriate only to the former. In 1853, for example, the number of questions set in each paper ranged from seven to twelve, and since there is no indication of how many a candidate was expected to answer, he was probably expected to attempt them all. Nor would this have been unreasonable, since they were of a limited and factual kind, calling only for intelligent reading and a reasonably good memory.17 The combined school survived until 1872, but eight years before then the requirement that every candidate must take Literae Humaniores before proceeding to a second school was removed. In fact, not many of those who sought honours (themselves of course a small minority) had done so in both Literae Humaniores and Law and Modern History. It seems that most took honours in one school and a pass in the other,18 if indeed they graduated at all. The change did nothing to diminish the predominance of Literae Humaniores. Even under the old regime, few of those who took honours in Law and Modern History later achieved distinction, and the number was even smaller after the change. This was in part, no doubt, due to the absence of college scholarships to attract good candidates, but the founders of the combined school were probably content that it should be less demanding. Fifty years later Sir Charles Firth,19 in a retrospective survey, concluded that 16 17 18 19

The papers for Trinity term, 1853, are reproduced in Lawson, 184±6. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Modern History (above, n. 14), 6.

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the standard of the combined school `was not set high, and was not designed to be high'. And, as between the two subjects, law was evidently the weaker. In 1864 C. S. Roundell, in an open letter to the Vice-Chancellor20 drew on his experience as an examiner in the school to declare that law was `on a distinctly lower level' than history. Four years later Goldwin Smith21 even said that `the legal portion of the so-called Law and History School has become almost a farce, leaving the School, in truth, merely a School of History.' In addition to the combined school, there had been since 1851 an examination for the degree of BCL.22 The focus of the examination was Justinian's Institutes and the Syntagma of Heineccius.23 So long as Phillimore occupied the Regius chair there were presumably no lectures, but his successor, Travers Twiss, was more conscientious.24 That there was an examination is clear25 (though there was no class list), but no papers appear to have survived, if indeed any were set, and we cannot tell what the standard was. There was no faculty organization and, until towards the end of the period of the combined school, no attempt to provide public (that is, University) lectures on the legal part of the syllabus. The teaching continued to be by lectures in the colleges, reinforced by private tutors.26 The college lectures must commonly have been given by the same man who lectured on history.27 Nor is this surprising in view of the elementary nature of the syllabus and the fact that it was based on set books. What was lacking, and continued to be lacking for a considerable time, was any adequate textbook. It was to this (and to the absence of any proper professorial teaching) that C. S. Roundell28 attributed the low standard of law in the combined school. For the able man there were two scholarships to help him on his way. After earlier changes the Vinerian Scholarships were placed on a new footing in 1867.29 There was to be one scholarship of £80 each year, tenable for three years and awarded after an examination. The subjects of examination covered a much wider range than the law papers in the combined school or indeed than those of the separate school after 1872. They were in fact closer to those which were to be required for the reformed BCL after 1873.30 There 20

Letter to the Vice-Chancellor, 14 Jan. 1864, Bodl. G. A. Oxon c. 80 (216). The Reorganization of the University of Oxford (1868), 28. 22 RCO (1850) report, 84. 23 See notices preserved in Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c. 79 (47), G.A. Oxon. c. 80 (30). 24 See notices preserved in Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c. 72 (15). 25 G.V. Cox, Recollections (above, n. 7), 377±8. 26 In 1856 Travers Twiss in A Letter to the Vice-Chancellor on the Law Studies of the University, 7, said that `not more than half' of candidates had the assistance of private tutors. 27 See T. E. Holland's evidence to the Selborne Commission, UOC (1877) evidence, Q. 1037. 28 (Above, n. 20), quoted in Lawson, Oxford Law School, 32. 29 Oxford Historical Register, 1220±1900 (1900), 127. 30 See below, p. 395. 21

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was no requirement that candidates should have taken either the school or the BCL, though almost all the scholars until 1914 had in fact done so (sometimes after Greats or another school). A number became, or were when elected, fellows of colleges, but few scholars subsequently achieved distinction until the standard of the Law school began to rise in the twenty years before 1914.31 From among the scholars before that time, however, there should be mentioned the future Viscount Bryce (1861) and Lord Phillimore (1868), who achieved eminence as a judge. From the ®nal twenty years one can name F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead (1896), F. de Zulueta (1903), who became Regius Professor of Civil Law, the future Lord Uthwatt, Lord of Appeal (1905), the future Lord Greene, Master of the Rolls (1908), and the prodigy J.C.V. Behan (1906), who achieved ®rst classes in both the school and the BCL, as well as the Vinerian,32 all in the one year 1906. He and Uthwatt were Australians, members of the new breed of colonials and Americans who were helping to strengthen the Law school in this period. The quali®cations for the Eldon Law Scholarship, created in 1830 and worth £200 for three years, were a ®rst class in one of the examinations leading to the BA, or one of the Chancellor's prizes; an intention to follow the profession of the law; and membership of the Church of England.33 There was no examination and no knowledge of the law was required. It was in fact in our period almost always given to a man who had read, not Law, but, most commonly, Greats, and who no doubt intended to cram for the Bar. What is surprising is that, although it was from this academic background that most of the leaders of Bench and Bar were to be drawn until the middle of the twentieth century, and although a fair number of Eldon Scholars achieved distinction in other walks of life (including the academic, though rarely in law), only one made a name in the `profession of the law'. He was Cyril Asquith, the Scholar for 1913, who became a Lord of Appeal. From before the beginning of our period there should be mentioned Roundell Palmer (1834), who became Lord Chancellor as the Earl of Selborne.

t h e i n d e p e n d e n t s c h o o l 3 4 Ð the ®r s t tw enty y e ars It is dif®cult to tell precisely what considerations led to the separation of the component parts of the combined school in 1872. In a lecture given in 1876 31

See below, p. 395. Also the Eldon Scholarship, but that involved no examination. 33 Lawson, Oxford Law School, 12; Oxford Historical Register, 1220±1900, 130. The clause commemorating Lord Eldon's stand against Catholic Emancipation was modi®ed in 1967 to read: `preference shall be given to Protestants of the Church of England.' It has since been removed. 34 Its title was (and is) the ®nal honour school of Jurisprudence. The change from `Law' to `Jurisprudence' was presumably intended to emphasize the academic character of the school. Here, in accordance with common practice, it is referred to as the Law school. 32

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William Stubbs, Regius Professor of Modern History since 1866, said35 that the separation had been `anxiously desired by many teachers of both subjects' and that the great fault of the old combined school was that there was no unity about the prescribed reading. Much of the Law, that was super-added to the History, had no more real connexion with it than a similar bulk of entomological reading might have had; and the really important historical side of Law was not brought in.

But he recalled that the change `was not adopted without some serious apprehensions' as to whether the supply of teachers would be suf®cient, whether each subject by itself was substantive enough to furnish the training for class examination of high character, and whether the separation would not produce a tendency to eliminate History from the Law teaching and Law from the History teaching.

It was this last apprehension which particularly weighed with him, but he took consolation from the fact that the lectures of the current occupants of the law chairs, Maine, Bryce, and Holland36 `are to a great extent historical lectures, and are as great an advantage to the History students as they are to the Law students'. Two at least of those professors (Maine and Holland) also regretted the change. They said as much in their evidence to the 1877 Commission,37 but agreed that men would not be willing to spend the amount of time necessary to study both subjects satisfactorily. `They want to begin their practical life sooner.' Maine (who had come to Oxford only in 1869) also said, without further elaboration, that he had `heard that evils were found to arise in the examinations, which evils ®nally led to the separation'. That there were risks for Law in the separation cannot be doubted. We have seen that it was the weaker partner in the combined school, and in the hearings of the 1877 Commission there were suggestions by the Commissioners38 that the new Law school had the reputation of being the easiest avenue to a BA degree, though it was maintained in reply that this was already a thing of the past. The separation could hardly, however, have been attempted a few years earlier. The principal weakness of the subject must have lain in the absence of adequate teachers to, in the words of Stubbs quoted above, `furnish the training for class examination of high character'. There had been, it is true, a conscientious occupant of the Regius chair since 1855 in the shape of Travers Twiss39 and in 1859 All Souls had created the 35 36 37 38 39

Seventeen Lectures, 34±6. He ignores Kenyon. UOC (1877), evidence, Qs 988, 5613, 5615, 5618. Ibid., Qs 1144±6, 1430. Lawson, Oxford Law School, 25.

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Chichele chair of International Law, occupied by Mountague Bernard,40 a man of distinction in his time; but the Vinerian chair was to remain for practical purposes in suspense until after Kenyon's death in 1880. It was not indeed until the years immediately before and after 1872 that the professoriate which was to lay the foundations of a distinguished law school began to take shape. The public teaching was ®rst strengthened by the creation in 1867 of a Vinerian Readership in English Law, held until 1874 by a young man of ability and energy, Kenelm Digby.41 Then, two years later, the Corpus chair of Jurisprudence was established in order to attract to Oxford the eminent ®gure of Henry Maine. Another year later, in 1870, Travers Twiss was succeeded in the Regius chair by James Bryce, then aged 32; and in 1874 there was elected to the Chichele chair, in succession to Mountague Bernard, another young man, Thomas Erskine Holland,42 who was to be a formidable ®gure in Oxford until his retirement in 1911. In that same year, 1874, at the age of 31, Sir William Anson43 was appointed to the Vinerian Readership, which he was to hold until his election as Warden of All Souls in 1881. He was perhaps the most important ®gure in the law at Oxford in the pre-war years, both as a teacher and a writer and also as the head of a college which, as it emerged from the aftermath of the 1850 Commission, played a large role in the development of the Law school. The creation of the Chichele chair has already been mentioned; All Souls was the college of Blackstone and had had a long connection with the law; and under the new dispensation its prize fellowships were offered in law and modern history. But much more important was the establishment in the Codrington Library44 of a good collection of law books and the throwing of it open in 1867 to members of all colleges and to practitioners and others. From then until the Second World War and even later it played an essential part in the study of law in Oxford. Moreover, during Anson's wardenship (1881±1914) not only the Chichele chair, but also the Regius and Vinerian chairs, became permanently located in All Souls and the college created the All Souls Readerships in English Law (1906) and in Roman Law (1908) and the All Souls Lecturership in Private International Law (1910). In general, in the absence until the end of the period of any signi®cant number of law fellowships in other colleges, All Souls could be regarded as the centre of law studies in Oxford.45 And Anson was its guiding ®gure. In the 1870s therefore, after the appointment of Maine, Bryce, Holland, and Anson, the public teaching was in able hands, though few in number. 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid. 25, 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 75±8. Ibid. 30±1. Holland said as much to the Selborne Commission: UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 1078.

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The college teaching was done by various lecturers, few of them of any distinction. One of the longest-lasting (he taught for Exeter from 1873 to 1905 and for a number of other colleges also during those years) and one of the most successful was J. C. Wilson,46 who in his evidence to the 1877 Commission47 gives an account of college teaching at that time, an account which remained in essentials correct for another twenty years.48 He was lecturer for ®ve colleges, having an independent arrangement with each, but in fact grouping the men together for his lectures. There were, he says, seven other lecturers teaching law only,49 who were responsible for the men of twelve colleges. Few of such lecturers, it may be added, would ever be elected to fellowships, unless as bursars. Law students were few in number and law was peripheral to the predominantly classical interests of colleges. Another lecturer said: `The classical tutors have the manipulation of the funds, and they divide them nearly all, and the special subjects are worked as cheaply as possible.'50 By 1877 the system of `combined lectures,' which had begun in Modern History, was beginning to establish itself among the law lecturers.51 Holland gave the 1877 Commissioners a list of the law lectures for Hilary term, 1877,52 which shows most college lectures as open to members of one or other of three groups of colleges (or to others `by special arrangement', presumably involving a fee). There was, however, as yet no attempt to introduce any plan into the lecturing arrangements. It is to be noted that the principal function of the college lecturers was to lecture. Before the advent of the combined system, lectures had evidently been mainly `catechetical', but H. B. George, who, though primarily a historian, had also taught law, recorded53 `that it is impossible to get the men to answer questions at anything like a catechetical lecture, if they come from all over the university.' In addition to lecturing, the lecturers were responsible, he says, for advising their pupils and examining them. It is noticeable that he attached importance to `this personal control' as a crutch for the weak man, not as a stimulus for the able. `If all men were ®rst-class men, I think there would be very little need for such college teaching.'54 As Chapter 4 shows, it is dif®cult to tell when tutorial teaching in the modern 46

Lawson, Oxford Law School, 54. UOC (1877), evidence, Qs 1135±1217. See the passage from the OM of 27 May 1896 in Lawson, Oxford Law School, 95. 49 As opposed to the old-style lecturer who taught more than one subject (see above, p. 388). 50 H. Pottinger, UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 4271. Pottinger did become a fellow (of Worcester), as Librarian: Lawson, Oxford Law School, 53. 51 UOC (1877), evidence, Qs 991, 1037±49, 1337, 4505. 52 Ibid., Appendix, p. 395. They were not published in the Gazette until 1882 (though Holland said that there was something `very analogous'). H. B. George attributed this to `personal reasons'; see UOC (1877), evidence, Qs 1043, 4516. 53 Ibid., Q 4510. For another extract from this answer see Ch. 1, n. 261. 54 Ibid. Q 4512. 47 48

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sense came in. In an account of the Law school published in 1887,55 a law lecturer is said to be absolutely necessary for the undergraduate `to arrange his lectures for him, to advise him upon his reading, test it by papers, and assist him in dif®culties'. On the other hand, the author of the account of Greats56 says that `now it is as much the rule for a College tutor to take essays from his pupils as it was the exception 30 years ago.' The new method probably spread to the Law school only with the advent of the new young law fellows in the 1900s.57 The more personal teaching, which the old method of college lectures did not supply, was provided by the private tutors or coaches. The author of the same account of the Law school said58 that `private tutors in this and other schools had, and still have, full classes and make large incomes'. Nor was it only the weak man who went to them. The author of the parallel account of Greats says that until about 1870 it had been the almost invariable rule for the future ®rst-class man to `coach', whereas now it was quite unusual for the Greats man to seek any further help than that of his tutor and of public lectures. The difference in this latter respect between Greats and Law no doubt re¯ects the different methods of college teaching. We have noticed that there was in 1877 no co-ordination of the lectures. Until 1872, indeed, there had been no constitutional framework at all, save that provided by the appointment, by the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, of examiners. In that year there was created, in Law as in other subjects, a Board of Studies, but its only function was to control the examinations. In 1877 Holland could therefore say59 that the professors and college lecturers had no relation to one another at all; it was a matter of chance if they ever met. It was not until 1882 that a Board of the Faculty came into being, with essentially the same composition and the same powers as it has today. The other shortcoming of the Law school as it entered on its independent life has already been noted: the lack of any adequate textbooks. This was shortly to be remedied. In 1875 Digby published his History of the Law of Real Property and in 1879 there came a work of much more fundamental importance, Anson's Principles of the English Law of Contract. This was the ®rst attempt to state in a rational, systematic way and on a scale within the grasp of the student, the elementary principles of a branch of English law.60 It thus demonstrated that English law was capable of being taught in a manner appropriate to a university. Anson's book was followed a year 55

A. M. M. Stedman (ed.), Oxford: Its Life and Schools (1887), 286. Ibid. 262. See below, p. 395; cf. Lawson, Oxford Law School, 56±7. 58 Stedman, Oxford, 287; cf. the passage from the OM cited above, n. 48. 59 UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 1052. 60 Pollock's Principles of Contract had been published three years before, but that, though a more original work, was also more speculative and elaborate and could not serve as a student's ®rst book. 56 57

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later by Holland's Elements of Jurisprudence, which, through many editions, was to be one of the principal textbooks for the Jurisprudence paper. It and Sir William Markby's Elements of Law, published in 1871, are usually classi®ed as books on analytical jurisprudence and neglected as such. They were much more than that, for they afforded to the law students of the eighties and the nineties much general information about the law that, in the absence of any study of criminal law or the law of torts, they would not otherwise have obtained.61

By the beginning of the eighties therefore an able professoriate and the beginnings of a literature had been established. In 1882 it was at last possible to ®ll the Vinerian chair and A. V. Dicey began his professorial career. A year later the last of the great names was added when Frederick Pollock succeeded Maine in the Corpus chair. In 1884 it was decided, at a meeting in Markby's rooms in All Souls attended by Anson, Bryce, Holland, and Pollock, to launch the Law Quarterly Review, with Pollock as its ®rst editor.62 The syllabus of the independent school63 in 1872 was to modern eyes narrow and unbalanced. The heart of it was Roman Law64 and Jurisprudence (itself drawing heavily on Roman law). The treatment of English law was exclusively historical (the history of constitutional law, with texts; the history of the law of real property, with statutes). To these was added international law (also treated predominantly from a historical point of view). In the context of the predominance of the classics in schools and in the University and of the absence as yet of any scienti®c treatment of English law, the place of Roman law is not surprising. The Institutes provided a view, which English law could not, of law as a system, and the study of both Gaius and Justinian called for a historical approach. In Jurisprudence Austin, Bentham, and Maine were the dominant in¯uences, but, as has been indicated above, the range of the subject was quite different from what it is today. What is more surprising is how long it took for English law to obtain a substantial place in the syllabus.65 In 1877 a paper on the law of contract was introduced, and from 1886 the historical part of the syllabus was concentrated in a single paper expressly entitled `The History of English Law'. This made room for papers on the current law of real property and succession and on the law of the constitution.66 But it was not until 1905 that a paper was set on the law of torts (in place of the law of succession). 61

Lawson, Oxford Law School, 74. Ibid. 73. 63 Reproduced, ibid. 36±41. 64 Holland said to the Selborne Commission (UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 999) `Roman law here is at present the most important of all branches of law. It is made the foundation of the whole thing, and more importance is given to it in examinations than to anything else.' 65 For a few years from 1862 there had been a paper on Smith on Contracts; Lawson, Oxford Law School, 21, 23. 66 Ibid. 66. 62

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An important concomitant of the emergence of the independent school was the creation of a separate pass school. This is no doubt one of the reasons for a change in the style of examination papers, which, particularly from the eighties onwards, call for a more critical and re¯ective approach.67 The BCL was also reformed.68 The ®rst class-list of the new examination was issued in 1873. It had a remarkably wide syllabus, in Jurisprudence (including a possible study of parts of the French Code Civil or the German Commercial Code), Roman law, English law, with a wide range of Special Subjects, and International law. Holland, in 1877, said that the examination was `pretty severe',69 and this is borne out by the papers set.70 It was, however, taken by only a few candidates and they seem usually to have been non-resident (as were, not surprisingly in view of the range of the syllabus, many of the examiners).71 In 1887 the DCL ceased to follow on the BCL by mere lapse of time. Candidates were now required to submit a dissertation or a book.72

t h e i n d e p e n d e n t s c h o o l Ð t h e pr e - war ye a r s The weakness of the Law school in the ®rst twenty years of its independent existence lay in the low standing, and in most cases probably the low quality, of the college lecturers. They had little or no expectation of being admitted to the all-important status of fellows of colleges, and they belonged (and seem to have seen themselves as belonging) to a quite different category from that of the professors and readers. None of the appointments to the latter category was ever made from the former. Another weakness of the school was that few men of distinction attempted it. All this began to change in the second half of the nineties. In 1896 Merton elected to a tutorial fellowship F. E. Smith, avowedly in order to encourage an interest in law among undergraduates.73 In the following year St John's elected Holdsworth and a string of elections of law fellows followed. By 1914 there were eleven established tutorial fellows, nearly all of a quite different calibre from that of their predecessors of three decades before. Five of them were to become professors and three heads of colleges. In the professoriate the important event in this period (and not only for the Law Faculty) was the arrival in 1903, as successor to Pollock in the Corpus chair, of Paul Vinogradoff. He introduced to Oxford the continental type of seminar and trained a generation of historians and lawyers in rigorous methods of research. 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

See the papers for 1872 and 1880, reproduced, ibid. 187±94, 212±18. The syllabus for 1877 is reproduced, ibid. 195±8. UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 989. Those for 1875 are reproduced in Lawson, Oxford Law School, 198±211. See the lists in Oxford Historical Register, 1220±1900. Lawson, Oxford Law School, 69. Ibid. 98.

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The `rise of the tutors'74 was not without its effect on the balance of power within the faculty. The new men, secure in their colleges, were less prepared than their predecessors to accept the dominance of the professoriate, which was composed of men who had never been tutors; and the contrast between the two groups was accentuated by the concentration of professors in All Souls, a college remote from undergraduate teaching. After a brief eruption,75 however, there was no further strife and certainly after the First World War, when most of the chairs came to be occupied by men who had been tutors, the division ceased to be signi®cant. The intellectual quality of the best of those whom the new breed of college tutors taught also improved. An important factor in this improvement was the advent of the Rhodes Scholars.76 They were less inclined than their British contemporaries (and less well equipped) to follow the dominant classical curriculum and they came for the most part from countries in which legal education enjoyed a higher prestige than in England. They were also markedly more mature. More than one third of those Rhodes Scholars in this period who read for an honour school chose the Law school or the BCL or both. Of the twenty-two candidates who were placed in the ®rst class in the three years 1912±14, nine were Rhodes Scholars (and three others also came from overseas). 74

Ibid. ch. IV.

75

See Lawson, 112±15.

76

Ibid. 110.

page

16 English d . j . pa l m e r Although English Literature was ®rst included among the subjects for the pass examination in 1873, and English Language and Literature was introduced in the special examinations for women in 1881, the signi®cant starting-point of the development of modern English studies in Oxford was the establishment of the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. Created by statute in 1882, it was the outcome of various representations made to the 1877 Commission, though it did not conform exactly with any of them. Indeed, both the title of the new chair and the duties prescribed for its holder (he `shall lecture and give instruction on the history and criticism of the English Language and Literature, and on the works of approved English authors')1 were somewhat unrealistic as well as imprecise, for `English Language' was generally understood to mean the philological study of Old and Middle English, while `English Literature' as an academic subject was widely and loosely conceived as an aesthetic and cultural engagement with great authors, useful as examination-fodder for such as pass candidates and women, entrants to the civil service, and students in the civic universities.2 Perhaps the Commissioners had in mind some analogy between English and other modern languages, along the lines proposed to them by R. L. Nettleship, who wanted to see English included in a school of Modern European Languages and Literature.3 Whatever their intentions, it was unlikely that a candidate for the Merton professorship would come forward with acceptable quali®cations both as a philologist and as a literary critic and historian. If the criteria of academic distinction and a contribution to learning were to be upheld, then a man of letters, however eminent as an author, would not have competed successfully with a professional scholar trained in a recognized discipline of research. Inevitably, in the context of Oxford's 1

See clause 1 of the statute for the Merton Professorship, Statutes (1882), 96. For a history of the development of English studies in the nineteenth century and a more detailed account of the early years of the school, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (1965), especially II, III, and IV. 3 UOC (1877), evidence, 227±8. 2

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academic politics at the time, the con¯ict of interests between the party of research and the party of liberal education4 would focus upon the ambiguous conjunction of `Language' and `Literature' in the new chair of English. In the event, the electors recommended the appointment of Arthur Sampson Napier in 1885.5 Napier had taken his ®rst degree in chemistry at Owens College, Manchester, and had subsequently graduated at Oxford in 1877 with ®rst-class honours in Natural Science. An enthusiasm for German led him to take up the study of Old English and philology, and in 1878 he was working at the University of Berlin under the supervision of the distinguished Old English scholar, Julius Zupitza. Napier's doctoral thesis on the homilies he attributed to Wulfstan was accepted by the University of GoÈttingen in 1882 and published in part during the following year. On the strength of this work and with Zupitza's support, he was given the title of Professor Extraordinary at GoÈttingen. When he applied for the Merton professorship early in 1885, Napier was able to provide testimonials from eighteen professors, most of them continental, and from others including Bishop Stubbs, F. J. Furnivall and four fellows of Exeter College where he had been an undergraduate. He was 32 when he took up his appointment. As a scholar, Napier was meticulous rather than proli®c. A younger colleague recalled many years later that `he was excessively cautious and fastidious about publishing,'6 while his most recent memorialist has written that `he was not a scholar with great schemes of research for ever distracted by professorial duties. His duties came ®rst and research second.'7 For the ®rst twenty years at least, during which time he was the only professor of English in Oxford, the most arduous of these duties was the long struggle to place English studies on a secure footing in the University. According to his friend and obituarist, Lewis Farnell, Napier `set himself whole-heartedly to the task of his life, the introduction and organization of the scienti®c study of English in Oxford. He knew our University well enough to realize that his sole chance of success was the creation of an Honours School . . . with the help of powerful friends he pulled it through at last.'8 Although his appointment was perceived at the time as a victory for the party of research, Napier himself did not take sides against the cause of liberal education. He did not share that narrow-minded hostility towards literary studies which some of his friends and allies displayed in the campaign for `the scienti®c study of English'. He took no part in the acrimonious polemics which, shortly after 4 For an account of these con¯icting interests, see Engel, From Clergyman to Don, especially III, IV, and V. 5 Napier's work in Oxford is described in detail in an essay by Neil Ker, `A. S. Napier 1853± 1916', in J. L. Rosier (ed.), Philological Essays (The Hague, 1970), 152±81. 6 Ibid. 173. 7 Ibid. 155. 8 Ibid. 159. On Farnell and his academic af®liations, see Engel, From Clergyman to Don, 215±16.

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his arrival in Oxford, made the question of English studies a focal issue in the general contention over the future of the University. Matters ®rst came to a head in 1886±7 as plans were initiated for a school of Modern Languages and Literature. With the Taylor Institution staffed by teachers of the major European languages, and Max MuÈller, formerly Professor of Modern Languages, now in the chair of Comparative Philology which had been created for him in 1868, the idea of such a school had been in the air for some time. It began to assume a more material shape from March 1886, when Napier and Frederick York Powell joined forces to recruit supporters for a proposed school. By November they had secured twentythree signatories to a memorial addressed to the Hebdomadal Council, and without delay the council approved in principle the proposal for the school. By the end of the year Napier and York Powell had also won the in¯uential support of D. B. Monro, Provost of Oriel, who was to present the preamble to the statute before Congregation in May 1887. These quiet preparations, even at their preliminary stage, provoked a sudden and furious onslaught in a series of articles in the national press by John Churton Collins.9 The ®rst appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette as early as May 1886, entitled `An Educational Crisis and how to avert it'. The appointment of a philologist to the Merton professorship was denounced as a conspiracy. The policy behind this appointment, it was claimed, now threatened to extinguish genuine literary culture by setting up a school from which the all-important classical heritage of Greece and Rome was to be excluded. Many who were startled by these intemperate fulminations must have wondered who this zealot was. Churton Collins was a Balliol man who had left Oxford in 1872 with an undistinguished degree in Literae Humaniores and had subsequently made his way into literary journalism and University extension teaching. He had himself been a candidate for the Merton professorship in 1885; but his public intervention in Oxford affairs was prompted not so much by any sense of personal grievance as by a passionate devotion to the cause of literary studies in humane education. During the following months he returned to the attack repeatedly, and his contempt for philology was scathing: As an instrument of culture it ranksÐit surely ranksÐvery low indeed. It certainly contributes nothing to the cultivation of the taste. It as certainly contributes nothing to the education of the emotions. The mind it neither enlarges, stimulates, nor re®nes. On the contrary, it too often induces or con®rms that peculiar woodenness and opacity, that singular coarseness of feeling and purblindness of moral and intellectual vision, which has in all ages been the characteristic of mere philologists.10 9 Churton Collins's campaign is more fully described in Palmer, The Rise of English Studies, ch. VI. See also Anthony Kearney's biography of Collins (Edinburgh, 1986). 10 John Churton Collins, The Study of English Literature: A Plea for its Recognition and Organization at the Universities (1891), 65.

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In demanding that Oxford should accept its responsibility to the nation for training better teachers and scholars of literature, he formulated his own conception of an English school whose studies would be exclusively based on the relationship between great English authors and the tradition they inherited from classical literature. He even attempted to marshal public support for his campaign by circulating a questionnaire among a selection of eminent contemporaries and publishing an edited version of their replies. It is obvious that Churton Collins intended to align his arguments in terms of the current disputes between `research' and `education', hoping to appeal to those college interests that were opposed to the `specialists' and their innovations in the School of Literae Humaniores.11 R. L. Nettleship, the Balliol tutor who had himself proposed the creation of a school of Modern Languages and Literature in his evidence to the 1877 Commissioners, seems to have shared some of Churton Collins's suspicions about the school now being planned, although he was one of the signatories to the memorial sent to the Hebdomadal Council. In December 1886, Nettleship con®ded his misgivings privately to A. C. Bradley, then Professor of English at Liverpool: They are beginning to talk again about a modern Literature school here. I hope it won't be done in a hurry, but it does seem to me that, if (as seems likely) fewer people are going to learn Greek and Latin, we ought to begin making preparations to supply their place. The discussions about it make me feel how very little the classics owe their present position in education to their being literature, for the ®rst thing the ordinary person says is, ``For heaven's sake don't let us murder Shakespeare, etc., by treating them as we treat Aeschylus and Sophocles.''12

`It must be humbug to say that a literature in one's own language cannot be made educational,' Nettleship declared in the same letter, but that was precisely what was being said by way of retort to Churton Collins. A contributor to the Oxford Magazine in October 1886, for instance, asserted that `English Literature, as a subject of examination, has had its time . . . It was found to be, of all subjects, the most convenient to the crammers, the most useless as a test of ability or of knowledge.'13 Although his persistent broadsides provoked little genuine debate and certainly failed to win much active support in Oxford, Churton Collins succeeded in making the study of English the main issue as the proposals for the Modern Languages school passed through their successive stages. There can be little doubt that it was at his instigation that Lord Goschen, Chancellor of the Exchequer and also President of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking 11

See Engel, From Clergyman to Don, 208±11, 242±3. Cited by D. G. James, `The Teaching of English in Universities', Universities Quarterly, v (1951), 232. 13 `The Universities and the Quarterly Review', OM 27 October 1886, 309. 12

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that `every effort should be made to encourage the cultivation of English Literature at Oxford by placing it on the same level as other recognized academic studies.'14 Churton Collins had taught for the Society since 1880, and his views were plainly echoed in Goschen's hope `that a system may be discovered which will combine the pursuit of English Literature with the existing study of the Ancient Classics'. The letter was published in the University Gazette just a week before Congregation was to consider the preamble to the statute for the proposed school. The school's supporters had an easy victory when Congregation met on 3 May. D. B. Monro presented the preamble to the house as a measure complying not only with the memorial sent to the Hebdomadal Council in the previous November, but also, less obviously, with Lord Goschen's letter to the Vice-Chancellor. Referring to Churton Collins's arguments for the autonomy of `Literature', Monro is reported as saying that `there was need of a basis for the aesthetic study to rest upon. He hoped the study of literature would be historical, and founded upon the study of language.' E. A. Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History, expressed a similar opinion more forcefully, in enquiring `what was meant by distinguishing literature from language, if by literature was intended the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley?' The preamble was approved by 82 votes to 24.15 Between May and November, when the statute was to have its ®nal hearing, the war of words intensi®ed. Freeman launched a counter-blast at Churton Collins in the October issue of the Contemporary Review, assuming a supercilious sneer at his adversary's academic pretensions: It did not occur to me that to have written an article or two on some very modern subject was of itself a quali®cation for a professor of ``English Language and Literature''. The gift of writing such articles well is a gift by no means to be despised, but I should have called it by some other name, possibly by some less lofty name. I might have thought that ``literature'' of such a kind, if ``literature'' it is to be, was all very well in its own way, perhaps amusing, perhaps even instructive, but that it was not quite of that solid character which we were used to look for in any branch of a University course.

Literature as Freeman represented it was no more than a form of fanciful self-indulgence which could neither be taught nor examined: we do not want, we will not say frivolous subjects, but subjects which are merely light, elegant, interesting . . . All things cannot be taught; facts may be taught; but surely the delicacies and elegances of literature cannot be driven into any man: he must learn to appreciate them for himself.16 14

Gazette, xviii (26 Apr. 1887), 382. Report in The Times, 5 May 1887. `Literature and Language', Contemporary Review, lii (October 1887), 549±66. Cf. J. A. Hobson, `The Academic Spirit in Education', ibid. lxiii (Feb. 1893), 236±47. 15 16

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teaching and scholarship

If the term `soft option' had been available to him, Freeman would surely have used it. In Oxford itself, opposition to the proposed school also focused on the literature issue. A pamphlet by Edward Armstrong, of Queen's College, deprecated the scheme as ```the Hundred-Best-Books-School'', and its ®rst principle is that every book which ought to be read, ought not only to be taught, but be made the medium of Examination.'17 Thomas Case, Wayn¯ete Professor of Moral Philosophy, published a pamphlet attacking the provision made for English Literature in the statute on every conceivable ground. It would divorce the study of English from classical literature and from English history. It would compete with the school of Literae Humaniores, introduce undesirable specialism, and vulgarize education in Oxford. Moreover, argued Case, the subject did not lend itself to academic discipline: English Literature is largely read in private, and it is open to question whether the individual views and personal feelings, with which one approaches favourite poets, should be shackled by a regular School.18

Case's pamphlet appealed to every prejudice without regard for consistency. On the eve of the ®nal vote on the statute in Congregation, York Powell issued a pamphlet blandly assuring all interested parties that the School would be a response to `a real de®nite demand on the one hand for a scienti®c study of the Modern Languages, on the other for an historical and critical study of the Literature of those tongues'.19 He failed to persuade in suf®cient numbers either those who wanted more literature or those who wanted less, and on 1 November the statute failed to secure a majority in a tied vote of 92 for and 92 against. The University was not to be rushed into creating a school of Modern Languages, particularly since it was far from clear what the provision for English Literature would be. `The vote of Congregation on November 1st will probably not be taken by either party as a ®nal settlement of the question,' wrote Henry Nettleship, Professor of Latin, in a pamphlet shortly after that event.20 He was convinced `that philology is a necessary adjunct to the academical study of literature', but he also acknowledged that `what the nation most pressingly feels is the need of a school of the English language and literature.' This spirit of compromise was eventually to prevail, but the next move did not come until June 1891, when 108 members of Congregation signed a memorial to the Hebdomadal Council asking for the establishment of an English school. The signatories included Napier, York Powell, 17

The Duty of the University in Relation to Modern Languages (October 1887). An Appeal to the University of Oxford against the proposed Final School of Modern Languages (24 October 1887). See also `Ballade of Letto-Slav', Oxford Review, 9 Nov. 1887. 19 The Proposed School of Modern Languages and Literature (31 October 1887). 20 The Study of Modern European Languages and Literatures (1887). 18

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D. B. Monro, R. L. Nettleship, Max MuÈller, John Earle (Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon since 1876), and the historian Charles Firth, who was to play a prominent part in the school's early development. Unwisely, the memorial contained a pledge that the innovation need not be expensive: The establishment of such a School would not involve the University in any serious additional expenditure. There would be no need for the creation of any new Professorship or Readership, and the existence of the School would in this case, as in others, be followed by the rise of a body of competent teachers outside the Professorial staff.21

Events were to prove otherwise. First, however, Council reacted much more cautiously than it had done over the initial proposal for the school of Modern Languages, this time keeping greater control over the situation. Six months passed before it gave its response, which was to promise consideration of `any proposals not involving the establishment of a New School'. Council set up a committee which in March 1892 circulated a questionnaire requiring respondents to consider some of the practical implications and alternatives to the prospect of a full-scale honour school. Whether the reluctance of Council and its committee to accept the idea of an English school in principle arose from doubts about the academic standing of the subject itself, from prudential misgivings about the capacity of existing resources to sustain such a school, or simply from a desire to preserve the University from another ®asco like that of 1886±7, the questionnaire certainly made an effort to assess, and indeed to formulate, opinions on the options involved. The outcome was to place before Congregation a straightforward choice between an honour school and an annual University scholarship in English. Congregation met on 5 December 1893 to vote on these alternatives. Some of the contributions to the debate were not encouraging. Thomas Fowler, President of Corpus Christi and a member of the Hebdomadal Council's committee, opposed the establishment of a school on the grounds that it would be either too dif®cult to attract suf®cient candidates or else a soft option, since `every idle young man thinks he has a literary taste: so that the School would attract precisely those who need a stricter training'. Among those who spoke in favour of a school, one member suggested that it would be an advantage `if it drew off the weaker candidates' from Literae Humaniores, while another reminded the house that `the women should be considered and the second and third-rate men who were to become schoolmasters.' The school was preferred by 110 votes to 70.22 21 A copy of the memorial and other documents cited here relating to the establishment of the English school were collected by C. H. Firth and deposited in the Bodleian Library under the catalogue reference Firth b. 36. 22 Report in The Times, 6 Dec. 1893.

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teaching and scholarship

Before completing its relatively smooth passage, the statute creating the school embodied two amendments designed to ensure that candidates should have some competence in subjects other than English. The ®rst required of those taking the school either honours in another school or pass Moderations; in practice this came to mean that Classical Moderations was the normal preliminary quali®cation for entry to the English school. The second special requirement was that each candidate would be expected to show a knowledge of English history appropriate to the periods of English Literature on which he offered to be examined. The statute was ®nally approved by Congregation without a division on 5 June 1894. At the same time, another statute decreed that a professorship of English Literature should be created when the Rawlinson Chair of Anglo-Saxon next became vacant.23 The longevity of Professor Earle forestalled this development until his death in 1903, and for its ®rst ten years the school was severely handicapped for lack of an experienced specialist in literature. The original Board of Studies consisted of ten ex-of®cio members and eight elected jointly by the electors of the Literae Humaniores Board and those of the Modern History Board. One of its ®rst tasks was to specify the examination syllabus and for this purpose a committee of ®ve was nominated: D. B. Monro (Chairman), Napier, York Powell, Firth, and W. P. Ker (fellow of All Souls and Professor of English at University College London). As Firth recalled, Their task was not easy. The long controversy about the claims of language and literature had made the representatives of each rather unyielding about the rights of their subject. Moreover, while the representatives of language knew exactly what they wanted and never varied in their demands, the representatives of literature were less consistent and less harmonious in their views.24

The committee was nevertheless anxious to give equal importance in principle to language and literature and to provide for different kinds of study by distinguishing between examination papers based on prescribed texts and more general papers on the history of the language and literature, as well as affording candidates the opportunity to offer extra papers on Special Subjects. Their scheme, as amended and ®nally approved by the board, is represented by the list of papers published in the ®rst examination regulations: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Beowulf and other Old English texts. King Horn, Havelok, Minot, Sir Gawayne. Chaucer and Piers Plowman. Shakespeare (seven plays were prescribed). 23

Gazette, xxiv (5 June 1894), 534±5. C. H. Firth, The School of English Language and Literature: A Contribution to the History of Oxford Studies (1909), 33. 24

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5. Milton, Bacon, Dryden. 6. Authors from 1700±1832. 7. History of the language. 8. Gothic, Old English and Middle English translation. 9. History of the literature. 10 and 11. Special Subjects.

The ®rst honours examination was held in 1896, but only two men offered themselves as candidates and both withdrew before a class-list could be published. During the next ten years, on no occasion did the class-lists contain the names of more than ®ve men. On the other hand, 146 women took the examination during the same period. Some of these came from institutions outside Oxford, but since 1892 the Association for the Higher Education of Women in Oxford had organized an effective system of lectures and classes in English Language and Literature. The situation in the colleges was very different: the con®dent expectation of those who had petitioned the Hebdomadal Council in 1891 that the very existence of an English school would `be followed by the rise of a body of competent teachers outside the Professorial staff' was sadly misplaced. With one exception, the colleges showed no willingness to support the new school by contributing to its teaching resources, even on a collaborative basis. The single exception was University College, which elected Ernest de Selincourt to a temporary lectureship worth £50 p.a. in 1898. As a member of the college, de Selincourt had graduated in Literae Humaniores in 1894, and after studying under Napier and Max MuÈller had been teaching literature for the school since 1896. The Common University Fund granted him a lectureship of £150 p.a. in 1900. Before 1904, most of the teaching for that side of the school was given by de Selincourt. The school was in a very precarious position when Firth wrote to The Times in September 1903 to protest urgently that the study of English literature had been `systematically starved' by the University and colleges alike: At the present moment the University is contemplating the institution of a professor of English literature at the quite inadequate salary of £500 per annum. Our ®nanciers propose at the same time to abolish the existing Lectureship, in order either to apply the funds to the amalgamation of the professorship or to devote them to some totally different subject. In reality it is absolutely necessary to retain this lecturer as an assistant to the future professor, and if so large a subject as English literature is to be seriously taught in the University it would be desirable to add a second lecturer.25

These were the circumstances in which Walter Alexander Raleigh was brought to Oxford in 1904 as the ®rst Professor of English Literature.26 25

The Times, 28 Sept. 1903. On Walter Raleigh (knighted in 1911) see the preface by D. Nichol Smith to The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh (1879±1922), ed. Lady Raleigh (2 vols 1926). See also Virginia Woolf, `Walter 26

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teaching and scholarship

He was far from being the kind of scholar to win the approval of the old party of research, though his critical gifts were evident in his books on The English Novel (1894), Milton (the Clark Lectures, 1899) and Wordsworth (1903), as well as in his substantial introduction (1899) to the Elizabethan translation of Castiglione by Sir Thomas Hoby, The Book of the Courtier. He had held chairs of English at Liverpool (1890±1900) and Glasgow (since 1900), and he brought with him a considerable reputation as a brilliant and stimulating lecturer. Raleigh's enthusiasm for literature had little in common with the moral and cultural crusading of many early professors of the subject, and he bore a strong antipathy towards the text-grinding examination system. In the years to come his lack of solemnity and his scepticism about the usefulness of criticism were to develop into a personal disenchantment with academic studies, but whatever his private frustrations and selfdoubts, he fought strenuously for the interests of the school throughout the period before the First World War. Raleigh's election was subsequently described as an `innocent conspiracy' by one of the conspirators, T. H. Warren, President of Magdalen and since May 1903 a co-opted member of the English Board.27 Without submitting an application, Raleigh was offered the chair, and a fellowship at Magdalen to supplement what Firth had described as `the quite inadequate salary'. At ®rst he refused to leave Glasgow, but his mind was changed by the prospect of giving a mere 42 lectures in a year, instead of the 160 he was then obliged to deliver.28 Once in Oxford, his ®rst move was to persuade Napier that the English school should be `bifurcated' (Raleigh's word)29 between language and literature, leaving a minority of papers to be taken by all candidates. In effect this would make the school more attractive to most prospective students by reducing the amount of compulsory language work, though that is not quite how the two Professors of English presented their proposals to the Board of Studies in November 1905. `The School has to provide for the needs of two classes of students,' they explained, `those who are primarily students of language, and those who are primarily students of literature. Experience has shown that the existing scheme is too rigid, and does not allow suf®cient freedom for the development of excellence in either branch of the subject.'30 In March 1906 the Board approved the amended honours Raleigh', Collected Essays (vol. I, 1966), 314±8 and Chris Baldrick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848±1932 (1983), 75±80. Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains (1937), 202±18, gives an admiring account of Raleigh's qualities as a teacher. The comments in Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag (1986), 57±71, are less admiring. 27 Obituary notice on Raleigh in OM 1 June 1922, 397; Warren later held the poetry chair, 1911±16. 28 Lady Raleigh (ed.), Letters, ii. 259. 29 Ibid. ii. 295. 30 Reports, etc., of the English Board, 1894±1913, OUA. The minute book of the English Board for the same period has also supplied information cited here.

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regulations, which retained a common core of four papers (Old English texts, Middle English texts, Chaucer, and Shakespeare) with another six to be taken mainly in language or in literature. This amendment ®rst took effect in 1908. The advent of Raleigh was evidently boosting con®dence in the school: the number of men taking the honours examination rose to twelve in 1907 and again in 1908. The most important development in the management of the school before the war was initiated in March 1907, when Ingram Bywater moved a resolution to the Board that `a Committee of English Studies be appointed to organize lectures and tuition and to negotiate with the colleges on the subject and report to the Board'. The English school was in a peculiar administrative situation, with a Board of Studies most of whose members had no ®rst-hand experience of studying or teaching the subject, and a small but growing number of undergraduates and postgraduates for whose instruction the colleges provided virtually no support. In establishing the Committee of English Studies, the Board was effectively placing control of the school in the hands of the four committee members: Napier, Raleigh, Firth (now Regius Professor of Modern History), and Joseph Wright, whose remarkable career had taken him from working as a child-hand in a Saltaire mill to succeeding Max MuÈller as Professor of Comparative Philology in 1901.31 They were to prove a highly successful team in turning to advantage the consequences of the ®nancial neglect deplored by Firth in 1903. Rarely have four Oxford professors enjoyed such freedom of action in collectively running the affairs of an honour school. In May 1907, just two months after its formal inception, the Committee of English Studies came forward to the Board with the draft of a letter to be circulated to the colleges: Dear Sir, The increase in the number of candidates for the English School and the diversity of subjects which that School prescribes for study have made it necessary in the opinion of the teachers concerned, to organize the teaching with a view to supplying adequate tuition, in both language and literature, for all students. The English Board has therefore appointed a Committee, to arrange the present teaching more systematically, and to endeavour to provide the additional instruction which is needed. The Committee, if it receives support from a suf®cient number of Colleges, is prepared to guarantee adequate teaching and supervision for all candidates taking the School, upon payment of a ®xed terminal fee for each candidate. The fee it proposes to ask is ®ve guineas (or ®ve pounds free of Income Tax) for each student. In return for this fee it would undertake to provide all the lectures, classes and private tuition which are necessary for the School. With regard to supervision it is proposed that one of the English Tutors recommended by the Committee shall be selected by the College concerned to supervise the whole of the candidate's 31

See E. M. Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (2 vols 1932).

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work, and to report terminally as to his progress and his attendance at lectures. The Tutor selected will make the necessary arrangements with other lecturers and teachers for the various parts of the work, and will be responsible to the College for the whole. It is our hope that your College will give its support to the Committee in their effort to carry out this scheme. The students taking English are scattered in many Colleges; in no College, for many years to come, are they likely to be numerous. The subjects of study included within the range of the School are very various; and the teachers are few. It is only by co-operation and system that the needs of the student can be adequately supplied.

The letter was approved and the response from the colleges was favourable enough to encourage a start to the scheme, which Raleigh described as `piratical'.32 The English Fund, as it was called, enabled the committee to strengthen and diversify the teaching by calling upon the services of teachers in other schools and visiting scholars, as well as employing some of the postgraduates in the school. It was a great step forward. Moreover, thanks to the benefaction of the Goldsmiths' Company, a Goldsmiths' readership in English Literature was established in February 1908, and David Nichol Smith, then Professor of English at Armstrong College, Newcastle upon Tyne, and previously Raleigh's assistant at Glasgow, was appointed to this new post. The arrival of Nichol Smith, whose abilities in scholarship complemented Raleigh's very different gifts and temperament, was a timely reinforcement of the literature side of the school, particularly in the training of postgraduate students. It was now on the language side, which included the teaching of medieval literature, that more experienced staff were needed to support Napier. Just as the future of the school seemed more secure, however, a double crisis threw its progress into jeopardy again. In March 1908 the board's attention was drawn to the fact that it was acting beyond its powers in entering into ®nancial dealings with the colleges. A special statute would be needed to authorize the board's collection and allocation of income for teaching purposes, and the English school was therefore once more at the mercy of the Hebdomadal Council and Congregation. While this piece of legislation was being negotiated, the school unexpectedly lost the services of de Selincourt, who left Oxford to become Professor of English at Birmingham. The departure of de Selincout was particularly serious, not only because he had undertaken so much of the tutorial teaching, but because those colleges that had sent pupils to him might now make other arrangements outside the scheme organized by the Committee of English Studies. On behalf of the committee, Raleigh wrote to the colleges with a list of other recommended tutors, one in language and three in literature. Raleigh's anxiety and distrust of the colleges is evident in his private letter to Firth in December 1908: 32

Ibid. ii. 490.

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I have drafted a letter to the Colleges about tuition, saying only what we have agreed. You shall have a proof. Wright thinks it is pressing, because they may be moved to make other arrangements in default of information from us. I have approached them in humble wise, asking what they are going to do, and suggesting that if they have no other plan, our men are to hand, and ef®cient. I feel as if I were on the high road to serious politics, which I take to be a kind of revenge for unnecessary trouble and indignity. The material for making me an anarchist is slowly accumulating. If the English School is smashed by a stampede of the Colleges I shan't write anything at all for Oxford readers, but I shall feel sorely tempted to try something outside.33

In the event there was no stampede, but the crisis emphasized the need for the forthcoming statute to establish the centralized control of the school. It was in anticipation of the statute that Firth brought out his monograph in 1909, The School of English Language and Literature: A Contribution to the History of Oxford Studies, which not only gives an account of the foundation and development of the school itself, but traces its antecedents in the venerable traditions of the University and concludes by marshalling the reasons for the continued existence of the English Fund. `The need for more organization may not be so strongly felt in the case of old and wellestablished studies, which possess a very large number of teachers, and ample pecuniary resources,' Firth argued. `The case of a new study is different. We have few teachers and small resources, and, in order to economize power, the creation of an ef®cient system of organization is a necessity for us.'34 He was, however, prepared to concede the right of the colleges in future to make their own arrangements for tutorial teaching, provided that the Committee was allowed to manage its comprehensive and balanced programme of lectures and classes: A more serious dif®culty is the feeling which seems to have arisen in some colleges, that the present system does not leave them suf®cient freedom in the choice of tutors. While believing that the system described is not really open to that objection, the Committee would prefer to take no share in providing tuition, and to con®ne themselves entirely to providing lectures and classes. The separation of tuition and lecturing is a solution which rests on an intelligible principle. The business of privately teaching members of a college within its own walls is a domestic function best left entirely to the colleges. But the business of lecturing to or instructing classes drawn from the University at large is a public function, which should be left to men appointed by the University or approved by it. The English Committee, as representing the English Board, wishes to retain the power of organizing this public teaching until the University otherwise ordains, or gives the Board authority to undertake the work at present done by the Committee.35 33 34 35

Lady Raleigh (ed.), Letters, ii. 339. Firth, The School of English Language and Literature (1909), 41. Ibid. 43.

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In a letter appended to Firth's monograph, Raleigh also addressed this issue, distinguishing between the responsibility of the colleges, through their tutors, to act in loco parentis, and the duty of the University professors and readers to appoint the lecturers, as `a body competent to judge of their excellence' in the subject: We believe that these claims are easily reconcilable if the Colleges choose their tutors and the English School appoints the public teachers of the subject. In practice, some of the tutors would no doubt be appointed by the School to lecture, and some of the public lecturers would be welcomed by the Colleges as tutors, so that the two of®ces, without loss of independence, would tend more or less to coincide.36

The special circumstances which had placed the development of the school under the direction of the Committee of English Studies included the in¯ux of postgraduate students from home and abroad to study for the B.Litt., a degree introduced in 1895. As Firth pointed out, thirty-six men had been admitted to the School as B.Litt. students, `more than have entered for any other subject excepting Natural Science'. The training of these graduates, many of whom looked to a university career, in methods of research and advanced study, as well as the assistance they gave in teaching, needed a central and senior organization. The school's activities were integrated and not con®ned to the preparation of candidates for the BA. In Firth's words, `We must get rid of the idea sanctioned by our customary phraseology, that a School simply means an examination. A School means the sum of all the teaching given in a particular subject, or the whole body of students of that subject. The examination is not an end in itself: it exists merely to test the work done in the School.'37 By stressing the interdependence of undergraduate teaching and postgraduate training, Firth and Raleigh were able to represent the work of the School as a positive contribution to the future prestige of the University. The English school may have seemed something of a law unto itself, but it was neither the threat to classical studies nor the refuge of idleness and dilettantism that some had predicted. `If we can build up an ef®cient and many-sided School for advanced English studies,' wrote Raleigh, `the other Englishspeaking Universities will be ready, for the most part, to accept our lead.' Moreover, the English Fund could be commended as a relatively economical means of supporting the school, while, as Raleigh was not slow to state, `there are many other Universities, it is true, which have a much more numerous staff and a much more costly special equipment for English studies. At Harvard alone, I am told, the English staff numbers almost thirty.'38 Congregation met to consider the statute for the English Fund on 29 November 1909. Raleigh addressed the house for the ®rst and only time, 36

Ibid. 51.

37

Ibid. 46±7.

38

Ibid. 48.

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no doubt with all the persuasive powers of which he was master, and by 117 votes to 65 Congregation con®rmed the right of the colleges to make their own provision for tutorial teaching, while the Board of Studies was empowered to appoint lecturers and to draw up the lecture-lists, using the English Fund `for the provision of additional lectures'. On 27 May 1910 the board reconstituted the former Committee of English Studies as a Standing Committee, adding to the old ®rm of Napier, Raleigh, Firth, and Wright the names of Nichol Smith and R. J. E. Tiddy, who had recently secured the CUF lectureship vacated by de Selincourt. Just before the war, the resources of the Fund helped to establish the English library, not without some reluctance from the Curators of the University Chest to part with money of®cially designated `for the provision of additional lectures'. In October 1914 Raleigh left Magdalen College for Merton, and his chair was thenceforth entitled the Merton professorship of English Literature. The English Fund remained in existence until 1926, by which time the school had become too large to be managed in this way. Its creation had rescued the school from the precarious plight of the early years and enabled an exceptional measure of independence and coherent leadership to guarantee its sturdy growth. When Congregation saw ®t not to dismantle the system in 1909, it was not a victory for language or literature, research or liberal education, University or college interests, but at last a vote of con®dence in English studies.

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17 Modern Languages and Linguistics r e b e c ca p o s n e r The establishment of the honour school of Modern Languages at Oxford, in 1903, took place in a period which witnessed innovations in language study all over Europe.1 These were related in large part to the spread of popular education and greater international scholarly interchange, led by the outstandingly successful German educational establishments. In Britain interest in Oriental languages had been nurtured particularly by colonial contacts, though theologians were of course interested in the Semitic languages. Those who advocated the study of modern European languages, in universities as well as in schools, had to contend against upholders of the pre-eminence of classical studies, a con¯ict which re¯ected differing political and cultural predilections. The powerful conservative opposition to modern linguistic studies in Oxford, and among Oxford MAs, is a recurrent theme of this volume. They were seen as smacking of opportunism and dilettantism, and, more important, as a potential threat to the hallowed dominance of Greek and Latin. Study of living languages was usually thought to involve purely practical skills, lacking the scholarly discipline of classical philology. The philosophical `general grammar' that enjoyed a great vogue in the eighteenth century was often less concerned with the idiosyncrasies of natural language than with the devising of an ideal language that could re¯ect thought without distortion. On the other hand, the `new philology' that came to the fore in the early nineteenth century, under the leadership of German scholars, though it was historically orientated, seeking the origins and studying the development of modern languages, did lay the foundations of the scienti®c study of language as an autonomous discipline. Such European language teaching as existed in nineteenth-century Oxford was made possible by the Taylor bequest.2 The rather partisan3 accounts by 1 See the Colloquium: UniversiteÂs EuropeÂennes, linguistique et enseignement des langues. Mouvements d'innovation de 1880 aÁ 1914. Universite de GeneÁve, September 1991. 2 See G. Barber, `The Taylorian', Pt 1, ch. 21; for the teachers of Spanish see I. Michael, `Afterword: Spanish at Oxford 1595±1998', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, lxxvi (1999), 173±93. 3 C. H. Firth, The School of English Language and Literature: A Contribution to the History of Oxford Studies (1909) and Modern languages at Oxford 1724±1929 (1929). Firth, at the time

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Sir Charles Firth detail the vicissitudes of the schools of English and Modern Languages. One of the bones of contention in these ®elds has, from the beginning, been the role of literary study, its methodology, and its chronological coverage. Today, in spite of continuing protests to the contrary, it appears that victory has been won by those who believe that advanced study of a living language must be centred principally or even wholly on close scrutiny of literary texts, with a decided preference for more modern texts. Oriental studies, on the other hand, have remained, until very recently, more within the tradition of classical studies, looking more to the language and culture of past eras. In the history of linguistic studies at Oxford during the 1880±1914 period two intertwined threads need to be followed through: the ®rst, that of linguistic or `philological' scholarship and advanced study; the second, that of approaches to language teaching and `applied linguistics'. `Philology' in Oxford is traditionally used for what is called elsewhere `historical linguistics', rather than in its more widespread sense of `the study of texts': its practitioners would probably prefer to call themselves `lovers of language', while their opponents accuse them of being `anti-literature'.4 The great prestige that philological or linguistic studies acquired in the nineteenth century was due to the remarkable achievements mainly of German scholarship within the Humboldtian university tradition. The British Philological Society, founded in 1842,5 and the initiator of the great lexicographical work which was to become the Oxford English Dictionary, drew its original inspiration from this new wave of scholarship. Reverence for German scholarly achievements, in this as in other ®elds, persisted thoughout Victoria's reign,6 though more strongly among those of liberal views than among the conservatives who often had the upper hand at Oxford. It was, for instance, an anonymous Oxonian who in 1834 attacked `Germanised Englishmen . . . not only surcharged with gloomy ideas on divinity, but also upon philology',7 and another in 1854 who, while advocating the encourof his account of Modern Languages, was campaigning for the extension of the Taylor Institution, and so painted a rather rosy picture of the history of the subject. A very different story is recounted in G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1948), 124±7. 4 See K. Koerner, `On the historical roots of the Philology/Linguistics controversy', in A. Ahlqvist (ed.), Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Amsterdam 1982), 404±13. 5 See H. Aarsleff, The Study of language in England 1780±1860 (Princeton, 1967), ch. VI. 6 See G. Haines, Essays on German In¯uence upon English Education and Science (Hamden, Conn., 1969), and T. F. Mitchell, `Linguistics and Linguists in Victorian England', Zeitschrift fuÈr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 25 (1977), 133±47. 7 Cited by R. W. Chambers, `Philologists at University College London (Centenary Lecture delivered on 2nd May, 1928, at University College London)', Man's Unconquerable Mind (1939), 342±58. Oxford's suspicion of German language and scholarship in the early nineteenth century may have stemmed from fears that German methods of Biblical criticism would gain ground in the University. See, for instance, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Pt 1, 30, 52±3, 137;

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agement of the academic study of European languages, was suspicious of `German and other foreign modes of thought'.8 The Royal Commission of 1850 included in its recommendations the establishment of a school of Mental Philosophy and Philology, declaring that the study of language is `in itself deserving encouragement and honour',9 and suggested that students should be free to devote part of their time to Sanskrit, Oriental, and modern European languages. What ensued was the endowment of the chair of Latin by Corpus in 1854, of the chair in Celtic by Jesus in 1876, and the establishment of the chair in Comparative Philology in 1868. A chair in Chinese was established in 1875 as a result of a public subscription organized by a committee of merchants trading in the Far East.10 European languages lost out in this process: Max MuÈller was translated to Comparative Philology at his own request. He thus vacated the chair of Modern European Languages which he had occupied since 1854 (after serving as deputy professor from 1851): it was consequently abolished. The more lowly posts of Taylorian teachers in French, German, Spanish, and Italian were retained, alongside similar ones in Hindustani, Persian, and Telugu (to which languages were later added Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and Burmese). Mark Pattison in 1868 was indeed critical of the use of the Taylor legacy to provide free instruction in the `languages of society and travel' rather than to ®nance the science of comparative philology, maintaining moreover that the Taylor scholarships, established in 1857, were awarded for skills `such as would be useful for a courier or a foreign clerk, or to a gentleman setting out for his ®rst tour on the continent'.11 Goldwin Smith in the same year12 went even further, asserting that although `indispensable accomplishments', modern languages do not form `high mental training', and warning that giving the French language a greater place in education `would render dominant the political and moral ideas of the French nation'. He goes on: `Its excessive use in the education of women, who know little of their own tongue or its great writers, is probably a cause of the inferiority of the female mind, as I believe the most sensible women begin to feel.'13 J. S. G. Simmons, `Slavonic Studies at Oxford, 1844±1909', Oxford Slavonic Papers, n s xiii (1980), 1±27; ibid., iii (1952), 145 n. 2. 8 [A. C. Tait], `Government Education Measures for Poor and Rich', Edinburgh Review, January 1854, 158±96. 9 J. Heywood, The Recommendations of the Oxford University Commissioners, with Selections from their Report (1853), 293±4. 10 Papers relating to the Chinese professorship at Oxford, Bodl. MS Top Oxon c. 528. 11 Pattison, Suggestions, 132±3; the argument that the scholarships were awarded to undergraduates who had spent their childhood abroad, or had even had French nannies, has been echoed in more recent times in discussions about the Heath Harrison scholarships. 12 Goldwin Smith, Reorganization (1868), 33. 13 One of the arguments used to oppose the establishment of honours schools in English and European languages in the 1890s was that these were `women's subjects'. The standard of

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The neglect of English as matter for advanced study was criticized: besides the chair of Poetry, it was represented only by the Rawlinson chair of AngloSaxon (that is, Old English), endowed in 1795, and covering at this period `the language and history of the Anglo-Saxons, old Low German, and the dialects and antiquities of Northern Europe'.14 The Selborne Commission of 1877 paid particular attention to language needs and heard evidence that pressed for the sort of provision found in German universities for both teaching and research, though some, like Montagu Burrows (Chichele Professor of Modern History), felt that, as `modern languages are very feebly taught at boys' schools,' they could not be made requisite.15 The new statutes drawn up by the Commissioners, which took effect in 1882, did provide for an increase in linguistic activity. One minor but signi®cant change was to transform the Boden chair in Sanskrit, originally established in 1832 for the dissemination of the holy scriptures among the natives of India, into a more scienti®cally orientated post; Sir Monier Monier-Williams, the incumbent since 1860,16 with a colonial service background, was succeeded, at his death in 1899, by his German-trained and linguistically skilled deputy, Arthur Anthony Macdonnell (who had previously served as Taylorian teacher in German).17 There were also attempts in this period to wrest the study of Hebrew in Oxford from the traditional grasp of the theologians and to integrate it more with linguistic studies:18 although the Regius professorship of Hebrew remained attached to a canonry at Christ Church, the appointment in 1884 of Adolf Neubauer as CUF Reader in Rabbinical Hebrew was a move in the new direction. More important for the study of modern European languages was the endowment by Merton of the Chair of English Language and Literature in 1885 (see Chapter 16), to which the German-trained Arthur Sampson Napier was elected, even though his academic skills were more suited to the Anglo-Saxon chair (whose occupant, John Earle, had opposed the widening of its scope to cover the `Teutonic languages' in general).19 After Earle's death in 1903 the two chairs were amalgamated until the proceeds of the trust created by the will of a previous holder of the Anglo-Saxon chair, language teaching in girls' schools was certainly much higher than in the boys' public schools. See pp. 9 (n. 34), 282 above. 14

John Earle, who had already occupied the chair from 1849 to 1854, took it up again in 1876. UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 827. 16 He was elected after a hotly contested election in Convocation in which Max MuÈller was a candidate, with powerful support from international scholarship (including Whitney, Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Renan, Pott). 17 See his account of Sanskrit studies at Oxford in OM 28 Oct. 1903, 25±6. 18 See the evidence of T. K. Cheyne to the Selborne Commission, UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 3680. 19 UOC (1877), evidence, Q. 3561. 15

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Joseph Bosworth, became available to the University in 1910. The ®rst election to the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair took place in 1916. A chair of Romance or Neo-Latin languages was also to be endowed by Corpus,20 but the college proved unwilling to meet its commitment on this score. In 1887 Thomas Fowler, the President of Corpus `without extravagant show of sorrow', according to the Oxford Magazine, informed Congregation that the Professor `will certainly not be appointed in our time'.21 The ®nancing of the chair `pending the ful®lment by Corpus Christi College of its statutory obligation' formed part of the University Appeal in 1907±8, by which time it was reported that there were thirty-four students studying Old French, Old ProvencËal, and Old Spanish, and the historical and comparative grammar of these languages, with every prospect of an increase if teaching could be more adequately provided.22 A gift in memory of Cuthbert Shields, formerly Robert Laing, the Corpus fellow who had strongly supported the establishment of the chair, enabled the ®rst Taylorian appointment to be made in 1909. The Oxford Magazine reported: `In the futureÐthe near future we may hopeÐhis College is to endow a Corpus Christi Professor of the Romance Languages; in the interval the proceeds of the Cuthbert Shields benefaction are to be applied in relief of the Curators of the Taylorian Institute for their Professor in this subject.'23 Hermann Oelsner, a Cambridge modern languages graduate with a German doctorate in Dante studies, was promoted from his post as Taylorian lecturer, served till 1913 without a college af®liation, and was succeeded (on early retirement at the age of 43)24 by Paul Studer, a specialist in Old French, as were successive professors until the 1960s, when the chair became more orientated towards linguistics. The 1882 statutes also authorized the appointment of non-established (some of them virtually titular) professors. In 1891, the Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology since 1876, Archibald Henry Sayce, became Professor of Assyriology, and in 1898 an American, Lawrence Hedworth Mills, became Professor of Zend Philology. In 1907 the ®rst titular professor of a single modern European language was elected: Hermann Georg Fiedler, a Saxon by origin, previously a professor at Birmingham, became Taylorian Professor of German. W. R. Mor®ll, who was constituted a professor by 20 It was provided that the professor `shall lecture and give instruction on the history and literature of the languages of modern Europe which are derived from the Latin', Statutes (1882), 58. 21 OM 26 Oct. 1887, 22. 22 HCP 78 (1907), 145. The Taylor funds were in a position to contribute £300 a year to the establishment of the professorship of the Romance languages, leaving only £200 a year to be found from other sources in order `to put the subject upon a permanent footing'. 23 OM 25 Nov. 1909, 104. 24 He gave up his responsibilities as member of the Council of the Philological Society and as Romance editor of the Modern Language Review at the same time, but continued to write a few short reviews for the periodical until his death in 1923.

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decree of Convocation in 1900, covered, in addition to Russian, the other Slavonic languages. The great weakness of the strategy of establishing in Oxford chairs on the German pattern was that, while professors were often well-paid and honoured (outside the University at any rate), they had virtually no authority and usually lacked contact with college teaching. They were obliged to deliver lectures, but did so to exiguous audiences, as undergraduate teaching for examination purposes was organized by college tutors and there were few more advanced students. Especially before the establishment of honours schools in language studies, professors in this ®eld were virtually doomed to address a handful of miscellaneous auditors. Even Max MuÈllerÐa highly successful lecturer in fashionable circles outside the UniversityÐclaimed that he lost his Oxford audiences when his own pupils were employed as college tutors and so made his lectures redundant.25 Hippolyte Taine, invited to lecture in the Taylorian at the time of the Paris Commune, had complained that his crowded lecture-room was ®lled, not by undergraduates, but by Oxford ladies. In October 1889 a critical article in the Edinburgh Review, by the conservative H. H. Henson,26 protested that the professoriate was not endowed merely for the entertainment of ladies, and estimated the size of the University audiences for the language professors as between two and sixteen. A visiting Belgian, Georges Du¯ou,27 who attended Professor Napier's lectures in May 1892, remarked that Napier used (handwritten) handouts to help his audience follow his argument, and lamented the fact that the lectures were delivered to only half a dozen young ladies `with indefatigable ®ngers' (probably meaning that they took copious notes) and a few odd visitors, but only two undergraduates. Du¯ou also attempted to attend Professor Earle's lectures, but discovered that these had already been discontinued, presumably because of the lack of an audience: he suggested that Professor Earle devoted more attention to his pastoral duties as Rector of Swainswick, the Oriel College living which he held in conjunction with the chair, than to his teaching responsibilities as Professor of Anglo-Saxon. It might be added in Earle's defence that the Rawlinson chair was comparatively under-endowed. With the founding of the women's colleges, from 1879, came a new clientele for teaching in modern linguistic studies, and more assiduous audiences for some professors, who sometimes also undertook tutorial 25 Jacques Bardoux (Memories of Oxford, 1899) was shocked that only a dozen people were at a lecture delivered by Max MuÈller that he attended, while a great crowd of undergraduates was meanwhile watching a cricket match nearby. The lecture was probably on the Kutho-Daw, given on 12 June 1895 at 2.30 p.m. in the University Museum, and illustrated by lantern slides; Gazette xxv (11 June 1895), 592. 26 H. H. Henson, `Oxford and its Professors', Edinburgh Review, clxx (Oct. 1889), 303±27. 27 `L'Universite d' Oxford et son enseignement scienti®que des langues modernes', Revue de l'Instruction publique en Belgique (1894) 36.2., 4., 37.2., 5.

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teaching for the special syllabuses devised for women students. Even when honours schools were established in English (1894) and Modern Languages (1903) women students outnumbered men, and the women's societies were particularly well supplied with tutors in this ®eld (in 1903, for instance, there were nine women tutors in Modern Languages, ®ve in French, and four in German, while by 1913 there was only one lecturer at the men's colleges). Despite this development the professors were often marginalized in teaching activities and played few active roles in administration. They would therefore take refuge in their own personal research, and some, like Archibald Sayce, spent little time in Oxford. Max MuÈller, whose principal talent was for teaching, elected to hand over his regular lecturing duties to a deputy, paid out of his own salary, only eight years after being appointed to the chair of Comparative Philology, and to devote himself, for the next twenty-®ve years, to his own researches, mainly on Oriental mythology. Taine had judged Oxford scholarship to be erudite and sound, positivist in methodology but lacking ¯air. Du¯ou remarked twenty years later that John Earle was not abreast of German philological advances and that he overspecialized in quirky corners of his discipline, both in teaching and reasearch. Other linguists of the period had been trained in Germany at a time in which intensive study of old textual materials was the order of the day. The methods used consisted mainly in the careful preparation and classi®cation of ®ches containing examples of linguistic features, rather than in analysis and elaboration of theory. This procedure is particularly suited to lexicographical work, involving laborious compilation of a wide and apparently formless mass of dataÐtoday better handled by computational means, but then all performed manually (with, frequently, the aid of wives and daughters). Dictionaries were the greatest lasting achievement of the Oxford academic linguists at the end of last century. The New English Dictionary, on Historical Principles, an initiative of the Philological Society, began publication in 1888,28 and other languages covered included Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Greek, and Sanskrit, as well as the voluminous English Dialect Dictionary that Joseph Wright initially had to ®nance himself. Editing of texts, and meticulous cataloguing of their linguistic idiosyncrasies, was another activity in which Oxford scholarship thrived. Much of the published work at this period was pedagogically orientatedÐtextbooks and collections of texts for studyÐencouraged by the activities of the Clarendon Press. But by 1880 continental linguistic scholarship had developed in new ways. Interest in linguistic change and its mechanisms had been fostered by evolutionary theories, and the 1870s had brought what seemed a revolutionary new look, with the Junggrammatiker formulation of `sound-laws' that were independent of meaning and outside speakers' conscious control. This 28

See p. 615.

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methodology proved tremendously successful in systematically accounting for puzzling phenomena, but by the older school it was held to rely excessively on theory and too little on textual evidence. At the same time, a greater attention to living language use was growing, especially non-standard varieties, needing a new set of skills, other than poring over manuscripts and collecting ®ches: most important among these were the phonetic techniques that new technology was beginning to render feasible. Towards the end of our period came the ®rst dawning of modern synchronic linguistics, seeking to discern the system that underlies language use, and to explain the complexities simply and exhaustively. Until 1900 the more general linguistic concerns were represented at Oxford by Max MuÈller,29 whose oratorical style was much appreciated by fashionable society, and by the Queen, who appointed him to the Privy Council. Among professional linguists he enjoys a much less illustrious reputation:30 Henry Sweet mocked his `toffy and Turkish delight' manner, and his `soap-bubble' linguistics, which some claim comforted those fearful of evolutionary theory, and which certainly titillated those for whom Indian culture held a romantic fascination. Joseph Wright, who succeeded him, and whose origins have been described in the last Chapter, presented a complete contrast. He was a devoted teacher and administrator, with unbounded loyalty and devotion to Oxford,31 but a plodding and unoriginal scholar. After Wright's retirement (1925) the chair fell more into the sphere of Literae Humaniores than of Modern Languages, while a chair of General Linguistics was not created until the mid-1970s. Today the Oxford linguist of the period who is most admired by his successors, as innovative, brilliant, and wide-ranging, is Henry Sweet.32 His Oxford career was, however, one of disappointments. After failing to 29 See Georgina MuÈller (Max-MuÈller), The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max-MuÈller edited by his Wife (1902), and N. C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max MuÈller, P. C. (1974). 30 See W. D. Whitney, Max MuÈller and the Science of Language: A Criticism (New York, 1892) and L. Dowling, `Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language', Publications of the Modern Language Association, 97 (1982), 160±78. In view of Whitney's scathing assessment of Max MuÈller, it is curious that he wrote a testimonial for the latter for the Sanskrit chair in 1860. However, the only remarks bearing on it quoted by the candidate are somewhat ambiguous: `I do not see how there can be any question of your superior claim' [does he mean this as a slight on Monier Williams, rather than a recommendation of Max MuÈller?] . . . `All who love the cause of oriental learning are interested in having you relieved from the duties of a Chair in Modern Languages.' 31 See E. M. Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (2 vols 1932); C. H. Firth, `Joseph Wright', Proceedings of the British Academy, 18 (1933), 1±19. 32 See C. L. Wrenn, `Henry Sweet', Transactions of the Philological Society 1946, 177±201, reprinted in T. Sebeok (ed.), Portraits of Linguists: A Bibliographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics 1746±1963 (Bloomington, Ind., and London 1966), vol. 1, 512±31; T. F. Mitchell, `Linguistics and Linguists in Victorian England', Zeitschrift fuÈr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 25 (1977), 133±47; and J. Kelly and J. Local, `The Modernity of Henry Sweet', Newsletter of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, 2 (1984), 3±9.

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be elected to the Merton chair, for which as an outstanding Anglicist he was eminently suited,33 he was passed over in favour of Joseph Wright in the appointment to the Comparative Philology chair in 1901, in spite of enthusiastic recommendations from some of the greatest names in linguistics of the eraÐlike Brugmann,34 Jespersen, Passy, Paul, and Schuchardt.35 As a consolation prize a short-term and lowly-paid readership in Phonetics was created for him and renewed until his death in 1912. Sweet is best known perhaps as Bernard Shaw's alleged model for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion (1912);36 Shaw paid tribute to Sweet for having `impressed himself professionally on Europe to such an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject',37 but he also criticized Sweet's cantankerousness and embittered attitudes. Sweet's controversial tendencies had surfaced in a number of abrasive letters published in the Academy at the time of Napier's election to the English chair in 1885. He predicted the Merton Chair would go to a man who will add to the social attractions of Oxford, and pass as a kind of High Priest of literary re®nement and general culture, but will be otherwise sterile, neither adding to knowledge himself nor training others to do so;

and he attacked those professors who ®rst make a great parade of their ideal devotion to science, and then do their writing and teaching by a deputy or not at all.38

This last remark doubtless referred to Max MuÈller, whom he called, in private correspondence with Napier, an `arch-liar and sneak'. Joseph Wright seems to have been spared the edge of Sweet's tongue, but it is noticeable that although the Wrights and the Sweets lived only a stone's throw from each otherÐin Banbury Road and Rawlinson Road respectivelyÐMrs Wright's 33

Sweet did not actually apply for the chair, assuming perhaps that he would be offered it. The candidates were George Saintsbury, Edmond Gosse, A. C. Bradley, Napier, and John Nichol (Glasgow). Napier's application was the most professionally presented and included testimonials from Tobler, Skeat, and Foerster: Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature [applications and testimonials of candidates] (1885). 34 Brugmann also wrote a short testimonial for Wright. Sweet had written a glowing reference for Wright when he applied for the deputy professorship in 1891, but did not repeat it in 1900. Wright was supported by the heads of the women's colleges and by Napier, Skeat, Mor®ll, Victor Henry, and Murray. 35 H. Sweet, Letter of Application, List of Published Works and Testimonials for Corpus Christi Professorship of Comparative Philology in the University of Oxford (1901). 36 B. Collins, `Sweet, Jones and Bernard Shaw', Newsletter of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, 9 (1987), 2±7, suggests, unconvincingly, that the true model was Daniel Jones, who became Professor of Phonetics at University College London. The hypothesis is advanced more cogently in B. Collins and I. M. Mees, The Real Professor Higgins: the Life and career of Daniel Jones (Berlin 1999). 37 G. B. Shaw, `Preface to Pygmalion', reprinted in Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (1934), 771±3. 38 9 May, 27 June 1885.

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biography of her husband only once mentions Sweet, whom she met over tea when she was an undergraduate, and whom she described as `shy'. Although most of the Oxford stories about Sweet depict him as aggressive and abusive, Daniel Jones offered a more sympathetic account of a scholar `always ready to help ungrudgingly all who asked his assistance'.39 In spite of the setbacks and even hostility which he encountered, Sweet preferred to stay in Oxford with which, it has been suggested, he was never entirely able to break his emotional ties, rather than to accept more prestigious posts elsewhere.40 Nearly all Sweet's works were published by the Clarendon Press; yet he was never appointed an examiner for the English or the Modern Languages Schools. And six weeks before his death from pernicious anaemia, he was asked to change the subject of his lectures on Ugrian phonetics or to have them removed from the lecture list. One legacy of his unpopularity among his fellows at Oxford was possibly the University's failure to establish a post in phonetics before the 1980s. Another, much younger, Oxford linguist of the period whose reputation remains high today was Mildred K. Pope. A supporter of the candidature of Sweet for the Comparative Philology chair in 1901, Mildred Pope's own work developed and re®ned the methods of the Junggrammatiker, applied to the history of the French language. She gained ®rst-class honours in French and German in the University examination for women in 1893 and was immediately appointed as tutor at Somerville, interrupting her teaching career brie¯y to obtain a doctorate in Paris, and being appointed reader at Oxford in 1928, before going as professor to Manchester in 1934. The institution of the B.Litt. degree in 1895 meant that research students could work, with a certain amount of guidance, in Oxford. Before 1914 there were few who registered for the research degree in European languages (less than in Oriental languages), and even fewer who ®nished their course. Three students, all at Jesus, were awarded degrees in Celtic languages,41 and two took their degrees in FrenchÐone of them, John Orr, Balliol (1912±13), an Australian Rhodes Scholar, afterwards Professor of Romance Languages at Edinburgh,42 completed an edition of a thirteenth-century French text (by Guiot de Provins).43 About forty students took B.Litt. degrees in English, 39

MaõÃtre PhoneÂtique, 7±8 (1912), 99 M. K. C. MacMahon, `Sweet, Europe and Phonetics', Newsletter of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, 17 (1991), 12±18. 41 These were George Henderson, who already had a doctorate from Vienna and who wrote on Gaelic dialects (1896±1900); and two graduates from Wales, John Lloyd-Jones (1906±8) and Thomas Parry-Williams (1909±12) who wrote on loan words in WelshÐfrom Latin and English respectively. 42 See I. Iordan, J. Orr, and R. Posner, Introduction to Romance Linguistics: Its Schools and Its Scholars (1970). 43 The other, Percy Mansell Jones (Balliol), a graduate of the University of Wales, registering in 1914, obviously had his studies disrupted by the war, and did not submit his thesis on Emile Verhaeren until 1924. 40

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among them a pupil in phonetics of Sweet's, Henry Cecil Wyld of Corpus (1899), who in 1904 became Baines Professor of English Language and Philology at Liverpool, and in 1920 Merton Professor at Oxford, and who edited Sweet's papers.44 Most of the B.Litt. candidates had graduated from other Universities, British, colonial, or foreign, a good proportion of them being Rhodes scholars. As long as the study of European languages had no place in the honours examinations for undergraduate degrees, teaching was bound to remain at a rather elementary level. True, the examinations for Taylor scholarships (one of which, in French with Italian, was awarded to the poet Swinburne in 1858, and another, in German, to Henry Sweet in 1870), as well as special examinations set for the women's colleges, did presuppose a high standard of expertise in both language and linguistics,45 but University pass degree examinations in French or GermanÐfrom 1872Ðwere less demanding than the modern A-level and could be taken without ever speaking a word of the language in question.46 Oriental languages were better served, gaining a separate faculty board under the 1882 statutes, followed by the creation of an honour school in 1886.47 Created largely with the needs of the Indian Civil Service in mind, the honour school was initially divided into Indian and Semitic branches, with the former predominating in the early years. The two branches of the school were united in 1895, most candidates thereafter tending to specialize in the Semitic languages. The syllabus was mostly based on the respective classical Oriental languages, and these came to be recognized as alternatives to Greek or Latin for Indian students in Oxford's preliminary examinations, such as Responsions. After the establishment of a tripos in Modern Languages at Cambridge (1886), Oxford linguists banded together to propose the foundation of an honour school that would cater for a range of European languages, including English. An account of this proposal is given in the preceding Chapter. The arguments advanced in favour of the establishment of the course spoke of the 44

H. C. Wyld (ed.), Collected Papers of Henry Sweet (1913). A perusal of examination papers from 1858 to 1899 reveals that the standard required in philology was high. Questions were included on such topics as: the utility of Romance philology for the study of comparative grammar; Grimm's theory that the literary period of a language is normally one of linguistic decadence; the role of analogy in language; the in¯uence of political history on the development of the French language; a critical history of the work of great contemporary philologists. We do not know, of course, what the standard of the answers was. The literature questions were less testing. 46 Questions could be of the level: `Give the forms of the verb faillir.' There was a small number of set-books to be studied: in French, for instance, one syllabus speci®es MolieÁre's Tartuffe, Corneille's Horace, or Racine's Athalie and de Tocqueville's Ancien reÂgime, while in German one work by each of Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing was prescribed. 47 See A. L. F. Beeston, `Arabic Teaching at Oxford', OM no. 72 (Trinity term 1991), 18±20, written on the centenary of the ®rst ®nal honour-school examination in Literis Semiticis. 45

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need for practical linguistics in colonial administration and trade, as well as the growing demand for properly quali®ed teachers in schools, but it is likely that the spirit that animated the proposal was of a scienti®c linguistic rather than of a practical nature. After the tied vote in Congregation, in November 1887, the proposal was effectively sunk, and the subsequent foundation of an honour school of English in 1894 left the other European languages out in the cold; it was argued that they would attract few students and that the programme would be too expensive to operate. When Modern Languages eventually achieved honour-school status in 1903, it was less a result of pressure from the linguistsÐindeed the Taylorian teachers took no part in the Congregation debateÐthan of an initiative brought about by the Hebdomadal Council. Emphasis was placed on the growing need for teachers of modern studies in the secondary schools, and the encouragement of language studies was seen as a counterbalance, not as a complement, to the `growing claims of natural sciences and mathematics',48 reinforcing the values instilled by classical studies, and bringing modern languages `into line with the ancient classics' as instruments of a liberal education.49 It was suggested that, far from being a vehicle for `research' or original investigation, the new school would enhance `practical, aesthetic, and scienti®c acquaintance with a language and literature' and produce an `army of good working teachers of modern languages comparable to the teachers of ancient languages in the past'.50 The debate in Congregation was, by all accounts, `long, dull and uninspiring', although there was a large attendance, `including the ladies'.51 Those who spoke in opposition to Council's proposal invoked the well-worn arguments that there would be few candidates and that the cost would be too great (at a time when the University was in de®cit). The intervention of Henry Sweet, however, roused cheers from some and wrath in others. He condemned the proposal as `reactionary and mischievous', pointing out that no weight would be given in the distribution of honours to `pronunciation, power of elocution, power of understanding and being understood'.52 The Oxford Magazine spoke of his `deplorable disregard of what was due to his audience and to himself'.53 One member of Congregation, Clement Webb of Magdalen, who witnessed Sweet's performance, recorded in his diary: Not without considerable humour of a rough kind he attacked the proposed School as not one of Modern Languages at all, but of Medieval . . . Conservatives and Liberals 48 See the reports of the speech by the President of Magdalen, Thomas Herbert Warren, to Congregation in the Oxford Chronicle, 15 May 1903, 9 and the Oxford Times 16 May 1903. 49 Journal of Education, July 1901, 433±6. 50 OM 6 May 1903, 304. 51 OM 13 May 1903, 340. 52 Oxford Chronicle 15 May 1903. 53 OM 20 May 1903, 340.

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might unite against the School; the former bec[ause] it is a Modern Language School; the latter bec[ause] it isn't.54

Webb regarded Sweet's mockery of Napier and Rhys55 and his complaints about the smallness of his own salary as evidence of the inbred brutality of the man which has always stood in the way of the recognition of what I believe is his really distinguished work in phonetics. It is odd a student of phonetics, by the way, should not detect (I suppose he does not) the complete lack of the `h' in his speech.

I am sure that Sweet, if he did drop his aitches, would have done it deliberately to emphasize his anti-eÂlitist stance; `doing an Eliza Doolittle' in Congregation being an instance of Sweet's `rough humour'.56 In spite of Sweet's protests, the proposal was passed (93 to 51). One languageÐfrom French, German, Italian, SpanishÐcould be studied, a proposal to allow two languages being defeated (17 to 40),57 although from 1908 two languages were permitted in the preliminary examination. In 1904 Russian, and in 1913 Modern Greek, were added to the list of permitted languages. Although an attempt to make competence in the spoken languages obligatory was voted down, it was agreed that there should be an oral test.58 However, the syllabus was heavily weighted towards older periods of language and literature: for instance, no French prose works written after 1762 were set. Moreover, important writers like Luther and Voltaire did not ®gure in the syllabus.59 In 1909 (with little change thereafter) the prescribed texts in French were: the oldest French monuments, Alexis, Chanson de Roland, BeÂroul's Tristan, Aucassin et Nicolette, Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis, some of Montaigne's Essais, Pascal's PenseÂes, and some of the Lettres provinciales, two plays by Corneille, eight by MolieÁre, and four by Racine, and some works by Rousseau and by Hugo. In German, the syllabus was similarly structured, with medieval works outweighing modern ones, but with some by Lessing, 54

Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1148 (12 May 1903). For an earlier violent outburst by Sweet, see M. K. C. MacMahon, `Henry Sweet as Novelist', Newsletter of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, 2 (1984), 10±14. 56 The RP (Received Pronunciation) standard seems to have been invented by Daniel Jones. Sweet believed that foreign learners should, for practical purposes, be taught middle-class London pronunciation (like his own), but he resisted an appeal to the imaginary `correct' or `careful' speaker, as knowledge of how English people actually did speak was still in its infancy. For Shaw's similar views, wittily expressed in a 1911 letter to Sweet, see M. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: ii (1989): The Pursuit of Power, 326. 57 OM 10 June 1903, 397. 58 OM 27 May 1903, 361. Warren was anxious to assign honours on `more solid grounds' than `an acquirement . . . dating not improbably from the nursery', so pro®ciency in the colloquial language was disregarded in the allocation of honours, but identi®ed on the class list (The Times, 13 May 1903). 59 F. C. S. Schiller, OM 17 Feb. 1904, 204. 55

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Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Grillparzer, Kleist, and Hebbel. In addition, candidates offered a paper on the history of language and two on the history of literature. Special Subjects included Anglo-Norman and ProvencËal, Old Saxon, and Old English. On the more modern side were subjects relating to literary relations between England and France or Germany, literary criticism, and German drama. Candidates were also expected to show competent knowledge of the history, especially the social history, of the country, though after 1905 no special paper was set in this area. The syllabus at Cambridge at the same period was very much on the same lines, though Cambridge, unlike Oxford, actively encouraged students to spend some considerable period abroad during their university careers.60 Language teaching was, as it still is, centred on the prose/translation model of the classical languages and there appears to have been little or no University provision for oral practice.61 In the French and German teaching programme of 1908±9,62 Henri Berthon gave one set of classes in French `Practical Phonetics' in Michaelmas term, but professorial teaching was predominantly on medieval language and literature. The number of lectures delivered in French and GermanÐfor instance, Berthon on Pascal's PenseÂes, on Rousseau and on Victor Hugo, and Fiedler on Goethe and on SchillerÐ was relatively small; but this represented a greater proportion than the one which applied later in the twentieth century. Oral tests continued to be badly organized until the 1980s: in the period 1905±1914, it was claimed, only eleven undergraduates `of British origin' achieved `special' pro®ciency in the spoken language, although nineteen honours candidates (out of a total of eighty-one) had been placed in the ®rst class.63 60

K. Breul, `Modern Language Work at Cambridge during the last Twenty-®ve Years', Modern Language Teaching, 5 (Oct. 1909), 161±76. Forty years later, when I myself came up as an undergraduate, the Oxford honour school still followed much the same pattern (though literary works up to 1914 were now studied), whereas Cambridge had completely restructured its tripos syllabus. The standard required by the papers set, it would seem, had changed little since the honour school began, though the literature questions would today be regarded as too general and unsophisticated. The practice in the early years of requiring candidates to answer six or eight questions in the space of three hours suggests that answers may have been rather super®cial. 61 It is possible that there was some provision for oral practice by the women's colleges; the ®rst person whose colloquial pro®ciency was adjudged worthy of mention was a woman from Somerville, who took a third in German in 1909. After 1905 no essay for free composition in the language was set, but some questions (by 1914 a whole paper) were to be answered in the relevant language. 62 H. G. Fiedler, `Modern Languages at Oxford', Modern Language Teaching, 5 (1909), 132± 9. Whereas there were 53 men graduates in French and 23 in German during the period 1905±14, there were only two in each of Spanish (in 1908 and 1909) and Russian (in 1906 and 1914), and only one in Italian (a Mr Franchetti who took a ®rst in 1913). Women candidates offered only French or German. 63 See G. B. Grundy in OM 28 Feb. 1919, 207. Grundy had proposed that the oral test be made compulsory in the 1903 debates (Gazette xxxiii (26 May 1903), 555). In his ®gures he does not count the 26 women who took ®rsts nor the 18 women who showed colloquial pro®ciency

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Meanwhile in schools newer language teaching methods, based on living usage, as advocated by Sweet, were gaining ground.64 A government committee, chaired by Stanley Leathes of the Civil Service Commission, which was appointed during the war to look into the subject, was disparaging about contemporary language studies in England, and singled out Oxford for criticism.65 Unfortunately the Modern Languages Faculty has until recently been slow to respond to suggestions for reform on the language side, preferring to devote more attention to the literary aspects of the subject, and so it can, to some small extent, be held responsible for the poor performance of the English in European languages, even to this very day, when we are proceeding to `ever closer union' with the rest of Europe. during this period. He also discounts 8 men with foreign names: as far as I can judge, these comprise one in Italian, ®ve in German, and two in French. It is noteworthy that before 1909 no one attained colloquial pro®ciency, but that in the 1914 class-list there are in this category 8 men (including all 6 ®rsts, of whom one graduate in German, Alfred Ewert, a Canadian Rhodes scholar at St John's, later became Professor of the Romance Languages) and one woman (Vera Farnell, a ®rst in French, who became a fellow and tutor at Somerville). 64 See G. T. Clapton and W. Stewart, Les EÂtudes francËaises dans l'enseignement en Grande Bretagne (Paris, 1929); M. Gilbert, `The Origins of the Reform Movement in Modern Language Teaching in England', Research Review, 4, 5, 6 (1952±5); E. W. Hawkins, Modern Languages in the Curriculum (1981); H. Radford, `Modern Languages and the Curriculum in English Secondary Schools,' in I. F. Goodson (ed.), Social Histories and the Secondary Curriculum Subjects for Study (1985), 203±8. 65 Modern Studies, being the Report of the Committee on the Position of Modern Languages in the Education System of Great Britain (1918). The committee, appointed by the Prime Minister 26 Aug. 1916, reported 2 Apr. 1918: PP 1918, ix. 381±470. See also S. M. Leathes, What is Education? (1913), 112.

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18 Music s . l . f . wo l l e n b e r g Music is now performed, studied and listened to by a much larger number of persons, and in a more serious spirit, than was the case at any previous period of our history. It is rapidly becoming an essential branch of our education . . . and a strong desire is felt by a large, important, and increasing section of the public to know something of the structure and peculiarities of the music . . . of the nature and histories of the instruments on which it is performed, of the biographies and characteristics of its composers . . . all . . . as may throw light on . . . an Art . . . so prominent.1

For music, as for so much else in the University, the nineteenth century was an age of reform. In 1893 Charles Abdy Williams (a recent music graduate)2 expressed the view that, `At one time, to be a Mus. Bac. or Mus. Doc. meant little . . . now it means that the holder has passed several very severe examinations.'3 His view was linked with the traditional assessment of the University in the eighteenth century as one in which `music naturally suffered neglect along with other studies'.4 This is not entirely fair; and it is important to remember that candidates for the B.Mus. and D.Mus. had been subject to statutory regulations governing the exercises and duration of study.5 Nevertheless by 1800 Oxford's B.Mus. and D.Mus. degrees still lacked a truly academic status. They were awarded simply on the basis of an exercise in composition. Standards were not noticeably high. By the end of the nineteenth century the B.Mus. and D.Mus. regulations encompassed, besides the traditional exercise in composition, a series of written papers, the subjects including harmony and counterpoint, the history of music, and prescribed scores for study. No more than the briefest account of these reforms can be given here, for many other developments must be mentioned. Music was made in the Holywell Music Room and the Sheldonian. University and college 1

Sir George Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians (4 vols 1879±89), preface to vol. i. B.Mus. (Oxon.) 1889. 3 Degrees in Music (1893), 42. 4 Ibid. 41. Cf. the article by C. A. Fyffe, `Bachelor of Music', in Grove, Dictionary (i.121) `The torpor into which the English universities fell during the 18th century affected the value of their musical diplomas.' 5 S. L. F. Wollenberg, `Music and Musicians' in The Eighteenth Century, 866±7. 2

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musical societies ¯owered: the choral establishments reached a high standard.6 It is fairly safe to identify Sir Frederick Ouseley7 as the initiator of the new examination syllabus in music. According to Abdy Williams, inspiration for the Oxford reforms was derived from the ideas of Sir Robert Stewart, `who had many years previously established the preliminary ``Arts'' and history examination and analysis, &c., at Dublin'.8 Henry Hadow highlighted for the Hebdomadal Council in 1898 the background to Ouseley's reforms:9 The system of granting musical degrees on examination dates from 1856, when it was established by the University at the proposal of Sir Frederick Ouseley. Before that time . . . candidates . . . were not required to pass any examination, musical or otherwise. The degrees were granted on the nomination of the Professor, and the only requirement was that the candidate should give a concert in the Sheldonian Theatre, at which a composition, previously approved by the Professor, should be performed.10

In noting that only `forty-one persons, or an average of two in three years, were admitted to the degree of B.Mus.' and only nine (in fact there seem to have been ®fteen) to the degree of D.Mus. in the period from 1800 to 1856, Hadow deduced that: `the old degree seems to have been the University [sic] recognition of eminence (or, more rarely, of promise) in the musical profession': it could therefore best be replaced by the honorary degree.11 During the period of Ouseley's reforms certain trends are clearly visible: ®rst, a desire to increase the content of the B.Mus. examination, and secondly, a de®nite though irregular rise in the numbers of candidates for the B.Mus. 6 Further details will be found in the author's forthcoming book, Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and in `Music in Nineteenth-Century Oxford', in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, ed. B. Zon (Aldershot 1999), i. 201±8. The nineteenthcentury documents about music held at Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, New College, Pembroke, and Queen's are especially informative; and the University Archives contain volumes of minutes, reports, and lists of candidates in music. For secondary sources from the period see, for example, Abdy Williams, Degrees in Music (1893); J. H. Mee, The Oldest Music Room in Europe (1911); P. C. Buck, J. H. Mee, and F. C. Woods, Ten Years of University Music in Oxford (1894); E. S. Kemp and J. H. Mee, Ten More Years of University Music in Oxford (1904). 7 See Biographical Appendix, below. 8 Williams, Degrees in Music, 42. See also Grove, Dictionary iii (1883), 33, which refers speci®cally to `the important change lately made at Oxford and Cambridge, by introducing literary elements into the examination for Musical degrees' as one that was anticipated by the `present Professor' at Dublin `many years before'. (Sir Robert Stewart was elected to the Dublin professorship in 1862). 9 HCP 51 (1898), 42. The background to the reformed statute of 1856 may be traced in the Hebdomadal Council Register (7), 1854±66, passim, OUA. 10 The location in fact varied among the Music School, the Sheldonian, the Music Room, and colleges (see Hebdomadal Council Register (5) 1833±41, passim). 11 HCP 51 (1898), 42; honorary doctorates in music were awarded in the nineteenth century from 1879 onwards. Recipients included Arthur Sullivan (1879), Elgar (1905), Glazounov (1907), Grieg (1906), Joachim (1888), Saint-SaeÈns (1907), Stanford (1883), and Richard Strauss (1914).

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Throughout the second half of the nineteeth century there was much agonizing over the music degrees. The professors of Music and their assistants, and the various University committees, were frequently occupied in discussions of possible improvements to the system of examining for the B.Mus. Their efforts resulted in much rearranging of the syllabus; periodically there were reports of special committees, leading to the promulgation of new statutes; in all, there was a progressive redesigning and re®ning of the syllabus to an ever greater sophistication. Each change tended to generate further need for change. Some of the most signi®cant stages in this process may be summarized as follows. Ouseley's original scheme required candidates to pass an examination held by the Professor of Music, the Choragus, and some other graduate, and to compose a piece of music in four parts with organ and string accompaniment, which was to be performed in public. A Bachelor wishing to proceed to the Doctorate had to pass an examination and compose a piece in eight vocal parts with full orchestra.12

In 1871 the B.Mus. examination was extended to two parts, the ®rst (in harmony and counterpoint in not more than four parts) being held annually and acting as a preliminary to the second. This latter was also held annually, later in the year, and took in history, form, and set works, as well as more advanced harmony and counterpoint.13 The next important addition to the regulations came in 1876, when a statute was passed requiring B.Mus. candidates who were not members of the University to show, before being allowed to enter for the B.Mus. examinations, `evidence of having received a liberal education', either by certifying that they had passed Responsions or an of®cial equivalent, or by taking tests administered by the masters of the schools in English and Mathematics, Latin, and either Greek or a modern language.14 The addition of extra hurdles was not imposed by the University on the Music school in an effort to make its degrees academically more respectable, but was advocated most strongly by the Music professor and his 12 Williams, Degrees in Music, 41. Three examiners, including the Professor and Choragus, became the norm (with some variations) for the whole period. 13 In the same year the requirements for the B.Mus. exercise were increased from a four-part to a ®ve-part composition (the standard wording used by the examiners with reference to successful candidates was as follows: `canticus quinque [ formerly quatuor] partium compositis, et examinatione habita, satisfecerunt nobis'). The examiners' approval of the exercise was needed before the candidate could present himself for the second written examination. 14 Gazette, vii (20 June 1876), 44. The statute took effect from Hilary term 1878. Such changes doubtless occasioned the conspicuous rise and fall in the numbers applying to take the B.Mus. in various years. Once the idea of a preliminary requirement was introduced, it was subjected to various modi®cations. In 1890, Ernest Walker complained, `the University took a regrettably backward step in instituting a special ``Preliminary Examination for Students in Music'' as a ``soft option''' enabling candidates to enter without a knowledge of classical languages; Grove, Dictionary (2nd edn 1904), i. 679.

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colleagues: `Those who study music', Ouseley told the Selborne Commission in 1877, as well as those who teach it, have felt it as a continual discouragement of late years that the degrees in this subject, whatever be the amount of acquirement that they testify to, do not carry the weight that other degrees do. This arises, no doubt, from the fact that the education testi®ed to by the examinations is one of a narrow type, and does not involve those elements of a liberal education which are requisite before the degree can be placed on a level with . . . a general course of study at this University. . . A small beginning has already been made in this matter by the requirement of passing an elementary examination in subjects other than technical music.15

A further obstacle to Ouseley's aim of bringing `the ordinary [non-honorary] musical student into closer relation with the University'16 was the traditional absence of any residence requirement. Although music candidates were (by the late nineteenth century) required to matriculate at the University, and to enter their names on the books of a college or hall, or the Delegacy of Non-Collegiates, this tended to give outside applicants only a very tenuous connection with their colleges. The Oxford Magazine reported an incident of a B.Mus. candidate, formally attached to New College, who having received his degree was discovered asking directions to his college.17 Sir Hubert Parry took his B.Mus. examination while still a schoolboy at Eton. Hadow is again eloquent on this point: Under the present system the connection between musical graduates and the University is restricted to matriculation, the work of the examination-room, and the ceremony of the degree. Successful candidates bear an Oxford distinction without having . . . contributed anything to Oxford life or gained anything from its experience . . . it leaves the successful candidate in a position always anomalous and often misunderstood.18

Although Hadow's proposal to restrict music graduates to those who were `members of the University by residence', and to require the BA as a preliminary to the B.Mus., was rejected by the Hebdomadal Council in 1898,19 his intentions were partially realized when in 1910 Council ®nally agreed that some conditions of residence should be attached to the B.Mus. While it was thought undesirable `to require residence as a necessary condi15 UOC (1877), supplementary evidence, 374±5. These aspirations did not meet with universal approval: Fyffe saw the effect of the 1878 requirement as `to sever the connection between the University and the musical world'; Grove, Dictionary, ii (1880), 624. 16 HCP 51 (1898), 42. 17 OM 11 Nov. 1896, 57. 18 HCP 51 (1898), 38. The proposed change to residential status generated strong feelings and Hadow deemed it necessary to marshal in support of his carefully argued case an impressive list of names; ibid. 35±7. 19 HCP 51 (1898), xxiv, Acts, 21 Nov. 1898; in 1870 a similar proposal had been rejected, 42±4, Gazette i (22 Nov 1870), 3.

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tion for a Degree in Music', it was essential to exercise control over the academic standing of students who did not reside.20 The new statutes of 1911, re¯ecting ideas which had been put forward but shelved in the 1890s,21 represented a turning-point in the history of the Oxford school of Music. A Board of Studies in Music was established, and it was laid down that No one who has not been admitted to the degree of BA shall be permitted to supplicate for the degree of Bachelor of Music unless he has (a) passed in a Group of the Final Pass School, and (b) pursued a course of study approved by the Board of Studies.22

With the enactment of the 1911 statutes, the B.Mus. came closer than ever before to achieving `that position in the University' which Ouseley (and his successors) `always hoped that it would one day attain'.23 An important element that received attention in the drive to reform the music degrees was the exercise in composition. The statutory performance of the B.Mus. and D.Mus. exercises was abolished in 1870 and 1890 respectively. More crucial for the status of the exercise was the fact that candidates could `send in exercises without paying any fee'; the examiners expressed the somewhat forlorn hope that if the exercise were `properly recognized as part of the examination, and candidates had to enter their names and pay fees when they sent it in, there might be a little check upon their venturesomeness'.24 The urge to integrate the exercise properly within the examination system led to the appointment of a committee (in response to a proposal from the Professor of Music) to consider the statute governing the exercises for musical degrees; and in 1911 a draft revision appeared with a note indicating that `on general grounds the Professor of Music, the Choragus, and Sir Hubert Parry desire that the Second and Third Examinations for the Degree of B.Mus. be interchanged so that a candidate's exercise will not be submitted until he has passed both written examinations.'25 The new statute to this effect was among those introduced in 1911. Although it was intended to ensure that candidates should show their pro®ciency on the theoretical side before submitting more practical evidence of their ability in composition, this did not relegate the exercise to a mere afterthought, but rather con®rmed its position as the `real climax of the examination'.26 20

HCP 87 (1910), 221±3. HCP 52 (1899), 59, 79. 22 Gazette xli (8 Feb. 1911), 445; approved with considerable support, ibid. 577, 713. 23 HCP 51 (1898), 43. 24 HCP 63 (1902), 21±2, giving statistics of passes and failures for 1902, illustrating the `exhausting experience' for the examiners of dragging themselves through a quantity of exercises sent in `year after year' by `hopelessly bad candidates'. 25 HCP 88 (1911), 51. 26 HCP 90 (1911), 221±2 (letter proposing that the order of the written examination and the exercise for the D.Mus. be interchanged so as to conform with the new B.Mus. arrangements). 21

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While the of®cial documents record, often with considerable expressiveness, the concerns of those responsible for examining, there are some equally revealing glimpses of the candidates' views. One wrote to Sir Walter Parratt, Professor of Music, in 1913: Sir You will doubtless remember at the recent Oxford musical exams that the bells of the various colleges rang practically throughout the whole of Tuesday in Commemoration of the King's Accession. I have always been given to understand that the problems set at Oxford have to be worked musically & quite rightly too, but under the conditions which prevailed on that day I don't quite see how they couldÐat least I couldn't & the little bit of work I sent in had to be worked mechanically. . . . As it was my Final . . . I consider myself most unfortunate. The Expense of the thing is awfulÐit doesn't give one much Encouragement to rise in one's profession.27

One peculiar dif®culty experienced by certain candidates is highlighted by the report in Jackson's Oxford Journal (5 November 1892) of `the recent ®nal examination for the Bachelor of Music Degree, held at this University' in which `two ladies (Miss A. Thomas, of Clapham Common, and Miss E. B. Grant, of Plymouth) distinguished themselves by taking the degree', and they were thought to `have the honour of being the ®rst two ladies who have gained this distinction at Oxford'. This prompted the correspondent to re¯ect on the `deplorable' state of affairs whereby `the non-conferring of diplomas and the deprivation from the use of their titles by successful candidates who happen to be of the gentler sex' prevented women from enjoying `the merit they have so well earned, especially in reference to musical degrees'. Among the men, besides the customary numbers of parish organistsÐ important in maintaining the standards of church music locallyÐwho entered for the Oxford degrees in the hope of `rising in their profession', there were quite a few musical graduates in the period 1800±1914 who achieved real eminence and innovation in one or more branches of the profession.28 The pattern of the academic course may be traced from the surviving examination records of the approximately 369 successful candidates for the B.Mus. in the period 1854±1914. It was usual to matriculate as shortly as a day before taking the ®rst B.Mus. examination: Charles Kitson matriculated on 5 November 1894 at St Edmund Hall (having passed the Cambridge University Previous Examination in 1893), took the ®rst B.Mus. on 6 November 1894, gained approval of his exercise in September 1895, and passed the second B.Mus. in May 1897, in which year his exercise was deposited (the standard procedure). In some cases the process was very 27 28

OUA MUS R/1/1, 17±18. Notable examples are listed in the Biographical Appendix, below.

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lengthy and might never be completed. Frank Muspratt of Queen's passed his Music Prelim. in 1895, and matriculated and took his ®rst B.Mus. in 1897; but after his exercise was approved in 1901 he appears to have lapsed.29 From matriculation to third B.Mus. examination at this period might take as little as two years (A. Eagle®eld Hull, 1896±8) or as long as eighteen years (Percy George Vincent Henniker, New College, 1887±1905). The gap between B.Mus. and D.Mus. might extend well over the statutory minimum of ®ve years; Septimus Ernest Luke Spooner Lillingston (BA 1886, matriculated Charsley's Hall 1881 and `Migrated to Hertford 1884') took his B.Mus. degree in 1888 and his D.Mus. in 1913.30 As Hadow stressed, the proposal to restrict the B.Mus. to Bachelors of Arts was made when a sizeable proportion of musical degree candidates held an Arts degree and would have been unaffected by the restriction. These graduates formed one stratum among those who `contributed . . . to Oxford life' and `gained . . . from its experience'31 within the college community. The strength of college and University musical life in this period was dependent on a variety of factors: on maintaining centuries-old traditions in appropriate forms (as at the major choral establishments): on setting up new ventures (such as the Balliol concerts, founded in 1885); and, in these and other musical contexts, on the in¯uence and efforts of individual Oxford ®gures. Some members of the University gave long and devoted service in several contexts: to the work of the Music school, to University music, and also to college music. John Henry Mee, Coryphaeus 1891±9, author of, inter alia, the standard work on the history of the Holywell Music Room, was evidently indefatigable. Appearing in his capacity as Treasurer of the Egles®eld musical society at Queen's, he was specially honoured in the society's ®ftieth anniversary concert programme book, which featured his photograph: There has been no one who has spent himself more freely in the interests of this Society than the Rev. J. H. Mee, D.Mus., formerly Scholar of the College. Not only has he composed works for the performances, ®nanced the Society through days of dif®culty, but has . . . been a member of the chorus in every concert since 1872.32

On an earlier occasion his co-editors for the ®rst volume of the history of University music in Oxford (1884±94) had expressed their con®dence that `the resolution of a General Meeting which ordered that his [Dr Mee's] portrait should be pre®xed to this book will meet with unanimous approval.'33 To their admiring and affectionate tribute E. S. Kemp, Dr Mee's 29 30 31 32 33

OUA UR/L/9/2. Ibid. HCP 1898, 38. QCA, news-cuttings album, 23. Ten Years of University Music, 9.

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co-editor for the second volume (1894±1904), later added: `To the cause of fostering the growth of Undergraduate music in Oxford, he has brought not only artistic appreciation but also business capacity, a suf®ciently rare combination.'34 One especially strong character seems to have been Warden Sewell of New College. From documents such as his personal letter-books and his Discipline Book35 comes a sense of his concern to promote an ordered musical life in the college. One or two examples must suf®ce here. On 24 January 1861 the Warden wrote that he had noted the morning before `one Chaplain and one Choral Scholar' only, and he wondered `what is considered by the chaplains to be the rule that regulates their attendance at the Chapel Service'. His concern was to ensure greater regularity and more frequent attendance by `all the members of the choir' to facilitate `the decent performance of divine service'.36 These were problems to which he gave further thought. On 14 April 1861, for example, he wrote engagingly to the Revd W. Tuckwell, suggesting that it would be advisable `to assign to the Chaplains, in the music selected, such parts as may prevent them from having (rightly or wrongly) the feeling of being as it were put upon the shelf'. This policy was intended as part of his drive to encourage `all the Members of the Choir to exert themselves for the improvement of the service'.37 Problems of imperfect attendance and preparation persisted in spite of the Warden's constant reminders and regulations, and there were more serious problems: As regards Mr. Roebuck & Mr Crane, the former is no longer in the service of the College, having been dismissed for intoxication by a Meeting of the Warden & Fellows on the 27th of March last. I took the opportunity to speak to Crane, being under the impression that he was not always free from intemperance. He assured me that there was no foundation for the suspicion; that he drank neither beer nor spiritsÐonly occasionally some light Claret. How far this statement is correct I am unable to say. At all events Roebuck's removal will act, for a time at least, as a warning and check, if any of the remaining members of the Choir are tempted to fall into the same habits. I fear that a Choir must always be more or less unsatisfactory, manage it and control it as you will.38

The last sentence particularly gives the clue to Warden Sewell's attitude. If for Warden Sewell music in chapel was a branch of discipline and of religious observance (there is no evidence that he was especially musical), for John 34

Ten More Years . . . of University Music, xviii. NCA MS 8666±7 and 8561. 36 NCA MS 8561, 17. 37 Ibid. 23. 38 NCA MS 8667, fo 74, Warden Sewell to Revd Spooner, 5 Apr. 1879. Another serious problem, caused by the presence of choristers, is indicated by a notice put up `on the door of Magd. Coll. Hall' that `Any undergraduate detected speaking to a Chorister will be sent down & the Chorister expelled. Or if found asking a chorister to his room will be expelled' ( June 1874): MCA MS 881 (among loose papers facing p. 81). See also pp. 35, 797. 35

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Mitchinson, Master of Pembroke, it was a real interest in its own right, and he was a genuine musician: Music bulked largely in my recreations. I had a fairly good tenor voice and could read music ¯uently. I belonged to Dr Corfe's Motett & Madrigal Society, and . . . to the Amateur Musical Society. . . I must not forget our own little musical club in college. I hatched it, and . . . gracefully retired in favour of Mr A. Barrett, a music vendor. . . We knew him among ourselves as Signor Barretti. He taught us quite well, and, though we never broke out into a concert, we had our full measure of pro®t and pleasure from our weekly practice lesson in the good old Englishmen's voice glees.39

The records show Warden Sewell's concern for music to have been that of a fairly benevolent but ®rm disciplinarian. By contrast, Mitchinson's affectionate enjoyment of music shines from the pages of his autobiography. Combining several of his interests, as Bishop of Barbados he had `trained a coloured choir for his cathedral in the Tonic sol-fa system'.40 Later, during his mastership of Pembroke (1899±1918), he ensured that music in the college chapel was vigorously encouraged, an organist being regularly engaged and the organ properly maintained: the level of performance was naturally more modest than that demanded in the larger establishments at the choral foundations.41 Bishop Mitchinson's undergraduate involvement in college music on the secular side also bore fruit later; by the 1860s and 1870s the `little musical club' he founded had grown into the College Glee Club and the College Musical Society: and these were giving concerts.42 Similar societies were associated with other colleges: Walter Parratt conducted for the musical societies of Exeter, Trinity, Jesus, and Pembroke colleges;43 and there are documentary records of others at Magdalen, Merton, and New College, as well as the Egles®eld Society at Queen's. The Balliol College Musical Society, something of a special case, deserves particular mention. From their inception in 1885 the Balliol concerts showed special features, such as an emphasis on Baroque (Corelli, Bach, and Handel) and on Classical repertory as well as more recent continental music (from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert to Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms); the inclusion of multi-movement works in full (Grieg's sonata for violin and piano, Haydn's `Surprise' symphony) as well as the more customary extracts; the prominence of organ music within mixed chamber recitals (the college hall was furnished, unusually, with a Willis organ in 1885 at Jowett's 39

Bishop Mitchinson, `Oxford Memories' (unpublished memoirs), 20±1, PCA MS 60/15/83. Musical Herald, no. 517 (1 Apr. 1891), 114. Copy held in PCA. In the years 1901±14 a series of organists received an annual stipend of £12 (with the possibility of bonus payments for special occasions), PCA 4/17/1, 223 ff. At Christ Church in 1899 the organist's stipend was £72.10s per quarter after tax and in 1911 approximately £70 per quarter, CCA D & C iii. b. 1. 42 PCA 58/1±3 (concert programmes). 43 New Grove (1980), article `Parratt'. 40 41

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expense); the appearance of more exotic performers, in addition to local artists; and the convention of ending each concert with a chorale. Altogether the Balliol concerts had from their earliest years a more serious aspect than most college society concerts of the period, probably under the in¯uence of the recently formed Oxford University Musical Union (1884).44 Sample programmes offer perhaps the most concise illustration of the activities of college societies. On 23 February 1865 the Magdalen College Maltese Glee ClubÐso named `because only malt liquor was to be drunk at their meetings'Ðput on in the Holywell Music Room a `Private Concert given by Edw. Handley, Commoner of Magd. Coll' (noted as `Very good') and conducted by `J. Stainer, B.A., Mus.Bac.'45 (college organist), with a characteristically light programme of short, mainly vocal items: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

PART I Part Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Two Roses' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Stirrup Cup'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Return, Blest Days' . . . . . . . . . . . . Cavatina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Semiranide' [sic]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DuetÐPianoforte and Violoncello . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Message' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Werner L. Arditi J. S. Smith Rossini Beethoven Blumenthal, words by Miss A. Procter (7) Terzetto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `O Nume Bene®co' . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rossini from La Gazza Ladra [Ninetta, Podesta, Fernando: `Respiro.'] (8) Part Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Come, Boys, Drink'. . . . . . . . . . . . Marschner Interval (10 Minutes) PART II (1) Part Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Love and Wine' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mendelssohn (2) Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music by Henry Smart, words by Barry Cornwall `Sing, maiden' (3) Glee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Happiest Land' . . . . . . . . . . . . Hatton, words by Longfellow (4) Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Rage, Thou Angry Storm' . . . . . . Benedict (5) Duet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mozart (Il Conte, SusannaÐ`Crudel percheÁ ®nora farmi languir cosi?') 44 See Ten Years, 2; and Arthur Burns and Robin Wilson, The Balliol Concerts: A Centenary History (1985). 45 MCA MS 983, printed programme with MS additions e.g. indicating or glossing on performers: `SOPRANO: MISS FANNY ARMYTAGE' `(who indulged in most ridiculous grimaces & affected contortions!)': `TENOR: MR FREDERICK WALKER' `of St. Paul's Cat hedral'.

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(6) Part Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edward Handley. `Ye fairies gay of form so bright' (7) Nocturre [sic] . . . . . . . . . . . . Violoncello . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Burgmuller (8) Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Nina' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. W. Hobbs RecitativeÐ`Nina! Nina! Oh! that a thousand tongues . . . . Air. Like yon bright orb that thro' the vaulted Heaven . . . [etc.] Words by W. Bellamy (9) Solo and Chorus . . . . . . . . . `Preghiera'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rossini (Mose in Egitto) `Dal tuo stellato soglõÂo . . .'

A programme for a Merton concert46 on Friday 2 December 1887 at 8.30 p.m. prints the names of the committee members and chorus (with the Revd J. H. Mee singing tenor and Mrs Mee among the altos). The conductor was Dr John Varley Roberts, of Magdalen. Again the contents of the programme are mainly short vocal items: Part the First Madrigal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Come, Shepherds, Follow Me' . . John Benet Duet Violin and Pianoforte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gade [from sonata for vln and pf ] Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Night Winds That So Gently Flow' . . J. Baptiste Calkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Die Beiden Grenadiere' . . . . . . . . Schumann Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `In This Hour of Softened Splendour' . . . Ciro Pinsuti Part the Second Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `I Loved Her'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. L. Hatton Pianoforte Solo . . `Valse Allemagne' [sic] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rubinstein [played by the Hon. Edith Brodrick, who also sang in the altos] Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Shall I Tell You Whom I Love' . . S. S. Wesley Trio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Corall'd Caves of Ocean' . . . H. Smart Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Beware'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. L. Hatton Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Bird and the Maiden' . . . . . . L. Spohr [with violin obbligato] Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `The Vesper Hymn' . . . . . . . . . . . . . L. van Beethoven Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `When All the World is Young'. . Elizabeth Phelp [verse by Charles Kingsley] Part Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . `Come Let Us Join The Roundelay' . . . William Beale God save the Queen 46

Merton College Archives Q. 2. 36.

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In the University, a new focus for the choral tradition was provided with the founding of the Bach Choir in 1896. While its programmes, featuring the large-scale choral works of Bach, embodied a serious approach, it is evident that (especially from 1901, when Hugh Allen took over the conductorship) the weekly rehearsals were occasions offering social and even comical enjoyment of the proceedings, as well as considerable musical edi®cation.47 One of the members of the choir under Allen's conductorship was a young Somerville undergraduate, Dorothy L. Sayers. Music in the colleges and the University inevitably, and rightly, functioned as entertainment, as a sociable activity, and as a decorative and expressive accompaniment to religious or academic ceremonial. The most signi®cant feature of the period 1800±1914 was, however, a new emphasis on its importance as an academic discipline within the University: this can be seen indeed as the beginning of the Oxford Music school in its modern form.

b i o g r a p h i ca l ap p e n d i x s i r h u g h a l l e n (1869±1946, B.Mus. 1892, D.Mus. 1896), Queen's: organist of St Saviour's, Reading, 1880; subsequently of St Asaph's Cathedral and Ely Cathedral (1897, 1898); organist of New College, Oxford, 1901±18; Choragus 1909±18; director of the Royal College of Music 1918±37; Heather Professor of Music 1918±46. `It was not in his nature to treat either of these two key positions in British music as a sinecure' (New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (1980), article `Allen'). s i r i vo r at k i n s (1869±1953, B.Mus. 1892, D.Mus. 1920), Queen's: organist of Worcester Cathedral 1897±1950; cathedral librarian 1933±53; published various editions (one in collaboration with Elgar) and bibliographical work. s i r h e n ry row l e y b i s h o p (1786±1855, B.Mus. 1839, D.Mus. 1854), Magdalen: Reid Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh 1841±3; Heather Professor of Music, Oxford, 1848±55. s i r p e r cy ca r t e r b u c k (1871±1947, B.Mus. 1891, D.Mus. 1893), Worcester: studied at the Royal College of Music with Parratt, C. H. Lloyd, and Parry (all connected with Oxford) and was organist at Worcester College, Oxford, 1891±4; Wells Cathedral 1896±9; Bristol Cathedral 1899±1901; Director of Music at Harrow 1901±27; in 1910 succeeded Prout as Professor of Music at Trinity College, Dublin. h . c . c o l l e s (1879±1943, B.Mus. 1904, Hon. D.Mus. 1932), Worcester: entered the Royal College of Music at 16, studied with Parry and others; on Parratt's advice entered for and won an organ scholarship at Worcester College, Oxford; became a 47 C. Bailey, Hugh Percy Allen (1948), 40±55. Opportunities for women to participate in instrumental as well as vocal music were provided by the founding of the Oxford Ladies' Musical Society (1898; from 1968 onwards renamed the Oxford Chamber Music Society. See G. K. Woodgate, The Oxford Chamber Music Society: A Brief History (1997)).

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proteÂge of Hadow, who directed him towards an outstanding career as a critic and writer on music; Colles also lectured at the RCM. Fellow of Worcester College, 1936 (New Grove, article `Colles'). c h a r l e s c o r f e (1814±83, B.Mus. 1847, D.Mus. 1852), Christ Church: son of the organist of Salisbury Cathedral, and brother of Joseph Corfe, organist at Bristol Cathedral. Charles Corfe was Choragus at Oxford 1860±83 and Coryphaeus 1856± 63; organist of Christ Church 1846±82; and conductor (from 1848) of the Oxford Motett and Madrigal Society. e d m u n d h . f e l l ow e s (1870±1951, B.Mus. 1896, Hon. D.Mus. 1939), Oriel: child prodigy. Read theology, then studied music in his fourth year; ordained 1894, and during curacy at Wandsworth took his B.Mus. and MA. Hon. D.Mus. Dublin 1917, Cambridge 1950, among other honours. Foremost of his generation in scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Church music. s i r w i l l i a m h e n ry h a d ow (1859±1937, B.Mus. 1890, Hon. D.Mus. 1909), Worcester: BA 1882, MA 1885, fellow of Worcester 1888; Principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle; Vice-Chancellor of Shef®eld University. `It was largely through his work at Oxford . . . that music in England began to ®nd a respectable academic place among the humane studies' (New Grove, article `Hadow'). a r t h u r e ag l e f i e l d h u l l (1876±1928, B.Mus. 1898, D.Mus. 1903), Queen's: editor (over a wide ®eld) and writer on music, particularly important at the time for his work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music; founder of a chamber music society and a music college at Hudders®eld, and of the British Music Society, 1918; editor of Monthly Musical Record, 1912±28. c h a r l e s h e r b e r t k i t s o n (1874±1944, B.Mus. 1897, D.Mus. 1902), St Edmund Hall: undergraduate and organ scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge; organist of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, 1913±20; Professor of Music, University College, Dublin 1915±20 and Trinity College, Dublin 1920±35. s i r f r e d e r i c k a r t h u r g o r e o u s e l e y, 2nd Bart. (1825±89, B.Mus. 1850, D.Mus. 1854), Christ Church: infant prodigy, son of the ambassador to Persia and St Petersburg, his godfathers were Frederick, Duke of York, and the Duke of Wellington; BA 1846, MA 1849; Heather Professor of Music, 1855±89. Among his distinguished musical and educational achievements was the founding of St Michael's College, Tenbury (1856±1985). `The Tenbury Collection' based on his library is in the Bodleian Library. s i r wa lt e r pa r r at t (1841±1924, B.Mus. 1873), Magdalen: child prodigy, organist of various churches, succeeding Stainer as organist of Magdalen College 1872±82, then succeeding George Elvey as organist of St George's, Windsor; Heather Professor of Music, 1908±18 (resigned). `He was the foremost exponent and teacher of the organ of his time, most of the leading organ appointments in the country being ®lled by his pupils' (New Grove, article `Parratt').

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s i r c h a r l e s h u b e r t h as t i n g s pa r ry, Bart. (1848±1918, B.Mus. 1867, Hon. D.Mus. 1884), Exeter: BA 1870, MA 1874. Hon. Mus. Doc. Cambridge 1883; Choragus 1883±1900; Hon. DCL Durham 1894; Heather Professor of Music 1900± 8 (resigned). Director of the Royal College of Music 1894±1918. His published work `helped to restore music to the place in literary, university, and national life that it had lost' (Frank Howes, New Grove, article `Parry'). w i l l i a m p o l e , FRS (1814±1900, B.Mus. 1860, D.Mus. 1867), St John's: Professor of Civil Engineering, University College London 1859±76; organist of St Mark's, North Audley Street, 1836±66. p e r cy s c h o l e s (1877±1958, B.Mus. 1908, Hon. D.Mus. 1943), St Edmund Hall: `largely self-taught'; music teacher, journalist, and university extension lecturer; editor of the Music Student (later the Music Teacher) to 1921; 1920±5 pioneering music critic of the Observer and music editor of Radio Times 1926±8. Distinguished author, of especially important work on Burney and eighteenth-century music. Later elected to Board of Faculty of Music, Oxford. Author of Oxford Companion to Music (1938); Hon. D.Litt. Oxford 1950, Leeds 1953, Hon. fellow St Edmund Hall. s i r j o h n s ta i n e r (1840±1901, B.Mus. 1859, D.Mus. 1865), Christ Church: BA 1863, MA 1866; ®rst organist of St Michael's College, Tenbury, 1856; organist of Magdalen College, 1859±72, then of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had been a chorister; founder of the Oxford Philharmonic Society, 1865; Heather Professor of Music, 1889±99 (resigned). `He was an excellent lecturer, and he did much to raise the status of the Professorship of Music at Oxford while he held the Chair. He also did much valuable work in the ®eld of musicology' (E. Fellowes, English Cathedral Music (4th edn 1948), 223). Together with Pole he conceived the idea of a learned musical society, founded in 1874 as the Musical Association (now the RMA): the ®rst President was Ouseley. l e o p o l d s to kow s k i (1882±1977, B.Mus. 1903), Queen's: child prodigy, at 13 studying with Parry and others at the Royal College of Music; FRCO 1900; organist and choirmaster at St James's Piccadilly, 1902; conducting deÂbut Paris, 1908; London deÂbut, 1909; Philadelphia 1912±38. His orchestral transcriptions and revisions earned him scholarly disapproval. e r n e s t wa l k e r (1870±1949, B.Mus. 1893, D.Mus. 1898), Balliol: BA 1891; assistant organist, Balliol College, 1891±1901, then director of music to 1925 (honorary fellow 1926). In `a life almost wholly devoted to Oxford music' he `helped to create the climate for the acceptance of music as a serious discipline' (New Grove, article `Walker'). s a m u e l s e bas t i a n w e s l e y (1810±76, B.Mus. 1839, D.Mus. 1839), Magdalen: cathedral organist of Hereford, Exeter, Winchester, Gloucester, and `considered the ®rst organist and church composer in England' in the 1830s (Williams, Degrees in Music, 103).

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19 Mathematics k . c . h a n na b u s s Mathematicians played a prominent part in the reform and administration of Victorian Oxford. Bartholomew Price, the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, and Henry Smith, Savilian Professor of Geometry, were in the ®rst rank of the reform party during the 1860s and 1870s. Two mathematics professors of the previous generation, Baden Powell and George Johnson, served on the 1850 Royal Commission. The role of the mathematicians in the University reform process is particularly interesting because they were also ®ghting on a second front to revitalize English mathematics after a century of stagnation. Exaggerated respect for Newton in the wake of the priority dispute with Leibniz had left English mathematicians isolated from the mainstream of mathematical developments on the Continent.1 The slow recovery of English mathematics during the nineteenth century is usually dated from around 1814, when a group of Cambridge undergraduates formed the Analytical Society,2 one of whose aims was to promote the introduction of continental notation and methods at Cambridge. For much of the century Cambridge enjoyed advantages which enabled it to recruit mathematicians more readily than Oxford. The prestige of the Cambridge mathematical tripos was unrivalled, and a good performance in it was often rewarded by a college fellowship. At Oxford mathematics was always in the shadow of classics. In a prize essay of 1817, a fellow and tutor of Balliol, C. A. Ogilvie, defended the value of mathematical study as a mental discipline, but nevertheless assigned it a subordinate position in relation to the classics.3 During the early decades of the century mathematics enjoyed some encouragement at Christ Church, which supplied nearly 30 per cent of those who obtained mathematical honours between 1810 and 1820. Nominations to Studentships at Christ Church were occasionally made on the basis of high attainment in this subject. Such elections were, 1

R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), ch. 14; E. J. Aiton, Leibniz (Bristol, 1985), 337±40. A. Hyman, Charles Babbage (1982), 23±4. `On the Union of Classical with Mathematical Studies', The Oxford English Prize Essays (4 vols 1830), iii. 178. 2 3

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however, rare. At the middle of the century only one-third of those with ®rsts in mathematics got fellowships, compared with three-quarters of those who obtained ®rsts in classics.4 Until 1864 the ®nal examination in classics was obligatory for all those seeking the BA at Oxford, whereas at Cambridge it was mathematics which formed the compulsory prerequisite for other studies. Between 1800 and 1807 Mathematics had brie¯y been accorded a place as a compulsory subject for the honours degree, but this was soon dropped; and the compulsory attendance at the lectures of the Savilian Professors demanded by the statutes was not enforced.5 Only the rudimentary test of competence in Responsions remained, and before 1850 it was possible to avoid this by substituting Logic for Mathematics. Even so successful an Oxford college as Balliol had no mathematical scholarships.6 Oxford's religious tests were a further obstacle to attracting mathematical talent: at Cambridge, where assent to the Thirty-nine Articles was required only on graduation, Jews such as James Joseph Sylvester and Dissenters like Augustus de Morgan were able to matriculate and become Wranglers. The petition for the abolition of the religious tests was presented to Lord John Russell in 1854 by a deputation which included Baden Powell and Sylvester,7 the latter becoming a belated bene®ciary of the repeal of tests when he was elected to the Oxford Geometry chair, in succession to Smith, in 1883. None the less, Mathematics was always a subject in which honours could be obtained at Oxford and by the 1830s `all the principal colleges' had mathematical lecturers.8 Moreover, the Mathematics professors, unlike those in some other subjects, were actually resident in Oxford and did deliver their statutory lectures. For those undergraduates who attempted to obtain honours in Mathematics at Oxford, it was said that `the curriculum for study for the ®rst class in mathematics prior to 1852 embraced only about two-thirds of the amount then required at Cambridge'.9 Certainly the earliest printed mathematical examination questions (for Easter 1828) could roughly be compared with a present-day sixth-form examination, with a few easier questions on decimals and fractions thrown in, and some book-work questions on Newton's Principia. This was a course well within the grasp of the abler classicists. By the late 1840s, however, the questions were already becoming more specialized and demanding, a process which was further 4 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 166; in 1856 Bartholomew Price alleged that only two college fellowships had been awarded solely for pro®ciency in Mathematics during the previous ®fteen years, PRO HO 73/42 pt i, 65. 5 RCO (1850), evidence, 257. 6 B. Jowett, `Recollections of Professor Smith', in The Collected Mathematical Papers of H. J. S. Smith (1894), xxxix. 7 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 198. 8 B. Powell, On the Present State and Future Prospects of Mathematics at the University of Oxford (1832), 12. 9 E. G. Sandford, Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (1906), 58±9.

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accelerated by changes in the structure of the mathematical curriculum effected in 1850, when the University's examination system as a whole was reorganized. By the 1870s mathematical honour Moderations, which concluded the ®rst half of the course, consisted of seven papers on pure Mathematics:10 Algebra; Trigonometry and the Theory of Equations; Geometry; Algebraic Geometry; Differential Calculus; Integral Calculus; General Problems. The materials for the papers on Algebraic Geometry and Calculus were not dissimilar to the corresponding parts of Moderations now; while the Geometry paper included both Euclidean and a little projective geometry. For the Second Public Examination there were twelve papers: Elementary Algebra, Trigonometry and the Theory of Equations; Elementary Geometry; Elementary Mechanics; Algebra, Trigonometry and the Theory of Equations with the Theory of Determinants; Geometry; Differential Calculus; Integral Calculus; two papers on Mechanics; Dynamics; Optics; Astronomy. The theory of determinants included some topics which are now regarded as matrix theory, and the Dynamics paper embraced not only modern analytical dynamics but also hydrodynamics. Oxford's course in Modern Geometry, introduced by Smith, was the ®rst of its kind in England.11 Besides extending the traditional plane Euclidean geometry into higher dimensions, it included a detailed study of projective geometry. In the early years of the nineteenth century Mathematics professorships were held in plurality and professors migrated from one chair to another.12 After the appointment of Baden Powell (1796±1860) to the professorship of Geometry following Stephen Peter Rigaud's migration to Astronomy in 1827, this pattern was broken. In one way, however, Baden Powell still followed in the older tradition: his main research interests lay in optics and astronomy rather than mathematics. A graduate of Oriel College, his reputation had been made by his experiments on the infra-red end of the solar spectrum, conducted while he was vicar of a country parish.13 Powell's election to the Savilian professorship owed as much to his Oriel and family connections as to his scienti®c achievements.14 According to Oxford gossip, Powell's rival for the chair had been Charles Babbage, though Babbage's correspondence does not really bear this out.15 Babbage, who was elected to the Lucasian professorship in Cambridge the following year, shared Powell's 10

A. M. M. Stedman, Oxford; Its Social and Intellectual Life (1878), ch. xii. J. W. L. Glaisher, Introduction, Collected Mathematical Papers of H. J. S. Smith (1894), lxxvi. 12 T. Hornsby held the chairs of both Astronomy and Natural Philosophy. A. Robertson and S. P. Rigaud both moved from the chair of Geometry to that of Astronomy. 13 R. Fox, `Baden Powell', in Dictionary of Scienti®c Biography (1981), xi. 115±16. 14 P. Corsi, Religion and Science (1988), 5, 34. 15 W. Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford (1909), 166; Hyman, Babbage, 63. 11

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scienti®c and theological interests, and the two men remained closely associated. Although Babbage was undoubtedly the more powerful mathematician, he was rather less conscientious in performing his professorial duties. While Powell moved to Oxford, lectured regularly, and wrote a series of undergraduate textbooks, Babbage continued to reside in London, apparently gave not a single lecture, and eventually resigned in 1839.16 Powell's other Cambridge contacts included Whewell, Herschel, and de Morgan, who became professor at King's College, London. Through them Powell gained a vision of mathematics going well beyond the Oxford syllabus of his day, and immediately upon taking up the chair he embarked on vigorous campaigning to raise the position of Mathematics within Oxford. The University had already gone as far as it wished in that direction, and Powell lacked the patience and political skills to get more than a few token changes.17 Powell did, however, institute the practice of printing the examination questions as a tool to raise standards. Moreover, the establishment of the University mathematical scholarships in 1831 proved to be a valuable stepping-stone to a future career for many of Oxford's more gifted mathematicians. Initially one scholarship tenable for three years was awarded annually, on the basis of an examination. After 1843 this was replaced by two two-year scholarships: the junior mathematical scholarship for undergraduates and the senior scholarship for graduates. The senior scholarship questions were more demanding and tested more advanced material than any other mathematics examination held in Oxford at that time, and winners of the scholarship included the future professors Johnson, Donkin, Price, Smith, and Esson. Powell nevertheless regarded the scholarships as little more than a weak palliative, far short of his larger aim to raise the mathematical honours exam to equal the position held by Literae Humaniores. Frustrated by the obstacles hindering reform, he published a highly polemical lecture on The Present State and Future Prospects of Mathematical and Physical Studies in the University of Oxford, in which he argued for enhancing the status of science and mathematics at Oxford to match their increasing importance in society at large. By its hostility towards these subjects, he contended, the establishment endangered its own position, while if the University continued to marginalize science there was a risk that the most in¯uential members of society would look elsewhere for their education. Supported by statistical and anecdotal evidence of the contemporary state of mathematical studies, Powell noted that not only had the number of students attending science lectures actually declined, but that 16 G. Jones, `Babbage: Architect of Modern Computing', New Scientist (29 June 1991), 33±6. For the advice about lecturing given to Powell by Copleston see Pt 1, 20. 17 Corsi, Religion and Science, ch. 9. Powell's links with the whigs were viewed with suspicion in the Oxford of the early 1830s: Pt 1, 74.

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though a certain portion [of those candidates who did study mathematics] had `got up' the four books of Euclid, not more than two or three could add Vulgar Fractions or tell the cause of day or night or the principle of a pump.18

No doubt Powell supported his cause with extreme cases, but he was not the only examiner to complain of rote learning. Another told of a student who reproduced perfectly one of Euclid's proofs except for the substitution of circles for triangles in all the diagrams.19 After the early setbacks Powell relied on less direct attempts at reform, but by no means abandoned his crusade to raise the status of science in society. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831 he became an enthusiastic supporter and played a major part in organizing its second meeting at Oxford in the following year. His own original contributions to optics diminished as optical theories grew in mathematical sophistication, and he became signi®cant rather as a popularizer of science. An accomplished speaker, his lecture demonstrations drew enthusiastic audiences,20 while his scienti®c reviews and popularizations continued to be of great importance. Powell was an early supporter of the wave theory of light and an in¯uential propagandist for the idea. It was Powell's enquiries which elicited from Sir William Rowan Hamilton his re®nement of Cauchy's theory of dispersion, which was ®rst published with Hamilton's blessing in one of Powell's survey articles.21 His popularization of science bore other fruit too. Charles Darwin acknowledged that his work on evolution had been strongly in¯uenced by Powell's writings.22 Powell was one of the ®rst prominent Churchmen to comment favourably on Darwin's theory,23 but he died in June 1860, just a few weeks before the famous debate on evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley at the new University Museum. From 1842, three years after Rigaud's death, Powell's colleague as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy was William Fishburn Donkin (1814±69). After graduating with ®rst-class honours in Classics and Mathematics in 1836, Donkin was elected to a fellowship at University College and a mathematical lectureship at St Edmund Hall, the two institutions at which he had studied. A quiet retiring Yorkshireman, when asked for his requirements in the new Museum he replied that a hut in the grounds would meet all his needs.24 He was apparently an accomplished musician who contributed articles on early Greek music to the Dictionary of Antiquities. 18

Powell, Present State, 40. J. Pycroft, Oxford Memories (1886), 82. Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford, 180. 21 T. L. Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Baltimore, Md., 1980), 158. 22 C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), xx. 23 Corsi, Religion and Science 183; see also Darwin to C. Lyell, 15 Feb. 1860, in C. Darwin: Autobiography (New York, 1965), 241. 24 V. Morton, Oxford Rebels (Gloucester, 1987), 71. 19 20

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It was therefore natural that one of his scienti®c interests should have been acoustics, though his great treatise on the subject lay un®nished at his death in 1869. Although Donkin published only sixteen papers over his lifetime they range widely, from the ®rst formulation of Hamiltonian mechanics for time-dependent systems, including a generalization of Hamilton's mechanics to systems in which energy is not conserved, to several early papers on statistics.25 The development of statistics proved to be an area in which Oxford graduates made a particularly signi®cant contribution. It has been said that modern mathematical statistics was founded by Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.26 Galton, a Cambridge graduate, attributed his interest in mathematical methods in the social sciences to an 1861 paper by William Spottiswoode (1825±83).27 After graduating from Balliol in 1845, with a ®rst in Mathematics, and winning the senior mathematical scholarship in the following year, Spottiswoode had returned to London to run the family printing business. He managed to combine this with an extraordinarily proli®c career in mathematics and physics, while retaining close contacts with Oxford.28 The 1861 paper was an attempt to unravel the origin of the Asian mountain ranges by statistical methods.29 Spottiswoode became President of the Royal Society in 1878, an of®ce which he held until his untimely death from typhoid fever in 1883.30 Edgeworth (1845±1926) read Greats at Balliol in the late 1860s, acquiring an interest in the moral sciences which John Maynard Keynes later attributed to the in¯uence of Benjamin Jowett's tutorials on political economy.31 It is not known whether Edgeworth attended any mathematics lectures at Oxford, but his New and Old Methods in Ethics, published in 1877, testi®es to wide reading.32 His mastery of mathematical technique was still more apparent in his Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, published four years later. Edgeworth returned to Oxford as Drummond Professor of Political Economy in 1891.33 Impressive though they were, these were all individual contributions: there was no Oxford school of Statistics despite an attempt by Benjamin 25 E. T. Whittaker, Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Bodies (4th edn 1937), 264; T. M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking (Princeton, 1986), 87. 26 S. M. Stigler, The History of Statistics (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 266 and ch. 9. 27 F. Galton, Memories of My Life (1908), 304. 28 Nature, xxvii (1883), 597±601. 29 W. Spottiswoode, `On Typical Mountain Ranges: an Application of the Calculus of Probabilities to Physical Geography', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 31 (1861), 149±54. 30 M. B. Hall, All Scientists Now (1984), 117±18. 31 J. M. Keynes, `Francis Ysidro Edgeworth' in Essays in Biography (1933), 274. 32 J. Creedy, Edgeworth and the Development of Neoclassical Economics (1986), section 2. 4 et seq. 33 A. Kadish, The Oxford Economists in the Late Nineteenth Century (1982), 198.

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Jowett and Florence Nightingale to endow a chair in the subject.34 Miss Nightingale's interest in statistics arose out of her need to interpret the mortality data which she had collected in the Crimea,35 and Jowett encouraged her idea of endowing a chair in Statistics at Oxford. Eventually the scheme foundered, a victim of Miss Nightingale's indecision and some questionable advice from Galton.36 From 1853 the third mathematics professor with Powell and Donkin was Bartholomew (`Bat') Price (1818±98) of Pembroke College. He continued as Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy until becoming Master of Pembroke in 1892. Price is known less for his research than as an inspiring teacher. His major works were his two-volume treatise on differential calculus and its four-volume sequel on in®nitesimal calculus, which ®rst appeared between 1852 and 1860.37 Both works were published by the Oxford University Press, in which Price was later active as Secretary to the Delegates, overseeing its transition to a modern academic press.38 Among the ®rst monographs published during Price's time at the Press was James Clerk Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Price was renowned as a coach, numbering Spottiswoode and Oxford's most famous mathematician, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, among his private pupils. Dodgson (1832±98) graduated from Christ Church in 1854 and the following year was appointed mathematical lecturer, a post which he eventually resigned in 1881. His load was heavy: at one point he had seventy students to look after and he sometimes gave as many as seven hours of lectures in a day, though his teaching was mainly preparation for Responsions and pass Moderations rather than for mathematical honours.39 Although eclipsed by his children's stories, most of Dodgson's books were devoted to mathematics and logic.40 Apart from the Treatise on Determinants41 these were mostly on 34

See K. C. Hannabuss, `An In®rmity of Purpose', OM n s no. 37 (Noughth Week, Michaelmas Term, 1988), 6±8; Quinn and Prest, xxxi±xxxii. 35 I. B. Cohen, `Florence Nightingale', Scienti®c American, Mar. 1984, 98±107. 36 M. Diamond and M. Stone, `Nightingale on Quetelet', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, A144 (1981), 66±79, 176±213, 332±351. 37 B. Price, Treatise on the Differential Calculus (2 vols 1848); B. Price, Treatise on the In®nitesimal Calculus (4 vols 1852±60). 38 See pp. 649±55. 39 R. L. Green (ed.), The Diaries of Lewis Carroll (2 vols 1953), i. 65±7; S. D. Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), 59±60; T. B. Strong, `Lewis Carroll', Cornhill Magazine, 4 (1898), 303±10. 40 D. B. Esperson, `Lewis Carroll, Mathematician', Mathematical Gazette, 17 (1933), 92±100; W. Weaver, `Lewis Carroll', Scienti®c American, Apr. 1956, 116±28; W. W. Bartley III, `Lewis Carroll's Lost Notebooks on Logic', Scienti®c American, July 1972, 38±46. 41 C. L. Dodgson, Treatise on Determinants (1867). This contains Dodgson's own algorithm for computing matrices originally published in PRS 15 (1866), 150±5, which has recently interested combinatorialists; see D. P. Robbins, `1, 2, 7, 42, 429, 7436, . . .', Mathematical Intelligencer, 13 (Spring 1991), 12±19.

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elementary topics such as Euclidean geometry. For non-Euclidean geometry one must turn to the pages of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.42 His very last publication was a letter in Nature describing a new algorithm for long division.43 Dodgson's views on University issues were generally conservative, but he enlivened many debates with humorous pamphlets, often written in a mock mathematical style.44 These presuppose considerably greater mathematical awareness on the part of his readers than that displayed by Powell's students thirty years earlier. Dodgson's political interests extended well beyond the University and embraced such issues as electoral reform. It is perhaps his work on the theory of games and of voting which represents his own most important contribution to mathematics.45 When Powell died suddenly in 1860, the electors chose as his successor Henry John Stephen Smith (1826±83), the young mathematics lecturer at Balliol. This proved to be a happy choice. Powell, Donkin, and Price had begun to restore the status of Oxford mathematics within Britain, but it was Smith who brought it international renown. A foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Smith carried off the major prizes of both the Berlin and Paris academies. His reputation was always higher on the Continent than in Britain. The great Italian geometer, Cremona, remarked that Smith's achievements had not received the acclaim they deserved in England owing to his extreme modesty. Glaisher at Cambridge commented that `very few even of his intimate friends were aware that in his own subjects he stood alone in England, and that his papers upon the Higher Arithmetic held a place amongst the most important productions of the century in abstract science.'46 Within two years of taking up his scholarship at Balliol Smith had served as President of the Union and gained ®rst-class honours in both classics and mathematics. He also won both the Ireland and the senior mathematical scholarships. Shortly afterwards he was elected mathematical lecturer in succession to his own tutor, Frederick Temple, who had resigned to take up of®cial work under the Education Of®ce, Whitehall. Temple himself had taken over following the enforced resignation of the Tractarian William Ward in 1842, and retained an interest in mathematics throughout an eccle42

The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (1939), 521±3. See also 312±13. Nature, 57 (1898), 269±71. 44 Typical examples are The New Method of Evaluation as applied to  and The Dynamics of a Parti-cle, Carroll, 1011±16 and 1016±26. 45 N. T. Gridgeman, `Charles Lutwidge Dodgson', in Dictionary of Scienti®c Biography (1981), IV, 136±8; D. Black, Theories of Committees and Elections (1958) ch. 20, Appendix; F. Abeles, `The Mathematico-Political Papers of C. L. Dodgson', in Giuliano Potter (ed.), Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (New York, 1982). 46 L. Cremona, `H. J. S. Smith', Atti dell' Accademia dei Lincei, ser. 3, 7 (1883), 162±3; J. W. L. Glaisher, Introduction (n. 11), lxxxii. 43

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siastical career which took him on to become Archbishop of Canterbury.47 It was normal for colleges to elect promising young men to such lectureships soon after graduation: Donkin, Price, Dodgson, and Temple all started their careers in this way. None the less Smith was uneasy at the insularity which this encouraged and protested to his sister, `they prefer having work ill done by an in-college man to having it well done by an out-college one, and this is not wise.'48 It was not only mathematics which Balliol wanted Smith to teach. Following the approval of a new examination in Natural Science in 1850, Balliol had decided to build a laboratory and asked Smith to run it, which he did from 1853 to 1860.49 To equip himself for this task he studied with StoryMaskelyne in the Old Ashmolean and with Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry. Smith's ®rst pupil was the chemist Augustus Vernon Harcourt, who with the mathematician William Esson undertook the ®rst detailed studies of chemical kinetics. Smith also saw to the equipping of the new Museum laboratory, since Brodie's refusal to sign the Thirty-nine Articles barred him from Convocation.50 Although he broke off one mathematics lecture to remark that `it is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and the one that endears it to the really scienti®c mind that under no circumstances can it possibly be of the smallest possible utility to anyone,' Smith retained a strong interest in the application of mathematics to chemistry.51 Despite these distractions, Smith had begun to establish at least a local reputation as a mathematician by the time of Powell's death, and the other Oxford mathematicians petitioned the electors for the Savilian professorship in his favour. The outside candidate was George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic and already a mathematician of great distinction, but he compromised his application by submitting no testimonials. It seems that he had been alarmed by the controversy which had just engulfed some of the contributors to a volume of Essays and Reviews, and was far from sure that he wished to enter so bigoted an institution.52 None the less, Smith's election must have appeared yet another instance of preferring the competent internal 47 E. G. Sandford (n. 29), appendix to ch. 5 by Archdeacon Wilson; N. L. Biggs, E. K. Lloyd, and R. J. Wilson, A History of Graph Theory 1736±1936 (1976), 105. 48 C. H. Pearson, Biographical Sketches and Recollections of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894), 39. Smith's sister Eleanor founded the ®rst series of Women's Lectures at Oxford in the 1860s; see p. 238. 49 T. Smith, `The Balliol±Trinity Laboratories', in J. M. Prest (ed.), Balliol Studies (1982). 50 A. Vernon Harcourt, `The Oxford Museum and its Founders', Cornhill Magazine, 28 (1910), 350±63. 51 C. H. Pearson, biographical sketch in Collected Mathematical Papers, xxxiii; Nature, 86 (1910), 452±3; see Papers XXXII, XXXIII in Collected Mathematical Papers. 52 D. MacHale, George Boole (Dublin, 1985), 168; G. C. Smith, The Boole±de Morgan Correspondence 1842±1864 (1982), letter 67; Pt 1, 707±9.

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candidate to a distinguished outsider, which Smith had so much deplored when he got his lectureship, and he was uneasy about it.53 A mathematician who had run a laboratory and won the top classics prize offered an unrivalled breadth of outlook. On his death Mark Pattison regretted the loss of the most accomplished man in the whole university, at once scienti®c and literary. 20 M. A. sÐany 20Ðmight have been taken without making such a gap in the mind of the place.54

Moreover, Smith possessed enormous personal charm and had a genius for compromiseÐqualities which were not common amongst the reformers, who increasingly called upon Smith to act as their spokesman. The University also exploited his administrative skills. In 1874 he was appointed Keeper of the University Museum.55 Nor were his abilities valued only in Oxford: Smith was the ®rst Chairman of the Meterological Council and sat on the Royal Commission into Scienti®c Instruction (the Devonshire Commission) and the Selborne Commission. Oxford Liberals ran him as their candidate in the 1878 election for one of the University seats. It was not Smith's political preferences, however, but his scholarly interests which caused him to withhold his name from the petition organized in 1882 by a group of Oxford scientists, objecting to the choice of the Cambridge mathematician Arthur Cayley as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting proposed to be held at Oxford in the following year. They would have preferred Lord Salisbury, the University's Chancellor; Smith's respect for Cayley as a mathematician outweighed such local patriotic considerations.56 The Association stood ®rm in its choice, moved the 1883 meeting to Southport, and avoided Oxford until 1894. As a scholar, Smith had a range of connections with mathematicians and scientists on the Continent which was rare among his contemporaries. His undergraduate studies at Oxford had been delayed for two years by smallpox and malaria contracted during his travels; during convalescence he took the opportunity to attend science lectures at the Sorbonne. Each summer he travelled on the Continent, renewing his scholarly contacts. During the election of the Professor of Experimental Philosophy in 1865 Smith worked hard to attract Hermann von Helmholtz, though the scheme foundered for reasons which are not altogether clear.57 53

C. H. Pearson, biographical sketch in Collected Mathematical Papers, xxv. V. H. H. Green, Oxford Common Room (1957), 306. According to his sister, this of®ce `he accepted for the honour. . . and to be near the croquet ground', E. Smith to Charles Pearson, 29 Oct. 1874, Bodl. MS Eng. lett d. 191. 56 W. Odling et al., Letter to Captain Douglas Galton 20 June 1882, Bod. G. A. Oxon 8 1079 (13); British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Southampton Meeting, 1882, lix. 57 N. Kurti, `Opportunity lost in 1865?' Nature, 308 (1984), 313±14. 54 55

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Despite his election to the professorship Smith's ®nancial position was far from secure, and he continued his college teaching in addition to his new duties. During the late 1860s, in his capacity as Balliol's lecturer, Smith collaborated with William Esson (Merton), Charles Price (Exeter), and Charles Faulkner (University) in setting up the ®rst combined college lectures in mathematics. Although the initiative was generally attributed to Esson, Smith's importance to the scheme can be gauged by the fact that the lectures were abandoned for two years after Smith moved to a professorial fellowship at Corpus in 1873.58 Until the mid-1870s Smith's professorial lectures seem to have covered geometry and number theory, while his college lectures included calculus and probability. After resigning his college lectureship, he mixed all these topics in his professorial lectures. Smith's ®rst papers had been on geometry, but he soon turned his attention to number theory and that was where he built his international reputation as a mathematician.59 By the time of his election to the Savilian professorship he had just published the second of six reports on the theory of numbers, commissioned by the British Association. This panoramic survey of the whole subject was well received, particularly on the Continent.60 After Smith's death the six reports were gathered into a single volume, which the German number theorist Minkowski described as changing the whole balance of the literature.61 As work on the reports progressed, Smith found himself increasingly proving new results rather than reviewing known material, and two of his greatest papers arose in this way. His 1861 paper on linear Diophantine equations (integer solutions of simultaneous equations) derives what is now called the Smith normal form of a matrix with integral entries. This key step in establishing the cyclic decomposition theorem for modules was to be an essential tool in later developments in algebra.62 Another problem which excited Smith's interest arose out of Lagrange's theorem that every positive integer can be expressed as the sum of four squares. This can often be done in several ways. Gauss had found a formula for the number of ways of writing a number as the sum of three squares and Jacobi had done the 58 Baden Powell had advocated such a system in 1832: Powell, Present state, 20; E. B. Elliott, `William Esson (1839±1916)', PRS 103A (1916), lvi; see also E. B. Elliott, The Honour School of Mathematics and Physics in Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 41; p. 46 et seq. above. 59 Smith's mathematical work is discussed in more detail in K. C. Hannabuss, `Henry Smith' in J. Fauvel, R. G. Flood, and R. J. Wilson (eds), Oxford Figures: 800 Years of the Mathematical Sciences (1999). 60 Collected Mathematical Papers, nos V±X; L. Kronecker, Sitzungsberichte, Akademie Wissenschaften, Berlin (1875), 234; see also Hofmann to Brodie, 26 June 1867, in W. H. Brock, The Atomic Debates (Leicester, 1967), 126±7. 61 H. Minkowski, Briefe an David Hilbert (Berlin, 1973), 78. 62 Collected Mathematical Papers (n. 11), no. XII.

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same for two, four, and six squares. In 1867 Smith proved a formula which covered all these cases and ®ve and seven squares too.63 Smith's insight into areas outside his own speciality was clearly displayed in a remarkable 1875 paper `On the Integration of Discontinuous Functions'.64 In his history of integration theories Hawkins has suggested that `probably the development of a measure-theoretic viewpoint within integration theory would have been accelerated had the contents of Smith's paper been known to mathematicians whose interest in the subject was less tangential to his.'65 The paper contained the ®rst example of what is now called a Cantor set, eight years before Cantor's own work and a century before it found its application in chaos theory. In 1868 Smith won, jointly with Hermann Kortum of Bonn,66 the Steiner Prize of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for the solution of a geometric problem. The award of the Grand Prix of the AcadeÂmie des Sciences in Paris, which Smith won in 1883, was marred by controversy. The AcadeÂmie had chosen as its prize topic the very problem on sums of squares which Smith had solved in 1867. When it was appraised of Smith's priority, there was an attempt to hide the mistake by getting him to compete for the prize.67 This attempted cover-up went badly wrong, however, as Smith died before the competition was judged, and there was another correct solution from a young student at the University of KoÈnigsberg. The prize was awarded jointly to both of them, but journalists soon discovered Smith's priority and accused the student, Hermann Minkowski, of plagiarism.68 In fact, Minkowski became one of the most highly respected number-theorists of his generation, and retrospectively it seems very appropriate that Smith shared this last honour with the man who became his scienti®c heir. By the time of Smith's death, just over ®fty years after Powell's polemical lecture, Oxford Mathematics had changed beyond recognition and was attracting some extremely good students. Colleges now regularly awarded undergraduate scholarships in Mathematics and made elections to mathematical fellowships. Among the winners of the University's junior and senior mathematical scholarships between 1881 and 1888 were Leonard James Rogers (Balliol), Percy John Heawood (Exeter), and John Edward Campbell (Hertford). Heawood wrote one of the classic papers of graph theory;69 63

Ibid. no. XVII. Ibid. no. XXV. 65 T. Hawkins, Lebesque's Theory of Integration (New York, 1970), 40. 66 There is an interesting account of Kortum in G. Kowalewski, Bestand und Wandel (Munich, 1949), 87±8. 67 J. W. L. Glaisher, introduction to Collected Mathematical Papers, lxv±lxvii. 68 Nature, 27 (1883), 565; Minkowski's side of the controversy is described by L. RuÈdenberg in H. Minkowski, Briefe an David Hilbert, 14±15, and in C. Reid, Hilbert (Berlin, 1970), 12. 69 N. L. Biggs, E. K. Lloyd, and R. J. Wilson, A History of Graph Theory 1736±1936 (1976), 105±15, 217. 64

mathematics

455

Campbell wrote the ®rst English monograph on Lie groups and is commemorated in the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula;70 Rogers discovered the remarkable Rogers-Ramanujan identity twenty years before it was conjectured by Ramanujan.71 Smith's successor, James Joseph Sylvester, was already a mathematician of great distinction. Although nearly 70 at the time of his election, in 1883, Sylvester set to work with ®re and zeal, running his lectures as a research seminar, to show `by. . . example . . . the dif®cult art of mathematical thinking'.72 His ®rst thirty-three lectures on his new theory of reciprocants were published as research papers and his correspondence with the Danish mathematician Julius Petersen gave a major new impetus to graph theory.73 Unfortunately the next generation of pure mathematicians was more parochial in outlook. Edwin Bailey Elliott, who was elected ®rst Wayn¯ete Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1892, did not believe in encouraging research. Although his treatise on The Algebra of Quantics became the standard English text on modern invariant theory, and he remained proli®c up to his death, his work was aptly characterized in the DNB as `looking back to a closing epoch . . . typically English, it could be called Victorian'. When failing eyesight forced Sylvester to stop lecturing in 1894, William Esson was appointed his deputy, and three years later he was elected as Sylvester's successor to the Geometry chair. By that time, however, Esson was preoccupied with administration, and although he continued his collaboration with A. G. Vernon Harcourt at the Christ Church laboratory on chemical kinetics, they had by this time lost touch with the latest developments on the Continent.74 In applied mathematics the University was more fortunate in the election of Augustus Edward Hough Love. An early fruit of his professorship was his famous explanation of anomalous seismic data by what are now known as Love waves in the earth's crust.75 It was his contributions which carried Oxford's revived claim to international mathematical distinction into the new century. 70 J. E. Campbell, Continuous Groups (1903); E. B. Elliott, `John Edward Campbell', Proceedings of the Royal Society, 107A (1925), ix±xii. 71 G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan (New York, 1978), 91; G. H. Hardy and E. M. Wright, The Theory of Numbers (4th edn 1960), 296; A. L. Dixon, `Leonard James Rogers', ONFRS 3 (1934), 299±301. 72 Nature, xxxiii (1886), 222±31. 73 J. J. Sylvester, `Lectures on the Theory of Reciprocants', American Journal of Mathematics, 8 (1886), 196±200; 9 (1886), 1±37, 113±61; 297±352; 10 (1886), 1±16; G. Sabidussi, Correspondence between Sylvester, Petersen, Hilbert and Klein on Invariants and the Factorisation of Graphs (Institut for Matematik og Datalogi, Odense University, 1990). 74 `William Esson', Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Mathematicians (1912), ii. 272; K. J. Laidler, `Chemical Kinetics and the Oxford College Laboratories', Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences, 38 (1988), 245. 75 E. A. Milne, `Augustus Edward Hough Love', ONFRS 3 (1941), 467; C. R. Calladine, `The Theory of Thin Shell Structures, 1888±1988', Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 202 (1988), 1±9.

page

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page

20 `Oxford for Arts': The Natural Sciences, 1880±1914 j a n e t h owa r t h The reputation of Oxford science deteriorated sharply in the half-century following the Commissions of the 1870s. The Devonshire Commission had bestowed quali®ed praise on both ancient Universities for their efforts to promote the natural sciences. But the Asquith Commission was to contrast the distinction of Cambridge in science education and basic research with a catalogue of Oxford's defects. The teachers were too few, and on the whole were inadequately paid. In several instances the accommodation was insuf®cient and the equipment incomplete. The number of students and particularly of research students was in some subjects lamentably small, and in spite of brilliant exceptions the output of work was less than should be expected from a University possessing such great opportunities.1

After the high hopes raised by the opening of the University Museum and the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford science failed to keep pace with developments at Cambridge. Schoolmasters had long advised their pupils to go to Cambridge for mathematics, but the tradition `Cambridge for Science, Oxford for Arts'Ðwhich retained its hold in the public and grammar schools long after the twentieth-century revival of the science departments at OxfordÐhad its origin in the late Victorian era.2 From a national perspective it could, of course, be argued that neither University responded adequately to the growing industrial need for scientists. The Manchester University Chemical Society was assured in 1906, `That the ancient universities are keeping the Nation back there cannot be a doubt.'3 Both Universities were criticized for retaining compulsory Greek.4 1

RCOC (1919), report, 114. For a fuller discussion, see J. Howarth, `Science Education in late-Victorian Oxford: a curious case of failure?', EHR cii (1987), 334±71. 3 H. E. Armstrong, Professor of Chemistry at the City and Guilds College in South Kensington, quoted in M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry (1972), 31. 4 See pp. 869. Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister to Inquire into the Position of Natural Science in the Education System of Great Britain, PP 1918, ix, 529. 2

457

458

teaching and scholarship

Neither was as successful in attracting private benefactions for the endowment of science as the new civic universities or the Imperial College of Science and Technology, founded in London in 1907. The expansion of university science in London and the provinces was the most palpable threat to the status of Oxford and Cambridge as `national' universities. The needs of science also brought into question their future as endowed institutions independent of the state aid provided for other universities through the Treasury grant. Haldane persuaded Asquith in 1914 (although the plan was overtaken by the outbreak of war) that both ancient universities should be offered £20,000 a year speci®cally for science.5 But Oxford was especially vulnerable to criticism. The Cavendish Laboratory under Clerk Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh, and J. J. Thomson had established an unrivalled international reputation.6 Cambridge contributed many more graduates, especially in physics and biological science, towards the staf®ng of newer university departments.7 No other university produced more Fellows of the Royal Society: in 1910 those educated at Cambridge (130) easily outnumbered those who were London graduates (81) and exceeded those trained at Oxford (59) by more than two to one. Cambridge drew ahead of Oxford rapidly after 1880 in numbers of both university teaching staff and undergraduates in the sciences. By 1886 it had 18 professors to Oxford's 13 and 16 lecturers to Oxford's 4.8 In the late 1870s there was little to choose between the number of candidates for the Natural Science school (NSS)Ðabout 30 a yearÐand the Cambridge Natural Science tripos (NST), whereas between 1881 and 1904 the NST produced more than twice as many graduates as the NSS.9 After 1880 numbers of NSS graduates actually fell, to a low point of 22 in 1885. Numbers picked up in the 1890s and by 1910±14 13.7 per cent of Oxford honours graduates were reading Natural Science, which had become the third largest honour school (Table 20.1). More jobs were created for scientists too: by the eve of the war about sixty members of Congregation were engaged in teaching or research in the sciences (some of whom may have escaped the notice of the Asquith Commission as they held college rather than university appointments). But `Cambridge for Science' had entered conventional wisdomÐand at a time when the market for science education was expanding. When undergraduate 5 Viscount Haldane to Selby-Bigge, 20 Apr. 1914, quoted in E. Ashby and M. Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work on Education (1974), 117. On mistrust of state patronage among pre-war scientists see below p. 638 and C. N. L. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. iv. 1870±1990 (1993), 97±8. 6 R. Sviedrys, `The Rise of Physics Laboratories in Britain', HSPS 7 (1976), 427±36. 7 Howarth, `Science Education', 343, table 2. 8 Ibid. 370±1, table 4. 9 For Cambridge ®gures see R. M. MacLeod and R. C. Moseley, `The Anatomy of an EÂlite: The Natural Science Tripos and its Graduates 1850±1914' (SSRC Report, 1976), quoted in Howarth 335 n. 3.

the natural sciences, 1880±1914

459

TA B L E 2 0. 1 nat u r a l s c i e n t i s t s as a p ro p o r t i o n o f ox f o r d g r a d uat e s , 1 8 5 5 ± 1 9 1 4

1855±59 1860±64 1865±69 1870±74 1875±79 1880±84 1885±89 1890±94 1895±99 1900±04 1905±09 1910±14

Total BAs

Total Honours

Natural Science Honours

Percentage of all Honours

1,383 1,520 1,637 2,044 2,293 2,675 3,054 2,841 2,991 2,922 3,329 3,194

701 635 817 1,211 1,533 1,666 1,963 2,038 2,108 2,278 2,563 2,738

57 53 54 82 137 126 131 172 229 245 304 374

8.1 8.3 6.6 6.8 8.9 7.6 6.7 8.4 10.9 10.8 11.9 13.7

examinations were opened to women in the 1880s, those who read Natural Sciences showed a marked and persistent preference for Cambridge. A mere 91 women sat the NSS before 1916, under a quarter the number of Newnham and Girton students who had been classed in the NST (303). The proportion of Oxford women students examined in the NSS fell as low as 4.3 per cent in 1911±13. The relatively low esteem in which the Oxford science departments were held doubtless also explains why they attracted few graduates from other universities to study for the new research degree of B.Sc. Natural Sciences drew under a third (31 per cent) of their research students from outside Oxford, compared with over half of those who took the B.Sc. or B.Litt. in other faculties between 1895 and 1911. The founders of the Museum had not aimed to attract large classes but rather to attract a select band of ®rst-class men by the excellence of Oxford's facilities. These aspirations persisted. In 1882 R. B. Clifton, Professor of Experimental Philosophy, applied to Council for £4,000 to purchase and house a generator for electric lighting in the Clarendon Laboratory, currently supplied by a voltaic battery which emitted noxious fumes. `As arrangements have been made for the British Association to meet in Oxford next year,' he wrote, `I am anxious that my department should not be found behind the age.'10 Money could not be found. Five years later Council was 10 Reports and Estimates as to the prospective outlay on University Buildings, 28 Mar 1882, 9, HCP 1 (1882). The BAAS did not in fact visit Oxford until 1894, after a gap of 34 years. A dispute over who should preside, the Cambridge mathematician Arthur Cayley or Oxford's Chancellor, Lord Salisbury, led the Association to hold its 1883 meeting instead in Southport.

460

teaching and scholarship

persuaded to seek approval for the expenditure of £4,800 on an electricity laboratory at the Clarendon. Convocation refused. Opponents made much of the fact that only three NSS candidates were entered for honour Physics: ` . . . we might conclude from this that the staff of the Laboratory, which consists of a Professor and two demonstrators, cannot have much to do.'11 In 1888 two dynamos were given to the laboratory by Henry Wilde and Clifton himself ®nanced the building in which they were installed. The Museum was connected to the mains supply in 1902 but the Clarendon was omitted, to save money, because it had its own generator.12 When Lindemann succeeded to the chair of Experimental Philosophy in 1919, the Clarendon was still not connected to mains electricity.13 In its early years the Clarendon had produced a few physicists of noted ability. Sir Lazarus Fletcher had a long and distinguished career as a mineralogist at the British Museum; Sir Arthur RuÈcker worked on molecular physics with a NSS graduate of the 1860s, A. W. Reinold, and was London University's ®rst Principal (1901±8); J. Viriamu Jones became the ®rst ViceChancellor of the University of Wales.14 But Clifton's disillusionment began with the Selborne Commission, which provided for the creation of only two new chairs in place of the ®ve he had asked for, and it intensi®ed over the years. New College, charged with the support of a second Physics chair, spent money instead on college buildings, and the new Wykeham chair of Physics was not ®lled until 1900. In 1884 Council rejected Clifton's proposal that Mechanics should be the ®rst chair set up by Merton, giving priority instead to English.15 Instead it was left to college laboratories to supplement the teaching provided at the Clarendon. Trinity College, with some help from the CUF, used a benefaction to open the Millard laboratory under the direction of a lecturer in mechanics, the inventor F. Jervis-Smith, who also taught electricity and magnetism.16 In an attempt to attract more honours students to the Clarendon, Clifton sought custom in terms that suggestedÐ perhaps misleadinglyÐhis own failure to keep up with modern physics: students were deterred `by an exaggerated estimate . . . of the extent of the See W. Odling et al., Correspondence with Capt. Douglas Galton, 20 June±14 July 1882, Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 88 1079 (13). 11

OM, 15 June 1887, 287±9. Report of Committee on Electric Supply and Lighting in the University Museum, 18 Jan. 1902, 3; UM/M/3/2, OUA. 13 The Earl of Birkenhead, The Prof in Two Worlds: The Of®cial Life of Professor F. A. Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell (1961), 89. 14 T. E. T., `Sir Arthur RuÈcker', PRS series A, 92 (1916), xxi±xlv; A. L., `Sir Lazarus Fletcher', ibid. 99 (1921), ix±xii; E. B. Poulton, John Viriamu Jones and Other Oxford Memories (1911). On Reinold, the ®rst Lee's Reader in Physics, see R. Fox, `The University Museum and Oxford Science', Pt 1, 674. 15 Hebdomadal Council Acts, 2 June 1884, HCP 8(1884). 16 The Revd Frederick Jervis-Smith MA FRS: Testimonials (privately printed, 1900), OMHS; DNB Missing Persons, 353±4. 12

the natural sciences, 1880±1914

461

mathematical knowledge required' for laboratory work in physics, whereas `a very moderate acquaintance with the most elementary branches of Mathematics' would suf®ce.17 The research output of the laboratory was negligible, although its cellar was used in 1894 by a visitor, Professor C. V. Boys of the Royal School of Mines, for determining the values of the Newtonian constant of gravitation.18 Honours students remained few. Instead, when a practical examination was introduced into the Physics prelim. in 1891, there was growing demand for elementary teaching from candidates aiming at honours in other branches of the NSSÐ`a class of students not contemplated when the laboratory was designed', as Clifton remarked bitterly. Overcrowding led ®nally in 1897 to the conversion of the room used as the professor's private laboratory into an electrical laboratory for students. `The Professor and Demonstrators have now . . . no place in which they can carry on research; and all attempts to undertake work of this character must in future be abandoned,' was Clifton's comment.19 The story of the Clarendon's decline does not end here. Clifton retained his chair until 1915, retiring at the age of 80. A second physics professor, J. S. E. Townsend, a young fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was appointed to the Wykeham chair in 1900, and he contrived in time to build up a research team and carry out important work on gaseous ions.20 But there was no space for Townsend at the Clarendon: he worked in a borrowed room at the Observatory and a makeshift tin hut until a proper electrical laboratory was built in 1910, with money given by the Drapers' Company. Relations between the professors were strained. Townsend timetabled his lectures to clash with Clifton's.21 When he took over teaching for the prelim., Clifton grumbled that the Clarendon lost fee income needed for the maintenance of the laboratory. There was by 1907 a danger of `accidents from the fall of decayed pieces of wood' from the roof lining.22 He eventually closed the Clarendon three days a week. Such was the state of teaching in the years when Oxford's most distinguished pre-war physicist, H. G. J. Moseley, son of the late Linacre Professor Henry Moseley, was up at Trinity (1906±10).23 17 Gazette, xix (2 May 1889), 404. Most Oxford physics graduates did take Honour Moderations in Mathematics, and some took the FHS of Mathematics, before reading the NSS. 18 Gazette, xxv (28 May 1895), 540. On (Sir) C. V. Boys (1855±1944) see DNB and (for a critical view of Boys as a teacher) H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols 1934), i, 211±12. 19 Gazette, xxviii (7 June 1898), 588. 20 A. von Engel, `John Sealy Edward Townsend,' BMFRS 3 (1957), 257±72; J. L. Heilbron, H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist 1887±1915 (Berkeley Calif., 1976), 36; J. Morrell, `Research in Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, 1919±1939', HSPS, 22 (1992), 265±6. 21 Gazette xxxiii (19 May 1903), 242, 637±8; xxxv (16 May 1905), 572. 22 Ibid. xxxvii (16 May 1905), 573; xxxv (2 June 1908), 753. 23 Heilbron, Moseley, 34±5 n. 17. E. R., `H. G. J. Moseley', PRS series A, 93 (1916±17), xxii± xxviii.

462

teaching and scholarship

Harry Moseley's research after graduating, begun at Manchester under Rutherford and completed in Townsend's laboratory, led rapidly to the discovery of the means of determining atomic numbers, a fundamental advance that would surely have won him a Nobel prize if he had not been killed in action at Gallipoli in 1915. But Moseley's scienti®c achievements owed little to his undergraduate training in physicsÐhe had left Trinity with a second. The Clarendon had once been a symbol of Oxford's ambitions to leadership in science; in Lindemann's day it could aspire to rival the Cavendish in the ®eld of low-temperature physics.24 The decay of the laboratory in Clifton's later years was the most striking feature of the malaise of Oxford science. Between the ideals of mid-Victorian enthusiasts for science and the realities of successful department-building there was a gap, illustrated by the contrastÐwhich was not con®ned to physicsÐbetween the Gothic elegance of early building in the Museum area and the squalid huts that served, at least temporarily, to accommodate expansion in the next generation. But there were nevertheless areas of strength in the science departments. Within the NSS, Chemistry was particularly vigorous and a popular school of Physiology had emerged by the early twentieth century (Table 20.2). Zoology (animal morphology), a non-vocational ®eld which attracted few undergraduates, was a department with strong research traditions and committed students. `The few we have are goodÐand intend to research,' wrote Gilbert Bourne, fellow of New College and a future Linacre Professor. `Quantity we cannot expect now, because there is no career in animal Morphology, but quality we can get and are getting.' In Chemistry, Physiology, and Zoology the proportion of honours candidates who took ®rsts was 28 per cent, well above the ratio of ®rsts in Oxford's Arts schools.25 Chemistry ¯ourished despite the shortcomings of the Museum and professoriate. Of all the sciences it was best catered for in college laboratories.26 Its leading scholar was A. G. Vernon Harcourt, nephew of the founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, cousin of the Liberal politician Sir William Harcourt, and pupil of Sir Benjamin Brodie and the mathematician Henry Smith.27 As Lee's Reader in Chemistry (1859±1902) 24

Morrell, `Research in Physics', 263±4. Bourne to Spencer, 5 Dec. 1893, Baldwin Spencer MSS, Pitt Rivers Museum, Box I. H. For the higher honours ratios, 1875±1914, see Pt 1, 362. 26 `The Contribution of the College Laboratories to the Oxford School of Chemistry', H. B. Hartley, Studies in the History of Chemistry (1971), 223±32; K. J. Laidler, `Chemical Kinetics and the Oxford College Laboratories', Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, 38 (1988), 197±283. 27 H. B. D., `A. G. Vernon Harcourt', PRS, xcvii, series A (1920), vii±xi; M. C. King, `The Course of Chemical Change: the Life and Times of A. G. Vernon Harcourt', Ambix, 31 (1984), 16±35; J. Shorter, `A. G. Vernon Harcourt. A Founder of Chemical Kinetics and a Friend of Lewis Carroll', Journal of Chemical Education, lvii (1980), 411±16; K. J. Laidler, `Chemical Kinetics and the Origins of Physical Chemistry', Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, 32 (1985), 43±76. 25

the natural sciences, 1880±1914

463

TA B L E 2 0. 2 nat u r a l s c i e n c e h o n o u r s b y s u b j e c t , 1 8 8 6 ± 1 9 1 4 : m e n a n d wo m e n 1. Men 18861±89 1890±4

1895±9

1900±4

1905±9 1910±14

Chemistry Chemistry & Crystallography Chemistry & Mineralogy Physics Physiology Zoology Botany Geology Geology & Mineralogy Astronomy Engineering

54 Ð

89 Ð

108 Ð

118 Ð

138 Ð

120 1

Ð 12 29 12 1 1 Ð Ð Ð

Ð 19 50 6 5 3 Ð Ð Ð

Ð 24 72 12 3 9 Ð 1 Ð

6 18 83 14 Ð 6 Ð Ð Ð

2 46 80 9 8 20 1 Ð Ð

Ð 53 111 11 25 27 Ð Ð 26

Total

109

172

229

245

304

374

1

1886 was the ®rst year in which the subject taken in the NSS was speci®ed

2. Women

Chemistry Physics Physiology Zoology Botany Geology Geology & Mineralogy Total

1886±9

1890±4

1895±9

1900±4

2

2 1

4 1 Ð 3 2 1 Ð

2 3 2 4 Ð 3 Ð

6 Ð 6 4 1 4 1

7 2 3 6 1 2

11

14

22

21

1

4 1

3

8

1905±9 1910±14

Harcourt worked in the Christ Church laboratory, which was provided by Dr Lee's trust with a generous research grant of £250±£375 a year.28 A pioneer in the new ®eld of physical chemistry, he set out to understand not the results but the course of chemical change, and his work in collaboration with the mathematician William Esson on the rate of explosion in gases, published between 1864 and 1912, is still regarded as classical. Harcourt had 28 CA MS Estates 118, Treasurer's Accounts. The annual grant received by the Chemistry department at the Museum was £800 in 1887±8. On the shortage of research funds at the Daubeny laboratory, allowed less than £20 a year by Magdalen, see A. E. Gunther, R. T. Gunther: A Pioneer in the History of Science 1869±1940 (1967), 45.

464

teaching and scholarship

little contact with parallel work on chemical kinetics in progress on the Continent and his cautious approach to publication was characteristic of Oxford: `the evil of being anticipated by the industrious German is much less than that of making statements which you or others afterwards discover to be inexact.'29 His work was not widely recognized in his own lifetime. But his in¯uence as a teacher and founder of a research tradition was to extend across the generations, chie¯y through three of his pupils, H. B. Dixon, who became professor at Manchester, and N. V. Sidgwick and F. D. Chattaway, who remained at Oxford. Others who became heads of college laboratories and passed on his emphasis on exact experimental technique (often in makeshift premises) were Sir John Conroy and D. L. Chapman. Another pupil, V. H. Veley, ran practical classes as a demonstrator at the Museum.30 The work of Harcourt and his pupils promoted collaboration between college laboratories since it depended on precise measurement: Dixon used ®rst the electric chronograph in the Daubeny laboratory, then an improved version devised by the Millard lecturer, Jervis Smith.31 Harcourt's successor as Lee's Reader, H. B. Baker, a pupil of Dixon's, organized the division of responsibility for teaching in different branches of chemistry between the college laboratories in 1904.32 Henry Tizard, who went up to Magdalen in 1904, found the University chemistry laboratories, by contrast, in a `lamentable state'. The Wayn¯ete Professor, William Odling, nearing the end of a forty-year tenure of the chair and by then aged 76, lectured in a frock coat and exercised `little if any in¯uence'.33 Odling came to Oxford with a distinguished record of publication but wrote nothing after 1876 except an elementary textbook and a volume, completed after his retirement, on The Technic of Versi®cation.34 He took the novel view that it was `not etiquette' for the professor to enter the laboratory and left all practical teaching at the Museum to demonstrators, among them the long-serving W. W. Fisher, Aldrichian Demonstrator 1873±1914. Yet Odling was not altogether, as has been suggested, `a disaster for Oxford chemistry'.35 A respected ®gure in the profession, he was President of the Institute of Chemistry (1883±8) at the time it obtained its Royal Charter and he used his in¯uence to prevent divisions opening up between 29

Harcourt to Conroy, 28 Mar. 1873, quoted in King, `Vernon Harcourt', 25. J. A. Gardner, `Victor Herbert Veley', ONFRS 1 (1932±5), 229±35. Hartley, Studies, 224; Jervis-Smith Testimonials. 32 The Daubeny laboratory taught quantitative analysis, the Balliol±Trinity laboratory physical chemistry, Christ Church inorganic chemistry and after 1907 the Queen's College labortory became responsible (together with the University laboratory) for organic chemistry. See E. J. Bowen, `Chemistry at Oxford' (typescript, 1970), 19; Bowen MSS, OMHS. 33 R. W. Clark, Tizard (1965), 10, 12. 34 See J. L. Thornton and A. Wiles, `William Odling', Annals of Science, xii (1956), 288±95; W. H. Brock in DSB; H. B. D. `William Odling', PRS series A, c (1921±2), i±vii; and obituaries in Nature, cvii (3 Mar. 1921), 19±20; Journal of the Chemical Society, xix (1921), 553±64. 35 Sanderson, Universities and British Industry, 38. 30 31

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theoretical and applied branches of chemistry and between professional and university chemists.36 His own interests were primarily theoretical and his lectures at the turn of the century were still thorough and up to date. Frederick Soddy gave Oxford credit for producing chemists who were well grounded in atomic theory, and it may have been in part through Odling's in¯uence that Oxford's Chemistry school covered some territory that in Cambridge was appropriated by physicists.37 Soddy claimed that the work on radioactive disintegration that he began with Rutherford at McGill shortly after graduating, and which was recognized by Rutherford's Nobel prize in 1908 and his own in 1921, belonged to chemistry rather than to physics.38 The Alembic Club, a society founded in 1900 for chemists and open to undergraduates as well as dons, signi®cantly attracted physicists to its meetings.39 Sir Harold Hartley recalled that Harry Moseley had come down from Manchester to consult his college tutor, the chemist D. H. Nagel, who selected the cleavage fragment of potassium ferrocyanide used in his classic investigation of X-ray spectra.40 But whatever may be said for Odling's intellectual in¯uence, W. H. Perkin (junior), who took up the Wayn¯ete chair in 1912, found the laboratory at the museum greatly de®cient in apparatus, materials, and lecture specimens.41 In Perkin Oxford at last acquired an entrepreneurial professor in the modern German style, and by the end of the war results were apparent in a new organic chemistry laboratory, built and endowed with funding from the Worcestershire Sauce manufacturer Charles William Dyson Perrins, and an increase in the rate of Oxford chemical publications to a level that equalled Cambridge and Imperial College, London.42 The biological sciences and ®elds that played little part in the undergraduate curriculumÐastronomy, anthropology, geology, mineralogyÐ were small, centralized departments. They included few, if any, college 36 R. B. Pilcher, The Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland: History of the Institute 1877±1914 (1914), 78±89. 37 The overlap between physical chemistry and physics is discussed in K. J. Laidler, The World of Physical Chemistry (1993), 55±82. For Soddy's views on chemical education at Oxford see M. Howorth, Atomic Transmutation: The Greatest Discovery ever made, from Memoirs of Professor Soddy (1953), 19±21, 124. They were more positive than is implied by a recent biographer, who cites his description of University teaching at the Museum as ```almost incredibly bad, or rather, almost non-existent'''. But this comment, recorded by Howorth, applied especially to practical inorganic chemistry; L. Merricks, The World Made New; Frederick Soddy, Science, Politics and Environment (1996), 18±19 (cf. Howorth, 21). 38 Soddy to Howorth, 25 Dec. 1952, Soddy MSS, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. b. 171. 39 The OU Chemical Club, founded the previous year, limited its undergraduate membership to 12 because it met in college rooms; the Alembic Club had 21 members. E. J. Bowen, `The Alembic Club. The First Fifty Years', MS Museum 167, OMHS; Heilbron, Moseley, 37. 40 `Contribution of the college laboratories', 227±8. 41 Gazette, xliv (10 June 1914), 864. 42 A. J. Greenaway et al., The Life and Work of Professor William Henry Perkin (1932); J. B. Morrell, `W. H. Perkin, Jr., at Manchester and Oxford: From Irwell to Isis', Osiris, 8 (1993), 104±26.

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teachers and the quality of work depended mainly on the professor. Professorial control of biological teaching was strengthened by the creation of the Wayn¯ete chair of Physiology in 1882 and provision in 1884 for the teaching of physiologyÐin which practical instruction had previously been con®ned largely to the Daubeny laboratory at Magdalen under a Cambridge graduate, Charles YuleÐin a new laboratory adjacent to the Museum. The Museum was necessarily the focus for disciplines that were served by its collections, which gradually and not without inter-departmental disputes and acrimonious exchanges with the Keeper, E. B. (later Sir Edward) Tylor, passed into the control of the professors.43 When Tylor retired, his successor, Henry Miers, was designated Secretary rather than Keeper of the Museum, in recognition of the autonomy of its departments. Even more self-contained was the University Observatory, adjoining the Museum but governed by a separate Board of Visitors. The Physiology department ranked as one of the three leading British centres in the ®eld, yet it was much less productive than the departments at Cambridge and University College London. The ®rst Wayn¯ete Professor, J. S. Burdon-Sanderson, recruited by Acland from UCL where he had established a reputation among the pioneers of experimental physiology in the UK, lacked the dynamism of his Cambridge counterpart, Michael Foster, and was past his peak as a researcher.44 At Oxford he worked mainly on electro-physiology but the department's reputation owed more to the important research on the physiology of respiration carried out by his nephew J. S. Haldane, an Edinburgh graduate, who followed him to Oxford in 1887. Haldane became a fellow of New College and in 1907 a Reader, but much of his work was done in a private laboratory at his house and he had limited contact with students. He was twice passed over for the chair and resigned after Charles Sherrington was elected in 1913.45 Sanderson's successor, Francis Gotch, enjoyed a good reputation as a teacher but was less distinguished as a researcher. When Sherrington arrived in Oxford he found the department `a sleepy, if not moribund part of the university'.46 In Zoology, by contrast, as in Chemistry, the basis was laidÐin this case by George Rolleston's teaching of comparative anatomy at the MuseumÐ 43

OUA UM/M/1/6 fos 7±12, 145, 150. Stella V. H. Butler, `Centers and Peripheries: the development of British Physiology 1870± 1914', Journal of the History of Biology, 21 (1988), 473±500: J. S. and E. S. Haldane, Memoir and Papers of Sir John Burdon Sanderson (1911), 125; G. L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (1978), 361. 45 C. G. Douglas, `John Scott Haldane', ONFRS, 2 (1936±8), 115±39. Wolfson College was built, 1970±4, on the site previously occupied by Haldane's house and laboratory. See also p. 506 below. 46 Obituaries of Gotch, Lancet (1913) ii. 347±51; Nature, xci (24 July 1913), 534±5; J. C. Eccles and W. C. Gibson, Sherrington: His Life and Thought (1979), 25. On the reputation of the department for neurophysiological research under Sherrington, see C. Webster, `Medicine', The Twentieth Century, 318. 44

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for an indigenous research tradition that continued into the inter-war years.47 The Linacre department developed into a productive centre for research within a strongly Darwinian framework, as did the Hope department of entomology after the departure of its ®rst professor, J. O. Westwood, who had been the only entrenched opponent of Darwinism at the Museum.48 George Rolleston was succeeded with distinction in the Linacre chair by two of his pupils, H. N. Moseley and E. Ray Lankester, and a third, E. B. Poulton, became Hope Professor of Zoology in 1893.49 The Hope and Linacre departments each published research papers in a series of Reports and in 1891 Lankester started a research seminar for zoologists at the Museum. The proceedings were informal, refreshmentsÐtea, bread and butter, and tobaccoÐwere provided and, unlike the Alembic Club, it was open to women as well as men.50 The Hope department became a `worldrenowned centre for the study of the coloration of insects', focusing particularly on defensive adaptation and mimicry.51 Of Lankester it was said after his death that `since Huxley's day no one has left so deep a mark on zoological science.'52 When Lankester left Oxford to become Director of the British Museum (Natural History) at South Kensington in 1899 the pattern of internal appointments was broken by the election of a London graduate, W. F. R. Weldon, a pioneer of biometrics and collaborator with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. In the ®eld of anthropometry, however, a research tradition had already been established by Rolleston's work on craniology and continued in the Human Anatomy department under Arthur Thomson (see below, p. 473). In 1895 Galton presented his collection of instruments to Thomson's department where an anthropometric laboratory was set up, foreshadowing the more elaborate researches set in motion by Weldon in response to the recommendations of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904).53 On Weldon's death in 1906 the Linacre chair went again to an internal candidate (though in this case one noted as 47

For Rolleston see Pt, 1, 675±6. S. A. Neave, The History of the Entomological Society of London 1833±1933 (1933), xxii± xxiii, 132. 49 Nature, xlv (26 Nov. 1891), 79±80; G. D. Hale Carpenter, `Edward Bagnall Poulton', ONFRS, 4 (1942±4), 655±80. For Lankester, see below, pp. 483±4. 50 Journal of the OU Junior Scienti®c Club, 13, 14 Feb. 1894, OMHS. On the later development of the Alembic Club as a research seminar and the survival until 1950 of the rule excluding women (including the future Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin), see J. Roche, `The NonMedical Sciences, 1939±1970', in The Twentieth Century, 268. 51 ONFRS, 4 (1942±4), 657; A. Smith, A History of the Hope Entomological Collections in the University Museum, Oxford (1986). 52 J. A. Thomson, The Great Biologists (1932), 161. For a modern assessment of `one of the giants of late-nineteenth century British science' see J. Lester and P. J. Bowler, E. Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology (1995). 53 OUJSC Conversazione programme, 26 May 1896, OMHS; A. E. S., `Walter Frank Raphael Weldon', PRS series B, 80 (1908), xxv±xli; Biometrika, 5 (1906±7), 1±52; Gazette, xxxix 25 May 1909, 691. 48

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a keen oarsman and commanding of®cer of the OU Volunteers and a capable rather than outstanding scientist), G. C. Bourne.54 The only other NSS graduates elected to an Oxford chair between 1880 and 1914 were H. A. Miers, who followed Nevil Story-Maskelyne as Professor of Mineralogy in 1895, and his successor and former pupil H. L. Bowman. Whereas Story-Maskelyne's research had been largely carried out in London (as Keeper of Mineralogy at the British Museum), Miers set up a laboratory at the Oxford Museum and transformed the department into a small but productive centre for crystallography. It continued on the same lines under Bowman when Miers left to become London University's second Principal in 1908.55 Other professors, who had established reputations as independent scholars or at other universities, also promoted research in the smaller science departments. E. B. Tylor, for whom the ®rst readership in Anthropology in the UK was created in 1884, and upgraded in 1896 to a personal chair, was the leading British scholar of the time in his ®eldÐ ethnology was in effect, in Max MuÈller's words, `Mr. Tylor's Science'.56 R. R. Marett, who followed him as Reader, developed the Diploma in Anthropology after 1905 as a training in research. The elderly Professor of Astronomy, Charles Pritchard, according to Lord Kelvin, presided over `the most active University Observatory in the United Kingdom' and he made innovative use of photography in determining the distances of the ®xed stars.57 His successor in the Savilian chair, H. H. Turner, a Second Wrangler from Cambridge, stands out for his international connections.58 He contributed to the Astrographic Catalogue both important advances in techniques of skymapping and organizational skills and was credited with seeing through to completion not only Oxford's share but `nearly a quarter of the entire scheme'.59 Turner's later work on statistical astronomy and `star-streaming' was combined with a growing interest in seismology: he was among the ®rst to suggest deep-seated origins for earthquakes and made Oxford the world centre of seismological data-gathering. In geology Joseph Prestwich, President of the Geological Society and `one of the last of the old heroic race of geologists', was followed by two Cambridge graduates, A. H. Green and 54

S. J. H., `Gilbert Charles Bourne', ONFRS, 1 (1932±5), 126±30. E. A. Vincent, Geology and Mineralogy at Oxford 1860±1986. History and Reminiscence (1994), 4±5, 11±15; M. W. Porter (ed.), Diary of Henry Alexander Miers, 1858±1942 (1973), 19. 56 A. Kardiner and E. Preble, They Studied Man (1962), 76. 57 OM 31 May 1893, 397; Charles Pritchard: Memoirs of his Life Compiled by his Daughter Ada Pritchard (1897); R. Hutchins, `John Phillips, ``Geologist-Astronomer'', and the Origins of the Oxford University Observatory', History of Universities, xii (1994), 236±7. 58 R. A. S., `Herbert Hall Turner', PRS series A, cxxxiii (1931), i±ix; J. S. Tenn, `Herbert Hall Turner. The Twenty-second Bruce Medallist', Mercury, 1994, 16±17; M[onthly] N[otices of the] R[oyal] A[stronomical] S[ociety], xci (1931), 321±34. I am indebted to Roger Hutchins for these last two references. 59 Ibid. 328. 55

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W. J. Sollas.60 Both were active, ®eld-working professors. Sollas's long tenure of the chair (1897±1936) was marked by increasing eccentricity, but the department's reputation before 1914 rested on his standing as an authority on Palaeolithic man and proli®c contributions to many branches of geology. These four departments remained small and, on the whole, conspicuously ill-provided with funds, chie¯y because they continued to contribute so little to undergraduate teaching. Geology was established as a branch of the NSS in 1885 and in the early twentieth century attracted undergraduates from the Forestry School, who were encouraged to take a degree in Natural Science as well as the Forestry Diploma. But a proposal to make Anthropology a degree course was defeated in 1895 and in later years the department did not seek to revive it, preferring instead to concentrate resources on its successful diploma course.61 Astronomy and Mineralogy, though they became degree courses within the NSS in 1895, were rarely studied by undergraduates. Yet Miers looked back on his experience at Oxford, working with a few dedicated students, as a time when he had `unique opportunities for his own researches'.62 Among these students were two womenÐFlorence Isaac, who worked with Miers on crystallography, and Mary Winnearls Porter, whose career was launched by work on the Corsi collection of marbles: both were awarded research fellowships at Somerville.63 So was the anthropologist Barbara Whitchurch Friere-Marreco, a Lady Margaret Hall classicist who became a proteÂge of Sir John Myres.64 Oxford, predictably, produced many fewer early women scientists than Cambridge or London, but it did offer some openings.65 Research-oriented professors who were not overburdened with undergraduate teaching tended to welcome women as collaborators or assistantsÐover thirty are recorded as working in the Museum departments and Observatory before 1914. Several of them (like Mary Porter, who had no university education) were not trained in the Oxford NSS. William Sollas researched and published with his daughter Igerna, an NST zoologist who held teaching and research posts at Newnham (1903±13), and 60 Vincent, Geology, 5±10, 26±47; Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich, by his Wife (1899), 402±21; C. L., `Alexander Henry Green,' PRS series A lxii (1897±98), v±ix; A. Smith Woodward and W. W. Watts, `William Johnson Sollas', ONFRS, 2 (1936±8), 265±81. 61 Lit. Hum. Reports 1913±21, FA 4/7/2/2, fo 12, OUA. 62 Porter, H. A. Miers, 34. 63 Vincent, Geology, 12±14, 16, 18. 64 Somerville College Register, 1879±1971, 393. 65 P. A. Kidwell, `Women Astronomers in Britain, 1780±1930', Isis, 75 (1984), 534±46; M. S. Creese, `British Women of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries who Contributed to Research in the Chemical Sciences', BJHS, 24 (1991), 275±305; M. S. Creese and T. M. Creese, `British Women who Contributed to Research in the Geological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century', BJHS, 27 (1994), 23±34; L. Bindman, A. Brading, and T. Tansey (eds), Women Physiologists (1993).

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supervised the translation by another daughter, Hertha, of E. Suess's Das Antlitz der Erde (5 vols, Oxford, 1904±24).66 H. H. Turner's work in astronomy and seismology relied crucially on the labours of Ethel F. Bellamy, niece of the Observatory assistant F. A. Bellamy, who was for nearly ®fty years on the staff of the Observatory.67 He collaborated in work on the variable stars with another distinguished woman astronomer who had no formal training, Mary Adela Blagg.68 The biological departments at the Museum were also, up to a point, receptive to women. Florence Buchanan, daughter of Burdon-Sanderson's friend Sir George Buchanan, worked with him for many years on electrophysiology and was in 1896, when the Physiological Society met at Oxford, the ®rst woman to be present at one of its scienti®c meetings.69 A productive researcher in her own right, she was recruited after Burdon-Sanderson's death to organize French and German classes for medical students.70 Ray Lankester brought with him from University College London a tradition of making space in the laboratory for women and his Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science published the work of a number of Oxford women (but launched none of them on scienti®c careers). The Physics and Chemistry departments, by contrast, though they admitted women students, did not encourage them to take part in research. Still less encouraging was the Botany department, although this was a ®eld in which women excelled at London University.71 S. H. Vines, Sherardian Professor of Botany (1888±1919), was not noted as a misogynist, and indeed presided over the Linnean Society when it agreed in 1903 to admit women fellows (among the ®rst of them was the wife of the chemist V. H. Veley, neÂe Lilian Jane Gould, a Somervillian with a ®rst in the NSS who became assistant librarian at the Royal Society).72 But in an overcrowded department without strong research traditions, women were marginalized: Vines was remembered for refusing to admit all but the ablest women students.73 Vines was the least successful among heads of the small non-vocational departments. He had been the founder of a highly regarded botany school at Cambridge but did not do the same for Oxford. The physical separation of the Botanic Garden from the Museum and the department's cramped pre66

Vincent, Geology, 27±30; Creese and Creese, `Women in the Geological Sciences', 52. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2 (1961), 21±3; Kidwell, `Women Astronomers', 544. 68 Ibid. 540, 542; MNRAS, 105 (1945), 55±6. 69 Women Physiologists (n. 65), 5, 6, 8. 70 Gazette, xxxvii (22 May 1907), 642. 71 See, for example, C. Bingham, The History of Royal Holloway College 1886±1986 (1987), 100, 117, 148±9. 72 A. B. R., `Sydney Howard Vines', ONFRS, 1 (1932±5), 185±8; F. O. Bower, Sixty Years of British Botany (1938); Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 116 (1903±4), 17; 117 (1904±5), 19; Somerville College Register, 11. 73 P. Grif®n (ed.), St. Hugh's; One Hundred Years of Women's Education in Oxford (1986), 73. 67

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mises placed it under special disadvantages.74 Vines's complaint that Oxford botanists were `more inadequately provided with accommodation in the way of suitable buildings than in any other institution, where Botany is recognised as an academic subject, in the United Kingdom' was to be echoed by his successors.75 Like Clifton, he complained that the growth of Prelims classes made it impossible to do research in term-time.76 Yet this problem was eased by the erection of a new teaching laboratory at the Museum in 1899 for elementary botany and zoology students (most of whom would go on to take honours in physiology). Despite the department's poor facilities Vines's demonstrator, A. H. Church, did in¯uential research on plant evolution which won him an FRS in 1921.77 Vines chose instead, partly through ill-health, to live on the reputation he had built up at Cambridge, where he had written innovative textbooks incorporating continental approaches to plant physiology and introduced techniques of practical botany teaching pioneered at South Kensington by T. H. Huxley and a team of demonstrators that included two early NSS graduates, W. T. Thiselton-Dyer and Ray Lankester.78 He did little research at Oxford and critics claimed that he `put more undergraduates off botany, and careers in botany, than any Sherardian professor in history'.79 The trickle of botany graduates dried up altogether at the beginning of the century and undergraduate demand revived only with the arrival of the Forestry students in 1905. Oxford was particularly slow to develop the applied sciences.80 At the turn of the century Cambridge was producing about ®ve times as many medical graduates: undergraduates reading the NST could tailor their options to the requirements of the second MB, and half of those who read the tripos between 1886 and 1914 became doctors.81 A Mechanical Sciences tripos was introduced in 1892, eighteen years before Engineering Science was recognized as a branch of the NSS. By the time a chair in Engineering was ®nally set up at Oxford in 1907 it was, in the words of its ViceChancellor, `almost the only ®rst-rate University in the world which has

74 Vines's predecessor, Isaac Bayley Balfour, had left for a chair at Edinburgh after only four years at Oxford. 75 Vines to Warren, 12 June 1895, UM/M/3/1, OUA; J. Morrell, `The Non-medical Sciences, 1914±39', The Twentieth Century, 152±3. 76 Vines to Tylor, 4 May 1896, OUA, UM/M/3/1. 77 A. G. Tansley, `Arthur Harry Church', ONFRS, 2 (1936±8), 433±43; D. J. Mabberley (ed.), Revolutionary Botany. `Thalassiophyta' and other Essays of A. H. Church (1981). 78 G. Gooday, `Nature in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science', BJHS, 24 (1991), 334. 79 A. E. Gunther (n. 28), 111. 80 A. Engel, `The English Universities and Professional Education', in K. H. Jarausch (ed.), The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860±1950 (Chicago and Stuttgart 1983), 299±302. 81 R. M. MacLeod and R. C. Moseley, `The ``Naturals'' and Victorian Cambridge', Oxford Review of Education, 6 (1980), 186.

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not a School of Engineering'.82 Agriculture, a component in the Cambridge poll degree course, did not become a degree subject at Oxford until after the war. Although some teaching was provided in these vocational subjects, debate about their place in the curriculum was prolonged. Acland's opposition to the creation of a `complete medical school', discussed in Pt 1 Ch. 17, in¯uenced some NSS graduates who shared his belief that `applied science sti¯es the acquirement of knowledge for its own sake.'83 This had never been a general view among Oxford's pure scientists. Yet there were some who feared that vocational courses would compete for resources and students. The botanist S. H. Vines persistently obstructed the development of courses in agriculture and rural economy, deprecating `the prevalent tendency to convert the University into a technical school'.84 Opinions differed outside Oxford too as to how far the ancient universities should go in this direction. Other universities were not always keen to see courses developed that would compete with them in technological ®elds: Rosebery, as Chancellor of London University and Lord Rector of Glasgow, spoke out against it and Oliver Lodge, Chancellor of Birmingham University, approached Hebdomadal Council in 1907 with the suggestion that Oxford should develop links with the Birmingham engineering department rather than create one of its own.85 They deployed the argument, for which there was some support among academic residents, that Oxford was not well placed to compete with engineering departments in industrial areas. A different view was taken by learned and professional bodies. When the British Association met in Oxford in 1894 its mechanical section passed a unanimous resolution, forwarded to the Vice-Chancellor by Vernon Harcourt's younger brother, Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL, favouring the introduction of a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering.86 Hebdomadal Council kept a weather-eye on in¯uential movements of opinion. It was in Oxford's interests, resources permitting, to meet the demand for professional education and not to fall too far behind the times. In the case of Medicine, Council decided at an early stage that the Selborne Commission had made a mistake, and, despite continuing opposition from the Regius Professor, a Medical Faculty was set up in 1886. `The London Medical World and the Oxford, minus Dr. Acland, approve the Statute,' Jowett con®ded to Florence Nightingale.87 Burdon-Sanderson, who suc82 T. H. Warren, Letter of Appeal to the Delegates of the CUF and to the Colleges for assistance in starting a Professorship of Scienti®c Engineering, 1907, Bodl. Firth b. 36, fo 251. 83 Oswald Latter, science master at Charterhouse, writing in Nature, liv (23 July 1896), 269. 84 Vines to the Vice-Chancellor, 17 May 1897, Hebdomadal Council Committee Minutes, 1886±98, OUA HC 3/1/3. See also n. 81. 85 Rosebery, Questions of Empire (Glasgow, 1900), 29±31; Oxford Times, 13 Nov 1909, 3e; Lodge to Warren, 10 July 1907, HCP 78 (1907), 1±2. 86 L. F. Vernon Harcourt to Boyd, 28 Sept. 94, HCP 39 (1894), 1±2. 87 Letter, 23 Feb. 1886 in Quinn and Prest, 297. Jowett ignored Acland's KCB, 1884.

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ceeded Acland in the Regius chair in 1895, followed the example of Michael Foster at Cambridge in promoting the Physiology school as `the highbrow path from academic study into medicine'.88 Gradually provision was made for the teaching of pre-clinical students, who combined their medical studies with work for the NSS. An Edinburgh graduate, Arthur Thomson, appointed in 1885 as lecturer and in 1893 Professor in Human Anatomy, attracted large audiences and showed that their fees would meet the department's working expenses. The brick `Anatomical Shed' where he began lecturing was enlarged by means of a corrugated iron extension and then, in the depths of the agricultural depression in 1893, replaced by a proper laboratory for which Convocation voted £7,250.89 A small bacteriological laboratory was set up in 1891 and at the turn of the century Pathology was made a separate department and acquired a laboratory (®nanced partly by a benefaction from Ewan Frazer, a recent Oxford medical graduate), a reader and in 1907 a chair, held by Georges Dreyer, a committed researcher from the University of Copenhagen.90 Pharmacology was still being taught in a tumble-down shed in the early twentieth century and had to wait until 1912 before it acquired the status of a department and a readership.91 Two further posts were endowed by benefactors: the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy, held by the experimental psychologist William McDougall, who did research in the physiology laboratory, and a Readership in Ophthalmology presented by Mrs Ogilvie. By the turn of the century it was not clear that a better pre-clinical education was provided at Cambridge (where the drop-out and failure rate was said to be as high as 50 per cent).92 Physiology now approached chemistry in its popularity within the NSS. In Sir William Osler the medical school acquired in 1904 a Regius Professor of international standing who combined a cultivated interest in the classics with uncompromising advocacy of the interests of science and research.93 More hesitant steps were taken to provide for agricultural science. It lacked in¯uential advocates at the Museum, despite an indigenous if sporadic tradition of concern with the application of science to farming and a certain amount of encouragement from the state. Of Daubeny, one of the most versatile pioneers of science at Oxford, it has been said that `he practically 88

R. E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry (1982), 42. Thomson, Memorandum relating to the Department of Human Anatomy, 1891, MS Gunther 65, OMHS; W. Collier, The Growth and Development of the Oxford Medical School (1904); H. M. Sinclair and A. H. T. Robb Smith, A Short History of Anatomical Teaching in Oxford (1950), 64±6. Thomson was also, from 1900, Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy: he published a popular Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students (1896). 90 S. R. Douglas, `Georges Dreyer', ONFRS, 1 (1932±5), 569±76. See also p. 507 below. 91 Statements of the Needs of the University (1902), 30. 92 C. Newman, The Evolution of Medical Education in the Nineteenth Century (1957), 291; H. D. Rolleston, The Cambridge Medical School: A Biographical History (1932), 31. 93 H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (2 vols 1940); `The Old Humanities and the New Science', in G. L. Keynes (ed.), Selected Writings of Sir William Osler, 1849±1919 (1951), 8±33. 89

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founded scienti®c agriculture in England' and the Rothamsted Laboratory was set up by a pupil of his, John Bennet Lawes, a member of Brasenose College.94 The poorly endowed Sibthorpian chair of Rural Economy, though periodically vacant through lack of funds, was held in 1884±90 and 1894±7 by former Rothamsted men, J. H. Gilbert and Robert Warington. In 1883 Council was reminded by two NSS graduates, now eminent botanists, that agricultural science `could hardly be said to be of unimportance to the land-holding corporations which compose the body of the University, or to the sons of land-owners which [sic] supply so considerable a proportion of its undergraduates'.95 The Technical Instruction Act of 1891 provided county councils with funds to spend on agricultural education and created a need for trained instructors. Cambridge introduced a diploma in agriculture in 1892 but a similar proposal at Oxford foundered, despite the support of in¯uential local county council members, apparently because of the cost of providing teaching.96 Instead in 1894 the Extension delegates were authorized to issue diplomas in agriculture to students at the Reading Extension College. Warington revived the question in his inaugural lecture, delivered on the centenary of the Sibthorpian endowment, arguing for a degree course in Agriculture, aimed chie¯y at the sons of the landed gentry and land agents.97 He won promises of ®nancial assistance from the Clothworkers' Company and from Eleanor Ormerod (a well-known agricultural entomologist who regarded J. O. Westwood as her `mentor'), and enthusiastic support from Halford Mackinder, Principal of Reading College.98 In 1898 Council proposed the introduction of an honour school of Agricultural Science: it was to be open to af®liated students from Reading College, which would provide some of the teaching and have representation on the Board of Studies that supervised the course. But the involvement of `foreign bodies' in the scheme helped Vines to drum up resistance to it and the statute was thrown out by Congregation (47 votes to 45).99 It was not until 1909 that approval was given for a diploma in rural economy, steered through (despite 94 J. Reynolds Green, A History of Botany in the United Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the end of the Nineteenth Century (1914), 422; G. Vaughan Dyke, John Lawes of Rothamsted, Pioneer of Science, Farming and Industry (Harpenden, 1993). See also Pt 1, 560. 95 Memorandum by J. H. Hooker and W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 2 Apr. 1883, MS Gunther Physic Garden, 2, OMHS. 96 Report of the Committee on Agricultural Education, 18 June 1891, Bodl. G. A. Oxon 80 620 (11). 97 R. Warington, Agricultural Science: Its Place in a University Education (1896). The Council of the Royal Agricultural Society had in 1893 passed a resolution urging universities to give the subject degree status. 98 H. J. Mackinder to the Vice-Chancellor, 7 June 1897, HCP; R. Wallace (ed.), Eleanor Ormerod LL.D, Economic Entomologist: Autobiography and Correspondence (1904), 80; J. F. M. Clark, `Eleanor Ormerod (1828±1901) as an Economic Entomologist: ``pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green''', BJHS, 25 (1992), 442. 99 The Times, 18 May 1898, 9.

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continuing criticism from Vines) by the next Sibthorpian Professor, William Somerville.100 Efforts to introduce a Forestry degree in the early twentieth century also ran into opposition. Once again the university frustrated Council's plans to capitalize on an opportunity of patronage from the state. The chance arose when the government decided to close the Cooper's Hill College for Indian probationers: plans to transfer both engineering and forestry students to Cambridge were challenged and the India Of®ce succumbed to pressure to send the foresters to Oxford (which offered Bagley Wood as evidence that it had better facilities for practical study).101 The decision was not popular with Cambridge menÐEarl Spencer observed that he had `not infrequently passed Oxford' but it had not occurred to him `that it was situated in the centre of a great forest'102Ðand the monopoly of training Indian foresters, granted initially for three years, was withdrawn in 1911, when Cambridge and Edinburgh were also allowed to offer them places.103 Yet meanwhile the Oxford Forestry School, set up in 1905, had got off to a ¯ying start. It brought to Oxford the government professor of Forestry, William Schlich, and his assistant, whose salaries were paid by the India Of®ce.104 They cherished the hope of founding `a School of Forestry for the British Empire, in which, besides practical foresters, Professors of Forestry for the numerous schools in our Colonies and at home might be trained'.105 A diploma in forestry was introduced in 1908 and St John's was persuaded to re-endow the Sibthorpian Chair and build new premises for Forestry and Rural Economy on Parks Road. At the opening of this building Herbert Warren expressed the hope that Oxford would `develop a scienti®c school here, second to none in the country': it was strange, he suggested, that academic recognition for `the studies of the forest and the ®eld' had not come sooner in a university whose connection with the land was `as wide as it was deep'.106 Hebdomadal Council lent its support in 1910 to Schlich's move to upgrade the diploma into a ®nal honour school of Forestry. Yet neither the appeal to tradition nor material considerations could persuade the University to agree. Opponents, who included some scientists, urged that the course was too general to merit honours status and that Forestry was not a 100 Diploma in Rural Economy: Memorandum by Professor Vines, 5 Dec. 1908, HCP 81 (1908), 295±7. 101 HCP 68 (1904), 37±8, 127±31; 70, 1904±5, 47±50, 127±8. 102 Parl. Deb. 7 Mar. 1905, 4S, 142, 544±5. The government defeated the attack by 30 to 24. Of the Archbishops, Canterbury voted for Oxford, York for spreading the probationers. 103 HCP 88 (1911), 113±15. 104 The Department of Rural Economy also attracted state funding (though on a smaller scale than agricultural science at Cambridge), as did the Institute of Agricultural Economics set up, with C. S. Orwin as Director, in conjunction with the Development Commission in 1912: see The Twentieth Century, 145±6. 105 OM 3 Mar. 1910, 250; HCP 82 (1909) 35±6. 106 Oxford Times, 24 Apr. 1909, 10. See also p. 832.

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science but `rather an art, or calling, or occupation'.107 Particularly damaging was the chargeÐdenied by SchlichÐthat pressure from the India Of®ce lay behind the proposal.108 The defeat of the Forestry school in Convocation in 1910 (105 votes to 98) was a real setback. In 1913 the India Of®ce grant was cut off and not until 1919 did Schlich succeed in raising enough money to endow a University chair. When Forestry was ®nally recognized as a degree subject after the war it was, like Agriculture, relegated to the lowly status of a pass school.109 The creation of an honour school of Engineering Science within the NSS in 1909 proved much less controversial, even though Oxford was remote from heavy industry (the nearest being the Great Western Railway's works thirty miles away at Swindon). The foundation of a chair, agreed in principle since 1882, had been delayed chie¯y because other claims were given priority, ®rst by Merton, then by St John's, which transferred to Rural Economy the funds it had accumulated to endow a professor in Engineering. Finally T. A. Brassey, as sponsor of Oxford's Appeal, took the lead in raising money for the chair, which was set up in 1907. Its ®rst holder, Charles Frewen Jenkin, son of the founding professor of engineering at Edinburgh, was a Cambridge Mathematics graduate whose interests, despite his extensive industrial experience, were academic.110 There was unanimous agreement that the Oxford school should be con®ned to the scienti®c aspects of engineering, including the `art of measurement' (crucial also in the pure sciences), and that graduates would go elsewhere for practical training.111 This was, in fact, a common policy in university engineering departments of the period, which increasingly made a point of providing laboratory teaching and leaving workshop training to industry.112 It was perhaps fortunate that pressure for a ®nal honour school in engineering did not come from a government department, inviting suspicion that Oxford's traditions of learning were threatened by utilitarian considerations. Instead it came from parents of public schoolboys, Rhodes scholars and the gentlemanly branch of the engineering profession, represented by the Institution of Civil Engineers.113 Brassey argued that there was a demand for civil and mining engineers in the colonies who were `®tted to become leaders of men'.114 As in the case of 107 OM 10 and 24 Feb. 1910, 198, 220, 234; ¯ysheet against the Forestry School, 28 Feb. 1910, Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c. 310. 108 OM 10 Mar. 1910, 268; 109 The Twentieth Century, 147. 110 R. V. Southwell, `Charles Frewin Jenkin', ONFRS, 3 (1939±41), 575±85. 111 Electrical Engineering 11 July 1907, MS Museum 89, OMHS; The Times, 6 July 1907, 16; C. F. Jenkin, Engineering Science (1908); G. Gooday, `Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain', BJHS, 23 (1990), 25±57. 112 R. Fox and A. Guagnini (eds), Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850±1939 (1993), 35. 113 `The Needs of Oxford University', Feb. 1907, Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. c.236. 114 The Times, 6 July 1907, 16.

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medicine, it was argued that Oxford had a part to play in educating the eÂlite of the profession and also in promoting basic research. Equally important, however, was the support of Oxford scientists. A diploma in scienti®c engineering and mining subjects, started in 1905, though it attracted very few students, had drawn in as teachers a number of pure scientists as well as the lecturer in mechanics, Jervis-Smith, and the Professor of Natural Philosophy, A. E. Love, who taught applied mathematics. Among them were Sollas, Miers, and Townsend, J. S. Haldane, who lectured on mining hygiene, and the chemist H. B. Baker, who taught assaying in a room in the basement of the Christ Church laboratory.115 Interest in applied work was by no means unusual among Oxford scientists. Jervis-Smith's inventiveness in producing measuring instruments led the Home Of®ce to recruit him to a committee which did experiments at Woolwich on the effects of explosions, and he also worked on photography, telegraphy, and the telephone.116 Vernon Harcourt became interested in the measurement of light intensity while acting in the 1870s as one of the Metropolitan Gas Referees, who ®xed the acceptable limits of impurity in London's gas supply, and he developed the Pentane Lamp which was adopted as the of®cial standard of light in Britain until the 1930s. He may or may not have been the White Knight imagined by his Christ Church friend, C. L. Dodgson, but he was well-known for trying out on visitors a device he invented for the administration of chloroform, which won the approval of the British Medical Association and was widely used in hospitals.117 J. S. Haldane was regularly employed in industrial and government work on mining safety and some of his later work was done in a laboratory established by the Doncaster Coal Owners. He also evolved a system of stage decompression for deep divers that was used by the British Navy.118 Even Clifton served on the Royal Commission on Accidents in Mines, 1879± 86, and designed a new safety lamp, while the Aldrichian Demonstrator, Walter Fisher, acted as public analyst for the City of Oxford and three neighbouring counties.119 The First World War opened the eyes of some Oxford men, such as Tizard and Hartley, to the applications of science, but if they were closed before the war that had less to do with the ethos or content of Oxford science than with its weak connections with industryÐand 115 Report of the committee for scienti®c engineering and mining subjects, Gazette xxxv (14 Mar 1905), 423. 116 Jervis-Smith, Testimonials; DNB Missing Persons, 353±4. 117 C. King, `The Chemist in Allegory; Augustus Vernon Harcourt and the White Knight', Journal of Chemical Education, 60 (1983), 177±80. 118 C. G. Douglas, `John Scott Haldane', ONFRS, 2, 1936±8, 115±39; R. Clark, JBS: The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane (1968), 26±8, 39±40; J. F. Fulton, `John Scott Haldane', New England Journal of Medicine, 214 (1936), 651±3. 119 R. T. G., `Robert Bellamy Clifton', PRS series A, xcix (1921), vi±ix; Bowen, `Chemistry at Oxford' (n. 32), 15.

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perhaps also the reluctance of industrialists to promote research.120 Despite appearances, opposition to applied science at Oxford tended to be opportunistic rather than ingrained. This is well illustrated by the dispute over the location of the ®rst purpose-built laboratory for Engineering, which was refused a site in the University Parks in 1912. Con¯ict about the development of the Parks had begun at the turn of the century when H. H. Turner requested that a house should be built for the Professor of Astronomy adjacent to the Observatory, so that he could take every opportunity of favourable weather to use the instruments.121 It continued in the inter-war years, until agreement was reached on boundaries to the science area in the Parks and the Keble Road triangle was earmarked for future expansion.122 The main issue at stake was the preservation of a natural environment that was prized increasingly as one of Oxford's unique assets. The University had bought land in the Parks in the 1850s speci®cally for the Museum, but the purpose of its later purchases was less clear.123 New vested interests emerged in a changing University societyÐcricketers and footballers, the families of North Oxford, dons who were keen naturalists like W. Warde Fowler or enjoyed a daily walk to work through the Parks, Extension students who came to the annual Summer Meeting and appreciated its pastoral setting.124 Alternative sites for new science laboratoriesÐincluding the Walton Street premises of the Clarendon PressÐwere considered but rejected, partly on grounds of cost.125 Controversy became inevitable. It drew in the Curators of the Parks, most of them Arts men, backed by Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls and MP for the University. These men were not, in other contexts, hostile to scienceÐ although Anson's interest in it was regarded as somewhat `tepid and dutiful'Ðbut they were cast in this hard-fought environmental battle in an unfriendly role.126 The sharpest pre-war skirmish over encroachment on the Parks was caused not by the claims of engineering but by the proposed astronomy 120 Clark, Tizard (n. 33), 60; A. G. Ogston, `Harold Brewer Hartley', BMFRS, 19 (1973), 358. Evidence of the limited industrial contacts of the OU Appointments Committee (by contrast with its Cambridge counterpart) is given in T. Weston, From Appointments to Careers: A History of the OU Careers Service 1892±1992 (1994), 47±8; see also below, p. 856. There were, however, two science dons who moved into industry before the war: Edward Chapman became a railway director and V. H. Veley director of a brewing company. 121 University Museum Delegates' Minute Book 1894±1900, fo 18, OUA. 122 The Twentieth Century, 140. 123 The issue is discussed exhaustively in OM xxvii (1908±9), 27, 46±7, 60, 79, 94, 109±10, 123. 124 OM 13 Feb. 1901, 201; H. Hensley Henson (ed.), Memoir of Sir William Anson (1920), 125±6; S. Rowbotham, `Travellers in a Strange Country: Responses of Working-class Students to the University Extension Movement, 1878±1918', History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), 62±95. 125 University Museum Heads of Departments' Minutes, 22 Apr, 5 May 1907, UDC/M/13/1, OUA. 126 Henson, Anson, 124.

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professor's house. Oxford possessed a second Observatory, the property of the Radcliffe Trust, and by tradition the Savilian Professor's duties were con®ned to teaching rather than observation. Arguing that Turner's proposal entailed wasteful duplication of resources, the Curators blocked it on three occasions, ®nally securing a decisive three to one majority in Congregation in 1907 after Anson had suggested a merger between the Radcliffe and University Observatories.127 For Turner the defeat was bitter. His own researches, which depended upon observation, were `crippled' by lack of easy access to the instruments at night: coordination of Oxford's resources for astronomy would be best achieved, as he pointed out, by relocating the Radcliffe Observatory under clear skies in South AfricaÐthe solution eventually adopted in the 1930s.128 Meanwhile no other observatory of the same class in the world was left unprotected from storms and vandals by the lack of a resident director.129 But the University was more readily persuaded of the need for new laboratories. In 1912 Congregation agreed to release space in the Museum area for a chemistry laboratory (175 votes to 106) on the grounds that no other suitable site was available. The location of a laboratory for the new engineering department was more controversial because it was expected to be `noisy'. The CuratorsÐprompted, it was rumoured, by one of their number who lived near the Museum and did not want to `lose his siesta'Ðhit on a clever ruse.130 They offered a site, at the north-west corner of the Parks and some distance from the Museum, that threatened the Chestnut Walk behind the family residences of Norham Gardens and suggested the prospect of in®lling along Parks Road. Predictably, when the proposal came to Congregation it was defeated (81 votes to 234). The Delegates of the Museum made it clear that they would have preferred a less conspicuous site.131 The in¯uence of `bird lovers' was denounced by some scientists.132 But the outcome was a compromise quite acceptable to Frewen Jenkin. A committee led by Anson and two Curators, A. H. Johnson and R. W. Raper, raised a private subscription of £3,000 to buy land just outside the Parks for the laboratory.133 Scientists did not really want to spoil the Parks, nor bird-watchers to thwart the engineering department. 127 Hebdomadal Council was induced to veto Turner's request in 1896 but later relented: for ensuing debates in Congregation see OM 13 Mar. 1901, 271 and 13 Mar. 1907, 272; Oxford Times, 16 Mar 1901, 7 and 16 Mar 1907, 7. 128 Turner to Anson, 18 May 1907 and 13 Dec. 1911, Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. d. 310, fos 34±7, 60±1; Turner to Gunther, 17 Jan. 1917, Old Ashmolean Letterbooks II, MS Gunther, OMHS; I. Guest, John Radcliffe and his Trust (Over Wallop, Hampshire, 1991), 299±300; The Twentieth Century, 153±4. 129 Gazette, xliii (14 May 1913), 791. 130 Myres to Lees Smith, 4 Nov. 1912, Bodl. MS Myres 36, fo 180. 131 Oxford Times, 23 Nov 1912, 5. 132 Townsend, The Proposed Engineering Laboratory [1912], Bodl. G. A. Oxon. c. 153. 133 Anson et al., The Parks and Science [Nov. 1912] and 25 Feb. 1913, in ibid; Jenkin to Anson, 3 Feb. 1913, Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. d. 310, fo 46.

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There were, however, echoes in the battle for the Parks of a longer-running controversy about the place of science in Oxford. It had both a national and a parochial dimension, and three distinct but interwoven strands. The dominant theme was a struggle for resources that went back to 1830 when the eminent mathematician Charles Babbage had pleaded for funds to halt the decline of British science.134 A national science lobbyЮrst organized effectively by the group of London-based scientists including T. H. Huxley, who formed the X club in the 1860s, and given an in¯uential voice in Nature, founded and edited by the astrophysicist Norman LockyerÐcampaigned to raise awareness of the growth of investment in science by Britain's industrial competitors. The British state was niggardly by comparison with Germany and private patrons less muni®cent than in the United States. Yet the endowments of the ancient Universities represented a unique source of patronage for English scienceÐas Salisbury had pointed out in his evidence to the Devonshire CommissionÐuntil the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 1890s intensi®ed competition for resources. At Oxford in particular, the failure of the NSS to attract large numbers of students encouraged the argument that the University should specialize in Arts subjects rather than spend money on a study for which it `offered no natural facilitiesÐan adventitious and arti®cial growth'.135 Such extreme views provoked extreme responses. Ray Lankester asserted that two-thirds of college endowments should be transferred to the support of science.136 In the aftermath of the Boer War, when Lockyer mobilized the science lobby to demand greatly increased state spending on university science, outside pressure was brought to bear on OxfordÐpartly in order to challenge attitudes that prevented public recognition of the importance of science to the nation.137 The wellknown chemist Raphael Meldola spoke at an Oxford Extension meeting of the need for more applied research in the older universities.138 John Perry, Professor of Engineering at the Royal College of Science, at a public meeting organized by the Oxford Mathematical Society and the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire, attacked supporters of the University's classical traditions as `forces of darkness' hostile to the growth of science. `Oxford fears and hates natural science,' he claimed.139 134 C. Babbage, Re¯ections on the Decline of Science in England and some of Its Causes (1830, repr. Farnborough 1969). See also P. Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain 1850±1920 (1987), 75±137; R. M. MacLeod, `Resources of Science in Victorian England. The Endowment of Science Movement 1868±1900', in P. Mathias (ed.), Science and Society 1600± 1900 (1972), 111±66; A. J. Meadows, Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). 135 A. T. S. Goodrick in Macmillan's Magazine, xc (1904), quoted in Engel, 221. 136 E. Ray Lankester (ed.), Linacre Reports, iv (1900), iv±v. 137 Nature, lxi (1 Mar. 1900), 418; lxvii (12 Mar. 1903), 433. 138 `The relations between scienti®c research and the chemical industry', Nature, lviii (27 Aug. 1903), 403. 139 `Oxford and Science', Nature, lxix (31 Dec. 1903), 207±14; letter in ibid., 270, (21 Jan. 1904).

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A second strand in the debate was cultural resistance to science, which had its counterpart, exempli®ed in Lankester's Romanes Lecture on `Nature and Man', in the elevation of scienti®c knowledge at the expense of the humanities.140 In late Victorian and Edwardian Oxford the rationale for opposition to science had changed: it was no longer, as in the 1830s, based on theology but rather foreshadowed twentieth-century antagonism between competing branches of the academic profession. Con¯ict over resources fostered a language of cultural antipathy, as in Edward Freeman's jibes at the `physical science-botherers', mere `tradesmen' who wanted `to take money from the University to teach their own trades'.141 Science could be represented as utilitarian, brutal to animals, ugly, hostile alike to nature and humane values Ðmuch to the chagrin of its exponents. `To some people an engineering laboratory might be ``potted hell'', but to others it was a portal of knowledge,' protested Frewen Jenkin.142 Not many Arts men in this generation identi®ed with Freeman's overt hostility to science and very few Oxford scientists shared Lankester's outright antagonism towards the humanities. Most scientists preferred to make common cause with colleagues in Arts subjects against features of the University that were seen as harmful to the progress of learning.143 This was the third strand in the discourse. Scientists backed Edwardian reformers who criticized the college system, the commitment of effort to teaching for examinations rather than research, and the marginalization of the professoriate. But here they came up against college conservatives, commonly targeted as enemies of research. College men sometimes responded curtly. `Show me a researcher and I'll show you a fool,' was a remark attributed by Oriel's ®rst science fellow, Henry Tizard, to its Provost, C. L. Shadwell.144 The notion that cultural hostility to science was encouraged by Oxford's `genius loci', or special associations with classical learning and the Church, was canvassed at the time and has convinced some historians.145 Yet there were alsoÐhardly surprisingly, in a generation fascinated by the implications of theories of evolutionÐareas in the sciences that positively attracted classical scholars and philosophers. J. A. Smith launched proposals, with support from J. L. Myres, Gilbert Murray, and others, for a new degree course in science and philosophy; they were overtaken by the war, but a syllabus agreed by the Lit. Hum. and Natural Science Faculty Boards in 1914 included Special Subjects on `The Psycho-Physical Problem', `Natural Selection in Relation to Man and Society' and `Primitive 140 141 142 143 144 145

Nature, lxxii (22 June 1905) 184. W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman (2 vols 1895), ii. 334±5. Oxford Times, 23 Nov. 1912, 5. Poulton, Viriamu Jones (n. 14), 256±70. Clark, Tizard (n. 33), 12. Howarth, `Science Education', 335±6, 349±53.

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Religion'.146 Sometimes, as in the case of Cambridge mathematicians and physicists, an overlap of interest between disciplines could lead to demarcation disputes.147 A move to make Anthropology a degree course within the NSS was defeated in 1895 because some classicists wanted instead to make it a Special Subject within Greats.148 A similar con¯ict over the status of psychology was provoked by Henry Wilde's attempt to ensure that the readership he endowed in Mental Philosophy should be held by a philosopherÐbut in that case the University disregarded his wishes and appointed the experimentalist William McDougall to the post.149 As for religious traditions associated with Oxford, there is little evidence that they generated signi®cant resistance to science in the later nineteenth century. Passions aroused by the Huxley±Wilberforce debate at the opening of the Museum subsided quickly. In 1881 Jowett tried to tempt Huxley to the Linacre chair, assuring him that the election would arouse no `odium theologicum': `Nous avons change tout cela; or rather it has changed itself.'150 The relaxation of tensions between religion and science was not, of course, con®ned to Oxford. As Salisbury observed in his presidential address at the British Association's meeting in 1894, `Few men, whatever their creed, would now seek their geology in the books of their religion.'151 The only serious manifestation of clerical opposition to science after 1880 occurred during the anti-vivisectionist campaign against Burdon-Sanderson's physiology laboratory.152 There was vigorous resistance in Convocation to the vote of £10,000 to ®nance the building of the laboratory, narrowly carried in 1883 (88 votes to 85 and 188 to 147), and to the annual grant for its upkeep, sanctioned in February 1885 by 412 votes to 244. Attendance was swollen at the last of these debates by a noisy contingent of country parsons led by Canon Liddon. The issues in this much-publicized episode were, however, far from straightforward. Clerical obstruction of University legislation during Jowett's Vice-Chancellorship, discussed in Chapter 25, was a symptom of reaction against the losses in¯icted on the Church by the 1882 statutes. Among the academic residents who opposed the physiology laboratory secular motives predominated. Some, like Bodley's librarian E. W. B. Nicholson and the young conservatives of the Non-Placet Society, were 146 Lit. Hum. Board minutes and reports, FA 4/7/1/3 fos 34±5, 40±1, 80; FA 4/7/2/2/fo 14, OUA; J. N. L. Myres to Clark, 8 Oct. 1972, Bodl. MS G. N. Clark 257. The plan was revived after the war but defeated in Congregation in 1923; see The Twentieth Century, 143. 147 D. B. Wilson, `Experimentalists among the Mathematicians: Physics in the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos, 1851±1900', HSPS, 12 (1982), 325±71. 148 Tylor to Acland, 17 June 1875, Acland MSS d. 95, Bodl. 149 OUA HC/M/3/16; OUA Misc Records, MR/7/2/11. 150 Jowett to Huxley, 4 July 1881, Huxley MSS, xxv fo 38, Imperial College, London. 151 Report of the Sixty-Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1894), 5. 152 R. D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton 1975), 275±6.

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opportunists who objected to the diversion of resources from the humanities. Principled opposition to experimentation on animals was often based on humane or aesthetic rather than religious considerationsÐas in the case of Ruskin who resigned the chair of Fine Art in March 1885 in protest against `the vote endowing vivisection'.153 But Oxford does not seem to have been a particular stronghold of such sentiments. The London-based antivivisection movement had agitated against Burdon-Sanderson's work at UCL and went on, led by Frances Power Cobbe, to protest against the co-option of his wife to the council of Somerville.154 Oxford residents were apt to resent the intervention of outsiders in University affairs and it mobilized support for Burdon-Sanderson.155 No objections were voiced when an extension to the physiology laboratory was built in 1907.156 Nor does it seem that Ruskin's disillusionment with science had much in¯uence at Oxford, where his earlier work still had devoted admirers. One of them, Harold Hartley, was in charge of chemical warfare by the end of the First World War.157 Debates about the position of science in Oxford were coloured by personalities, of which the most colourful was that of the University's leading biologist. Edwin Ray Lankester, who was said to believe that `Westminster Abbey would be much better employed as a scienti®c laboratory than in its present of®ces,' belonged as much to the London-based science lobby as to the Oxford academic world.158 The son of a scienti®c family of T. H. Huxley's circle, he became Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London in 1874 at the age of 27, eight years after graduating with a ®rst in Natural Science from Christ Church. But he also held a fellowship, and was brie¯y tutor, at Exeter College from 1872. He was a prominent ®gure in Oxford academic politics long before his tenure of the Linacre chair (1891±9). No one did more to raise the level of acrimony. Some years later, with Lankester off the scene, Edward Poulton could claim that differences between the University and colleges were `without the least personal feeling'.159 But ill-feeling towards Lankester in the Oxford world is captured in an incident recorded by a Magdalen undergraduate: when he 153

Ruskin, Works, vol. xxxiii, p. lvi. On feminist opposition to vivisection in connection with women's higher education at Cambridge and London as well as Oxford, see M. A. Elston, `Women and Anti-vivisection in Victorian England' in N. A. Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Perspective (1990), 282±3; H. Kean, `The ``Smooth Cool Men of Science'': the Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection', History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 26±7. 155 French, Antivivisection, 276. 156 H. M. and K. D. Vernon, A History of Oxford Museum (1905), 96. 157 Sir Harold Hartley, Studies in the History of Chemistry (1971), 197. 158 Echo Portrait Gallery, 9 Feb. 1891, R. T. Gunther Press Cuttings fo 49, OMHS; obituaries in E. S. G., `Edwin Ray Lankester', PRS series B, 106 (1930)' x±xv; Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (1929±30), 200±11; Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, xlix (1929), 359±65; Nature, cxxiv (24 Aug. 1929), 309±14. 159 Poulton, Viriamu Jones, 263. 154

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dined as Vines's guest at high table `as a result only 4 other dons dined there! when there are generally about 16±20.'160 The antipathy was reciprocated. Lankester had migrated from Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1866, reluctantly and under pressure from Huxley and his family, because Oxford's facilities for science appeared at that time to be superior.161 He took no pleasure in the life of a college fellow `amidst old bachelor clergymen and cynical young classics' and complained to Huxley of `the inextricable mess of medieval folly and corporation jealousy and effete restrictions which surround all Oxford institutions'.162 A ®ghter by temperament, he waged a series of public battles not only with opponents of science but with colleagues at the Museum and with the University, against which he brought a law-suit.163 He was known equally for his pre-eminence among British biologists and a propensity for `explosive and unconsidered action in a just cause'.164 In 1906 he was compulsorily retired (though with a knighthood and an enhanced pension) from the directorship of the British Museum (Natural History) at South Kensington after a row with its standing committee. Lankester attempted to return to the Linacre chair, but the conviction that he had `hindered as well as helped science' by his pugnacious tactics led the electors to prefer the genial but uninspiring Bourne. This decision created the damaging impression that `Oxford people do not want a strong, brilliant professional but prefer humdrum men who will not overshadow the College tutorial teaching.'165 It was not taken lightly. The Vice-Chancellor, Herbert Warren, Sir Benjamin Brodie's son-in-law and a keen advocate of the sciences, had `seldom been so exercised about anything'. Lankester's `violent attacks on the University and his opposition to the clerical and classical interests, to the Medical School and to many others things have been most prejudicial and yet of course he is without equal in his own line.'166 Personalities apart, there were real dif®culties in institutionalizing natural science in an ancient collegiate university, some of them not peculiar to Oxford. Endowments were mainly attached to colleges and heavily committed to fellowships and scholarships in classics or, at Cambridge, mathematics. Scholars in the older deductive disciplines at both places sometimes regarded experimental science with suspicion or contempt, as no more than a 160

R. T. Gunther to his father, 28 Jan. 1891, Gunther MSS. OMHS. Lester and Bowler, Lankester, 19. 162 Lankester to Huxley, 18 Dec. [1872] and n.d., Huxley MSS xxx, fos 39±44, 48±57, Imperial College, London. 163 The lawsuit, which Lankester lost, related to his dismissal as examiner in the NSS for refusing to attend vivas; OM 18 Jan. 1888, 153±6, 22 Feb. 1888, 246±7. 164 The Times, 16 Aug. 1929, 15. 165 Thiselton-Dyer to Gunther, 26 July 1906, quoted in Gunther, R. T. Gunther, 48. 166 Warren to Gunther, 12 July 1906, ibid. 75. Lester and Bowler, Lankester, offer a more sympathetic portrait of Lankester, who evidently did not appreciate how dif®cult his colleagues found him. 161

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`pleasant recreation' or `hobby' for amateurs.167 Some colleges took a lead in patronizing scienceÐat Cambridge pre-eminently Trinity but also Caius and St John's; at Oxford, Christ Church, Magdalen, and later Balliol, Trinity, and JesusÐbut the college system was ill-adapted to the needs of disciplines requiring expensive plant and specialized teaching, more effectively provided in central laboratories. Both Oxford and Cambridge were situated in agricultural counties and found it hard to establish the credibility as scienti®c universities which was needed to attract benefactors from industry. Because they required students to have some Greek and admitted them at 18 they recruited largely from public schools, where science teaching was generally poor. The mania for organized sport meant that not much undergraduate laboratory work went on in the afternoons. The `easy-going feeling' at Oxford contrasted, according to Baldwin Spencer, with the refreshing `spirit of work' at Owens College, Manchester.168 Weldon, who had moved from London in the hope of teaching `an infant Huxley', found instead classes of `nice Oxford boys' who spent more time on sport than on science.169 `Each week consists of only six half-days,' complained Lankester, `and the summer term is from the start a prolonged Sunday School treat, with ¯ags and trumpets and processions and races, and everything which shall induce a man not to attend lectures or laboratory.'170 Why did Cambridge make more headway against these odds in developing its science departments? A brilliant professoriate might, as at the Cavendish, steer a department to great achievements. But it was not enough to elect ®rst-rate scientists to chairs. Sir James Dewar did not do much for Cambridge chemistry. Finding University society uncongenial and little experimental tradition in the department, he combined his Cambridge chair with another at the Royal Institution in London where he spent most of his time.171 Tradition clearly played some part in creating conditions for success.172 The mathematical tradition at Cambridge was a particular asset for research in physics, since the Cavendish professors were able to attract as research students Wranglers looking for subjects for their fellowship dissertations. But the strength of mathematics did little to encourage the development of successful undergraduate courses in natural science.173 In contemporary discourse, the claim that Oxford lacked scienti®c traditions 167 Vernon and Vernon, Oxford Museum, 25; D. A. Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge (1947), 205, 206 n. 1. 168 Spencer to Goulty, 19 Jan. 1885, Baldwin Spencer MSS, Box III, fo 54, Pitt Rivers Museum. 169 Biometrika, 5 (1906±7), 27±9. 170 Lankester to the Vice-Chancellor, May 1897, OUA HC/M/13/1. 171 `Sir James Dewar', PRS series A cxi (1926), xiii±xxiii. 172 Geison, Michael Foster, 95. 173 Sviedrys, `Rise of Physics Laboratories' (n. 6); P. Forman, J. L. Heilbron, and S. Weart, `Physics circa 1900. Personnel, Funding & Productivity of the Academic Establishments', HSPS, 5 (1975), 29; Wilson, `Experimentalists among the mathematicians' (n. 147).

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was deployed to various ends. For Acland it dramatized the achievement of those who had founded the Museum (as he was fond of saying) `in a ploughed ®eld'; for later generations it could excuse disappointing performance in the sciences or, alternatively, emphasize the futility of spending money on them. But Oxford had in fact traditions of its ownÐas even Lankester admitted in his Romanes LectureÐnotably a history of experimental teaching in chemistry and comparative anatomy, stretching back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in¯uential in the early years of the Museum.174 At the Jubilee celebrations of 1908, Warren pointed out that `Science was not a stranger to Oxford before the ®rst stone of the Museum was laid.'175 Much else was written to support this claim, culminating in R. W. T. Gunther's compendious account of Early Science in Oxford (15 vols, 1920±67).176 Physical evidence of an indigenous scienti®c tradition was provided by Oxford's collections and the Radcliffe Science Library, rehoused in 1903 in a new building at the Museum ®nanced by the Drapers' Company.177 It is tempting to invoke the more robust and rigorous traditions of Cambridge science as an all-embracing explanation of the superiority it established after 1880. But a series of authoritative studies of the NST points to the in¯uence of more mundane factors.178 A ¯exible system of funding science posts and a curriculum that proved attractive to undergraduates produced rapid expansion in the Cambridge science departments. This made for self-sustaining growth, as generations of Cambridge-trained doctors, schoolmasters and mistresses advised parents that it offered the best undergraduate course, and career openings for scientists were available in its laboratories. The NSS did not `take off' in the same way, with consequences that proved particularly damaging at a time of ®nancial stringency. It is to institutional factors that we must look in order to understand what went wrong at Oxford. Differences emerged between the two universitiesÐthe product, it seems, of chance and circumstance rather than deliberate policyÐwhich made it harder for Oxford to reallocate resources towards the sciences. Above all, 174 Nature, lxxii (22 June 1905), 184; A. V. Simcock, The Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1685±1985 (1984); H. M. Sinclair and A. H. T. Robb Smith, A Short History of Anatomical Teaching in Oxford (1950); V. Morton, Oxford Rebels: The Life and Friends of Nevil Story-Maskelyne, 1823±1911 (Gloucester, 1987). 175 Vernon and Vernon, Oxford Museum, 109. 176 A. V. Simcock (ed.), Robert T. Gunther and the Old Ashmolean (1985); Howarth, `Science Education', 350±1. 177 Guest, Dr. John Radcliffe and his Trust, 192±207. 178 R. M. MacLeod and R. C. Moseley, `Breadth, Depth and Excellence', Studies in Science Education, v (1978) and `The Naturals and Victorian Cambridge'; G. K. Roberts, `The Liberallyeducated Chemist: Chemistry in the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos 1851±1914', HSPS 11 (1980); R. Porter, `The Natural Sciences Tripos and the ``Cambridge School of Geology'', 1850± 1914', History of Universities, 2 (1982); Wilson (n. 147).

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the University derived a much smaller income from the taxation of colleges and thus had less freedom to create new teaching posts. The 1882 statutes imposed a proportional levy on Oxford colleges and allowed them to offset spending for `university purposes' against their contribution to the CUF, rather than following the policy of the Cambridge Commissioners, who obliged colleges to pay a ®xed sum towards University needs.179 There is no evidence that the Oxford Commissioners foresaw that science would be disadvantaged by their recommendations. The University was better endowed at Oxford than at Cambridge, so there appeared to be no compelling need for high rates of college taxation to augment its income, and colleges had shown willingness to create science teaching posts in the 1870s.180 But as a result of the agricultural depression the income of the CUF was much lower than had been anticipatedÐunder £4,000 a year in the 1890s, compared with the £30,000 a year contributed by colleges to the CUF at Cambridge.181 Overall annual University spending on science at Oxford between 1882 and 1900 ran at somewhat under 75 per cent of spending at Cambridge. The colleges also did less for science than had been hoped. Open competition in fellowship elections had been pressed further at Oxford than at Cambridge, and this appears to have worked against scientists. Colleges that might have been persuaded to support their own best science graduates tended to opt instead for the accomplished Greats man.182 There were also fortuitous differences in the system of electing to undergraduate scholarships. Oxford's awards were worth more money and a high standard was insisted upon. Colleges sometimes found it impossible to ®ll even the comparatively small number of scholarships open to scientists: candidates were `not only few in number but also of low average quality'.183 At Cambridge students were allowed to compete for scholarships after a year's work at the University, and the proportion of awards that went to natural scientists was appreciably higher.184 A decision taken in 1900, after strong pressure from the schools, to introduce a `close period' for college scholarship examinations was said by Oxford scientists to have worsened the position further, as it prevented them from examining schoolboys before the Cambridge examinations in December.185 179

See Pt 1. 432±5 (Appendix 12.1) Howarth, `Science Education', 355±6. See Pt 1, 674±5. 181 Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge, 321; A. J. Engel, `Oxford College Finances 1871± 1913: A Comment' and J. P. D. Dunbabin, `Oxford College Finances: A Reply', Economic History Review, 2nd series, xxi (1978), 439. 182 Saturday Review, lxxxix (28 Apr. 1900), 527±8. 183 [G. C. Bourne], `The Position of Science at Oxford', Nature, liv (9 July 1896), 225±6. 184 In 1911±12, 56 science scholarships were awarded at Cambridge and 25 at Oxford; Interim Report of the Consultative Committee on Scholarships for Higher Education, PP 1916 viii, 368. 185 Gunther, R. T. Gunther, 51±2. 180

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teaching and scholarship

All these dif®culties were compounded by the curriculum that Oxford offered scientists. It differed from Cambridge both in the general requirements of the BA course, laid down by the University, and the syllabus of the NSS, which was devised by scientists themselves. Oxford required more Latin and Greek than was expected at Cambridge. Until 1887 all undergraduates were required to take classical pass or honour Moderations before proceeding to a ®nal school, and this cut into the time available for science. Even when scientists were exempted from Mods, `compulsory Greek' in the examinationsÐResponsions or its equivalentsÐthat quali®ed undergraduates to embark on the NSS was relatively demanding. J. J. Thomson, who knew no Greek before he went up to Trinity, passed the Cambridge Previous on two hours' work a day for under two months, whereas a beginner needed between six and twelve months' `cram' to get Greek up for Responsions.186 But schoolboysÐand girlsÐwere also attracted to Cambridge by the twopart tripos adopted in the 1880s, which offered in Part I a broad course combining biological and physical sciences and qualifying successful candidates for a degree, and in Part II an option of greater specialization.187 The Oxford NSS was based on a differentÐand after the curriculum was modi®ed in the 1880s, a less consistentÐphilosophy. When Natural Science was ®rst made part of the undergraduate curriculum in 1850, the aim had been to produce graduates who were not narrow specialists but at once generally cultivated and thoroughly grounded in the `basic' sciences, physics and chemistry, before they proceded to advanced work.188 The Natural Science Preliminary examination, introduced in 1871, which originally counted towards the assessment of candidates in the ®nal honour school, gave them a training in the physical sciences, while in the NSS an element of breadth was achieved by a system of accumulating marks across the range of subjects offered. In its scienti®c content the course was already narrower than that offered at Cambridge, since geology and botany were treated as optional `Special Subjects', available only to those who could satisfy the examiners in general biology. The intention was, as Acland put it, to prevent students `amateuring in advanced subjects'.189 Changes in the syllabus introduced in 1885 retained the bias towards physical science while bringing a new emphasis on specialization. On the one hand honours candidates could now offer one subject only within the NSS. The biological sciencesÐMorphology (zoology), Physiology, Botany, and GeologyÐwere recognized as separate branches of the school and candidates had to choose between them. On the other hand changes in the NS Prelim., which became 186 J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Re¯ections (1936), 35; Curzon, Principles and Methods of University Reform (1909), 101±3. 187 MacLeod and Moseley, `Breadth, Depth and Excellence'. 188 Pt 1, 689. 189 PP 1872, xxv, Q. 2895.

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an unclassi®ed pass examination, introduced a new anomaly. Elementary biology courses were introduced for those who intended to specialize in a biological science. But they were not taken by those aiming at honours in physics or chemistry, whereas until 1892 biologists still had to offer both physics and chemistry in the Prelim. The syllabus of 1885 established what became a distinctive and controversial characteristic of Oxford science educationÐits organization in single-subject schools. In the late nineteenth century advocates of the NSS argued that it set a higher standard than Part I of the Cambridge tripos. But it was regarded in the schools as at once more dif®cult and narrower than the NST, less useful as a preparation for school-teaching as well as medicine. There can be no doubt that this had a damaging effect on recruitment, especially for the biological sciences where highly specialized ®nal honour schools were preceded by a disproportionately heavy work-load in Prelims. The thinking behind the 1885 syllabus re¯ected a concern for the quality of Natural Science graduates that had been present since the start of the NSS. But the shift towards specialization was a major defeat for the older generation at the Museum. Ironically, the key role in forcing it through was played by a zoologist who soon had reason to regret it, Ray Lankester. A vocal critic of Acland's failure to lecture and refusal to revive the medical school, he also mounted a campaign to broaden and modernize biology teaching. Challenging the dominant in¯uence of George Rolleston, he engineered a crisis. In a petition to the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, Lankester accused Rolleston of bringing irregular pressure to bear on examiners to exclude from the syllabus newer areas of botany and physiology that fell outside his own ®eld of interests.190 When Lankester examined in the schools in 1879 he took the opportunity to set papers that went beyond the scope of Rolleston's teaching, with the result that one future FRS, F. A. Dixey, was given a third.191 `All your old friends and pupils will rally round you and only feel grieved you should be worried by such a cur,' the Magdalen tutor Edward Chapman told Rolleston. `My wife says he wants horse-whipping or in the words of the Bursar of Magdalen 3 dozen well laid on.'192 But Rolleston's health broke down and the syllabus was revised after the death of this much-loved Linacre Professor in 1881. The outside specialists consulted by the NS Board during discussions on syllabus reformÐthey included Foster at Cambridge, Albert GuÈnther at the British Museum (National History) and Thiselton-Dyer at KewÐadvised the introduction of separate honour schools in the three branches of biology, 190

Dept.

Lankester to the Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, 3 Dec. 1877, Rolleston MSS, OU Zoology

191 MSS relating to examinations, Apr.±Dec. 1880, ibid.; E. B. Poulton, `Frederick Augustus Dixey', ONFRS i (1932±5), 465. 192 Chapman to Rolleston, n.d. 1880, Rolleston MSS.

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as did the two professors elected after the division of the Linacre chair, Burdon-Sanderson and Henry Moseley.193 They did so on the grounds that Part II of the Cambridge Tripos produced better quali®ed biologists than the NSS. The failure of University College to elect to a fellowship in biological science in 1881 was recent evidence of the de®ciencies of Oxford's ®rst-class men: the external examiners had found the candidates lacking in `the grasp of their subjects which is necessarily based on accurate knowledge'.194 Foster assumed, however, (and other outsiders may have shared the assumption) that specialisation would be preceded by a broad training on the lines of Part I of the NST.195 At Oxford this was not the case. Instead the NS Prelim. was downgraded to a pass examination, intended to require only four terms' work. The reasons for this decision are not wholly clear, although there had been complaints that biologists found the physics and chemistry papers in the Prelim. `excessively hard'.196 Attempts were made in the 1890s to reverse it. The case for an honours Prelim. that would equalize the burden of work on candidates in the various sciences and `prevent excessive and premature specialisation' was now put by the professors of botany, zoology, and geology and by Vernon Harcourt.197 It was also suggested that candidates should be allowed to offer two subjects in the ®nal honour school. But opinion on the NS Board was evenly divided and no action was taken. Among the disadvantages of the specialized NSS syllabus adopted in 1885, much to Acland's regret, was that it led to further public wrangling at the Museum. It was strongly defended not only by most physical scientists but also by Burdon-Sanderson, who found that it allowed him to expand the physiology syllabus and encourage students to study Human Anatomy. This was bitterly resented by Lankester, who had not foreseen the effects of a specialized curriculum on the biological sciences. Zoology, botany, and geology, which drew large classes of Part I students at Cambridge, now found themselves in unequal competition with physiology, the obvious choice for prospective medical students, who tended to neglect even Lankester's Prelims course in favour of Arthur Thomson's human anatomy lectures. Lankester maintained that a grounding in pure biology was more important for physiologists than `dissection of the Human Body as taught to medical students', and attempted to have NSS undergraduates banned from attending Human Anatomy classes.198 Both he and Burdon-Sanderson can193

Papers relating to the reform of the Biology syllabus, 1882, OMHS MS Gunther 65. Thiselton-Dyer to Acland, 14 Mar. 1882, MS Gunther 65. 195 Foster to Acland, 18 Mar. 1882, MS Gunther 65. 196 Poulton to Acland, 11 Mar. 1882, MS Gunther 65. 197 NS Faculty Board minutes, Oct. 1890±June 13 1893, OUA NS/M/1/1±2. 198 Lankester, circular to leading teachers of physiology, 11 Apr. 1892, MS Gunther 65; Medical Faculty Board minutes, 11 June 1892, OUA/Med/M/1/1. 194

the natural sciences, 1880±1914

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vassed support outside the University from eminent biologists and medical men. Sir William Church observed to Acland that it was `amusing, though I fear detrimental to Oxford, that each seems bent on cutting into the claims of the other on the students' time'.199 Argument was bitter because of the growing recognition that departments with few students were at a disadvantage in extracting resources from the hard-pressed University or from colleges and also in providing specialist teaching.200 Some of the blame for slow growth in the sciences was naturally attributed to the colleges, which both controlled undergraduate admissions and had patronage to dispense. Lankester suggested, in one of his more temperate manifestos, that they had a particular duty to offer fellowships in zoology, botany, and geology, which attracted few students because they offered so few professional openings for ®rst-rate graduates.201 Bourne complained, with reason, that the vast majority of college posts were held by Arts dons.202 In 1892 there were only thirteen college lecturers or tutors in science and only ®ve colleges, Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, Trinity, and Wadham, had more than one science teaching post. While undergraduate numbers remained low, however, it was hard to break out of the vicious circle whereby lack of demand for teaching kept down the number of science teachers, which in its turn hindered recruitment. The science undergraduate was much less likely than his counterpart in the humanities to ®nd a college tutor with expertise in his chosen ®eld. The same was true for women students: a single science tutor, Jane Willis Kirkaldy, a Somerville zoologist appointed in 1894, was charged with the supervision of all women scientists. In the men's colleges there was a ®nancial incentive to encourage students to read subjects that could be tutored in college, and the predominance of Arts dons tended to reinforce a hierarchy of disciplines in which science still took a humble place. A commoner, if of more than average ability, is told [by his tutor] that he must read for honours in classical moderations, and afterwards for `greats'; if of average capacity, then law or history is indicated; if of lesser ability, the prescription is pass moderations with two pass classical schools, and probably political economy for the third. Neither honour men nor pass men hear of science unless they make particular enquiries about it: and if they do, they are as often as not told that it will not give them the breadth of education necessary for their future careers. Instances 199

Church to Acland, 8 Feb 1892, Bodl. MS Acland d. 63, fo 103. `Medical education in Oxford', OM 21 Oct. 1885, 309±10. 201 Lankester, An Appeal to the Governing Bodies of the Colleges within the University of Oxford (1892). There were a few University research scholarships for biological science: the Burdett-Coutts scholarships for Geology and Natural Science, the Radcliffe travelling fellowships for study abroad in medical science (loosely interpreted in practiceÐLankester himself had held one) and a biological scholarship for study in the Naples Zoological Institute; Curzon, Principles and Methods, 182. 202 `The Position of Science at Oxford', Nature, liv (9 July 1896), 225±6. 200

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can be cited of freshmen anxious to read science having been ordered to take a classical school instead.203

Yet Oxford scientists themselves showed little interest in developing a pass school. Their own failure to follow the example of both Cambridge and their Oxford colleagues in classics and modern history and adopt a syllabus designed to draw students played its part in the setbacks of the 1880s and 1890s. In 1911, however, the annual Report of the Museum Departments attracted favourable notice in Nature. `A remarkable feature . . . is the great and growing need for accommodation . . . all departments alike tell the same tale of great and increasing activity in scienti®c work.'204 An increased output of research, provision for applied sciences, and a slow but steady increase in undergraduate numbers suggest a modest recovery in Oxford science in the early twentieth century. Graduate students for the B.Sc. remained few (79 overall in the sciences between 1895 and 1914) but over a third (28) were in chemistry, an area of considerable strength. Professors were elected who were to boost Oxford's reputation in the inter-war yearsÐ Osler, Perkin, SherringtonÐand Lindemann already had an eye on the succession to Clifton's chair.205 More progress could have been made had it been possible to pension-off professors. A growing sense of corporate identity in the science departments is suggested by the group photographs taken at the turn of the century. Thriving specialist clubs and societies were established in chemistry and the life sciences. There was interest in popularizing science too: the older Ashmolean Society merged in 1901 with the Natural History Society of Oxfordshire, and its programme of events at the Museum included an annual series of Christmas lectures for children.206 The OU Junior Scienti®c Club, founded in 1882 to hear papers by undergraduates and senior members at its fortnightly meetings, had a membership of about 200 in the 1890s and attendance at its biennial conversaziones at the MuseumÐincreasingly elaborate occasions, open to the general public, with exhibitions, a brass band, and a popular lectureÐreached over a thousand.207 These developments must have been in¯uenced by the changing climate of opinion at the turn of the centuryÐon the one hand, the growth of the research ethic within an increasingly professionalized academic community, on the other a heightened awareness of the need to produce scientists for 203

Ibid. 227. `Scienti®c Progress in the University of Oxford', Nature, lxxxvii (10 Aug. 1911), 196. Birkenhead, The Prof in Two Worlds, 56. 206 F. A. Bellamy, Historical Account of the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire, 1880±1905 (1908). 207 OUJSC Minute Book, 24 May 1898, Radcliffe Science Library; P. J. Rowlinson, `Student Participation in Science Teaching: the Early Years of the Oxford University Junior Scienti®c Club', Oxford Review of Education, 9 (1983), 133±6. 204 205

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493

industry.208 Judging by the careers pursued by NSS graduates of the years 1900±14, however, industrial needs played a comparatively small part, at least directly, in persuading Oxford men to read science. About a ®fth of chemistry graduates whose careers are recorded in college registers went into business, industry, or engineering, but more took up university- or schoolteaching and signi®cant numbers went into non-scienti®c professions or government service (Table 20.3). Harold Hartley spoke for the able and ambitious NSS graduate when he turned down a `®ne opening ®nancially'Ða post with the Guinness companyÐ`preferring to take my chances in Oxford or elsewhere as a teacher or researcher. I don't want,' he explained, `to have to resign all chances of winning any distinction besides that of being a successful brewer's chemist.'209 Physicists were still less likely to go in for applied work. Much the most strongly vocational school was Physiology, essentially a training for doctors. But the varied careers of NSS graduates were a sign of the increasing acceptance of science as a liberal education. Within Oxford there was growing support for the inclusion of science as a compulsory subject in Responsions. Oxford departed in many ways from the ideals of Henry Acland, but it did play its part in one project close to his heart, in raising the status of both medicine and science by incorporating them into its studies. `Gentri®cation' is a slightly misleading term for this process, for the ancient Universities absorbed and encouraged the professionalization of a scienti®c culture that already had its devotees in genteel families. Several Oxford scientists of this generation came from gentry backgroundsÐAcland, Story-Maskelyne, Vernon Harcourt, Clifton, Conroy, Burdon-SandersonÐor had, like Moseley, Poulton, Weldon, and Edward Chapman, substantial private means. An old aristocratic tradition of amateur interest in science was represented by the late Victorian Chancellor, Salisbury. The Earl of Berkeley built his own laboratory in 1898 at Foxcombe, Boar's Hill, where he worked on the measurement of osmotic pressures with two Oxford chemists, M. P. Appleby and E. G. J. Hartley.210 Jervis-Smith and the astronomer Charles Pritchard had both established reputations as clergymen amateurs before they were recruited to Oxford posts. `Gentlemen of science' sent sons to Oxford, some of whomÐlike Darwin at Cambridge in an earlier generationÐmade good despite the de®ciencies of the place. The scienti®c offspring of the Victorian intellectual aristocracyÐlike Julian Huxley, who was 208 S. Pollard, England's Prime and England's Decline (1989), 183; J. Donnelly, `Industrial Recruitment of Chemistry Students from English Universities: a Revaluation of its Early Importance', BJHS, 24 (1991), 3±20. 209 Hartley to Sir John Conroy, 15 Aug. 1900, Conroy MSS 1B, bundle 25, BCLP. 210 Bowen, `Chemistry at Oxford'; Harold Hartley, `Randal Thomas Mowbray Berkeley, Earl of Berkeley', ONFRS, 4 (1942), 167±82; Laidler, `Chemical Kinetics', 227±8. Lord Berkeley also worked with E. G. J. Hartley in the Balliol laboratory on the electrolysis of glass.

494

TA B L E 20 .3 ca r e e r s o f nat u r a l s c i e n c e g r a d uat e s f ro m s e v e n c o l l e g e s , 1 9 0 0 ± 1 9 1 4 : ba l l i o l , c o r pu s , e x e t e r , k e b l e , m ag da l e n , m e r to n , s t j o h n ' s Chemistry Church Law Medicine Universities and research institutes School-teaching and inspection Indian and Colonial Forest Services Other colonial service UK government service Miscellaneous professions Commerce, ®nance Industry Engineering Died young Not known Total Source: Published college registers.

Physics

Zoology

5 2 5 13 24 2 4 3 6 4 20 1 11 18

2 4 1 3 11 1 2 3

1

118

5 1 1

1 4

2

2 5

1

39

11

Botany

9 1

Geology

Physiology

1

1

1 2

51

6 3 3

Engineering

2

4 3

1 1

2 1

1 4

1 2

13

28

57

2 1 5

Total 10 6 58 23 36 18 12 9 7 12 28 3 19 30 271

the natural sciences, 1880±1914

495

given his father's old set of rooms when he went up to Balliol in 1906Ðmade their own contribution to the integration of science studies within an eÂlite University which valued its connections with such families. This grandson of `Darwin's bulldog' read zoology but also carried off the Newdigate prize for some Spenserian stanzas on the prescribed subject, `Holyrood'. He spent the prize money on a microscope.211 Oxford's honours, such as they wereÐthe higher doctorates and honorary degreesÐwere extended to scientists and they were relatively well integrated into University life, perhaps better than in later years when they became more numerous. Most professors sat on college governing bodies. Those who were good men of business, like Odling and Osler, were elected to Hebdomadal Council. H. H. Turner became an active promoter of University Extension. Those who were clubbable were admitted to dining clubsÐ one of the more exclusive clubs made Clifton a member shortly after his election as professor in 1868.212 Scientists had their own Ashmolean Club, which invited heads of houses to its dinners. Some enjoyed college life, like Baldwin Spencer, who was conscious as a very junior fellow of his provincial origins and lack of a classical education but found his colleagues at Lincoln `extremely nice'.213 Some, like Odling, developed literary aptitudes. A. E. Love delivered the Latin encomia when honorary degrees were conferred on Professor Arrhenius of the Nobel Institute and Vernon Harcourt in 1908.214 But Herbert Warren believed that scholars in the humanities were equally in¯uenced by the scientists, whose example and methods had `in particular enormously encouraged the idea of original research'.215 Tizard took a different view: the gentlemanly lifestyle of the Edwardian college fellow as he recalled it encouraged contempt for research and idle good living.216 There was truth in both perceptions, for colleges varied greatly in their ethos, but Warren's opinion was possibly the more representative of the two. In the years before the First World War Oxford was, in the words of the zoologist Edward Poulton, `happily moving, but slowly, slowly, back to the ancient ideal of a University existing, before all things and above all things, for the love of knowledge'.217 Less easily reconciled with the traditions of the University was the modern ideal type of the professional scientist and department-builder, and there was a shortage at the Museum of the entrepreneurial ¯air needed to establish the sciences as successful University 211

Julian Huxley, Memories (2 vols 1970±3), i, 62, 67. F. Madan, Records of The Club at Oxford, 1790±1917 (1917), 43±5. 213 Spencer to Goulty, 14 May 1886, Baldwin Spencer MSS, Box III, fo 85. On Spencer's popularity at Lincoln see D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, `So Much That Is New'. Baldwin Spencer, 1860±1929: A Biography (Melbourne, 1985), 67. 214 Vernon and Vernon, Oxford Museum, 105±7. 215 Ibid. 115. 216 Clark, Tizard, 12±19. 217 Viriamu Jones, 123. 212

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teaching and scholarship

disciplines. Partly for that reason, the high aspirations for science entertained by the Museum's founders, and equally by later generations of University statesmen concerned with Oxford's reputation, were not ful®lled. The record of the pre-war decades, patchy achievement and a slow rate of growth, cast a long shadow over Oxford science. It was harshly judged in the twentieth century both by professional scientists and by a wider public that was increasingly alive to the dependence of national welfare and security on the contribution that science could make. Within Oxford it encouraged among Arts men, who had their own professional reasons for disputing the claims of scientists to parity of esteem, a condescending attitude that continued after the war. The historian Charles Oman, a veteran of the NonPlacet Society, recalled with satisfaction how, at the Oxford Pageant of 1907, he had offended `serious-minded persons' by the scene depicting the thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger BaconÐnot as a courageous scientist martyred by the Church, but as the comic magician of vulgar legend and inventor of the oracular Brazen Head in the play `Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay'.218 The Jubilee of the Museum on 8 October 1908 was a modest occasion, and Warren's speech in the Sheldonian had an almost apologetic tone. Science had `made an immense advance at Oxford', but the starting-point had been the `somewhat dark age' that preceded the foundation of the Museum. The audience was asked to remember that `®fty years is not a long time, it is a very short time, in the history of a great and ancient university.'219 A much more elaborate celebration on 10 June 1914 recalled the Oxford associations of Roger Bacon on the seven-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Representatives of the Universities of Paris and Cambridge, the Institut FrancËais, the Vatican Library, and the Franciscan Order attended the unveiling at the Museum of a bust by Hope Pinker. Sir Archibald Geikie, a recent President of the Royal Society, lauded Bacon's work as a pioneer of experimental science.220 In a Latin oration the Public Orator A. D. Godley declaimed, `Welcome, Friar Roger, on your return to Oxford! You here behold the fruits of your labours!' The Chancellor was present, the Warden and fellows of Merton provided lunch, and Bodley's Librarian an exhibition of manuscripts, prints, and books. In the Sheldonian in the afternoon J. J. Thomson delivered the Romanes Lecture on `Atomic Theory' (it was `very well put together but contained not much fresh theory', according to Harry Moseley).221 The day ended with a party in the Warden of Wadham's garden. As a ritual reconciliation between Oxford's intellectual past and present it conveyed the message that science was taken seriously and recognized as part of 218 219 220 221

Oman, Memories, 255±6. Vernon and Vernon, Oxford Museum, 109, 115. Nature, xciii (18 June 1914), 405; OM 18 June 1914, 409±10. Moseley to Rutherford, 11 June [1914] in Heilbron, Moseley, 241.

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the University's heritage. One practical result of the Bacon anniversary was the ®rst provision of facilities in the Bodleian for the study of the history of scienceÐthe `Science Room' in the Radcliffe Camera, presided over by R. T. Gunther's pupil Charles Singer and his wife.222 But Oxford residents can hardly have failed to observe ironies in the Roger Bacon memorial celebrations. Both the Warden of Wadham, Joseph Wells, and Godley were old allies of Oman's in university politics. The needs of the Bodleian had provided a refrain over the years for opponents of increased spending on the sciences. Two years into the war the claim that Oxford's mission still lay chie¯y in the Arts was reiterated by Dean Strong of Christ Church. In a Vice-Chancellor's oration that acknowledged the `claims of Natural Science to fuller recognition', he added that `the University will always, before all else, be a place of training for men of affairsÐ statesmen, administrators, diplomatists, and for such is required a knowledge of men, history both ancient and modern, philosophy, law, literature, and languages, and these must always be the leading studies of Oxford.'223 Only after a second and more threatening world war were these priorities effectively challenged. 222 223

A. V. Simcock, Robert T. Gunther, 65±8. Oxford Times, 14 Oct. 1916, 7.

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21 The Pitt Rivers Collection william r. chapman The Pitt Rivers Museum was established at Oxford in 1883 as a result of the gift of the ethnographical and archaeological collection belonging to Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers. He had begun his collection some thirty years earlier in order to illustrate what he referred to as the `principle of continuity'; and he was concerned to ®nd a place for it within an academic setting in order to promote the study of anthropology, a subject in which he had become involved as a serious amateur since the early 1860s.1 One of the main features of his collection, which numbered approximately 14,000 items at the time of its presentation to Oxford, was its unusual system of arrangement: rather than grouping objects according to their place of geographical origin, as was conventional practice among ethnographical collectors and museums of the period, Pitt-Rivers had organized the pieces in his collection according to their function and use, or, in some instances, on the basis of perceived resemblances in form. Typical `series', as he called the divisions in his collection, included boomerangs, bows and arrows, housing types (based on models), clothing and ornamentation, and so on, through several hundred series.2 Many were obtained from returning travellers and explorers, among them Richard Burton, the Africanist, and Edward Belcher, the Arctic explorer. Archaeological series, many the result of his own excavations, were divided more conventionally according to material, but were meant also to illustrate the gradual development of technology. Such a system, which was based in part on Pitt-Rivers's own experience in both testing and training troops in the use of the ri¯es introduced to British service during the 1850s, was intended to serve as an educational tool. But it was also meant to offer a method for research, allowing each object to be traced back to an original source, and establishing a means by which past contacts and 1 A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers, `Address as President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Bath, Sept. 6 1888,' Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1888, 825±35. 2 Catalogue of the Anthropological Collection lent by Colonel Lane Fox for Exhibition in the Bethnal Green Branch of the South Kensington Museum, June, 1874 (1874). Pitt-Rivers assumed his latter surnames in 1880 as a condition of an inheritance from his great-uncle, Lord Rivers. Until that date he was known by his family name, Lane Fox, or simply Fox.

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connections among races could be reconstructed. The system, therefore, had a speci®cally ethnological purpose, one that Pitt-Rivers hoped would be realized at Oxford. Pitt-Rivers had a long-standing association with George Rolleston, Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, who numbered ethnology among his many interests; and it may well have been this connection which decided Pitt-Rivers to locate his collection in Oxford when the existing arrangement to house it in the South Kensington Museum proved no longer satisfactory. Rolleston died in 1881 and it was through J. O. Westwood, then Hope Professor of Zoology and a well-known authority on ornamental design, a subject illustrated in Pitt-Rivers's collection, that he offered the collection in the spring of 1882. The University considered a report presented to the Hebdomadal Council by Henry Moseley, the Linacre Professor of Human and Comparative Anatomy, and signed by A. W. Franks of the British Museum, Sir John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury), and Edward Burnett Tylor, all leading members of the British anthropological community, and accepted Pitt-Rivers's offer in May 1883, `af®xing its seal' in the following year.3 The deed of gift bound the University to maintain `the general mode of arrangement at present adopted', on which Pitt-Rivers placed much emphasis, and not to make changes during his lifetime. These two stipulations had prevented the addition of the collection to those already existing in the British Museum.4 Despite the good intentions of everyone involved in the proceedings, the University was not prepared fully to accept a gift such as that offered by Pitt-Rivers. Anthropology was a new ®eld, unfamiliar to many of the University's more traditional, classically orientated scholars. No provisions had been made for housing the collection; and few in the University understood what would be required. The University's existing ethnographical and archaeological collections, some dating from Elias Ashmole's original gift of the Tradescant collection of natural and arti®cial curiosities in 1683, were in a neglected state and were at the time scattered among a number of University and college buildings and institutions. The ®rst step for the University was to establish a building committee, which soon commissioned T. N. Deane, son of the architect for the University Museum, to design a new annex for the existing Museum on Parks Road. The University had also to appoint an administrator for the collection and to select a lecturer to `teach the subject'. Henry Moseley accepted the ®rst task, already set out in the 3 Gazette xii (30 May 1882), 464±5; HCP 4 (1883), report to the Hebdomadal Council, 19 Jan. 1883. A decree authorizing the acceptance of the collection, and the expenditure of £7,500 on a building to accommodate it, was carried in Convocation after a division (67±9), Gazette xiii (13 Mar. 1883), 355. 4 OUA WP /2/17, Deed of Gift and Declaration of Trust of the Pitt-Rivers Collection, 20 May 1884.

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statutes governing his professorship, and Edward Burnett Tylor, then considered the pre-eminent British anthropologist, was approached to serve as the new Reader in Anthropology. He had been invited to deliver two lectures on anthropology in the University Museum in February 1883, which attracted large audiences, and in the following month he was appointed Keeper of the Museum to succeed Henry Smith.5 At the end of 1883 he was formally appointed to a Common University Fund readership, a post he held concurrently with the keepership of the Museum. Tylor's ®rst formal lectures were presented in the winter of 1884; and this marked the beginning of Anthropology as a teachingÐalthough not an examinationÐ subject at Oxford. While the building committee worked out the details of construction and funding and Tylor continued with his lectures, the collection itself remained in London, where it had been displayed for a number of years, ®rst at the South Kensington Branch Museum at Bethnal Green, from 1874, and then at the Main Branch on Cromwell Road after 1878.6 To assist in the task of packing and cataloguing the collection, Moseley engaged the young research student W. Baldwin Spencer, later noted for his work on Australian kinship systems, who had read for the Natural Science honour school at Exeter College, where Moseley and E. R. Lankester were fellows. Soon afterwards Henry Balfour, also a graduate of the Natural Science school, was appointed as Tylor's assistant at Oxford. Balfour was responsible after 1885 for unpacking objects once they arrived at Oxford and for supervising their installation within the new galleries as the latter were completed from 1886 onwards. That task would last until 1890, the museum having already been opened to the public. The `frequent arrival of new. . . additions,' as Balfour complained7Ðamong them collections presented by explorers such as the missionary in Melanesia, R. H. Codrington, and the archaeologist, Arthur EvansÐimposed delays. The transfer of the University's older ethnographical and archaeological collections, including the Ashmolean's famous Cook collection (donated by Johann Reinhold Forster),8 produced added complications and prevented Balfour from actually completing arrangements in the Museum until a much later date. The delays proved a constant source of complaint to Pitt-Rivers, who occasionally made recommendations to the staff at Oxford. 5 Gazette xiii (12 Jan. 1883), 248; (20 Mar. 1883), 383. The lectures were in reported in OM 21 Feb. 1883, 88, and 28 Feb. 1883, 111. 6 W. R. Chapman, `Pitt-Rivers and his Collection, 1874±1883: The Chronicle of a Gift Horse,' Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 14: 2 (1983), 181±202; see also W. R. Chapman, `Ethnology in the Museum: A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers (1827±1900) and the Institutional Foundations of British Anthropology' (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1982). 7 Gazette xix (2 May 1888), 403. 8 R. F. Ovenell, The Ashmolean Museum, 1683±1894 (1986), 167.

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By the early 1890s, the Pitt Rivers Museum had settled more or less into a routine. Tylor lectured to students, many of them from the as yet unrecognized women's colleges, both in the Museum and at his home, the Keeper's Lodge, on Parks Road. Balfour, who was appointed successively sub-curator, assistant curator and, in 1891, curator, `demonstrated' from the collection, enlisting research students and undergraduates to assist in the continual tasks of arranging artefacts and cataloguing. An attempt in 1895 to make Anthropology an examination subject in the Natural Science honour school was defeated. Tylor, whose readership was converted almost as a recompense to an honorary professorship in the next year, blamed the `unholy alliance between Theology, Literae Humaniores and Natural Sciences', identifying W. A. Spooner of New College, who spoke against the proposed school in Convocation, as `the arch-villain'.9 But students continued to be attracted to the ®eld, despite the fact that there were as yet few research opportunities or academic appointments. In 1904, having opposed according Anthropology the status of an honour school, Spooner was among the signatories of a memorial submitted to the Hebdomadal Council, urging the claims of Anthropology for fuller recognition by the University.10 Supporters included representatives of natural science (G. C. Bourne, W. J. Sollas, and W. F. R. Weldon), Literae Humaniores (E. Caird, L. R. Farnell, and J. A. Stewart), and Theology (S. R. Driver, A. M. Fairbairn, and W. Sanday), re¯ecting the inter-disciplinary interest in the subject. A diploma course was started in 1905, attracting graduate students in anthropology and members of the colonial service; and the ®rst examination was held in 1908. Among the ®rst candidates for the diploma were Sir Francis Knowles, who went on to work as a physical anthropologist to the Canadian Geological Survey, and Barbara Friere-Marreco of Lady Margaret Hall, subsequently a research fellow at Somerville. Teaching provision was extended under the organization of the Committee for Anthropology whose secretary, R. R. Marett, a Lit. Hum. tutor at Exeter and former student of Tylor, organized a series of lectures on Anthropology and the Classics. Since 1895 Arthur Thomson, Professor of Human Anatomy, had offered courses in physical anthropology; and by 1910 the committee listed over twenty teachers in allied subjects offering instruction relevant to the needs of anthropology students.11 While the major period for growth of the subject would come only in the 1920s, when anthropology became linked more securely to the problems of 9 J. L. Myres, `Memories of the Pitt Rivers Museum,' in Anthropology at Oxford (published on the Anniversary of the Five Hundredth Meeting of the Oxford University Anthropological Society, 1953), 7. The debate in Convocation on the proposed honour school was reported in the Oxford Times 8 June 1895; a correspondent explained the opposition from the point of view of the Lit. Hum. school in OM 12 June 1895, 419. 10 HCP 69 (1904), 87±90. 11 Gazette xl (31 Jan. 1911), 414.

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colonial administration, Oxford, primarily through the Pitt Rivers Museum, had made a strong beginning in it. Despite Tylor's retirement in 1909, and with it the end of the professorship, which had been a personal one, the Department (later the Institute) of Social Anthropology was founded in 1914. Its initial funding came from the Drapers' Company, mainly through the work of Tylor's successor, R. R. Marett, who became Reader in Social Anthropology in 1910.12 Although Pitt-Rivers's aim for a science of anthropology based largely on museum research was never realized, as Pitt-Rivers himself complained just before his death, the Museum which he had founded through his gift had served as a base for the new subject both at Oxford and for the nation. 12

Gazette xlv (27 Jan. 1915), 343.

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NOTE A The Medical School under Osler charles webster The shape of Oxford medicine was determined some quarter-century before the arrival in 1905 of William Osler as Regius Professor.1 The latter made no attempt to alter the earlier compromise.2 Advocates of the `Lost Medical School' therefore made no progress under Osler. Admittedly, Osler held the chair during the First World War, but he displayed no reforming instincts during the previous nine years of peace. Osler was at the zenith of his career at Johns Hopkins (1889±1905), which was then undergoing changes which made it the most advanced medical school in the Anglo-Saxon world. Osler was a part, although not the dominant member, of the team responsible for these developments. He was also deservedly notable for having written what was arguably the best single-volume textbook of medicine produced in modern times.3 Other recommendations for his appointment in Oxford were his link with his predecessor in the Regius chair, J. S. Burdon-Sanderson, under whom he had worked brie¯y while the latter was at University College London; and also his broad humanistic af®liations, which were an inevitable attraction in Oxford, where there was still suspicion that the rise of science entailed erosion of the values of liberal education. There is no doubt about the stature or merit of Osler, but neither he nor the University saw his appointment as a springboard for change. Osler was appointed as the guardian of continuity; his position was a convenient and undemanding place of honour and dignity from which he could undertake broader public responsibilities and thereby add to the reputation of the University for general responsibility and social concern. Osler's charismatic function was further enhanced during the First World War, when his generous and legendary hospitality at 13 Norham Gardens became a symbol for Anglo-American co-operation in the ®eld of the emergency medical services. 1 The principal sources for Osler's tenure of the Oxford chair are: H. Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (2 vols 1925); K. Dewhurst (ed.), Oxford Medicine: Essays on the Evolution of the Oxford Clinical School to commemorate the Bicentenary of the Radcliffe In®rmary 1770±1970 (Sandford-on-Thames, 1970); A. Flexner, Medical Education in Europe. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (New York, 1912); A. D. Gardner, `Some Recollections' (typescript, University College Library, Oxford); `Sir William Osler: Memorial Number, Appreciations and Reminiscences', Bulletin of the International Association of Medical Museums and Journal of Technical Methods, no. 9 (Montreal, 1926); A. H. T. Robb-Smith, A Short History of the Radcliffe In®rmary (1970). 2 The compromise whereby the Faculty of Medicine was created in 1886 and teaching provided in the medical sciences, but without instituting a complete clinical school of the type advocated in some of the evidence submitted to the Selborne Commission (arguing for the restoration of the `lost medical school'), is described in A. H. T. Robb-Smith, `Medical Education', Pt 1 Ch. 17, esp. 576±82. 3 The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892).

504

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505

Outside Oxford Osler exercised much positive in¯uence; in the medical ®eld he gave support for the establishment of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine, which ®rst appeared in 1906, and the Biochemical Journal which began in 1913. Osler was a leading ®gure in the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. He was even involved in an attempt to establish the history of medicine on an academic basis in Oxford, as well as in other gestures towards the humanities. Inevitably, because of his mammoth stature, the tradition has grown up that Osler exercised a decisive direct in¯uence on the Oxford medical faculty. However, this view rests on very slender evidence. In general, Osler's positive reputation rests on his informal activites at the Radcliffe In®rmary, where he conducted ward rounds and demonstrations for the bene®t of medical students and admirers. This to some extent revived the intentions of the effectively redundant Lich®eld chair,4 and it demonstrated Osler's gifts as a clinician and performer, thereby serving a valuable inspirational role, but this initiative possessed no systematic importance. Osler made little impact on the pre-clinical sciences. The chair of Anatomy was occupied by a Burdon-Sanderson nominee. The chairs of Pathology and Physiology were indeed ®lled by able scientists during Osler's time, but although Osler was involved to some extent in these elections, there is no evidence that he determined these appointments. The chairs of Biochemistry and Pharmacology were established only after Osler's retirement.5 The following notes outline some of the main developments in the preclinical departments, and the degree to which Osler was involved. Anatomy was of course the only facet of the medical faculty to have enjoyed a venerable history comparable with the Regius chair. During the time of Osler the department was in decline. Burdon-Sanderson had been responsible for the appointment in 1885 of Arthur Thomson, who had made a promising start at Edinburgh under the versatile and interesting Patrick Geddes. A new department was built and opened in 1893; but this accommodation was cramped and it was made into a museum, an environment unsuitable for modern experimental work. Thomson himself was a conscientious committee man, but he had no reputation as a scientist. Under him the Anatomy Department became a backwater. He hardly ®gures in the Osler biography. Physiology was, in reality, the only area of untarnished success in Oxford medicine during the time of Osler. The Wayn¯ete Professor was Francis Gotch, a former assistant to Burdon-Sanderson, and then Professor in Liverpool (holding the chair that passed to Sherrington), and ultimately BurdonSanderson's successor from 1895 until 1913. Gotch was known as a good 4

In 1882 the chair of clinical instruction was converted into two lectureships, Pt 1, 576. For the later developments see Charles Webster, `Medicine' in The Twentieth Century, Ch. 12, esp. 318±21; J. Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1914±1939: Transforming an Arts University (1997). 5

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lecturer, but as a scientist was no more than a minor worthy. He inherited a department built by Burdon-Sanderson. Gotch was the only pre-clinical professor who could be described as an intimate of Osler. With the latter's support, Gotch was successful in securing £5,500 to build an extension to the department. The situation was transformed with the appointment in 1913 of Charles Scott Sherrington, an outsider who had made his reputation in Liverpool, having been an unsuccessful candidate for the Wayn¯ete chair in 1895. Sherrington's reputation was made by The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906), which soon established itself as a classic of neurophysiology. Sherrington was already 56 on his appointment, but like his counterpart in Cambridge, Frederick Gowland Hopkins, continued to make an outstanding contribution to research well into his advanced years. He seems to have had only limited contact with Osler, but he found the Regius Professor pleasantly unstuffy. The Cushing biography makes few references to Sherrington, to whom Osler seems to have attached little signi®cance. During the First World War Sherrington became Chairman of the Industrial Fatigue Board, and he also undertook researches on behalf of the government into the alcohol problem. The zenith of his research work on re¯ex activity of the spinal cord occurred after the war, and it was then that he recruited his devoted band of disciples, who came subsequently to exercise a dominating in¯uence in the ®eld of neurophysiology throughout the Western world. Oxford also enjoyed the presence of a second great physiologist, the wellborn John Scott Haldane, who was related to Burdon-Sanderson, and was an expert on the physiology of respiration. He came to Oxford in 1887 and was Reader in Physiology from 1907 to 1913. Haldane had little contact with the Regius Professor, and after Sherrington's arrival he worked from his private laboratory in a non-university capacity. Haldane undertook important war-related work, especially in connection with problems of breathing in submarines. Sherrington was a notoriously poor lecturer but a brilliant experimentalist, and introduced new methods for demonstrating mammalian physiology to students. Sherrington's Mammalian Physiology: A Course of Practical Exercises, ®rst issued in 1919, became a model for teaching elsewhere. Student numbers expanded from 7 each year in 1887 to 26 per annum in 1914. The ®nal honour school of Animal Physiology was dominated by the staff of Sherrington's department and virtually all medical tutors in the colleges were physiologists. By the end of the war the hitherto adequate laboratory facilities were no longer suf®cient; some extra space became available in 1926 when biochemistry moved out, but the new department was not opened until 1953. Pathology was an important area for modernization in Oxford. A small start was made under Acland and Burdon-Sanderson, when in 1895 James Ritchie established a small department, but he eventually tired of waiting for the promised chair and adequate support for his department, and went to

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become the Superintendent of the laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. This provoked the University to take action; the chair was established shortly after Ritchie's departure, and the ®rst appointment went in 1907 to Georges Dreyer from Denmark, who had worked at the celebrated State Serum Institute in Copenhagen. This was a forward-looking appointment: Dreyer was a relatively young candidate, an outsider abreast of modern thinking, and a superb technician. He immediately succeeded in obtaining a minimum establishment for his departmentÐa University lecturer (E. W. Ainley-Walker) and a demonstrator (A. G. Gibson), both of whom served with him for many years. Dreyer established the reputation of his department, especially in the ®elds of bacteriology and biological standardization. The value of this work was demonstrated during the war, when Dreyer used his in¯uence to secure vaccination for typhoid and paratyphoid. In 1915, under A. D. Gardner (a future Regius Professor of Medicine), a centre for standard serums was set up in the department, funded by the Medical Research Committee (MRC). Immediately after the war, however, Dreyer's reputation went into catastrophic decline owing to a claim to have arrived at a vaccine for tuberculosis, and despite generous support from the MRC and the Dunn bequest, the department failed. The subsequent history suggests that severe personality failings may have been evident from the outset and stray pieces of evidence from before 1918 support this view, and especially suggest Dreyer's extreme imperiousness and intolerance.6 Dreyer failed to get pathology and bacteriology established at the ®rst-degree level; it was not taught until after the ®nal honour school, and the examinations were unclassi®ed, but were nevertheless useful preparation for entry into the London clinical schools. Pharmacology was not yet properly established in Oxford. In 1906 the facilities for this subject were described as being `little better than a shed',7 and matters did not improve until 1926, when space became available in the old department of pathology, which then moved to the new Dunn School of Pathology. James A. Gunn, who had struggled to teach pathology in the old museum until this date, was then rewarded by being appointed the ®rst statutory Professor of Pharmacology. Pharmacology, like pathology and bacteriology, was not examined in the ®nal honour school. Biochemistry advanced in Cambridge under Hopkins, but was not established in Oxford until after the war, when Osler's successor, A. E. Garrod, obtained support from the Rockefeller Foundation for a department, while Sherrington obtained an endowment from a Liverpool merchant to support the stipend of the new professor. 6 S. R. Douglas, `Georges Dreyer 1873±1934', ONFRS i (1932±5), 569±76; E. W. AinleyWalker, `Georges Dreyer', Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology, xxxix (1934), 707±23; Morrell, Science at Oxford, 182±6. 7 `The Oxford Medical School', BMJ, 23 June 1906, 1487.

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NOTE B The Ruskin School philip morsberger The Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University and the Slade School of Art at London University not only began operations in the same year (1871) but were actually part of the same bequestÐthe provision of £35,000 by Felix Slade, a wealthy lawyer, to establish chairs of ®ne art at the Universities of Oxford, London (University College), and Cambridge. At Cambridge, the ®rst Slade Professor was the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt; London University elected the artist Edward Poynter; Oxford's professorship was awarded to one of the most extraordinary men of the nineteenth century, the critic, historian, poet, philosopher, social prophet, and artist, John Ruskin. Although Cambridge was content to limit the activities of its Slade professor to giving lectures on art theory, history, and criticism, London directed Poynter to set about establishing an academy within University College for the training of ®ne-artists.1 At Oxford, it was the professor rather than the University who ®rst envisioned a school for the study of drawing and related activities. In his inaugural lecture of 8 February 1870, Ruskin, to the general dismay of his listeners, expressed his intention `to establish [within the University] both a practical and critical school of ®ne art for English gentlemen'.2 By the following year, the Ruskin Drawing School had become a fact, with working space in Beaumont Street in the University Galleries. The School cost Ruskin £5,000 of his own money for the establishment of a drawing mastership. He made, as well, a further gift to the University of about 800 drawings, prints, photographs, and watercolours, including a body of superb works by J. M. W. Turner, whom he had championed nearly thirty years earlier with the publication of Modern Painters.3 The ®rst trustees of the new school were: the Vice-Chancellor; Prince Leopold (the fourth son of Queen Victoria, and an undergraduate at Christ Church); Dean Liddell of Christ Church (the father of Lewis Carroll's Alice); the Regius Professor of Medicine (H. W. Acland); Bodley's Librarian (H. O. Coxe); and Ruskin himself.4 Ruskin, Liddell, and Acland had met as far back as 1836, when Ruskin and Acland found themselves fellow undergraduates at Christ Church and Liddell was a young tutor at that college. A respectful friendship developed which was to endure for more than half The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable help provided by Professor Robert Hewison in the preparation of this brief history. 1 2 3 4

H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826±1926 (1929), 346±7. Ruskin, Works, xx. 27. Gazette, v (1 June 1875), 633±4; UOC (1877), supplementary evidence, 375. The Ruskin Collection at Oxford: The Rudimentary Series, ed. R. Hewison (1984), 24±5.

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a century, during which each man was to leave a lasting mark on the UniversityÐnone, perhaps, more than Ruskin himself. It is fascinating to re¯ect on the remarkable interrelationship over the years of these three gifted men; and it is not often appreciated just how much the Ruskin School was actually the offspring of Christ Church. Liddell, from 1858, and Acland, from 1866, were both among the curators of the University Galleries, which had ®rst opened their doors in 1845.5 That same year, 1845, had seen the publication of the ®rst volume of Modern Painters, a precocious work of extraordinary insight and indisputable genius which, well over a century later, has lost little of its force. From the moment Modern Painters appeared, Acland knew he wanted Ruskin back at Oxford. When, in 1869, an appointments committee was set up by the University to consider Mr Slade's bequest for a chair of ®ne art, both Acland and Liddell were named to the committee. When Ruskin, consequently elected as the ®rst Slade Professor, submitted a formal proposal to the curators of the University Galleries for the establishment of a Drawing School, the most senior curators were Acland and Liddell. So, in the event, the Ruskin School was actually brought to life by three men of Christ Church. With such a sound beginning, with two generous benefactions (one from Felix Slade, one from Ruskin himself), and with professors and even a prince in on the foundingÐand considering, too, that John Ruskin had been formed by Oxford, was in every sense an `Oxford Man', and now held its newest chairÐit seems extraordinary that the school was destined to be endlessly troubled, uncertain of its direction, insecure, and actually impoverished for the next hundred years, even as the Slade School in London ¯ourished, going from strength to strength. The reasons are intriguing. There already existed in the city the Oxford School of Science and Art; its Director, appointed in 1865 when the School opened, was Alexander Macdonald, a draughtsman;6 both School and Director were very much in the gift of Acland and Liddell, both of whom had daughters studying under Macdonald. Through Liddell's and Acland's good of®ces, the School of Science and Art, though not part of the University, had been granted working space in the University Galleries. And it was Macdonald who was appointed the ®rst Master of Professor Ruskin's new Drawing School, which now, in effect, merged with the School of Science and Art. Ruskin considered himself responsible only to Oxford undergraduates: his was a University commitment. Macdonald, on the other hand, taught `The Professor's Class' for undergraduates, but also, with Ruskin's uncertain permission, `The Town Class', which comprised those who, like Alice Liddell, had used the facilities of the School of Science and Art. So, owing to 5 6

See Pt 1, 622. R. Hewison, Ruskin and Oxford: The Art of Education (1996), 56±8; Pt 1, 625.

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Macdonald's duality, the new Ruskin School was, from its inception, at once both inside and outside the University. Ruskin insisted on the highest standards of performance by the undergraduates; Macdonald, as Ruskin ruefully observed, `lets anybody in'.7 By this he meant that Macdonald admitted non-members of the University, whose fees were their principal quali®cation. Ruskin's goals for the undergraduates were lofty indeed. He made it clear that he wanted to produce through the combination of his lectures, writings, and the Drawing School, not merely artists but something much granderÐ `whole' men and women. He insisted that art teaching must be grafted onto something deeper than art per se and held that the teaching of art is the teaching of all things. He told the undergraduates that, however unsuccessful they might consider their drawings, they would nevertheless have learned what no words could as forcibly or completely have taught them.8 The students did exercises related to the drawings, photographs, etc. which Ruskin had given to the University. Architecture, botany, geology, ornithology: Ruskin saw art as an opportunity to explore all these, and more. Art was to be a branch of Natural Philosophy. Macdonald, meanwhile, was receiving the Ruskin Master's salary plus fees from the Town Class, and was also teaching at nearby Radley College. Indeed, he even became Keeper of the University Galleries. Ruskin's disquiet grew: he considered that Macdonald was undermining the new school and bringing the Ruskinian vision into discredit by allowing `dabblers and idlers' to occupy valuable space in the Galleries.9 Ruskin was not complacent or indifferent towards the fate of the Drawing School, as has sometimes been imagined: quite the contrary. In 1875 he actually pressed for the establishment of a degree in ®ne art to be awarded through the School and asked the Hebdomadal Council to set up a committee to consider the proposal. Council chose not to be interested, but the idea was far-seeing and remarkably prophetic. In 1877 Ruskin announced ambitious plans for extending the School to include a goldsmiths' shop and a sculpture studio; this too was rejected. In 1878, partly in disappointment at the dif®culties besetting his school, Ruskin sustained what was to be the ®rst of a series of severe mental breakdowns. In the same year he had had to suffer the devastating libel suit brought against him by Whistler in response to some of his journalistic criticism of Whistler's latest London exhibition. In 1879, exhausted, Ruskin resigned the Slade professorship; in 1881 he was struck by another, more crippling breakdown. A long period of recuperation followed; but by March 1883 Ruskin was offered the Slade chair anew and felt strong enough to accept. 7 8 9

Ruskin to Joan Severn, 27 May 1883, Bodl. MS Eng. Lett C. 46, fo. 3. `Line', lecture delivered 9 Mar. 1870, Ruskin, Works, xx. 130. Ruskin to Acland, 5 Feb. 1883, Bodl. MS Acland d. 73, fo. 166. For this see also Pt 1, Ch. 20.

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Back on the job, Ruskin proposed in 1884 that better premises should be built at the back of the University Galleries. He was prepared to help in meeting the expenses from his own resources. Once again his efforts to improve the School were refused by the University. Finally, on 22 March 1885, Ruskin resigned for good as Oxford's Slade Professor of Fine Art, a sick and disillusioned man. He tried subsequently, in 1886, to have Macdonald removed from his post, noting to his old friend Acland that an unwillingness to hurt Macdonald had been virtually the ruin of the Drawing School.10 But Macdonald was kept on, and when he ®nally retired, in 1921, he had reigned for ®fty years. John Ruskin died at his beloved Brantwood, in the Lake District, on 20 January 1900. A further seventy-eight years were to elapse before his dream would be realized of a degree-granting department of Fine Art, with staff, facilities, and levels of support worthy of the University. 10

Ruskin to Acland, 17 Jan. 1886, Bodl. MS Acland d. 73, fo. 199.

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NOTE C The Pattern of Examinations, 1914 m . c . c u r t h oy s Since its inception in 1800 the examination system had been considerably extended and modi®ed (see Pt 1, Ch. 11). The following diagrams are intended to illustrate in a simpli®ed form the various routes by which an undergraduate could qualify for a BA degree as matters stood in the academic year 1913±14. Of the examinations for which Greek was a compulsory element, the most crucial was Responsions (or an equivalent), which all undergraduates had to pass before embarking on their degree course. An alternative test, conducted by one of the school examining boards or, in the case of overseas students, by a recognized university, was permitted in lieu of Responsions, provided that it certi®ed that the candidate had achieved the requisite standard of Greek (Indian students could offer alternatives). By 1913 most undergraduates had satis®ed this requirement before coming Responsions or equivalent

Holy Scripture

Pass Mods

Additional Subject at Responsions or equivalent Holy Scripture

Honour Classical Honour Math.Mods. Mods

Prelim. Jurisp.

Prelim. Nat.Sc.

Lit.Hum., Mathematics, Jurisprudence, Modern History, Theology, Oriental Studies f i g u r e 21c.1 Routes to ®nal honours in Lit. Hum., Mathematics, Jurisprudence, Modern History, Theology, and Oriental Studies, 1913/14. Source: Handbook (1913), 105±9.

512

the pattern of examinations, 1914

513

Responsions or equivalent Additional Subject

Holy Scripture

Holy Scripture

Honour Classical Mods

Honour Math.Mods

Prelim. Nat.Sc.

Prelim. Forestry

Natural Science f i g u r e 21c.2 Routes to ®nal honours in Natural Science, 1913/14

Responsions or equivalent Holy Scripture

Classical Honour Mods

Pass Mods English f i g u r e 21c.3 Routes to ®nal honours in English, 1913/14

Responsions or equivalent Additional Subject Holy Scripture

Holy Scripture Honour Classical Mods

Additional Subject Pass and Math.Mods Groups B(2)+(5)

Pass Mods

Prelim. Nat.Sc.

Modern Languages f i g u r e 21c.4 Routes to ®nal honours in Modern Languages, 1913/14

Prelim. Jurisp.

514

teaching and scholarship Responsions or equivalent Holy Scripture

Pass Mods

Classical Honour Mods

3 Pass Group Papers (including 1 Compulsory Classical or Modern languages paper)

1 compulsory Pass Group paper and a Diploma or 2nd B.Mus.

f i g u r e 21c.5 Principal routes to a Pass degree, 1913/14

into residence at Oxford. Whether those who had done so faced any further tests in Greek (beyond that exacted in the compulsory but undemanding examination in Holy Scripture for which some knowledge of the Greek Testament was expected) depended on the honour school they wished to read. There were `Greekless' routes leading to ®nal honours in Mathematics, Natural Science, Jurisprudence, Modern History, Oriental Studies, and Modern Languages. No such remission was allowed for those reading English (unless it was taken as a second school) or for the pass school (except in the rather unlikely event that the candidate had obtained honours in the rigorous Mathematical Moderations); a further classical hurdle had to be surmounted in the form of pass or honour Classical Moderations. Of these intermediate examinations, pass Moderations and the Preliminaries in Natural Science or Jurisprudence could be taken in the ®rst year; Classical and Mathematical honour Moderations were taken in the second year. The History Previous, though approved by Convocation, had not yet been brought into being. All these examinations were open to women; but as women were not yet permitted to graduate they were not subject to the University's qualifying requirements (such as passing Responsions, Holy Scripture, and Moderations) which applied to male undergraduates. By 1914, however, some of the women's colleges were requiring their students to follow the course which, for men, culminated in a degree.

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`T HE MU DD IE D O AFS AT THE GO AL S ' ?

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page

516

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22 University and College Sport h. s. jones By 1850 the Boat Race, though not yet known by that lapidary title, had an established place in the sporting calendar. It was almost (though not quite) an annual ®xture, and was regarded as `the great event of the aquatic year' and `the greatest of all aquatic reunions'.1 The Oxford±Cambridge cricket match, a still more venerable ®xture, had established itself as an annual contest, but excited less public interest than its counterpart on the river. These were, however, the only two inter-university contests yet established; the concept of the `blue' had not yet emerged; and Lord's was not yet established as the permanent venue for the cricket match. Sport in Oxford had not taken on a recognizably modern form; neither had the word `sport' assumed its modern meaning, for to the Oxford undergraduate of the 1850s it still meant hunting, whereas rowing, cricket, and boxing were `athletic pursuits'.2 Several colleges had not yet begun to enter boats in the summer eights; and TorpidsÐalso at this time rowed in the summerÐattracted on average ten or fewer boats. Inter-collegiate cricket matches took place, and were reported in the sporting press, but they were rare events, for few colleges had suf®cient cricketers to compose an eleven. So college elevens had not supplanted the earlier dominance of private clubs such as the Bullingdon. No college owned its own sports ground, and most cricket was played at Cowley Marsh. Oxford sport was expensive and socially exclusive, not least because of the prestige still attached to country sports at a time when the country gentry still formed a prominent element in the undergraduate body.3 The half-century that followed saw the establishment of the distinctive patterns of modern Oxford sport and, indeed, of undergraduate leisure. The topography of central Oxford was transformedÐbut also preserved from 1 Bell's Life, 28 Mar., 4 Apr. 1852. All the races have been rowed on the Thames. The ®rst in 1829 was at Henley. The race on the Tideway became an annual event in 1856. It was rowed from Putney to Mortlake except when this was reversed because the state of the tide made a downstream course desirable. The two universities met in the Henley Grand Challenge Cup for the last time for many years in 1855. 2 For this usage, see, e.g., Cuthbert Bede BA [Edward Bradley], The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman (1853), p. 56. 3 Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 32±3. Farnell refers here to the 1870s.

517

518

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

developmentÐas colleges acquired and laid out sports grounds in accessible locations and as the University Parks were colonized by sportsmen. The range of team sports available to the undergraduate, formerly con®ned to rowing and cricket, was vastly increased with the emergence of football (in both codes), athletics, lawn tennis, hockey, lacrosse, golf, badminton, and a host of other pursuits, each in time giving rise to an annual ®xture against Cambridge and a claim to the award of blues. No sport could acquire standing and respect in undergraduate society without an annual `blues' match, and so the emergence of new sports may be traced by dating the ®rst Oxford±Cambridge contests: racquets and real tennis in the late 1850s; billiards, athletics, shooting, and steeplechasing in the early 1860s; bicycling and football (Rugby and Association) in the 1870s; hockey, water polo, skating, boxing, and fencing in the 1890s; ice hockey, lacrosse, and yachting between 1900 and 1913. Relations between undergraduate sportsmen and the college authorities, formerly strained, improved markedly from the 1880s onwards with the establishment in each college of amalgamated clubs whose ®nancial affairs were placed in the hands of a senior treasurer drawn from among the fellows of the college. Sport was becoming a central institution of college life. To the extent that University sport has been the subject of scholarly attention, a consensus has emerged as to how these developments should be interpreted. This consensus derives ultimately from the views of contemporary critics which have been absorbed into the works of modern historians. Matthew Arnold and Mark Pattison bolstered their arguments for University reform with the allegation that Oxford dispensed what was little more than a continuation of a public-school education.4 Sport was commonly cited as an illustration of the debasement of University education: Pattison denounced the `athletic furor' which had, he thought, established its mastery over Oxford. His judgements were echoed by foreign visitors like TaineÐhardly surprisingly, since it was from Pattison and his circle that Taine derived his view of Oxford.5 This interpretation, partisan though it was, has resurfaced in the works of modern scholars who have maintained that an ideology of athleticism derived from the public schools pervaded late Victorian Oxbridge, marginalized intellectual pursuits, and created a rift between `bloods' and reading men. These works depict Oxford sport as a derivative and eÂlitist phenomenon shaped by privileged under4 M. Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964; ®rst published 1868), 133, 318±20, where he repeatedly refers to Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lyceÂes; M. Pattison, Suggestions on Academical Organisation (Edinburgh, 1868), 127. For Arnold's phrase see Ch. 1, n. 139. 5 Pattison, Suggestions on Academical Organisation, 316; H. Taine, Notes sur l'Angleterre (2 vols Paris, 1923; ®rst published 1872), i. 212; J. Demogeot and H. Montucci, De l'Enseignement supeÂrieur en Angleterre et en Ecosse (Paris, 1870), 76±7.

university and college sport

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graduates who set out to refashion Oxford in the image of their public schools.6 The contention advanced in this chapter is that Oxford sport was a more original or indigenous phenomenon than these critics suggest. Far from being socially divisive and eÂlitist, its tendency was integrative and `democratic'. The rise of team sports was an integral part of changing patterns of undergraduate sociability and made a signi®cant contribution to the purposes of reformed Oxford. Undergraduate consciousness hinged on an insistence that schooldays had been left behind, and a wealth of autobiographical material supports this point of view.7 Many undergraduates found the atmosphere of Oxford liberating after school; others were disappointed at the lack of emphasis on athletic excellence in comparison with school; seldom did an undergraduate ®nd Oxford a straightforward prolongation of his schooldays.8 Football, as we shall see, was slow to penetrate Oxford, not only because of the absence of an agreed code but principally because it was seen, like athletics, as a schoolboys' game.9 Oxford's ®rst love was rowing: the match was made before the public schools' infatuation with sport, and the romanceÐno mere ¯irtationÐhas survived to the present largely because rowing was a rarity at school. In the eighteenth century it was assumed that the patterns of social life, consumption, and leisure of the undergraduate would be determined by his social standing: the gentleman-commoner and the servitor would move in vastly different social circles, and their relations with each other would be based on deference and superiority, not on the equality of two undergraduate members of the same collegiate society. Leisure activities exhibited this pattern. The fashionable undergraduate pursuits, even into the nineteenth century, typicallyÐindeed necessarilyÐinvolved expense on a grand scale: hunting, shooting, and riding, quintessential forms of conspicuous consumption, were easily possible (given the money) for an undergraduate in what was still a small market town close to open country.10 Team gamesÐso characteristic of Victorian OxfordÐwere absent, with the single exception 6 Most important is J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (1981), esp. ch. 6; Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (1989), esp. 83. 7 Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (1953), 33; and Richard Greville Verney, Lord Willoughby de Broke, The Passing Years (1924), 147±8. Willoughby de Broke added that `the schemer, the prig and the bore will ®nd more others like unto themselves at Oxford than they will ®nd anywhere else all through their lives.' Dr Martin Ceadel brought this to my attention. 8 For example, pp. 786, 788, 793n. 67 below; R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939), 12; Stephen Tallents, Man and Boy (1943), 122; L. Ragg, A Memoir of Edward Charles Wickham, Dean of Lincoln (1911), 50; H. Newbolt, My World as in my Time (1932), 95. 9 Howard Marshall with J. P. Jordan, Oxford v. Cambridge: The Story of the University Rugby Match (1951), 14±15; Colin Weir, The History of Oxford University A.F.C. 1872±1998 (1998), 8±10. 10 See Pt 1. 273. Samuel Smiles deplored the `neglect of physical exercise' among `students' in England and Germany: Self-Help (1859), 241±2.

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of cricket, which was already a fashionable gentry pursuit in the eighteenth century and was introduced into the universities by wealthy Etonians and Wykehamists.11 It was no exception to the association between fashionable pursuits and conspicuous consumption: in Oxford, cricket was played under the auspices of the exclusive Bullingdon Club, and its popularity depended upon the opportunities it provided for riding out to Bullingdon Green, where lavish dinners would be provided.12 By later Victorian standards, the game itself was almost incidental, except perhaps as a stimulus to gambling.13 So even where team sport existed, it was far from instilling the moral lessons which later Victorians derived from it. And, crucially, it was not located in the colleges. Early nineteenth-century Oxford sport, then, was marked by the essentially `private' forms of sociability that survived from the previous century. The distinctive University sports of the Victorian period made their earliest appearance within this context. Rowing, for instance, had its origins in picnic or dinner outings by boat to Nuneham or Sandford. On the return journey, when several `crews' entered If¯ey Lock together, they would scramble out of the lock as quickly as possible, and the later ones would give chase to the leaders. Rowing was the ®rst sport to give rise to systematic inter-collegiate competition: the ®rst eights race took place in 1815, with Brasenose at the head of the river. Gradually the college connection came to be regarded not merely as a convenient way of arranging rival crews but as the very nub of the contest: so, in 1823, after vigorous controversy, professional watermen were banned from the races, and in 1826 a meeting of college strokes excluded out-college men from college Eights, except in the case of illness or other unavoidable absence.14 Inter-collegiate competitive rowing was, then, well under way before the period of expansion in numbers of undergraduatesÐand before the cult of athleticism took hold of the public schools. Its signi®cance was soon acknowledged in the Oxford social season, for already by the early 1840s Commemoration week festivities featured the `procession of boats' in order of their position in the Eights.15 Torpids began in 1838, and were initially held in May or June, so that the early entrants were evidently college second eights. In 1852 they were moved to Hilary term, and it is not surprising 11

G. V. Cox, Recollections of Oxford (1870), 58. Hereford George, New College 1856±1906 (1906), 94; James Pycroft, Oxford Memories (1886), ii. 117; H. E. D. Blakiston, Trinity College (1898), 229±30. 13 S. Rothblatt, `Student Subculture and the Examination System in Early 19th-century Oxbridge', in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton, 1974), i. 247±303. 14 W. E. Sherwood, Oxford Rowing (1900), 5±6, 8, 11±12. All the college races were rowed on the Oxford stretch of the River Isis (Upper Thames). 15 Oxford Herald, 15 June 1839; Oxford Journal 1 July 1843. J. W. Peard's prowess as an oarsman was long remembered (Exeter College, 1829±33); but this owed much to his later fame as `Garibaldi's Englishman'. His feats with `The Thousand' outshone those on the river. 12

university and college sport

521

to ®nd a signi®cant increase in the number of boats entered in that decade, for Torpids could now be seen as preparation for the Eights. But the increase in numbers of boats was in fact steady and continuous: from ten or fewer in the 1840s, it rose to more than twenty in the 1870s and to thirty by the end of the century.16 The number of boats in the Eights did not increase quite so rapidly, for it was only from 1908 onwards that a college was allowed to enter a second eight, but it seems clear that the number of undergraduate rowers increased rapidly, even in proportion to the total size of the undergraduate population. At Brasenose, which was admittedly untypical in its numerical stagnation in the nineteenth century, but which entered boats in Eights and Torpids from the beginning, some 15 per cent of those admitted to the college in the 1840s represented the college either in Eights or Torpids or both; half a century later the ®gure had risen to over 30 per cent.17 Rowing, then as now, had far more undergraduate participants than any other Oxford sport. Contemporaries estimated that a majority of undergraduates rowed at some point in their time at Oxford,18 and they seem to have been right in their estimate. At St John's in 1883 44 per cent of undergraduates put their names down for Torpid fours.19 At Corpus, of 121 undergraduates who matriculated between 1899 and 1904, ®fty-eight (or 48 per cent) were recorded as participants in Michaelmas fours, Torpids, or Eights. Even in a large college like Keble the boat club of®cers would be disappointed if fewer than half the freshmen took up rowing in their ®rst term, though many of them would be weeded out prior to formal competition.20 Given the likelihood of a high turnover of oarsmen from one year to the next, these ®gures are quite compatible with the proposition that more than half the undergraduates rowed at some time. Rowing was perceived as `the unique feature of Oxford athletics'.21 It was no mere extension of public-school sport: on the contrary, it had a particular appeal to many who had been undistinguished athletes at school, for, unlike cricket, it was a sport in which someone who took it up from scratch at Oxford could, given strength and health, achieve Torpid standard at least.22 This was perhaps the main reason why rowing was the one sport which came to be 16 From H. C. Wace, `Brasenose rowing', in Brasenose College Quatercentenary Monographs ii part ii (1909), 180±8. 17 Brasenose College Register 1509±1909 (1909). 18 J. S. G. Pemberton, `The social life', in J. Wells (ed.), Oxford and Oxford Life (1892), 91. 19 OM 7 Nov. 1883, 357. 20 The statistics on Corpus are derived from the relevant issues of the Pelican Record. For Keble, see the Clock Tower, I no. 1 (Nov. 1912), 18, where disappointment is expressed that only 25 out of 58 freshmen were rowing. 21 Isis, no. 315 (20 May 1905), 350±1. 22 Gilbert C. Bourne, Memories of an Eton Wet-Bob of the Seventies (1933), 6±7. See also B. H. Jackson (ed.), Recollections of Thomas Graham Jackson (1950), 28, for the case of a shortsighted undergraduate for whom rowing at Oxford was his ®rst opportunity to do sport.

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`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

invested with the potential to transcend divisions within the college and to represent the college as a whole;23 perhaps a paradox, given that, with the advent of sliding seats with long slidesÐwhich placed a premium on years of prior training in techniqueÐthe University eight became overwhelmingly dominated by Etonians. For many undergraduates whose period of Oxford residence was quiet, frugal, and hard-working, rowing in the eight or the Torpid was their principal participation in the social life of the college.24 Rowing was quintessentially a team pursuit: it was the eight-oared races that won the affection of the University and of the wider public, and individual stars never won the acclaim that greeted their counterparts in cricket or athletics.25 It was a pursuit where sheer effort and graft counted for more than genius: this was true in particular of Torpids, where ®xed seats were still in use and which remained more `democratic' than the eights. It thus appealed to the Victorian sporting ethos, for it was `a very masculine recreation' which offered `no rewards to the weak, the faint-hearted, or the idler'.26 It also appealed to the emergent college community, which joined old and new members by a common bond of loyalty. For one consequence of the mode of operation of bumping-races was that attainment of a position towards the head of the riverÐunlike victory in rugby or cricket `cuppers'Ðrequired not one season's brilliance but sustained success over several years.27 Old members could follow the fortunes of their college boat in the national press and, knowing the importance of teamwork in rowing, could measure the health of the collegiate spirit. The inability of an individual spectator to view an entire race might be thought an obstacle to the development of rowing into a spectator sport. But the simplicity of the concept of bumping-races, as well as the possibility of completing an inter-collegiate tournament within a week, constituted weighty countervailing advantages. These factors helped Eights Week to acquire a unique importance in the University's social calendar: it acquired colourful ceremonial of its own which enabled it to edge even Encaenia out of its supremacy in the commemorative role. 23 Rugby was regarded as an easier game to pick up from scratch than soccer, which may partly explain the popularity of the former at Oxford: C. B. Fry, `Football', The Badminton Magazine i (1895), 483±92. 24 For two such examples see R. Jackson, Gordon Hewart (1959), 20, and E. A. Towle, A. H. Mackonochie (1890), 16±17. 25 When contemporaries commended rowing, it was often on the ground that it was a team effort: e.g. `Rowing at the Universities', Pall Mall Gazette, 1 June 1868, 112. Also letter from a `treasurer of college clubs' in OM 30 Nov. 1887. 26 Gilbert C. Bourne, A Text-Book of Oarsmanship, with an essay on muscular action in rowing (1925), 376. 27 J. Wells, Wadham College (1898), 202, and OM 30 Nov. 1887. The boats were arranged in line, the intervals between them being the same in all cases. When a boat caught up with the one in front, its bow touching the latter's stern, the pair fell out of the race, and on the next day those two changed places.

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Rowing was thus uniquely well-equipped to furnish a more egalitarian college community with a focus for its enthusiasm. But other sports evolved in a similar direction, abandoning the exclusiveness of private clubs and locating themselves ®rmly within the college or the University. Cricket was not a game that could readily be taken up from scratch at Oxford, and the cricketers in college, more than the rowers, tended to form a clique drawn from the leading public schools; but the removal of the OUCC from Cowley Marsh to the Parks in 1881, and the laying out of college grounds near to the centre of the city, enhanced the general interest in the game.28 Football was the other game with a credible claim to representative status, which could help undergraduates from obscure backgrounds to ®nd acceptance in college society.29 The very organization of the game, in its two codes, itself refutes the idea that loyalty to one's old school was a pervasive force in undergraduate life; for while the top public schools remained loyal to their own codes of football, college rugby and college soccer necessarily brought together men from different schools. In its early days, Oxford football took the form of matches between teams drawn from a particular school playing according to their `local' code; and the process by which this system was superseded by inter-collegiate competition surely helps refute the notion that undergraduate sociability in late nineteenth-century Oxford was rooted in a `public-school consciousness'. Football was introduced into Oxford by public schoolboys eager to continue to play the game they had learned at school. The exercise may have been a deliberate reliving of schooldays; certainly in the early stages there was no intention of setting up football as a rival to rowing and cricket, which were still `the only acknowledged athletic pursuits of the University'. Even when the OURFC was founded in 1869, it was by a group of Old Rugbeians, and for a time the game was practically con®ned to Rugbeians and Marlburians. For the ®rst seven years of the club's existence, the rules stipulated that the captain, the secretary, and one of the three members of the committee must be Rugbeians. The club had a semi-private status: it was, in a sense, an Oxford branch of the Old Rugbeians and Old Marlburians, for in those early days all Rugbeians and Marlburians at Oxford were expected to subscribe, though `outsiders' might join voluntarily. But the crucial point is that the club shed its ambiguous standing: between 1878 and 1903 only two Rugbeians captained the club, and none at all did so between 1887 and 1903.30 Loyalty to one's school was insuf®cient to sustain `local codes' among Oxford undergraduates: attempts to continue Winchester football 28

Wells, Wadham College, 202; J. S. G. Pemberton (n. 18), `The Social Life', 94±5. J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1949), 30; Earl of Birkenhead, F. E.: The Life of F. E. Smith (1969), 38. 30 A. C. M. Croome (ed.), Fifty Years of Sport at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Great Public Schools (1913±22), ii. 19; Marshall and Jordan (n. 9), Oxford v. Cambridge, 13±14. 29

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were conspicuously unsuccessful, and footballers from Eton, Harrow, and Winchester commonly took up rugby or (more frequently) soccer when they came up to Oxford.31 An analysis of the composition of college sports teams con®rms the capacity of Oxford sporting life to transcend public-school loyalties. Of sixty-seven Corpus rowing men who matriculated in the years 1899 to 1905, only sixteen were drawn from the twenty-three most prominent `rowing schools'. Undergraduates from those schools were only a little more likely to row at Oxford than were their contemporaries from nonrowing schools: 59 per cent in the former case and 45 per cent in the latter. Similar conclusions may be drawn from an analysis of Exeter oarsmen: contemporaries were correct when they stressed the attractiveness of rowing to undergraduates who had no previous experience of the sport.32 By the turn of the century, public schools (other than thoseÐEton, Harrow, and WinchesterÐwhich remained loyal to their own code) were all clearly identi®ed as either soccer or rugby schools. At Oxford, though undergraduates from soccer-playing schools would rarely take up rugby, their more numerous contemporaries from rugby-playing schools would quite commonly play soccer for the college, partly, no doubt, out of concern to defend college pride in the event of dif®culty in raising a team. Indeed in small colleges like Corpus, Worcester, and St Edmund Hall it was common for the same undergraduates to play both codes of football, and to pull their weight by playing other sports too.33 This period was remarkably fertile in the invention of college traditions, as the publication of the College Histories series demonstrates; but it is notorious that the invention of tradition is often a reaf®rmation of a threatened identity. In reformed Oxford there was ®erce competition between colleges; but it is a paradox that in modern Oxford inter-collegiate rivalry has not preserved but eroded the distinctive qualities of each college. Balliol graduates, elected to fellowships elsewhere, were instrumental in the convergence of colleges. This was the case in college sport, whose organization owed much to the initiative of Balliol, then the college of foremost academic repute; and the Balliol model of amalgamated clubs with senior treasurers was followed even by a self-consciously `sporting' college like Brasenose. When that college's boat club appointed a senior treasurer in 1881, the ®rst holder of the of®ce was the junior bursar, Richard Lodge, who 31

J. E. Vincent, `Winchester Football', in Montague Shearman, Football (1899), 84. Data derived from the Pelican Record; P. A. Hunt and N. A. Flanagan, Corpus Christi College Oxford Biographical Register 1880±1974 (1988); and the Stapeldon Magazine. `Rowing schools' are those de®ned as such in J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School (1977), 254±5. 33 H. Newbolt, My World as in my Time (1932), 95; Harry Brittain, Pilgrims and Pioneers (1946), 24; W. Wand, Cheerful Page (1965), 34. 32

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had enjoyed a distinguished but not notably athletic undergraduate career at Balliol.34 There were exceptions, and Christ Church stands out as a college where older leisure patterns retained their hold. In its volume in the College Histories series it boasted of its beagles, the only permanent pack in Oxford: the Christ Church beagles remained a noted Oxford institution at a time when, from the 1870s onwards, the decline of the gentry element among the undergraduates was undermining the pursuit of country sports in most colleges. GoneÐin most collegesÐwere the days of the celebrated sportsman, Squire Osbaldeston, who, as an undergraduate at Brasenose in the 1800s, would spend three days a week hunting. On one occasion he rounded off a hard day's hunting by pouring gravy over the heads of two undergraduate brothers who wore powdered wigs to dinner; his behaviour was denounced by the principal as `the act of a drayman or coal heaver in a low coffee shop'.35 Even at Christ Church, Henry Chaplin was one of the last of a dying breed: an undergraduate there in 1859±60, he owned four hunters and had access to his cousin's eighteen horses stabled at Bicester, and hunted six days a week.36 Christ Church was, in fact, losing its pre-eminence in Oxford society, and in team sports it was increasingly marginalized. It had been one of the ®rst rowing colleges, and had conferred its own colour, dark blue, on the Oxford eight.37 Its continued recruitment of Etonians ensured a succession of distinguished oarsmen, and by 1914 it still boasted more rowing blues than any other college. But the House was commonly accused of a lack of collegiate spirit, and in view of its size the performance of its boats was unimpressive. Having been head of the river sixteen times between 1817 and 1849 Christ Church did not repeat that achievement for almost sixty years. Likewise Trinity did not excel on the river because, in the words of the college's historian, it was `too much given to the individualistic pursuits of riding and hunting to excel in an occupation which requires persistent co-operation'.38 These instances apart, there was a general trend in patterns of undergraduate sociability away from the private club to the self-conscious college community. Undergraduate leisure activities came to focus much more sharply on this enlarged college community, and these activities left their mark on the rhythm of college life. In the 1880s 7 p.m.Ðinstead of 4 or 5 p. m. thirty years earlierÐcame to be recognized as the normal hour for 34 At Balliol and before that at Christ's Hospital, Lodge had been a contemporary of A. L. Smith, who, as we shall see, was to play a crucial role in the organization of college sport. 35 E. D. Cuming (ed.), Squire Osbaldeston: His Autobiography (1927), 12. 36 The Marchioness of Londonderry, Henry Chaplin: A Memoir (1926), 21. 37 In 1829 Oxford rowed in white and dark blue striped jerseys, modelled on the uniform of Christ Church because that college was currently head of the river: G. G. T. Treherne and J. H. D. Goldie (eds), Record of the University Boat Race 1829±1880 (1883), 125±6. 38 Blakiston, Trinity College, 229±30.

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dinner in hall: playing cricket or rowing for the college was now compatible with full participation in the domestic life of the college.39 The college community was enlarged to embrace old and current members, and even college servants, whose relationship with the college became much closer as they began to coach the eight or umpire college cricket matches.40 From the 1880s onwards a succession of appeals to old members raised funds for college barges and playing ®elds, a pertinent reminder of the place held by college sport in the hearts of old members. In the public schools, the `cult of athleticism' owed much to the initiative of the masters, who promoted team games as part of a `civilizing process'.41 Even here attitudes were ambiguous: sport had to be cleansed of its associations with rowdiness before it could serve its moral purpose. At the University level, the attitudes of the authorities were still more complex. There is little evidence that the initial impetus behind the growth of team sports owed much to the dons, and there was much outright hostility. Rowing was long regarded with distrust by dons, who from time to time would ban the college eight, as at Jesus in 1844.42 Attitudes were perceived to be changing by the 1860s,43 but as late as 1880 the Wadham eight was banned as a result of antagonism between fellows and undergraduates that had surfaced the previous year.44 The dons' particular bugbear was the inter-university athletic sports: in 1867 it was rumoured that the heads of colleges had banned the staging of such sports in Oxford.45 Attitudes changed in the last third of the nineteenth century; but most dons did not embrace an ideology of athleticism, if that is understood as a blanket endorsement of sport and its values. Tutors deemed it part of their job to help shape the `tone' of the college, and this would often involve a discriminating preference for certain sports over others. Those sports, notably rowing, which required such qualities as selfdenial, patience, and collective effort were esteemed;46 individualistic pursuits enjoyed less encouragement, and those which were deemed incapable 39 For meal-times, see OM no. 18 (27 Oct. 1886), 322; V. H. H. Green, The Commonwealth of Lincoln College 1427±1977 (1979), 562 n. 3; and Christopher Platt, The Most Obliging Man in Europe: Life and Times of the Oxford Scout (1986), 23±6. 40 College magazines not uncommonly carried appreciations of these servants: e.g. Stapeldon Magazine i (June 1904), 8. 41 Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football (1979), chs 2±3. The authors derive the term `civilizing process' from the work of Norbert Elias. 42 Bell's Life, 17 Mar. 1844. 43 Ibid. 29 Mar. 1863. 44 C. S. L. Davies, `The Great Wadham Row', Wadham College Gazette i no. 6 (Michaelmas 1979), 30±1. 45 See the letter of protest from R. F. Clarke, fellow of St John's, to the Vice-Chancellor, G. A. Oxon. c. 83 (432). This hostility survived remarkably late: in 1912 a college magazine could refer to the opposition directed at athletics by ```hecklers'' in the Hebdomadal Council': Brazen Nose i no. 6 (May 1912), 247. 46 Wells (n. 27), Wadham College, 202.

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of domestication were frowned upon or even suppressed. Country sports were never integrated into the new pattern. When E. A. Knox was appointed principal of postmasters at Merton in December 1875, he saw it as his immediate task to `check extravagance and idleness' in a college that enjoyed considerable social cachet. This involved the suppression of the `grinds', regular horseraces to the cost of which all Merton undergraduates were expected to contribute.47 It would be unwise, then, to accept at face value the assertion that in reformed Oxford and Cambridge `the tutors went to great lengths to ``reach'' their students through athletics and collegial comradeship'; still less the hyperbole that `a more or less muscular Christianity became the style of the most active dons.'48 There were sporting dons, some of them of outstanding athletic attainments like C. N. Jackson of Hertford, who in his undergraduate days broke the world record for hurdles. But the characteristic feature of the period was the appearance of a large number of dons who took a close interest in college sport as part of their tutorial duties. They might coach the college eight, and the advent of the bicycle enabled them to follow the boat more easily; or they might make occasional appearances for the college cricket eleven. At University College, H. M. Burge was a cricketer whose `popularity with the undergraduates was assured by his kindly sympathy with their interests and pursuits';49 A. L. Smith at Balliol and W. L. Courtney at New College were two others who shared his approach. Although some pro-athletic dons, like Burge, Courtney, and H. F. Fox, had taught at public schools, it would be misleading to characterize sporting dons as glori®ed schoolmasters.50 Within their ranks were some of the most impressive ®gures in the Oxford of their time. Jowett, for instance, was a keen follower of Balliol sport, the inspiration behind the purchase of land in Holywell for the creation of a college sports ground,51 an in¯uential supporter of the laying out of a University cricket ground in the Parks, and a defender of the interests of the OUBC before Convocation in 1881. A number of dons, especially college heads, explicitly used sporting success as a means of raising the standing of their college: Henry Boyd, Principal of Hertford, was the most notable exponent of this strategy. But sport alone was rarely suf®cient to establish a college as fashionable. Magdalen's rise to eminence under Warren's presidency certainly owed something to the college's prowess on the river; but for Warren academic attainment and aristocratic patronage were complementary to athletic 47 48 49 50 51

E. A. Knox, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian 1847±1934 (n.d. [1935]), 96. T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of the Intellectual Life of Victorian England (1982), 170. DNB. [Mrs W. L. Courtney], The Making of an Editor: W. L. Courtney 1850±1928 (1930), 7. Subsequently known as `The Master's Field'.

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triumphs in this strategy. Other heads ®rmly resisted athleticism: Thomas Fowler of Corpus and Dean Strong of Christ Church were two examples.52 The dangerÐparticularly acute if we pay too much attention to celebrated sporting colleges like BrasenoseÐis of mistaking a serious-minded educational strategy for a victorious philathletic ideology. At a time of a rapid expansion in undergraduate numbers and a growing emphasis on tutorial responsibilities, tutors agonized about the distance that separated them from their pupils.53 For younger dons such as Mandell Creighton at Merton in the 1860s, rowing in, or coaching, the college eight were means of overcoming the gulf;54 but in the nature of things, and especially at a time when tutoring was becoming a lifelong profession, this strategy was available to no more than a minority of dons.55 And it had to be used with care, for undergraduates were suspicious of tutors whose support for sport was too blatantly an attempt to play to the gallery.56 Yet the relationship between dons and undergraduate activities had been profoundly altered: the renewal of the corporate life of the college inevitably did much to fasten this relationship. This process can be seen at work in the changes that took place in the organization of college sport. After 1880 dons formally involved themselves in the running of undergraduate sport. Previously, when sporting activities had been organized wholly by the undergraduates themselves, clubs often ran into ®nancial dif®culties. Subscriptions were consequently high, and (given the social pressure in favour of joining college clubs) sport contributed to the problem of the high expense of an Oxford education. This was the impetus behind the intervention of the dons. The great innovator here was A. L. Smith, who as college lecturer in history amalgamated the clubs at Balliol in 1880.57 Henceforth, the management of sporting clubs (and, in some colleges, musical and other societies too) was united under the overall supervision of a senior treasurer. A single subscription, often charged to battels, would entitle the undergraduate to membership of all the clubs. Smith had been a member of the Balliol eight when an undergraduate, later coached successive generations of Balliol oarsmen, still rowed in the dons' eight, the Ancient Mariners, when in his ®fties, and founded the famous, or notorious, dons' hockey club; 52

C. M. Blagden, Well Remembered (1953), 67. Letter to the Vice-Chancellor from R. F. Clarke of St John's College, 2±3. On Creighton, see Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 52 and Ch. 1, n. 343. 55 In 1874, more than two-thirds of Oxford teachers were aged 35 or less; by 1900 the proportion had fallen to less than one-third: Engel, 294. 56 G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 58±9, on one such don at Brasenose. 57 Strictly speaking, Keble could claim priority, for there the system of amalgamated clubs came into operation as early as 1873. But Keble was regarded as exceptional, both in its newness and in its pronounced emphasis on the provision of an economical education; and it was Balliol's decision that did most to shape Oxford practice: OM, 16 Feb. 1887, and reply by W. Lock, subwarden of Keble, 23 Feb. 1887. 53 54

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but he was no philathlete in the public-school sense. Indeed, in his days at Christ's Hospital there had been no playing ®elds, and the only form of sport from which he derived much pleasure at school was `a mild form of hockey' played on asphalt.58 As a don he valued sport above all as `a solvent of social barriers in the college', and this perception of the potential of sport was rooted in his own experience: when he ®rst entered Balliol as a reserved undergraduate from a relatively poor background he had found in rowing the path to acceptance in college. Smith intended that the device of economically run amalgamated clubs would bring games `within the means of the poorer undergraduates'.59 Other colleges followed Balliol's example: Exeter in 1881, Jesus, Merton, Wadham, and Worcester in 1883, St John's in 1886, Magdalen and Lincoln in 1887, Oriel in 1889, Brasenose in 1892.60 So did the Delegacy of Non-Collegiate Students, which aped the new collegiate pattern: whereas in 1883 the information paper sent to new non-collegiate students simply instructed them on the availability of sports clubs, by 1890 `all students' were positively `recommended' to join the amalgamated clubs, for `they are a valuable means of promoting common feeling, and give opportunities of healthy amusement and social intercourse.'61 At Balliol, under the revised rules of 1881, the amalgamated clubs' committee consisted of the following: six of®cial members, namely the captain, treasurer, and secretary of the boat club, the captain and secretary of cricket, and the president of athletics; one of the fellows; and ten members elected by `the college' (all undergraduates) each Michaelmas term. The general annual subscription was reduced to two guineas, and the entrance fee from £4 10s to £1. This entitled the subscriber to membership of the boat club, the cricket club, and the athletic club. Those who rowed had to pay an additional subscription for the use of practice boats, and those who competed in Torpids or Eights had to make a contribution towards the entrance fees charged by the OUBC. The immediate reason for the amalgamation of the clubs was, in many cases, ®nancial exigency. By the 1870s and 1880s the barges acquired by several boat clubs in the mid-century from the London City Companies were reaching the end of their lives and were being replaced by expensive new barges.62 The example of Exeter is typical and well-documented. In 58 Mrs A. L. Smith, Arthur Lionel Smith, Master of Balliol (1916±1924): A Biography and Some Reminiscences by his Wife (1928), 18±19. 59 DNB; and Mrs A. L. Smith, Arthur Lionel Smith, 31, 76±7, 305±6. 60 Brasenose boat club ®rst appointed a fellow (R. Lodge) as permanent treasurer in 1881, and in 1888 the college clubs amalgamated for the purpose of the collection of subscriptions; but not until 1892 was an amalgamated committee established: H. C. Wace, `Brasenose Rowing' (n. 16), 82, 91, 102. 61 An Information Paper compiled for the use of Students of the University of Oxford who do not belong to any College or Hall (1883), 23; An Information Paper compiled for the use of NonCollegiate Students of the University of Oxford (1890), 24±5. 62 Diana Rowntree, `Oxford College Barges', Architectural Review, cxx (1956), 38.

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1872 the boat club commissioned Salter and Son to construct a new barge and successfully raised about £500 from undergraduates and old membersÐ predominantly, in fact, from the former.63 But when Salter presented his bill, belatedly, in 1876, it was greatly in excess of the expected sum. The captain's emergency appeal to about 230 old members met with a derisory response: only seven replies were received, and these contributions, totalling just £13 17s, had to be returned to the donors. An extraordinary committee was thereupon established, consisting of the boat club committee reinforced by ®ve members elected by the undergraduate body at large, an acknowledgement that the affairs of the boat club were of interest to the whole college, and that increased subscriptionsÐif deemed necessaryÐwould require the consent of the college and not merely of the boat club committee. This committee succeeded in persuading Salter to make certain deductions from his bill; but the boat club's saviour was the sub-rector, William Ince. The governing body decided that it would be improper for the college as a corporate body to bail out the boat club; but Ince and several of his friends made an interest-free loan to the club, to be paid back by means of an addition of ten shillings per annum to the subscription.64 This case was typical of the affairs of college clubs in the 1870s: ®nancial dif®culties and mismanagement were endemic, and this was the context in which amalgamation took place. At Exeter, the decision to amalgamate the clubs was taken in 1881 in response to a combined debt of £575. Within ®ve years the debt was extinguished, and the president of the amalgamated clubs attributed this result above all to the new administrative machinery. In addition, old members now subscribed liberally to help reduce the debt: the contrast with their unwillingness to rescue the boat club in 1876 was due partly to the efforts of the sub-rector, W. W. Jackson, in whose name the circulars were sent. The clubs were no longer private societies but were an integral part of the college community: indeed, the college itself now felt able to make a donation (of twenty guineas) to reduce the debt, and Jackson himself followed his predecessor's example and made an interest-free loan of £100.65 Amalgamation enabled dons to exert control over costs. An undergraduate would now no longer be obliged to subscribe to every club separately for fear of being thought a poor college man; a general subscription to the `amalgas' on his battels would discharge his obligations, and the more ef®cient collection of subscriptions, which were now charged to battels, meant that the level of the subscription could be reduced by 30 or 40 per cent.66 And the dons now acquired the power to help the poorer undergraduates: at Exeter in 63 The old members contributed £70, whereas at least ®fty undergraduates contributed ®ve guineas each: Exeter Coll. MS F. II. 14. 64 Exeter Coll. MS F. II. 17 and F. II. 14. 65 Exeter Coll. MS F. II. 1. 66 This was the estimate given in OM 16 Feb. 1887.

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February 1882, the amalgamated clubs' central committee set up a subcommittee, consisting of the sub-rector, the permanent treasurer (the bursar, C. T. Wilson) and the president of the clubs (Archibald How) `with power to admit as honorary members of the college clubs such members of the college as they shall be satis®ed are unable to pay the whole or any part of the usual subscriptions'.67 This typi®ed the attitudes of dons of the period: sport was a legitimate and desirable undergraduate activity, provided that it shed its old associations with exclusiveness and instead became a genuine college institution, open to all members of college. At the University level, too, dons became involved in the administration of sports clubs, as ®nancial dif®culties impelled clubs to seek assistance, normally from C. N. Jackson (`The Jacker'). Jackson became honorary treasurer of the OUAC in 1869 and subsequently assumed similar and time-consuming duties for the Association football, Rugby football, lawn tennis, and lacrosse clubs.68 Thomas Case performed similar functions for the OUCC. The importance of college sport also owed something to external supports. As in the United States, old members often proved enthusiastic followers of college sport and, as we have seen, began to respond generously to appeals for funds for the purchase of barges and the construction of pavilions. Equally important, perhaps, were the attitudes of employers who recruited Oxford graduates. Public-school headmasters were notorious for esteeming athletic attainments, but they were not alone. There is much evidence to suggest that sporting prowess was taken into account by recruiters to the colonial civil service: Sir Ralph Furse of the Colonial Of®ce was notorious for his preference for blues.69 Most of this evidence, however, comes from the ®n de sieÁcle, and these external in¯uences came into play once sport had attained a central place in college life. Even in the midst of this process of domestication, sport had its critics, both nationally (witness the controversy whipped up by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1868) and in Oxford itself. John Ruskin launched his North Hinksey road improvement project in 1874 as a deliberate attempt to ®nd a more constructive outlet for the energies expended on sport.70 It attracted 67

Exeter Coll. MS F. II. 1. Hertford College Magazine, no. 9 (May 1914), 46±7. The minute book of the Oxford University Lacrosse Club for 1903±14 makes it clear that he regarded it as his duty to attend most committee meetings, which were normally held in his rooms: Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. e. 587. 69 Royal Commission on the Civil Service, evidence 14 Nov. 1912, Qs 18, 653, and 674; A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, A Biographical Dictionary of the British Colonial Governor, Vol. i. Africa (Brighton, 1980), 17. 70 On the North Hinksey project see E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (1911), ii. 184±91; and Alon Kadish, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee 1852±1883 (Durham, NC, 1983), 32±6. In fact the undergraduates who participated in the projectÐmainly from BalliolÐsaw it as a means of getting to know Ruskin. Some of them, like Milner, continued to row. For an early critic of Oxford sport see SCOC (1867), Q 393 et seq. (C. S. Roundell). 68

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a wide range of undergraduates, from earnest Balliol men like Toynbee and Milner to aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, who, when asked which outdoor game he preferred, replied that he played none except that `I have sometimes played dominoes outside French cafeÂs.'71 The `arts and crafts' movement that revolved around Ruskin was an important source of antagonism to sport. C. H. Daniel, fellow, Bursar, and (from 1903) Provost of Worcester, was a High Church clergyman celebrated for his interest in printing, an interest born of the arts and crafts movement which in turn begat the Daniel Press. In 1881 he was the principal (and unsuccessful) opponent in Convocation of the proposed grant of £100 to OUBC to help meet the loss incurred as a result of the ®re at the newly constructed boathouse. He `saw no reason why any grant of this description should be made by the University to an athletic club', for the boathouse was, in his opinion, `a commercial speculation on the part of the boatclub'.72 The aesthetes, prominent in the 1870s, exercised an in¯uence antagonistic to sport, though the movement's academic guru, Walter Pater of Brasenose, enjoyed watching the college sports because `it is so beautiful to see young men leaping over bars like panthers.'73 A more important source of academic opposition to sport was the pro-research party. Its early leader, Pattison, and later proponents of the research ideal, such as Lewis Farnell of ExeterÐ though no mean athletes themselvesÐperceived the popularity of competitive team sports as a symptom of an unwholesome emphasis on `pot-hunting' in Oxford life. Schools results, University prizes, prize fellowships, and sporting trophies were all classed together as spurs to a shallow competitiveness that was both injurious to health and inimical to the higher learning.74 They feared that Oxford was betraying its obligation to scholarship and saw undergraduate enthusiasm for games, with its attendant heartiness, as a symptom of the colleges' degeneration into mere ®nishing schools for public schoolboys. Both Pattison and Farnell were partisans of the interests of the professoriate and the University in academic politics, and were critical of `the spirit of separatism' in the colleges, which they considered a manifestation of the public-school spirit.75 In a sense, these currents of opinion were failures. But it would be wrong to see their failure as evidence of the ascendancy of a henceforth unchallenged ideology of athleticism. A persistent undercurrent in academic opinion was critical of the emphasis on sport. Indeed, the resolution that Daniel opposed in Convocation in 1881 was 71 Wilde had, in fact, rowed in his ®rst year at Magdalen, but was not at home in the strenuous atmosphere of the river: when dismissed from the crew he nonchalantly remarked, `I don't see the use of going backwards to If¯ey every evening.' His scorn for the athletes in college was bolstered by Ruskin's in¯uence: Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), 38, 48. 72 Bell's Life, 5 Mar. 1881. 73 John Buchan, `Nine Brasenose Worthies', in Brasenose Monographs, ii part ii (1909), 24. 74 W. Warde Fowler, Oxford Correspondence of 1903 (1904), 39. 75 Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 59±60, 140±3, 270±4.

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passed by the surprisingly narrow margin of 44 votes to 31, after the honorary treasurer of the OUBC, W. L. CourtneyÐbacked by JowettÐ applied a `whip' in its favour. And sporting Oxford was no homogeneous bloc. The early twentiethcentury wave of criticism of the emphasis on sport, associated with the Edwardian reform movement, coincided with anxiety among games enthusiasts at the declining quality of Oxford sport. Rowing was the particular subject of this anxiety.76 By the turn of the century there was a remarkable diversi®cation of undergraduate pursuits. As late as the 1870s, sport was the only systematic distraction from work, and `sport' meant rowing, cricket, athletics, and (for the gentry) country sport.77 Football was just emerging. But the next quarter of a century saw the emergence of a range of new sports to attract undergraduate attentionÐlacrosse, golf, tennis, hockeyÐas well as a variety of non-athletic pursuits. Drama made its mark with the establishment of the OUDS in 1885,78 and journalism achieved a new prominence with the foundation of the Isis in 1892. There was a new awareness of the signi®cance of cliques in Oxford life: Isis could declare in 1897 that `The Clique System at Oxford is a mysterious but living reality. In no place in the world can its equal be found.' They were not, as formerly, cliques rooted in social status or school attended; rather, they were formed around leisure pursuits like music, drama, politics, and the various branches of sport. Mistrust was held to be most acute between the sporting clique and `those who reverence the higher arts'.79 One consequence of this diversi®cation of undergraduate leisure was that the mission of rowing to be the embodiment of the college spirit became at once more pressing and more elusive. Undergraduates and dons alike lamented the apparent displacement of rowing: Isis commended rowing as `the unique feature of Oxford athletics', contrasted it with `ephemeral pursuits' like tennis, lacrosse, golf, and hockey, and expressed the hope `that the day will never come when so grand a foundation will be sacri®ced in favour of a hodge-podge of less effective if harmless substitutes'.80 Here the weakness of applying an all-embracing concept of athleticism to Oxford is most apparent. Different sports were not regarded as functional equivalents. When a college was anxious about its declining position on the 76 See, notably, Hugh Legge, `Oxford Rowing', Isis (Eights Week Special Number, 1914), 4±5. Also Isis, no. 314 (13 May 1905), 331, and the Bystander, xxiv (29 Nov. 1909), 696. 77 Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (n. 3), 35; and Knox, Reminiscences, (n. 47), 76. 78 See Humphrey Carpenter, OUDS: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society 1885±1985 (1985). 79 Isis, no. 128 (19 June 1897), 321±2. 80 Isis, no. 315 (20 May 1905), 350±1. For other complaints about the dissipation of athletic efforts, see A. B. H., `An Old Story', Stapeldon Magazine, no. 10 (Dec. 1908), 102±5; also ibid. no. 15 ( June 1911), 43±4; and Oriel Record, Mar. 1913, 68±9. Also Hugh Legge, `Re¯ections on Oxford Rowing for 70 Years or thereabouts', OM 25 Feb. 1926, 325.

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river, it would appeal to the exponents of other sports to sacri®ce their specialism for the sake of rowing, in the name of `college patriotism'.81 If those appeals failed, rowing men could be vigorous in their denunciation of other sportsÐ`various kinds of pat-ball and poppy-cock', in the words of one old rowing blue82Ðrather as supporters of the traditional Oxford curriculum were inclined to label new academic disciplines as `soft options'. Lewis Farnell, an oarsman who as a don became increasingly sceptical of the `games-cult', was contemptuous of the fashion for golf, which he considered `specially adapted to the middle-aged, the timid, and the egoist'.83 Indeed, oarsmen were reluctant to admit that rowing could be subsumed under a broader heading like `sport' or `team games'. Gilbert Bourne, a rowing blue in the 1880s who subsequently achieved renown as a rowing coach while a fellow of New College and later still held the Linacre chair of Zoology, maintained that `rowing is not a game and affords an outlet for the energies of a not inconsiderable number of men to whom games, conditioned by arti®cial sets of rules, are for one reason or another distasteful.' Rowing was above all an art, `a grati®cation of an aesthetic instinct for motion on the waters'.84 Bourne recalled being `inconceivably bored', as an Eton schoolboy, by the Eton±Harrow cricket match, and found the atmosphere of the cricket ground uncongenial, though he did play for Eton at the Field Game.85 The sports which gained popularity around the turn of the centuryÐgolf and tennis, for instanceÐwere much more individualistic, even when disguised in the form of competition between teams, than essentially collaborative activities like rowing and rugby. They were also more relaxed and leisured than the strenuous games favoured in the high Victorian period, and could be played in mixed rather than all-male society, aspects which attracted ®erce denunciations from the partisans of the older sporting ethos. Golf gained popularity as an activity which permitted dons and undergraduates to compete on equal terms, so that H. M. Burge played golf with pupils like A. D. Lindsay, and H. F. Fox at Brasenose with the undergraduate John Buchan.86 The hegemony formerly enjoyed by sport (especially rowing) was now contested. The Isis, which in the 1890s had been an enthusiastic advocate of the games-cult, in 1910 published a series of editorials lamenting the prevalence of the `public school spirit' and especially its obsession with sport. The change witnesses to the decline of athleticism: even some Oxford 81

See, e.g., the Stapeldon Magazine, iii, no. 15 ( June 1911), 70. Legge, `Re¯ections on Oxford Rowing', 325. 83 Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 140; cf. also His Honour Judge Radcliffe, `Reminiscences of Oxford in the Seventies', Isis 7 Nov. 1923, 10. 84 Bourne, Memories (n. 22), 5; cf. Bourne, A Text-Book of Oarsmanship, 376. 85 Bourne, Memories, 47±8, 86. 86 D. Scott, A. D. Lindsay: A Biography (1971), 29; J. A. Smith, John Buchan (1965), 52. 82

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undergraduates were exhibiting a mild version of the rebellion against authority that took place among European youth in the ®rst decade of the twentieth century.87 This portrayal of the changing attitudes of the dons has focused on the ascendancy (not, however, unchallenged) of the idea that sport, by being domesticated, could be made to serve the educational purposes of reformed Oxford. But were the objectives of the pro-sport party among the dons ful®lled? Did sport in fact cement the collegiate community? How big a gap was there between intention and result? An emphasis on the `democratic' and educationally progressive impact of sport sits uneasily beside the common perception that sport was associated through bump suppers and Eights week bon®res with rowdy and unruly behaviour, with unthinking allegiance to the crowd, with the persecution of unpopular and unathletic individuals. What was the actual as opposed to the intended impact of sport on status hierarchies among undergraduates? Farnell believed that sporting had supplanted intellectual attainments in the undergraduate scale of values. In 1818 the undergraduates of Wadham had lit a bon®re in honour of Richard Bethell's ®rst-class honours in the schools; by the 1880s bon®res were the usual means of celebrating college athletic triumphs.88 Privileges were accorded to the leading sportsmen, just as in the public schools, where it was the members of the ®rst eleven and the ®rst ®fteen who were made prefects. At Lincoln, members of the boat club were allowed to use the fellows' garden on weekday afternoons; and in a number of colleges the captain of boats acted as unof®cial head of the undergraduate body.89 When he came up to Keble in 1895, Cyril Garbett, like many other freshmen, `was absurdly grati®ed to be noticed by some demi-god in a dark blue scarf.'90 In the Oxford of Mr Verdant Green, where social standing was a principal source of distinction within the undergraduate body, such deference would have been paid to the gold tassel of a nobleman. It was these manifestations which the new forms of status conferment created by sport tended to displace. Team sport was necessarily meritocratic in its tendency. In so far as the standing of colleges was measured by their sporting success, then the old divisions within college were dysfunctional. In Thomas Hughes's novel, St Ambrose's performance on the river was hampered by the exclusion of the servitor, Hardy, from the boat,91 but already when Hughes was writing the attitudes he depicted were begin87 Isis no. 436 (21 May 1910), 384. See also no. 430 (26 Feb. 1910), 245±7; no. 431 (5 Mar. 1910), 263±4; no. 432 (12 Mar. 1910), 281±3. See also pp. 799±800 below. 88 Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 140. 89 V. H. H. Green, Oxford Common Room: A Study of Lincoln College and Mark Pattison (1957), 285; D. W. Carmalt Jones, Diversions of a Professor in New Zealand (Wellington and Dunedin, 1945), 127. 90 C. Smyth, Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of Canterbury (1959), 43. 91 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).

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ning to seem anachronistic. At Christ Church in 1864 a servitor, W. G. Edwards, was considered presumptuous in applying for membership of the boat club; but he was admitted, stroked the Torpid and then the eight, and won an athletics blue. He was subsequently made an honorary Canon of Christ Church. For him, sport was the road to social acceptance in college.92 The most important mark of athletic status was, of course, the blue; and sporting prestige was institutionalized in Vincent's Club, founded in 1863, which rapidly became `the premier Social Club of the University'.93 Its membership was restricted to one hundred, and its rules made it relatively easy to blackball candidates for election. At its foundation it was composed principally of the friends of the founder, the oarsman W. B. Woodgate of Brasenose, and it held a particular attraction for men from the nearby colleges (notably Brasenose, University College, and Merton) who resented the inconvenient walk to the Union. Only slowly did it acquire its modern character as the club for bluesÐindeed, not until the 1870s do we see the emergence of the concept of `the blue' in a recognizably modern sense94Ð though already by the 1880s very few non-blues held of®ce in the club. In 1894 Isis could describe Vincent's as a `sacred Temple . . . to those whom, by virtue of themselves, their athletic powers, and their social and general goodfellowship, a grateful University delighteth to honour'. Election to Vincent's had become `the diploma which the University of Undergraduates grants in due season to her most successful and deserving sons'.95 When the OUDS was established in 1885, its founders acknowledged that `nothing of this kind succeeds at the university unless it is backed by the ``bloods'' and the ``blues'',' and therefore made the president of Vincent's, as well as the president of the Bullingdon and the president of the Union, an ex-of®cio member of the OUDS committee.96 At the height of its success, however, Vincent's was never straightforwardly a club for blues: in the 1890s they represented fewer than half of its members. The fact that Vincent's could claim pre-eminence over the Bullingdon (a club still dominated by the gentry and devoted to country sports) was an illustration of Oxford's changing values. How much substance was there to Farnell's contention that sport displaced academic and intellectual pursuits in Oxford's scale of priorities? 92 For Edwards's reminiscences, see Lucy S. Sutherland, `The last of the servitors', Christ Church Annual Report, 1975, 36. 93 J. S. G. Pemberton, `The Social Life', 110. 94 See Bell's Life, 7 May 1870, for the ®rst clear-cut reference in that newspaper to a particular individual as `a blue'; and 19 Feb. 1876, for the ®rst example of the use of the term to denote the honour conferred by participation in the Oxford±Cambridge contest. These usages grew out of an earlier collective sense: the Cambridge crew was `the Light Blue' (later, `the Light Blues'), and Oxford `the Dark Blue(s)'. 95 Isis no. 59 (10 Nov. 1894), 59±60. 96 Carpenter, OUDS (n. 78), 32.

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Historians who have advanced that contention have drawn too uncritically on the partisan opinions of Pattison and the `endowment of research' party; yet even those opinions have been misunderstood, for Pattison and his supporters, as we have seen, were critical of `pot-hunting' in academic as well as athletic pursuits. Pattison's critique of the shallow competitiveness of Oxford lifeÐthe quest for prizes and honours among undergraduates and preferment-hurting among MAsÐcan be traced as far back as a conversation with Newman in 1843, long before the fashion for organized sport took hold.97 Sportsmen were by no means conspicuously unsuccessful in the schools, and in the early part of our period they were almost certainly more successful on average than the undergraduate body as a whole.98 Colleges that were successful on the river often had high academic standards too: this was true of Wadham in the 1850s and Corpus in the 1860s. Indeed, sporting success could be interpreted as part of a wider renewal of college life: this was a ¯ourishing period for debating societies, essay societies, and other forums for intellectual pursuits, and biographical material records numerous instances of undergraduates and tutors who participated widely in the sporting, cultural and intellectual sides of college life.99 The case for the bene®cial impact of sport may be weaker when we turn to the Edwardian period. At a time when the academic standards of the University were rising, those of sportsmen rose less rapidly than those of their less athletic contemporaries. Eights week was causing serious disruption to the academic work of the University, though it should be noted that this was not because undergraduates were spending too much time rowing but because of their need to entertain their female relatives, for by this time Eights week had supplanted Commemoration week as the normal time for undergraduates to be visited by their mothers and sisters. In 1905, Congregation debated a proposal to move examinations forward one week so as to allow the eights to be held at the end of term. In support of the proposal, the senior proctor circulated data derived from a questionnaire completed by tutors and lecturers: 70 per cent of tutors thought that Eights week seriously affected attendance at honours lectures, and 43 per cent thought it seriously affected tutorial work. The disruption to the work of the passmen was even greater.100 97

Pattison's diary, 8 Oct. 1843: Bodleian MS Pattison 128. For a detailed vindication of this claim, see R. F. Clarke, The In¯uence of Pass Examinations: with a Scheme for their Incorporation into the Honour Schools (1869), Appendix B: `On the Intellectual In¯uence of Athleticism'. 99 H. H. Henson (ed.), Memoir of W. R. Anson (1920), 35, 46; A. Noyes, Two Worlds for Memory (1953), 12; L. Ridding, George Ridding, Schoolmaster and Bishop (1908), 10±11; Lady [Mildred March] Murray, The Making of a Civil Servant: Sir Oswyn Murray (1940), 26. These points are discussed in more detail by M. C. Curthoys and H. S. Jones, `Oxford Athleticism, 1850±1914: a Reappraisal' History of Education 24 (1995), 310±13. 100 Collection of pamphlets: Bodl. Firth b. 36. 98

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The University of Oxford had long been a `national' institution, in the sense of a central institution within the national Church. But the point is rightly made that the nineteenth century transformed, and for the most part strengthened, the place of Oxford in the life of the nation. The University's place in the sporting life of England was one aspect of this. The public image of Oxford, especially to Londoners, was coloured by sporting events like the Boat Race and the Varsity cricket match: in the words of the senior treasurer of the OUCC, writing in 1897, `the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race and cricket-match are the two anchors of the universities in the heart of the English people.'101 The Boat Race attracted press interest and large crowds even in its early years, and already in the 1830s and 1840s Bell's Life was publishing lengthy reports, preceded by a chronicle of previous contests between the two Universities. In contrast the cricket match was neglected in public esteem. In 1838, for instance, Bell's devoted to the match (though played at Lord's) a mere six lines together with the score-cardÐand this was in the issue that appeared nine days after the match ®nished!102 Public curiosity was evidently not overbearing in its demands. From the mid-1840s, however, the match became a major ®xture in the cricketing calendar and began to excite the interest of cricket enthusiasts: the 1850 match, even though played at Cowley Marsh rather than Lord's, was deemed worthy of a report of no fewer than sixty-nine lines. It was now a fashionable event in cricketing circles, and most of the leading members of the MCC, as well as large contingents from the Universities, could be expected to attend.103 From 1859 reports in Bell's were suf®ciently detailed to give bowling analysesÐ details which that newspaper gave for no other cricket ®xture for some time thereafter. Even so, crowds were small in comparison with later decades: just under 2,000 were present on the ®rst day of the 1856 match, and reporters commented upon the `most animated appearance' of the ground at a time when a large crowd was measured in hundreds rather than thousands.104 For at this stage the match was of great interest to cricket enthusiasts and gamblers, but not to a wider public. It was in the 1860s that the match began to achieve a wider popularity as amateur cricket, formerly much inferior to the professional game, began to enter what the standard history of the game calls its `halcyon days'.105 More than 4,000 were present on the ®rst day in 1861, and as many as 7,000 in 1867, many of them accommodated in the 101 Thomas Case, `Oxford University Cricket', in K. S. Ranjitsinhji, The Jubilee Book of Cricket (n.d. [1897]), 336. 102 Bell's Life 15 July 1838. The closely fought match of 1848, played at Oxford, merited only four lines: H. S. Altham, A History of Cricket (5th edn 1962), i, 114. 103 Bell's Life, 16 June 1850 and 11 July 1852. 104 Bell's Life, 22 June 1856; 27 June 1858. 105 Altham, History of Cricket, i, ch. 14.

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newly constructed grandstand.106 The presence of a signi®cant number of ladiesÐemphasized by the Bell's correspondent in 1861Ðtesti®ed to the incipient transformation of the match into a fashionable social event. The size of crowds soared in the 1870s: 14,772 paid for admission on the ®rst day in 1876, and both that match and, in its turn, the 1881 match broke the record for the total attendance at the whole of a cricket match.107 To these ®gures should be added those MCC members who attended and exercised their privilege of introducing up to four guests.108 The Bell's correspondent estimated that almost 45,000 attended the two days of the 1880 match; in 1883, Wisden thought the total attendance about 46,000.109 These were vast crowds by the standards of the time, rivalled not even by the Eton±Harrow match, for which a higher entrance fee was charged from 1874. `Roses' matches (Lancashire v. Yorkshire) might on occasion draw in a comparable number of spectators, but the same could not be said of other county matches, and not even a test match against Australia could surpass the Varsity match in its popularity.110 The match was now `a great fashionable festival as well as a cricket match'.111 Even the sporting press would dwell at length on the appearance of the crowd and especially on the changing fashions in ladies' clothes, and at the same time would complain that the spectators showed `de®ciency of spirit'; the lack of applause perhaps indicating that interest in the cricket was not the main motive for attendance.112 This was, indeed, a source of grievance for undergraduate opinion, which by the early 1890s was vociferous in its complaints about the shortage of seats available to resident members of the two Universities. Cricket, they thought, had become secondary now that the match was a society function. It was even proposed that OUCC and CUCC should threaten to move the match to the Oval. The match was an important money-spinner for the MCC, which capitulated to these demands and henceforth allocated a certain number of seats to members of the two University clubs. Even so, cricket enthusiasts continued to complain that the match was a social rather than a sporting event and was attended by few resident members of the Universities.113 106

Bell's Life, 23 June 1861; 6 July 1867. The numbers of those paying at the gate are given in Wisden for the years 1871±87. 108 In 1886 there were 3,097 MCC members, of whom 174 were resident overseas: Wisden 1888, 206. More than one-third of them would attend the Oxford±Cambridge match: 1,200 did so in 1879, according to Wisden 1880, 66. 109 Bell's Life, 3 July 1880; Wisden 1884, 69. 110 In 1886, 11,128 people paid for admission on the ®rst day of the Lord's test match; and 11,368 on the ®rst day of the Oval test. The attendance at Old Trafford was lower: Wisden 1887, 28, 35±7, 46±7. 111 Bell's Life, 1 July 1885. 112 Bell's Life, 5 July 1879 and 3 July 1880. 113 Isis, no. 47 (28 Apr. 1894), 239±41; no. 51 (26 May 1894), 309±10; no. 63 (19 Jan. 1894), 119±20; Public School Magazine, ii (1898), 134. 107

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Upper-class sport possessed great advantages as a spectacle in this era of the development of spectator sport, if only because of the big differences in physique between classes. Before the First World War, Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates were on average thirty pounds heavier and three and a half inches taller than their working-class contemporaries.114 This helps to explain why the Oxford±Cambridge rugby match and the inter-University athletic sports, though not rivalling the Boat Race and the cricket match in their popularity, nevertheless were regarded as major events by devotees of those sports and by members of the two Universities. The same cannot be said of the Association football contest, which in the 1880s was attracting scarcely more than a thousand spectators, a mere fraction of the number attending top professional club ®xtures.115 This was the period when professional football was superseding the amateur gameÐthe ®rst working men's football club to win the FA Cup was Blackburn Olympic, with a celebrated victory over the Old Etonians in 1883Ðand the Bell's correspondent was puzzled at the inability of university soccer to attract more spectators. In football, as in rowing, the image Oxford sport presented to the nation was very different from the image it sought to present to the University. In Oxford, rugby was the more `democratic' of the two codes of football, at least in the sense that it drew its participants from a wide range of public schools, whereas Association football was dominated by a small group of Clarendon schools. But in the nation at large (setting Wales to one side), soccer was the working-class game and rugby the game for privileged youth; so that the prominence enjoyed by the Oxford±Cambridge rugby match in the sporting calendar reinforced Oxford's socially exclusive image. The difference between the two games in the class composition of their followers was illustrated and con®rmed by the policies of their governing bodies during the 1880s and 1890s. The best soccer players needed, at the very least, to be paid for `broken time', and in 1885 the Football Association accepted professionalism. In 1893, by contrast, the Rugby Union maintained the amateur status of their game, even at the cost of expelling the northern clubs of the professional Rugby League. During the following century soccer spread all over Europe and beyond, whereas rugby was played chie¯y where Oxford and Cambridge and the public schools had been dominant or in¯uential. That group comprised the British Commonwealth and France, the French wine trade being traditionally one for the upper class.116 114 E. H. Phelps Brown, The Growth of British Industrial Relations: A Study from the Standpoint of 1906±14 (1959), 37. 115 Bell's Life, 3 Mar. 1883 (1,000 present at the most); 1 Mar. 1884 (not more than 1,500 spectators). The explanation may be that in comparison with rugby and rowing, soccer depended less on physical strength and more on skill. 116 Eric Hobsbawm, `Mass-producing Traditions: Europe, 1870±1914', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (1983), 289; but see also Tony Mason,

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Continental observers of the English educational system were repeatedly struck by the emphasis placed on sport in the public schools and the ancient Universities. In a European perspective, Oxford and Cambridge were out on a limb. So how is the distinctiveness of the English Universities to be explained? The two ancient Universities were located in semi-rural settings, with ample space for games ®elds. But the crucial point is surely that the ancient Universities were residential and were thus, like the public schools, obliged to concern themselves with the whole of their members' lives. By contrast, the Royal Commission on Physical Training in ScotlandÐappointed in 1902Ðcomplained of the neglect of physical training in Scottish higher education; but the key difference between the Scottish universities and their ancient English counterparts is lost in this attempt to gauge the global amount of time spent on sport. What was characteristic of Oxford and Cambridge was that sport was ®rmly located in the University and colleges. In Scotland, by contrast, university sports clubs were persistently dogged by students' preference for local clubs and for the former pupils' teams of their old schools. No doubt this was largely because the Scottish universities were local universities; and because their students lived either with their parents or in lodgings. It was harder therefore to build up an esprit de corps, crucial as that was to contemporary middle-class sociability.117 Moreover, the importance attached to sport at the English universities owed much to the emphasis on `character' in English educational thought. Commonly depicted as obscurantist, the expression of the hearty values of a pre-industrial and anti-capitalist gentry, of a leisure class rather than of a modern eÂlite, the sporting ethos of the Victorian public schools and the ancient Universities has been highlighted by historians and polemicists in search of the cultural roots of industrial decline. This interpretation needs to be challenged. The Victorian language of `character' is to be distinguished from the Hanoverian language of `virtue': where the latter had emphasized leisure and grace and ease of manner, the former lauded striving and effort and mastery of circumstance.118 And these values were thought to be exempli®ed in team games. Association Football and English Society 1863±1915 (Brighton, 1980), 244 n. 7, for factual accuracy. The Oxford University XI won the FA Cup in Mar. 1874, but ceased to enter the competition after 1880; Weir (n. 9), 11±13, 16; Harold Perkin, `Teaching the Nations How to Play', in The Cultural Bond, ed. J. A. Mangan (1992), 216±17. For Ronald Poulton's concern that rugby should not be con®ned to one class see p. 870 below. 117 R. D. Anderson, `Sport in the Scottish Universities, 1860±1939', International Journal of the History of Sport, iv (1987). Oxford sport is placed in a wider comparative context by H. S. Jones, `Student Life and Sociability, 1860±1930: comparative re¯ections', History of Universities, XIV (1995±6), 225±46. 118 For a discussion of these points, see Stefan Collini, `The Idea of ``character'' in Victorian Political Thought', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. xxxv (1985), 29±50; and M. J. Daunton, ```Gentlemanly capitalism'' and British Industry 1820±1914', Past and Present, no. 122 (Feb. 1989), esp. 132.

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Though the English universities look odd when viewed from Europe, they look much less so when viewed from across the Atlantic. For in the eastcoast American universities the cult of sport developed at the same time as in Oxford and Cambridge. The ®rst Harvard±Yale boat race, for instance, was rowed in 1852, and by the end of the century colleges (with the aid of alumni) were spending large sums on the construction of sports stadiums. Indeed, much of the literature on English athleticism and its association with anti-intellectualism draws its inspiration from studies of America. Yet there were important differences. The problem of professionalism was much more acute in the United States, where there were well-documented instances of the establishment of athletic scholarships by about 1900.119 Perhaps as a consequence, college sport in the United States was characterized by a very high standard of performance among the leading players, but also by a much lower general level of participation: at Harvard in the 1890s the proportion of students taking part in competitive sport seems to have been about one in four.120 This pointÐthat Oxford sport was characterized by participation rather than excellenceÐwas repeatedly emphasized by American observers of Oxford. The Oxford system, they concluded, had the distinctive virtue of being `for the many, not the few'.121 At the top level, Oxford sport could be of very high quality. The University cricket eleven supplied many members of the gentlemen's team in the annual Gentlemen versus Players match, and in 1884 Oxford achieved a celebrated victory over the Australians. College eights often competed successfully at Henley and even in the Olympic Games.122 There were individual stars of international renown, of whom the most celebrated was C. B. Fry, who in the course of his undergraduate career at Wadham (1891±5) was capped for England at soccer, equalled the world record for the long jump, and launched a notable cricketing career which was to make him one of the most celebrated public ®gures of his age. But these feats tend to obscure the crucial point: participation, not excellence, was the keynote of Oxford sport. For many defenders of undergraduate athletics, the breaking of records and the winning of blues were not ends in themselves, but means 119 Ronald A. Smith, `The Historic Amateur-Professional Dilemma in American College Sport', British Journal of Sports History, ii (1985), 225. 120 Out of 1598 Harvard students in 1892±3, 404 were passed ®t to take an active part in track athletics, baseball, rowing, or football: Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College 1892±93 (Cambridge, Mass., 1894), 15±16. 121 L. C. Hull, `Athletics at Oxford: the New Rules', American Oxonian, i no. 1 (Apr. 1914), 21±3, which gives the estimate that 80% of Oxford undergraduates engaged actively in sport every day. Also `A Few First Impressions of Oxford, by an American', Hertford College Magazine, no. 8 (Dec. 1913), 14. 122 At the Stockholm Olympics in 1912 New College First VIII represented Great Britain and won a silver medal: Alexander Reford, `NCBC and the 1912 Olympics', New College Record, 1986. I am grateful to the Revd Jeremy Sheehy, sometime dean of divinity of New College, for drawing my attention to this article.

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of exciting the sporting enthusiasm of the ungifted many.123 And an excessive concentration on the Boat Race obscures the fact that it was the Torpids that were recognized by contemporary observers and participants as embodying the quintessence of Oxford sport.124 But we can see an important tension at the heart of the ideology of athleticism, for the top athletes were scornful of a mentality which elevated the plodder. Those critics who by the early years of the twentieth century were lamenting the decline of Oxford rowing tended to attribute falling standards to the prestige attached to Torpids, which continued to be rowed in ®xed-seat boats. Some even advocated the abolition of Torpids.125 This would have been a huge stride towards the `Americanization' of University sport; but Torpids survived, and the participatory ideal has remained the central feature of Oxford sport throughout the twentieth century. 123

J. Wells, Wadham College, 206. Isis, no. 381 (22 Feb. 1908), 228: `As Plato would have said, in the Eights we see the Idea of Entertainment; in the Toggers we see the Idea of Enthusiasm.' 125 Legge, `Re¯ections on Oxford Rowing' (n. 76), 325. 124

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page

23 Oxford and Schooling j . r . de s . h o n e y an d m . c . c u r t h oy s The Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, writing in 1923, identi®ed what he claimed was `probably the greatest educational movement of nineteenth century Europe': this was the new public-school system which grew out of Arnold's Rugby.1 Whatever our reservations about the continuing in¯uence of that tradition, there is no doubt that these schools became what has been described as `de®ning institutions' for English education in that period.2 We should therefore not be surprised to ®nd that this in¯uence was also predominant in Oxford University, both in respect of recruitment and in the character of its social life. The transformation of the public schools may be brie¯y described. A ramshackle and partly discredited form of education available for relatively small numbers of the aristocracy, gentry, clergy, and professional classes in the early part of the century gave place (following Arnold's reforms at Rugby between 1828 and 1842, and the successful propaganda surrounding them) to a new formula. The most signi®cant features were the establishment of satisfactory discipline in boys' boarding schools and the use of that disciplinary security to ensure the propagation of master-approved, rather than purely peer-group, values. These reforms slowly and unevenly pervaded the older-established public schools and led to the transformation of a group of endowed grammar schools such as Uppingham and Sherborne. The new popularity of the reformed model led also to the expansion of the system and the foundation of new purpose-built public schools from the 1840s onwards.3 Cheltenham (1841), Marlborough (1843), Rossall (1844), and Lancing (1848) represented the ®rst wave; Clifton (1862), Haileybury (1862), and Malvern (1864) the second. Between 1870 and 1900 there emerged the distinctive features of the new and enlarged public-school system. Its 1

G. G. Coulton, A Victorian Schoolmaster: Henry Hart of Sedbergh (1923), 14±15. H. Steedman, `De®ning Institutions: The Endowed Grammar Schools and the Systematisation of English Secondary Education', in D. K. MuÈller, F. Ringer, and Brian Simon (eds), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction 1870± 1920 (1987), 113. 3 T. W. Bamford, The Rise of the Public Schools (1967), 18. 2

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superstructure was a group of between 50 and 100 schools, most of them wholly or partly boarding, with a common set of institutions of school life, including games, prefects, and organization by houses. Its infrastructure, which grew spectacularly during the same period, was the new preparatoryschool system, no longer based on an extension of the domestic world of the private tutor's family or household, but complete public schools in miniature. It became a crucial expectation or ambition of nearly every upper middleclass family between 1870 and 1914 that their sons should experience this kind of schooling for up to ten years of their lives. Not only did the system expand to cope with the numbers, but the schools themselves grew, sometimes becoming two or three times larger by the late nineteenth century than they had been in 1850. Among the functions of the new system was the production of a new social casteÐthe new species of `public-school man'Ð partly identi®able by neckties or by speech. The ability to give the right kind of answer to the critical question, `Where were you at school?' opened the way to jobs, commissions in the services, and club membership, and even gave distinct advantages in the marriage market. Yet it was highly signi®cant that the community of public schools which gave access to membership of this caste and thus to these privileges was not precisely de®ned. No one doubted that certain famous schools were included in it, and a body of common knowledge gave many others strong claims for inclusion; but the lack of any exact delimitation of that community gave the bene®t of the doubt to those men whose adoption of public-school attitudes, manners, and speech signalled their identi®cation with its value system. A rough and ready guide to which schools probably had the power to project their pupils into this privileged community of public school men within the decades from about 1880 to about 1902 is available to us if we adopt the hypothesis that public-school men would recognize others as such, if the latter had attended schools with which they had interacted at games and other characteristic public-school activities of the period, such as ri¯eshooting at Bisley, and cadet corps camps. Academic competition, especially for university scholarships, army entrance, and the like, also constituted a form of interaction which could make competing schools aware of each other. Analysis of these various forms of interaction during the period 1880±1902 leads to the identi®cation of some 50 public schoolsÐa ®gure which accords with contemporary estimates4Ðand a further 54 schools on the fringes of the public-school community (see Table 23.A1). A quali®cation must be entered that such lists can never exactly represent a school's position throughout the period: reputations quickly rose and fell, and headmasters might alter their policies towards entering boys for external examinations or participating in inter-school events. It is none the less contended 4

For example, W. R. Lawson, John Bull and His Schools (Edinburgh, 1908), 49.

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that these lists constitute a more accurate indication of a school's claims to public-school status than any other measure available. The type of schooling represented by these institutions was promoted as a powerful model by the development of the school story as a new literary form, and we know that the astonishingly persuasive in¯uence of this medium operated not just among the upper classes but among Board School pupils, even in city slums, and indeed through much of the English-speaking world. It is inconceivable that this powerful model should not also dominate school awareness at Oxford, and it is clear that this was indeed the case: that the question `Where were you at school?' became as important among Oxford undergraduates as it was for so many in this age-group generally. In 1894 Oxford University began recording the schooling of undergraduates in the matriculation register, and Queen's (for example) began to do so in 1898. College magazines listed the schools attended by freshmen; in 1906 the Exeter College magazine aggregated the numbers, since `it may be of some interest to see which public schools are represented in the College.'5 This interest was re¯ected elsewhereÐfor instance, in the registers of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, which began to note the schooling of entrants in 1900, while Crockford's Clerical Directory attempted to record the schooling of the Anglican clergy in its 1904 edition. This was now, of course, the most important single fact about anyone's background that there was to be known. C. M. Blagden came up to Corpus in 1892 from Brad®eld; sixty years later, as a retired bishop, he could identify exactly the schools of all his fellow-matriculants at Corpus in that year.6 Those without some nameable school to admit to were at a social disadvantage by the 1890s. Hensley Henson, who matriculated at Oxford in 1881 and in 1884 became, at 20, the ®rst Non-Collegiate student to win an All Souls fellowship, suppressed in directory entries all mention of the only school he had ever attended, and carried to the end of his life a grudge that he had never attended a public school.7 In one extreme case an undergraduate from a small, country grammar school coming up to Brasenose in 1903 was so intimidated after an encounter with public-school undergraduates, who burst into his rooms on his ®rst night in residence, that he ran away and, unwilling to accept Principal Heberden's offer to parade the college to identify the culprits, lived in lodgings for the rest of his undergraduate career.8 In the early nineteenth century school consciousness had been signi®cant in the university lives only of those undergraduates who had attended one of 5

Stapeldon Magazine, 1 (Dec. 1906), 209. C. M. Blagden, Well Remembered (1952), 79. 7 O. Chadwick, Hensley Henson (1983), 9. 8 See W. H. Elliott, Undiscovered Ends. Autobiography (1951), 43±53; the college returns of undergraduates in lodgings (OUA LHD/L/1/15) con®rm that Elliott, contrary to usual practice, lived out of college from his ®rst term. The son of a butcher, he was educated at Horsham GS. 6

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the small group of ancient public schools. Stafford Northcote, a scholar at Balliol in 1836, associated mainly with men from his old school, Eton, during his Oxford career. Wykehamists at New College were said to live entirely within the society of their former schoolfellows during their Oxford residence. But before 1870 most schools had such a small representation at the UniversityÐthe Taunton Commission found only thirty-six schools sending up three or more boys a year to Oxford or Cambridge in 1867Ð that their pupils would have had to make some effort to keep their school friendships in repair. The types of educational backgrounds of early nineteenth-century undergraduates and college fellows were, moreover, extremely varied. Of the Oriel Noetics, only two had attended a public school (Arnold at Winchester and Hawkins at Merchant Taylors'); Whately and Hinds had attended a private school at Redland, Bristol;9 Hampden had been the private pupil of a clergyman and Copleston had been taught by his father. Much the same pattern held true for the prominent Tractarians: Pusey had been at Eton, Newman at a private school in Ealing, and Keble had been taught at home. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a clear majority of Oxford undergraduates (and their tutors) had been exposed to the intense communality of the reformed public-school system. This inevitably affected University life though, as Chapter 22 shows from the example of sport, not always as directly or as unambiguously as is sometimes suggested. One particularly striking illustration of school in¯uences in this period is provided by undergraduate speech. Public schools were the main mechanism for the diffusion of the standard form of English accent known early in the twentieth century by phoneticians as Public School Pronunciation (PSP), and since the 1920s as Received Pronunciation (RP); the process of accent standardization carried on up to the ancient universities. At Oxford it had become virtually a condition of social equality among undergraduates by 1900 that one must `speak the Queen's English with a speci®c accent and intonation', though many dons and heads of houses, educated in the earlier period, retained traces of strong regional accents.10 When F. E. Smith, a future Lord Chancellor, entered Wadham in 1890 it took him about six weeks to adapt his Cheshire accent to the standard, and a future Lord Chief Justice, Gordon Hewart, who entered University College as a classical scholar from Manchester Grammar School in 1887 similarly adapted to `Standard English' from the Lancashire accent with which he grew up.11 The term `Oxford English', when used to indicate an admired and authoritative variety of English, seems to be of relatively recent currency and of 9

For details of the school see Notes and Queries, clxvi (23 June 1934), 440. Edwardian Youth, 8±9. R. Jackson, The Chief: The Biography of Gordon Hewart Lord Chief Justice of England 1922±40 (1959), 20. 10 11

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uncertain origin. But the term `Oxford accent' or `Oxford voice' had come into use by the early years of the twentieth century, sometimes to suggest an academic form of speech `of exaggerated precision, expressive of intellectual superiority' or even of `social superiority': some spoke of `the English of Eton and Christ Church', clearly implying the most aristocratic variant of RP, though contemporary authorities doubted whether this could be distinguished from that of Harrow and Trinity.12 The `Oxford accent', H. C. K. Wyld later wrote, `conveys an impression of precise and rather foppish elegance'.13 People claimed that they could detect an Oxford man in Singapore by his speech alone; others that the speech of Cambridge differed recognizably from that of Oxford. One speech form widely current among public-school men invaded and occupied the vocabulary of Oxford from the 1870s to the outbreak of the Second World War, to such an extent that it came to be labelled by lexicographers as the `Oxford -er', though it also affected British upper-middleclass speech generally, and was further popularized by public-school ®ction. This is the form which took the stressed syllable of a word (sometimes grotesquely garbled) and added to it the suf®x `-er' or `-ers', giving Oxford `the Giler' (St Giles), `Rudders' as the usual name for the examination in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion, and `Rollers' for early morning roll-calls in chapel. The tendency seems to have originated around 1870 at Harrow School (where a waste-paper basket became a `wagger-pagger-bagger' and where the future tutor of Balliol, F. F. Urquhart, acquired his nick-name `Sligger'Ð`the sleek one') and spread quickly through the leading public schools, also reaching Oxford by about 1875, where it had become an established fashion by the 1880s, causing the Oxford Magazine to draw the suf®x `er' to the attention of phoneticians.14 The Oxford diary for 1911±12 of William Elmhirst (Malvern and Worcester) uses the following terms throughout, `fresher', `brekker' (breakfast), `footer' (football), `bedder' (bedroom), `leccer' (lecture), `togger' (Torpids)Ðhence `togger brekker'Ðthe `Ugger' for the Union Society. Personal names are similarly treatedÐPuggers for Pearson and Jaggers for Jesus College, the latter usage also appearing in a letter written in Michaelmas term 1906 by a freshman at Jesus to a sixth-former at his old school, Bradford Grammar, describing his ®rst experiences of college life.15 By contrast, the Oxford diary for 1871 kept by Charles Cree, who had entered University College in 1869, shows no trace of this speech form.16 12

R. W. Chapman, `Oxford' English (Society for Pure English Tract no. xxxvii, 1932), 541. H. C. Wyld, The Best English (Society for Pure English Tract no. xxxix, 1934), 617. When C. R. Attlee's Labour colleagues in Limehouse chose him as their parliamentary candidate in 1919, they were worried about his `Oxford accent': K. Harris, Attlee (1982), 43. 14 J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe: the development of the Victorian Public School (1977), 235; OM 6 Feb. 1889, 179; cf. Isis 2 Feb. 1895, 156, for `rugger internatters'. 15 F. J. Hanby to R. D. Rees, [n.d. Oct. 1906], Trinity College Archives, DD77. 16 A. Cree (ed.), 1871, An Oxford Diary (1974). 13

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It remains to consider more precisely which schools undergraduates had attended before coming up to Oxford. Although there was evidence of a growing trend towards attendance at one of the ancient public schools in the early nineteenth century, particularly among undergraduates of high social rank,17 those who had attended a public school (as the term was then used) still formed only a minority of undergraduates. Before 1850 about a third of Oxford undergraduates had attended one of the nine foundations which were the subject of a royal commission of inquiry chaired by the Earl of Clarendon in 1861; the proportion of undergraduates who were former pupils of `Clarendon' schools was about the same when the Taunton Commission on endowed schools looked into the matter in 1867 (see Table 23.A2).18 Among these pre-1870 generations the experience of schooling was, moreover, generally less formative than it was for their successors; biographical evidence from the earlier period suggests that boys were routinely withdrawn from public schools and sent to country clergymen for up to two years in preparation for entrance to the University. When they came up to Oxford, former pupils of the ancient public schools were unevenly distributed around the colleges: New College (inevitably, since it was restricted to Wykehamists), Christ Church (where one half of all the Etonians at Oxford in 1861 were to be found), Balliol, and University showed the largest concentrations: at Jesus, Lincoln, Queen's, Wadham, Worcester, and the halls the proportions of such men were small (Worcester had 4 out of 69, Jesus 8 out of 78). Such in¯uence as these schools exerted on Oxford life before 1870 was as a result limited; though one sign of a new trend was the decidedly public-school complexion of academic Liberalism in the 1860s, Rugbeians and Harrovians being particularly prominent in its ranks.19 Even in 1861 the Clarendon Commission's de®nition of a public school, itself an echo of the de®nition adopted on the creation of the Charity Commission in 1818,20 was an anachronism, excluding as it did the new foundations of Cheltenham and Marlborough colleges. Yet the criterion beginning to be adopted in the late nineteenth century, membership of the Headmasters' Conference, was arguably too broad. Numbering over 100 17 M. V. Wallbank, `Eighteenth Century Public Schools and the Education of the Governing Elite', History of Education, 8 (1979), 1; John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (1984), 42; R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons 1790±1820 (5 vols 1986), i. 292±3. On the increase in the proportion of Christ Church undergraduates who had received a public as opposed to a private education, E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church Oxford, 1660±1800 (1988), 172. 18 The nine Clarendon schools were Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors', Rugby, St Paul's, Shrewsbury, Westminster, and Winchester. Clarendon Commission vol. 2, Appx D, 31; SIC (1864), Pt I, appendix vii, table 2. 19 On the educational background of those Oxford men attending the Freemasons' Tavern meeting, held on 14 June 1864 to support the cause of the abolition of religious tests, see C. T. Harvie, `University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860±86' (Edinburgh Ph.D. thesis, 1972), appendix 1, 546. 20 J. Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England 1800±1870 (1986), 212±13.

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schools by 1900, the size of the HMC exceeded contemporary estimates of the public-school community and included many day schools which, though some of their practices might approximate to those of the public schools, would not have claimed to offer the same experience of social processing; nor would their products have been recognized as such by public-school men (though some day schools did achieve such recognition). In the following discussion the information which Oxford began to collect systematically after 1894 has been analysed in the light of a classi®cation of schools by the de®ning characteristic of `interaction'. By the end of the nineteenth century over 40 per cent of Oxford undergraduates had attended one of a group of twenty-two schools, whose status as public schools would have been unchallenged. If the picture is widened to include the ®fty schools which contemporaries would have generally recognized as possessing the character of public schools, the matriculation register suggests that well over a half (57 per cent) of undergraduates admitted between Michaelmas 1894 and Trinity 1898 had attended such a school (see Table 23.A3). The sudden in¯ux of overseas students in the two decades before the First World War concealed how stable the pattern of recruitment from schools within the United Kingdom had become: this is evident when overseas students are removed from a comparison between admissions in the mid-1890s and the eve of the First World War (see Figure 23.1). Those individual schools which supplied the largest numbers of undergraduates to Oxford also remained unchanged over the same period (Table 23.A4); between 1895 and 1914 the same six `feeder' schools remained at the top of the Oxford list, ranged in identical order. By the mid-1890s differences between the colleges in their patterns of school recruitment had also been reduced. Most were drawing a majority of their undergraduates from the enlarged group of public schools. Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, New College, Oriel, Trinity, and University consistently recruited over 70 per cent (and in some years over 80 per cent) of their intake from the ®fty public schools. During 1895±8 former pupils of those schools were in a minority in only ®ve societies: Jesus (13 per cent), Lincoln (38 per cent),21 Queen's (29 per cent),22 St Edmund Hall (26 per cent), and the Non-Collegiates (8 per cent). Undergraduate awards limited to certain schools and localities continued to in¯uence the composition of individual colleges. Of the closed awards preserved by the Victorian commissions, the scholarships reserved for Wykehamists at New College and Merchant Taylors' at St John's (which had, in addition, awards for former pupils of Bristol, Coventry, Reading, and Tonbridge schools), and 21 Green, Lincoln, 656, appendix 4B, suggests a higher proportion, using a more extended de®nition of public schools. 22 The trend at Queen's, the result of its historic links with the northern grammar schools, is slightly exaggerated by the college's practice of matriculating non-resident B.Mus. students.

552

`the muddied oafs at the goals'? UK Private (3.5) Universities (5.1) ‘Fringe’ Public Schools (12.0)

Other UK Schools (19.6)

Public Schools (59.7)

1895–8

Private (1.8) ‘Fringe’ Public Schools (13.1)

UK Universities (5.1)

Other UK Schools (20.8)

Public Schools (59.1)

1911–14

f i g u r e 23.1 Previous education of men matriculating at Oxford in the academic years Michaelmas 1895 to Trinity 1898 and Michaelmas 1911 to Trinity 1914, excluding those educated abroad (percentages) Sources: Matriculation registers, OUA; for classi®cations of schools see Table 23.A1

the large number of Hastings Exhibitions at Queen's for the bene®t of grammar schools in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Yorkshire, were perhaps the best known. Christ Church had scholarships reserved for Westminsters as well as exhibitions for Carthusians and for those educated at schools in Shropshire. Most colleges had a sprinkling of such awards linking them to a variety of schools: Maidstone and Rochester Grammar Schools enjoyed preferences at University College; Manchester Grammar School and Hereford Cathedral School did so at Brasenose; and there were scholarships tenable by pupils from Bromsgrove School at Worcester. But the great majority of scholarships had been thrown open, and in aggregate these closed awards accounted for fewer than 10 per cent of all undergraduates. Turning to a wider perspective, a comparison between Oxford and Cambridge reveals the strength of the new trend. In 1861 more boys from Clarendon schools were going to Oxford than Cambridge and, applying a broader de®nition of the public-school community to those admitted to both Universities in 1878/9, the public-school element remained larger at Oxford.23 In the last quarter of the century, however, the gap narrowed considerably. Some contemporaries were slow to appreciate the change. When Bishop Gore moved his House of Lords resolution on the ancient Universities in 1907, Oscar Browning, the King's College history tutor, sought to 23 In 1878/9 Oxford drew 47% and Cambridge drew 34% from group one schools; by 1902±4 the ®gures were 44% and 42%.

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persuade him that reform was not needed at Cambridge. While Oxford was dominated by the public schools, Browning assured the bishop that Cambridge was but little touched by them: Cambridge was `a democratic and unfashionable university'.24 Within weeks of this exchange, however, Prince Leopold of Battenberg fell victim to one of the Edwardian purges in Oxford Responsions, and failed to meet the condition of entry to Magdalen; through the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a place was speedily found for him at Magdalene College, Cambridge.25 Gore took little heed of Browning's disclaimer, and with good reason, for the pattern of admissions to both universities was remarkably similar (see Figure 23.2). Browning might have pointed to the fact that Oxford took rather more Etonians and Wykehamists among the top feeder schools; while on the eve of the war Cambridge was admitting more boys from public elementary schools and more holders of local education authority awards (303 award-holders in 1911/12 as opposed to 118 at Oxford), the result of a connection which had been established with the London County Council.26 But these were on the fringes of an undergraduate body some 3,000 strong at both Universities. A substantial minority (about a third) of undergraduates at both Universities had nevertheless come from outside the public-school community, and their existence should not be discounted. In addition to the growing contingent from overseas, there were those educated at home or by private tutors, as well as the steady stream who came up to Oxford or Cambridge after studying at other universities in the United Kingdom, and, most signi®cant of all (accounting for nearly a ®fth of all admissions), the former pupils of schools in Britain which had no claims to public-school status. A survey of Cambridge undergraduates' school backgrounds at the turn of the century impressed the Cambridge Review with the revelation of the remarkable number of schools, `many of them unknown to fame', which sent men to the university.27 Much the same conclusion might be drawn from the Oxford matriculation register: 359 different schools in the United Kingdom supplied one or more matriculants in the academic years 1902±4.28 Yet the 24

G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore (1935), 291±2. Clement Webb diary, 11 Oct. 1907, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1153, fo. 37. 26 In 1910 58 boys left schools on the grant list in England and Wales and proceeded to Oxford with scholarships. Of these, 27 were ex-public elementary school pupils. For Cambridge the ®gures were 76 scholarship holders and 41 ex-public elementary school pupils, Royal Commission on the Civil Service, First Appendix to the Fourth Report, PP 1914 xvi, tables C1 and C2, pp. 214±17; LEA scholarships, table 4, pp. 266±70. 27 Cambridge Review, 17 Nov. 1904, 66. The survey was published as the ®rst report of the Studies and Examinations Syndicate, appendix M (`Places of Education from which students have entered the University of Cambridge between Michaelmas 1902 and 1904'), Cambridge University Reporter, xxxv (11 Nov. 1904), 221. 28 For examples from Parmiter's School, Bethnal Green, and Roan School, Greenwich, see J. Roach, Secondary Education in England 1870±1902 (1991), 83. Overall recruitment from less expensive schools was very similar: Oxford drew about 180 undergraduates and Cambridge about 195 over the three academic years 1902±4 from schools with tuition fees lower than £10 a year. 25

554

`the muddied oafs at the goals'? UK Private (3.7) Universities (3.8)

‘Fringe’ Public Schools (12.3)

Educated Abroad (8.4)

Other UK Schools (18.1)

Public Schools (53.6)

Oxford

Educated Private UK (4.4) Universities Abroad (7.1) (2.4)

‘Fringe’ Public Schools (13.5)

Other UK Schools (20.3)

Public Schools (52.3)

Cambridge

f i g u r e 23.2 Previous education of men matriculating at Oxford between Michaelmas 1902 and Trinity 1905, and at Cambridge between Michaelmas 1902 and Michaelmas 1904 (percentages) Sources: Matriculation registers, OUA; Cambridge University Reporter, 11 Nov. 1904

overall proportion of undergraduates from schools outside the public-school community rose only slightly between 1895 and 1914, when developments in national education might have suggested a more rapid expansion. By 1911±14 about 13 per cent (318) of men coming up to Oxford had attended grant-earning schools, most of them endowed schools such as Bradford Grammar School, which earned Board of Education grants by providing a given proportion of free places to pupils previously educated at publicly supported elementary schools. Apart from the obvious barrier of university costs, the continued requirement that all undergraduates should pass an examination in Greek was a major factor limiting the range of schools feeding Oxford. As early as 1870 the Chief Commissioner, Endowed Schools, Lord Lyttelton, had warned the universities that compulsory Greek would prevent them recruiting from many of the grammar schools reconstituted by the commissioners, for classical teaching to a high level was to be made available only in those endowed schools designated as `®rst-grade'.29 By the end of the century, when the number of candidates offering Greek in school examinations was almost stationary, there were signs that Oxford had reached the limit of potential admissions from among those boy schoolleavers within the United Kingdom quali®ed to surmount the barrier of Greek.30 To the promoters of the Edwardian university reform movement, 29 Lord Lyttelton to Vice-Chancellor, 3 June 1870, Gazette, i (14 June 1870), 9; Ward, Victorian Oxford, 288. 30 The numbers offering Greek in the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board Higher Certi®cates, Oxford Senior Locals, Cambridge Senior Locals, and London Matriculation were 2015 in 1882, 1592 in 1892, 1691 in 1902, and 1727 in 1912.

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writing a few years after the 1902 Education Act came into effect, the implications were ominous: There is no question that our two older Universities are generally regarded as the culmination of the `Public' School course, and the numerical proportion of `Public' School boys who come to Oxford to boys who come from the really public schools seems to bear this out. A most competent authority calculates that each of the larger Grammar Schools sends up from ten to twelve boys a year to the older Universities: that each of the smaller Grammar Schools sends only about two boys in three years; and that the new County and Municipal Schools have no real connexion with Oxford and Cambridge at all. We seem, therefore, to be threatened with a complete division of the educational system of the country into two partsÐthe expensive schools with the older Universities in one department, and the modern Council schools with the newer Universities in the other.31

Distinctions of status within English education also affected Oxford's approach both to teacher training and to the examination of schoolchildren. Although increasing numbers of Oxford graduates became schoolmasters in public, grammar, and preparatory schools,32 the prevailing assumptionÐby no means con®ned to OxfordÐwas that training was inappropriate for men intending to teach in these types of schools. It was not until the end of the century that the University offered any instruction in either the theory or practice of education; most Oxford men who became schoolmasters started teaching immediately after graduation and without any prior training. Resolutions urging Oxford and Cambridge to organize lectures in educational methods had been passed by the Headmasters' Conference from 1871 onwards, though head-magisterial enthusiasm for teaching diplomas was stated to be limited to endorsing the idea in principle; it was humorously observed that they were certainly not inclined to apply it to themselves.33 A memorial from the headmasters persuaded the Hebdomadal Council to produce, in 1879, a scheme to award certi®cates of ef®ciency to teachers in schools `other than the elementary'. But this was rejected in Congregation by one vote (41 to 42) in 1880.34 In the same year the Hebdomadal Council turned down a proposal from George Rolleston that a professorship of the history and methods of education should be added to the list of chairs which the University wished the statutory commission to establish.35 Two chairs in education had been founded at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews in 1876, but their early history would not have encouraged further experi31

Westminster Gazette 23 Feb. 1907. See Pt I, pp. 493±5. 33 See the evidence of G. C. Bell, Master of Marlborough to the Select Committee on the Teachers' Registration and Organization Bill, PP 1890±1 xvii, Q. 1,163. 34 Ibid. appendix 4, 551±3; Gazette, x (18 Feb. 1880), 250. 35 Hebdomadal Council minutes, 1 Mar. 1880, OUA HC 1/2/3, p. 15. 32

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ments; the ®rst professors had no obvious function in a system, like that in England, where secondary teachers did not require professional quali®cations other than a degree.36 Cambridge viewed teacher training rather more positively, instituting a syndicate in 1879 which organized lectures in educational subjects and held a certi®cate examination for the ®rst time in 1880.37 Secondary training did not return to the agenda at Oxford until the appointment of the Bryce Commission (1894), whose proceedings were seen as presenting a danger that Oxford graduates, lacking teaching credentials, might be excluded from posts in secondary schools if a system of teacher registration were implemented.38 A Diploma in Education was hurriedly established in anticipation of the royal commission's report, though not without a stiff ®ght in the University's legislature. Convocation passed the necessary statute by a small majority (88 to 76) in November 1896 and the ®rst full course, organized by the Delegates of Local Examinations, began in October 1897 under M. W. Keatinge, who had read Greats at Exeter College and studied pedagogy at Jena before going on to teach at Edinburgh Academy.39 Even then the arrangements were of a provisional nature: only after the creation of a teachers' register by the government in 1902, and the resulting concern that Oxford men intending to become masters in secondary schools `should not be put at a disadvantage' as compared with graduates of other universities,40 was secondary training recognized as an independent branch of University work at Oxford. A separate Delegacy for secondary training was established in 1902 and Keatinge was appointed to a Common University Fund readership in the following year (though conspicuously education was not accorded the status of a chair).41 Like the postgraduate diploma courses in other disciplines, the Education diploma was open to non-matriculated students, including women; the latter gained 91 of the 154 diplomas awarded between 1903 and 1911. It was clear from the outset that secondary training at Oxford depended very largely on external stimulus. Within the University there were certainly strong supporters of training: Arthur Sidgwick of Corpus had most strongly put the case for the recognition of teacher training as a necessary University 36 R. E. Bell, `The Education Departments in the Scottish Universities', in W. M. Humes and H. M. Paterson (eds), Scottish Culture and Scottish Education 1800±1980 (1983), 154±9. For the ®rst chair in England of the science and art of education, founded by the College of Preceptors in 1873, see R. Aldrich, School and Society in Victorian Britain: Joseph Payne and the New World of Education (1995), ch. 5. 37 P. Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University: The First Sixty Years, 1879±1939 (1982), 1, 10. 38 HCP 41 (1895), 51±2; HCP 43 (1896), 44. 39 Gazette, xxvii (24 Nov. 1896), 145; the syllabus is set out in ibid. xxviii (19 Oct. 1897), 57±8. 40 Report of the Committee on Secondary Education, 7 Mar. 1902, HCP 61 (1902), 57. 41 Gazette, xxxiii (4 Nov. 1902), 103. On the Oxford arrangements see School World, vi (Feb. 1904), 54±6. The directorship of the department of Educational Studies did not become a professor's post until 1988.

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function,42 while the Diploma itself had been brought forward by two heads of house, R. J. Wilson, Warden of Keble, who, as a former Warden of Radley College, had close school connections, and W. W. Jackson, Rector of Exeter. But when the government teachers' register was abolished, in 1906, student numbers at the Oxford Delegacy fell from 52 to 17 within a year. Even this handful were not all intending to become schoolteachers: some were seeking school inspectorships either under the Board of Education or the Indian Education Service, or posts within colleges or departments of education, for which a training quali®cation was becoming an essential credential. By 1912, as its income from fees dried up, the future of the Delegacy itself was in doubt, and an appeal had to be made to Convocation for an additional grant.43 Sparse encouragement was received from potential employers of teachers. The Delegacy reported that `The older Headmasters of the Public Schools have been unsympathetic or even suspicious,' and it derived some satisfaction from the results of a survey of 160 secondary school headmasters which found `only 21 were de®nitely adverse' to training.44 Dons were little less grudging; the Delegacy acknowledged that requests for funding had to overcome the scepticism of `a University composed largely of teachers few of whom have themselves been systematically trained'.45 Such a constituency was not slow to question the claim of education to be treated as an academic discipline, or to voice its suspicion of pedagogic theory. In 1896 Thomas Case had characteristically dismissed the proposed diploma course as mere `psychological and ethical quackery'. A supporter of training, R. W. M. Pope, Censor of the Non-Collegiate students, nevertheless doubted the value of educational theory, claiming that those lectures in the art of teaching which he had heard comprised `a mass of commonplaces expressed in very elaborate language'.46 Most telling, perhaps, were the sentiments of the President of Magdalen, T. H. Warren, who reluctantly endorsed the diploma course, though regarding it as largely unnecessary. He told the Bryce Commission in 1894 that Greats men already studied the principles of education and psychology in their philosophy reading, while the typical classical scholar, who had been a prefect at an English public school `under the Arnoldian or similar systems', would have acquired practical experience of keeping order.47 42 See, for example, his prefatory note to J. J. Findlay, Teaching as a Career for University Men (1889). 43 HCP 90 (1911), 258. 44 Delegacy for Training of Secondary Teachers, Memorandum for Information of Members of Convocation (1912), 2. 45 HCP 90 (1911), 257. The decree for the grant was carried (116±14), Gazette xlii (13 Mar. 1912), 514. 46 Quoted in L. Tomlinson, `Oxford University and the Training of Teachers: the early years (1892±1921)', British Journal of Educational Studies, 15 (1968), 297. The various views expressed are discussed in ibid., 296±8. 47 Bryce Commn, v. 257.

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`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

By contrast, few disputed the importance of training for teachers in elementary schoolsÐthat is, former pupil-teachers mainly instructing the children of the poor. When it was proposed to establish a Day Training College for such teachers at Oxford, in response to the Education Department Code of 1890 which permitted the creation of non-residential training institutions attached to universities, little signi®cant opposition was raised in Congregation.48 One anonymous ¯ysheet crudely attacked the idea of the University attempting to educate pupil-teachers `in the technicalities of their calling', and Thomas Case rehearsed a series of objections in an hour-long speech which evidently tried the patience of his hearers.49 But even the Oxford Magazine, by then the mouthpiece of the Non-Placet tendency in Oxford politics, relaxed its usual scepticism and thought the experiment `ought to be tried'.50 There had been a growing movement to enable elementary teachers to pursue their studies at Oxford since 1885, when Canon Barnett had ®rst organized a summer school at Balliol for teachers from London schools, and a Teachers' University Association to promote this object was well supported when it held a meeting at Magdalen in 1887.51 Some sixty members of Congregation signed a memorial addressed to the Committee of the Privy Council on Education urging that elementary teachers should be enabled to spend part of their training in Oxford;52 the signatories were mainly liberals, who championed day training colleges as an unsectarian alternative to the existing denominational colleges which then dominated teacher training. When constituted in 1892, the Oxford University Day Training College enabled a handful of the most able pupil-teachers in the country (though only men), holders of ®rst-class Queen's Scholarships awarded by the Education Department, to read for an Oxford BA degree at the same time as completing their courses for the government teachers' certi®cate.53 A former Censor of the Non-Collegiate students, W. W. Jackson, who had long pressed for such an institution, became the the ®rst Principal of the collegeÐloosely so called since it had no premises of its own while most of the students were Non-Collegiates, living in lodgings. During the ®rst decade of its existence, seventy-two students were admitted, the majority of whom obtained honours degrees.54 Many of the early students were local boys, 48 The promulgation of the statute in June 1891 was carried by 70 to 27, Gazette, xxi (9 June 1891), 542; Gazette xxii (24 Nov. 1891), 144. 49 See `Proposal to Establish in the University a Day Training College for Training Elementary Teachers' and the reply by W. W. Jackson, `Proposed Statute for Establishing a Day Training College at Oxford, 6 June 1891', in Bodl. G. A. Oxon. b. 138; OM 10 June 1891, 413. 50 Ibid. 401. 51 See Teachers' University Association, Annual Reports, 1887±1891; OM 7 Dec. 1887, 132. 52 W. W. Jackson, `Day Training Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge', Educational Review, 1 ( Jan. 1892), 137. 53 See the report of the committee on the training of teachers in elementary schools, 10 May 1890, in HCP 26 (1890). 54 Gazette (1 Dec. 1903), 191.

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among them Fred Clarke, a dairy-worker's son and former pupil-teacher at St Ebbe's Boys' School, who matriculated in 1899 and read modern history under Ernest Barker, before embarking on his career in education.55 While the University sought to bring the ideal of a liberal education within the reach of elementary teachers, and was anxious to make it possible for them to complete an undergraduate course, it showed little interest in the vocational side of the Day Training College. From the start it was stipulated that the costs of the college were to be paid from the government Treasury grant and not from University funds. Objections that the subjects laid down for the government certi®cate, including `reading aloud', `penmanship' and `repetition from memory', did not fall within the proper province of higher education were met by the reassurance that these technical skills would not be taught by the University nor fall within its curriculum. Professional training was entirely left to the Masters of Method, the ®rst of whom was J. W. Horne, headmaster of St Barnabas' Boys' School in Jericho, where the students took practice lessons. The masters, as the Inspectorate complained, were underpaid and were often themselves reading for degrees. Facilities for training at the Boys' Central School in Gloucester Green, run by Oxford School Board, and elsewhere were considered to be good, but they owed nothing to the University. A particularly severe report by the Inspectorate in 1904 condemned the inadequate facilities provided for the college, and commented on the the lack of `sympathy and support' which it received. Only donations by individual colleges two years later prevented the Day Training College from going under.56 After Jackson stood down in 1895, the college had a succession of principals, and never had the bene®t of a ®gure like Oscar Browning, who made a conspicuous success of the Cambridge Day Training College during his principalship from 1891 to 1909. At Cambridge both secondary and elementary training were combined under the same agency,57 avoiding the invidious division in Oxford's arrangements, which emphasized the dif®cult position of the elementary department and its students. In an earlier generation a concern to oversee the development of what were called `middle-class' schools (as distinct from the `upper-class' public schools) had led the University to organize examinations of schoolchildren. In his contribution to the 1856 volume of Oxford Essays, the former Balliol fellow Frederick Temple had contended that, in the educational sphere, `The one thing which the middle classes want, and which they cannot get without help, is organization.'58 Temple's suggestion that, in the absence of state 55

Tomlinson, `Oxford University' 304; F. W. Mitchell, Sir Fred Clarke (1967), 10±13. Gazette xxxv (1 Nov. 1904), 103; Gazette xxxvii (20 Nov. 1906), 37. 57 Searby, Training of Teachers, 2. 58 Oxford Essays, 1856 (1856), 264. For a fuller account of the origins and development of school examinations, see J. Roach, Public Examinations in England, 1850±1900 (1971). 56

560

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

involvement, Oxford and Cambridge should assume a supervisory role over middle-class schooling by conducting external examinations was endorsed by a committee of the Hebdomadal Council which agreed that the University should `endeavour to extend its bene®cial in¯uence to the education of classes now for the most part beyond its reach.'59 Following a successful experiment by T. D. Acland, who organized an examination for middle-class schools in the West of England, the Local Examinations delegacy was established in 1857 with power to conduct the examination of those not members of the University. The ®rst examinations were held in June 1858 at eleven centres: Oxford, London, Bath, Bedford, Birmingham, Cheltenham, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Southampton. Examinations were set for candidates under 15, for a junior certi®cate, and under 18 for a senior certi®cate. Cambridge also took up the idea, and in keeping with the national claims of both Universities there was to be no geographical division between the two operationsÐboth asserted their freedom to operate in the same areas.60 Oxford played a pioneering role in promoting local examinations (or `Middle Class Examinations', as the Locals were originally designated), but in the decades after 1860 the early momentum was lost. The Oxford delegacy almost immediately became embroiled in a controversy about the religious content of the examinations.61 Cambridge, meanwhile, expanded its operations, conducting the examination of girls unof®cially in 1863 and formally in 1865, a move delayed at Oxford until December 1869. In 1870 Cambridge was examining twice as many candidates as Oxford, and by 1880 the gap had widened to three times as many. A phenomenal growth in the Oxford Locals in the early twentieth century, when the number of senior candidates trebled from 3,726 in 1905 to 11,372 in 1909, brought the Universities roughly level by 1910 (see Table 23.A.5). Among the memorials in 1857 from interested bodies around the country urging Oxford to take up school examining, that from the trustees of Leeds Grammar School and the clergy of Leeds, headed by W. F. Hook, was con®dent that examinations would be welcomed by `the Masters and Scholars of the Grammar Schools, Proprietary Schools, and the better class of Private Schools throughout the kingdom'.62 Among the ®rst to embrace the new system was Joseph Payne, the educationist, who from June 1858 entered 59 `Report of the Committee on Middle Class Examinations' [1857], Bodl G. A. Oxon b. 29, p. 3; see also Pt I, 704. 60 SIC (1864), vol. iv. Q. 721. This principle was reasserted in 1904 in Oxford's response to the report on school examinations drawn up by the Board of Education Consultative Committee, HCP 69 (1904), 68±9. 61 Herald 4 May 1861, 25 Feb. 1865; J. Roach, ```The Rudiments of Faith and Religion'': Religious Controversy at Oxford, 1860±1865', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxii (1971), 333±53. 62 `Report of the Committee on Middle Class Examinations', 17.

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pupils from his ¯ourishing private school, Mansion grammar school, Leatherhead.63 The list of enthusiasts conspicuously omitted the ancient public schools. Few such schools entered pupils for the Locals, though public-school headmasters did invite individual dons to conduct annual examinations of their pupils on an informal basis. Only the threat of statecontrolled examinations in the wake of the Taunton Commission caused the Headmaster's Conference, ®rst convened at Uppingham in 1869, to look to the Universities to arrange a systematic independent scrutiny of their work. The outcome was the creation of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board in 1873, the Oxford side of which was administered by a new delegacy for the Inspection and Examination of Schools. Participation in the joint board's examinations was restricted to schools which had `a properly constituted governing body' (that is, excluding purely private schools) and which prepared `a fair proportion of boys for the universities'.64 There was an element of exclusiveness, as G. W. Kitchin, the Censor of the Unattached Students, observed, since the board was likely to `attach the universities more and more to the public schools, which are practically limited to the rich, and so tend to limit the universities also to the rich'.65 This objection carried less force as the numbers of ®rst-grade schools increased. By the early twentieth century the board examined candidates from over 100 boys' schools, including many of the larger urban grammar schools. At the end of the century the headmasters viewed the authority of Oxford and Cambridge, and the joint board in particular, as a safeguard of their independence from regulation by central government. This function was acknowledged when the Hebdomadal Council considered the implications of the report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. `It is understood', a sub-committee reported in February 1896, `that a large number of Schoolmasters, especially among those who are Graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, are looking to the Universities to take such steps in the matters of Training of Teachers, Inspection of Schools, &c, as may (by anticipation) render unnecessary the creation of new machinery for these purposes by Act of Parliament.'66 The introduction of the Education Diploma was the ®rst such pre-emptive measure. A similar reaction followed the proposals for greater state regulation of school examinations put forward by the Board of Education Consultative Committee in 1904.67 To the Headmasters' Conference the plans threatened a `gradual curtailment of the freedom which 63

Aldrich, (see n. 36), 76. Bryce Commn, v. 277. 65 Herald 15 Feb. 1873. 66 HCP 43 (1896), p. 44. 67 Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, 1 June 1904, PRO ED 24/184. 64

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`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

has hitherto been one of the best features of English education'.68 The Consultative Committee's suggestion that schools aided by local authorities might do best to look to provincial examining bodies conducted by the new civic universities appeared to challenge Oxford's position as a national examining body. It was, however, dif®cult to defend the existing unregulated system which had led to a chaotic proliferation of examinations, as new examining boards entered the ®eld and universities and professional bodies devised their own particular entrance requirements. In the ensuing defensive ¯urry of negotiations interchangeability was achieved between Oxford, Cambridge, London, and the Joint Matriculation Board.69 The boards then had to meet one of the periodic demands for a school leaving certi®cate in the face of a widespread concern about over-specialization within English secondary education. In 1905 the joint board responded by creating a school certi®cate examination for ®fth forms, covering `the ordinary curriculum of a Public School up to 16 or 17', with the condition of three years' attendance at an inspected school.70 When the Consultative Committee, chaired by A. H. D. Acland (son of T. D. Acland) returned to the subject in 1911, its conclusions were more friendly to the University examining bodies than those embodied in its 1904 scheme had been.71 Central activity was to be limited, as the Hebdomadal Council had urged, to promoting the equalization of standards and mutual recognition, and maintaining a close relation with the Board of Education's inspectors. The independent body set up in 1917 to bring this about, the Secondary School Examinations Council, was chaired by William Temple whose father, Frederick, had ®rst identi®ed this area as one likely to bene®t the Universities `by increasing their popularity and the general sense of their value'.72 Late Victorian Oxford developed a closer involvement with schooling, and the public schools in particular, than at any other period in the University's recent history.73 Many dons had, or expected to have, experience of schoolmastering: as late as 1900 there was a considerable traf®c between Oxford common rooms and schools of various kinds. The ¯ow was strongest between about 1860, when assistant masterships became more widely open to laymen and thus to fellows unwilling to enter orders,74 and 1882, 68

HCP 68 (1904), 67. HCP 68 (1904), 91. 70 Gazette xxxiv (16 Feb. 1904), 368; HCP 67 (1904), 37±8; HCP 68 (1904), 83±5; HCP 75 (1906), 124±5. 71 J. Roach, `Examinations and the Secondary Schools 1900±1945', History of Education, 8 (1979), 47. 72 F. Temple to F. Jeune, Apr. 1857, Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 29. 73 See `Secondary Schools and the Universities. II. The University of Oxford' in School World, vii (Mar. 1905), 89±91. 74 Tom Brown's Universe, 308. 69

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when most clerical and celibacy restrictions were ®nally removed from Oxford fellowships. The teaching staff of Wellington College in its ®rst two decades was largely composed of former college fellows. Later in the century young dons sometimes taught in public schools while awaiting fellowships: Joseph Wells, a tutor and later Warden of Wadham, spent two years at Sedbergh before his election to a fellowship in 1882. Public-school headmasters continued to enjoy a degree of standing in the wider world which, in addition to the ®nancial rewards, could be attractive to dons. John Simon, newly elected fellow of All Souls in 1898, and a recent President of the Union, seriously considered the offer of a public-school headship which followed hard upon these Oxford honours. Although, as instances mentioned elsewhere in this volume show, relations between Oxford and the public-school heads were sometimes frayed,75 the presence of university and college representatives on school governing bodies, the annual meetings of `Dons and Beaks' (®rst held in 1886), and most important of all, the joint examining board, provided channels of communication between college tutors and schoolmasters.76 Some dons treated the expounding of good educational practice, inspecting secondary schools, and organizing conferences on educational questions, which were seen to be within the province of the newly created professors of education in civic universities,77 as an important aspect of their tutorial vocation. H. T. Gerrans, the Worcester mathematics tutor and secretary of the Oxford Local Examinations Delegacy, and the New College classics tutor Percy Matheson, Oxford secretary of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, were particularly prominent in this respect.78 Inspections and examinations conducted for the joint board regularly brought dons into schools and exposed them to classroom issues, particularly those concerning the curriculum. Developments in schools helped to prompt additions to the range of subjects taught at Oxford: the creation of the honour schools in English and Modern Languages and the diploma in Geography were all brought about, in part, by the demand for graduates to teach these subjects. In 1907, after certain leading public schools instituted classes in mechanics for boys intended for the engineering profession, the University acknowledged that the creation of an engineering department had 75

See pp. 11, 126, 636, 822. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe, 340; Wadham College Gazette, iv (1912), 63; C. Cookson (ed.), Essays on Secondary Education (1898), 267. 77 A. Robertson, ```Between the Devil and the Deep Sea'': Ambiguities in the Development of Professorships of Education, 1899 to 1932', British Journal of Educational Studies, xxxviii (1990), 146; J. B. Thomas, `Birmingham University and Teacher Training: Day Training College to Department of Education', History of Education, xxi (1992), 312. 78 See Matheson's collected addresses to educational bodies, Education To-day and Tomorrow (1917). 76

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become an `urgent necessity' as parents now expected their sons to be able to continue these studies at Oxford.79 By far the most critical curricular issue concerned Oxford's entrance requirements. The obligation to pass an examination in Greek, which the University placed upon all those embarking on a degree course, was widely believed to be vital to the survival of Greek as a subject taught in schools. This view was endorsed by a post-war inquiry which concluded that the lastditch defence of compulsory Greek in Edwardian Oxford had allowed teaching of the language to gain a foothold in some of the local authority secondary schools established under the 1902 Education Act.80 Yet the Headmasters' Conference, which had been strongly opposed to compulsory Greek since 1900, was promoting a curriculum which doomed the requirement. In April 1914 the headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, son of the Endowed Schools Commissioner, privately approached the Vice-Chancellor concerning `the very great dif®culty, which is looming before us in the near future'. In line with several other public schools, Eton had introduced a policy of not teaching a second ancient language to boys who had failed to make progress in Latin by the age of 14. Nearly 50 per cent of Eton boys were now no longer learning Greek. Many of these would intend to seek admission to Oxford: `hence in a year or two the practical question must arise, how are these boys to be got through Responsions?'81 Eton, which remained the largest single supplier of undergraduates to Oxford, had no intention of preparing them to meet the University's Greek requirements. Lyttelton knew that the colleges would not relish the task of cramming the Greek-less freshmen, yet could not afford to turn them away. The war delayed the impact of the headmasters' new policy, and concealed its effect upon the subsequent decision to abolish compulsory Greek, but there could be no doubting the signi®cance of this particular interaction between Oxford and the public-school community. 79 The needs of Oxford University, Feb. 1907, Bodl. MS Top. Oxon c. 236; F. W. Sanderson at Oundle, H. B. Gray at Brad®eld, Edmond Warre at Eton, and H. A. Gilkes at Dulwich were among the headmasters who had introduced engineering classes. 80 The Classics in Education. Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister to inquire into the position of Classics in the educational system of the United Kingdom (1921), 19; see also The Twentieth Century, 110±11; Pt 1, 357. For the relevant statistics see ch. 33, n. 60, and The Twentieth Century, 110. 81 E. Lyttelton to the Vice-Chancellor, 28 Apr. 1914, HCP 98 (1914), 81±2. For Macan's warning, 8 Aug. 1914, see ch. 33, n. 20.

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Appendix TAB L E 23 .A 1 t h e pu b l i c - s c h o o l s c o m m u n i t y a n d i t s p e r i p h e ry c .1 8 8 0 ±1 9 0 2

(i) Fifty public schools

Group One (22 schools)

Group Two (8 schools)

Group Three (20 schools)

Bedford Brad®eld Charterhouse Cheltenham Clifton Dulwich Eton Glenalmond Haileybury Harrow Malvern Marlborough Repton Rossall Rugby St Paul's Sherborne Tonbridge Uppingham Wellington Westminster Winchester

Blair Lodge Eastbourne Felsted Highgate Hurstpierpoint Lancing Merchant Taylors' Radley

Bath Bedford Modern Berkhamsted Blundell's, Tiverton Brighton Cambridge, Leys Canterbury, King's Cranleigh Edinburgh Academy Epsom Fettes Forest Leatherhead, St. John's Loretto Merchiston Reading Shrewsbury University College School Weymouth Whitgift

(ii) Fifty-four `fringe' public schools c.1880±1902 (Groups Four to Five) Group Four (14 schools)

Group Five (40 schools)

Aldenham Ardingly Chigwell

Abingdon Bedford County Birmingham, King Edward School Blackheath Brecon, Christ's Bromsgrove Bury St Edmund's Cambridge, Perse

Giggleswick Guernsey, Elizabeth College Hereford Cathedral School Ipswich Jersey, Victoria College Leamington Leeds GS Liverpool College

Carlisle GS Christ's Hospital Cranbrook Denstone Durham

Llandovery College Manchester GS Merchant Taylors', Crosby Mill Hill Monmouth

City of London Derby Dover Framlingham Isle of Man, King William's King's College School Oundle Oxford, St Edward's St Lawrence Ramsgate U. Services, Westward Ho! Warwick

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`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

TABLE 23.A1 (contd.) Group Five (continued) Newton Abbot Oxford, Magdalen College School Plymouth Pocklington Portsmouth GS St Olave's Sedbergh Stonyhurst Sutton Valence Wake®eld GS Wellingborough GS Windsor, St Mark's Worcester, King's School York, St Peter's Source: J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe: the Development of the Victorian Public School (1977), 264, 268.

TA B L E 2 3. A 2 u n d e r g r a d uat e s m at r i c u l at i n g at ox f o r d a n d ca m b r i d g e i n t h e aca d e m i c y e a r s 1 8 1 8 / 1 9 a n d 1 8 4 8 / 4 9 , a n d u n d e r g r a d uat e s o n t h e b o o k s i n 1 8 6 1 w h o h a d at t e n d e d a ` c l a r e n d o n ' pu b l i c s c h o o l 1818/19 1848/9 1861 Oxford Cambridge Oxford Cambridge Oxford Cambridge Charterhouse Eton Harrow Merchant Taylors' Rugby St Paul's Shrewsbury Westminster Winchester

4 34 18 6 24 2 6 16 25

7 28 18 6 18 2 2 17 4

13 51 13 10 37 3 4 4 28

4 45 6 3 22 7 11 7 0

Total % of all undergraduates

135 35.8

102 24.5

163 36.7

105 23.5

23 164 122 27 106 11 17 28 60 558 33.3

10 85 89 7 44 17 29 22 2 305 20.5

Source: (for 1818/19 and 1848/49) Alumni, J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part II (6 vols 1940±54), published school registers; (for 1861) Clarendon Commn.

oxford and schooling

567

TA B L E 23 .A 3 p r e v i o u s e d u cat i o n o f t h o s e m at r i c u l at i n g at ox f o r d , aca d e m i c y e a r s 1 8 9 5 ± 8 , 1 9 0 2 ± 5 , a n d 1 9 1 1 ± 1 4 , a n d t h o s e m at r i c u l at i n g at ca m b r i d g e , 1 9 0 2 ± 4 Oxford 1895±8 N %

Oxford 1902±5 N %

Cambridge 1902±4 N %

Oxford 1911±14 N %

Group One

1129

44.7

1146 44.1

1125

41.7

1165 38.8

Group Two Group Three (Groups One to Three)

129 188 1446

5.1 7.5 57.3

104 4.0 142 5.5 1392 53.6

99 3.7 188 7.0 1412 52.3

105 3.5 188 6.3 1458 48.6

Group Four Group Five (Groups Four and Five)

61 231 292

2.4 9.2 11.6

49 1.9 270 10.4 319 12.3

115 249 364

4.3 9.2 13.5

69 2.3 255 8.5 324 10.8

Other UK Schools Private UK Universities Colonial Foreign Not Known

476 86 124 39 60 0

18.9 3.4 4.9 1.5 2.4 0

471 18.1 97 3.7 98 3.8 75 2.9 142 5.5 0 0

547 20.3 119 4.4 65 2.4 137 5.1 55 2.0 0 0

514 17.1 45 1.5 126 4.2 199 6.6 326 10.9 8 0.3

2523

100

2596 100

Total

2699

100

3000 100

TA B L E 23 .A 4 l e a d i n g s c h o o l s b y ox f o r d a d m i s s i o n s , 1895±8, 1911±14 1895±8 Eton Winchester Rugby Charterhouse Harrow Marlborough St Paul's Cheltenham Shrewsbury Haileybury Radley Clifton Malvern Merchant Taylors'

Oxford Admissions

1911±14

Oxford Admissions

193 115 103 84 80 78 54 49 42 40 40 38 38 36

Eton Winchester Rugby Charterhouse Harrow Marlborough Malvern Wellington Westminster Clifton Repton Dulwich Oxford H. S. Radley

191 127 110 82 79 69 54 50 47 40 40 38 37 37

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`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

TABLE 23.A4 (contd.) 1895±8

Oxford Admissions

Uppingham Wellington Manchester GS Repton Dulwich Westminster Bedford St Edward's Oxford Brad®eld Rossall Lancing Fettes

1911±14

33 32 32 29 28 28 27 25 22 22 21 20

Oxford Admissions

St Paul's Cheltenham Manchester GS Sherborne Shrewsbury Haileybury Llandovery Merchant Taylors' Brad®eld Edinburgh Academy Bedford Fettes Uppingham

36 35 31 30 27 26 25 25 24 22 20 20 20

TA B L E 2 3. A 5 ca n d i dat e s a d m i t t e d to t h e e x a m i nat i o n s o f t h e ox f o r d l o ca l e x a m i nat i o n s d e l e gacy , t h e ca m b r i d g e l o ca l e x a m i nat i o n s sy n d i cat e , a n d t h e ox f o r d a n d ca m b r i d g e s c h o o l s e x a m i nat i o n b oa r d , 1860±1910 Examination Oxford Locals

Prelim. Boys Prelim. Girls Junior Boys Junior Girls Junior Boys Senior Girls

Totals Camb. Locals

Prelim. Boys Prelim. Girls Junior Boys Junior Girls Senior Boys Senior Girls

Totals Oxford and Cambridge

Higher Boys Higher Girls School Cert. Boys School Cert. Girls

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

Ð Ð 573 Ð 291 Ð

Ð Ð 1095 45 425 40

Ð Ð 1100 344 292 383

Ð Ð 1366 817 354 609

1766 652 2614 1865 648 1292

1626 1510 4104 3777 3774 8006

864

1605

2119

3146

9837

22797

Ð Ð 272 Ð 91 Ð

Ð Ð 1634 397 301 271

Ð Ð 3506 1554 571 1139

Ð Ð 4981 2399 542 1405

3423 2158 5414 2965 921 1366

2947 1878 5984 3374 3885 4303

363

2603

6770

9327

16247 22371

Ð Ð Ð Ð

Ð Ð Ð Ð

699 1 Ð Ð

1276 166 Ð Ð

1380 753 Ð Ð

1296 869 741 0

oxford and schooling

569

TABLE 23.A5 (contd.) Lower Boys Lower Girls Total

Ð Ð

Ð Ð

Ð Ð

587 58

690 148

910 155

Ð

Ð

700

2087

2971

3971

Source: Annual Reports of the Oxford Local Examinations Delegacy, Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, and the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board Key (with dates of foundation): Oxford Locals 1858 Senior Locals: Boys under 18 1858 Junior Locals: Boys under 15 1870 Girls admitted to Senior and Junior Locals 1895 Preliminary Locals: Boys and Girls under 14 Cambridge Locals 1858 Senior Locals: Boys 1858 Junior Locals: Boys 1865 Girls admitted to Senior and Junior Locals 1895 Preliminary Locals: Boys and Girls under 14 Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board 1874 Higher Certi®cate: Boys of 18 and over 1878 Girls admitted to Higher Certi®cate 1883 Lower Certi®cate for Boys and Girls under 16 1905 School Certi®cate for Boys and Girls of 17

page

570

page

24 Origins and Destinations: The Social Mobility of Oxford Men and Women m . c . c u r t h oy s a n d j a n e t h owa r t h `Education cannot secure success in life, but it can go a long way to make life interesting,' Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls and soon to be Parliamentary Secretary at the Board of Education, observed in concluding his speech on the second reading of the 1902 Education Bill.1 The civilizing effect of education was a common theme of Oxford opinion throughout this period. In 1832 Thomas Arnold had advanced the claims of middle-class education to prepare the new electors for citizenship, and Frederick Temple's scheme for local examinations in 1857 was intended to reach `the great body of our Voters, of our Taxpayers, of our Ratepayers'.2 In anticipation of universal manhood suffrage, the Education Bill introduced in 1917 by the Oxford historian H. A. L. Fisher offered education to workers who, he assured the House of Commons, `do not want it in order that they may rise out of their own class, always a vulgar ambition; they want it because they know that in the treasures of the mind they can ®nd an aid to good citizenship'.3 Much the same was said of the secondary and higher education of women. James Bryce's report on Lancashire girls' schools for the Schools Inquiry Commission in the 1860s suggested the importance of a general education for middle-class wives: since men had little time for intellectual pursuits, it was left to the women to bring about `the elevation of the English commercial class to a higher level of knowledge, taste and culture than that at which they now stand'.4 The various consumers of education to whom Oxford extended its in¯uence during the nineteenth centuryÐwhether £10 householders, provincial Dissenters, women, or manual workersÐwere offered it in the name not of material advantage but of general cultivation. These ideas enjoyed particularly strong currency at the turn of the twentieth century within the university extension movement which, rejecting the 1

Parl. Deb. 4S cvii. 973 (7 May 1902). A. P. Stanley (ed.), The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold (1845), 232; Report of the Committee on Middle Class Examinations (n.p. n.d. [1857]), 7. Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 29. 3 Parl. Deb. Commons 5S xcvii. 800 (10 Aug. 1917). 4 SIC (1864) ix. 839. 2

571

572

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

competitiveness which it associated with Oxford's examination-driven degree courses, set its face against promoting individual as opposed to collective advancement.5 By contrast, the University's old regime had taken a decidedly robust view of the opportunities for personal promotion in later life to which an Oxford education might lead. It could, in the words of a defender of Oxford's unreformed constitution, `afford to those of the Middling and Lower Classes, who show a proper capacity, the opportunity of raising themselves by means of a liberal education, to situations of usefulness and honour'.6 In the ®rst half of the nineteenth century the University's talent was drawn to the Church; and the stalls, mitres, and bene®ces, which were the establishment's great prizes, offered considerable material rewards for scholars who applied themselves to Greek and Latin. Thomas Gaisford's remark about the lucrative ®nancial bene®ts of a classical education may be apocryphal, but the sentiment had contemporary echoes.7 In 1818 the governing body of Corpus requested four of its distinguished old members, who had risen to high positions from comparatively obscure backgrounds, to present their portraits for display in the college hall: `These pleasing memorials will not only show the eminence to which former students of the House have attained, but will also encourage the present to imitate their virtues and their diligence.'8 During the course of the century, as the balance of opportunities shifted from the Church to the state and the empire, the University propounded an ideal of disinterested public service. It continued to honour those alumni who had successfully scaled, in varying degrees, what Jowett described as `the ladder of competition reaching from the gutter to the skies'. As the quest for high position had now become a matter of public duty as much as personal ambition, the Master of Balliol agonized about the factors which brought some men forward and held others back.9 The founders and early principals of the women's societies were less inclined to suggest that wordly success was the purpose of university education. Miss Beale and Miss Wordsworth sometimes came near to suggesting that ambition was a sin, and emphasized instead that the object was to enable women to give fuller service `for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate'.10 Where higher education for women was advocated for material reasons, stress was laid on the need to equip middle-class women 5 On the ethos of the extension movement, see L. Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (1995), 124, 140±1. 6 Report and Evidence (1853), evidence, 467. 7 Cited in Pt 1, 15. For a parallel see D. K. Sandford, `Classical Education', Edinburgh Review, xxxv ( July 1821), 305. 8 R. Symonds, ```To imitate their virtues?''. The Portraits in Corpus Hall', Pelican Record, xl (Dec. 1997), 11. 9 Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, ii. 347. 10 Sermon to students 1885, LMH Archives Elizabeth Wordsworth MSS Box 5.

origins and destinations

573

to earn a living as teachers and protect them from the risk of downward mobility. But there were prizes available to professional women, though many fewer than were open to men, and they were concentrated in the expanding world of women's education. The honour of DBE was conferred upon Elizabeth Wordsworth and Emily Penrose for their work as principals of women's colleges. After half a century as Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College, Dorothea Beale's estate was worth £50,000. Both the men's colleges and the women's societies were alert to the social backgrounds of the students they admitted. Since its inception in the late sixteenth century, the University matriculation register recorded the social standing of male entrants in accordance with a tariff of admission fees which re¯ected a pre-industrial ranking of social status. Fees were highest for sons of the titled aristocracy, followed by sons of baronets, knights, and the higher clergy. Those payable by sons of fathers designated `armigeri' (esquires), `generosi' (gentlemen), clergy sons, and sons of plebeians were levied on a diminishing scale.11 This information was incorporated in the monumental register of Oxford Alumni, published in 1887±8 by the genealogist Joseph Foster, who advertised the value of the work to the social historian as a source of evidence illustrating `to what extent the mixture of classes prevailed, and what were the principal couches sociales from which the University was recruited'.12 In the same year Andrew Clark, a fellow of Lincoln, tabulated information from the matriculation register to illustrate the composition of the University in the early modern period.13 But it was left unclear how far usable information relating to Oxford admissions in the industrial age could be derived from a source which classi®ed students' backgrounds according to an archaic hierarchy of social ranks. Indeed, the conclusions of an ambitious twentieth-century attempt to use this evidence to show how far the ancient Universities promoted social mobility are seriously ¯awed by misinterpretations of the Oxford register.14 Changes in the University's fee structure in the mid-nineteenth century brought about a fundamental change in its record-keeping. After 1855, when there was a review of matriculation fees, a standard amount was levied from all students, irrespective of parental status, except sons of peers and eldest sons of other titled ranks, who continued to pay more.15 The imposition of 11

RCO (1850), report, 126; appendix, 66. Alumni, i. p. viii. The matriculation registers covering the years 1800±1914 are in OUA SP/ 11 and SW 2/3±9a. 13 A. Clark (ed.), Register of the University of Oxford. Vol. ii (1571±1622) Part II. Matriculations and Subscriptions (OHS xi, 1887), 406±9. 14 C. A. Anderson and M. Schnaper, School and Society in England. Social Backgrounds of Oxford and Cambridge Students (Washington, DC, 1952). Their conclusion from a survey of Oxford and Cambridge matriculants between 1752 and 1886, that `The students of the two universities came from strikingly different sectors of society,' derives from the incorrect assumption that Oxford sons of `armigeri' were all sons of military men; ibid. 6. 15 Calendar (1856), 125. 12

574

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

additional degree fees upon those termed grand compounders (graduands who had a landed income or possessed ecclesiastical bene®ces of a certain value) also ceased.16 When, in 1870, the scale of fees was further equalized so that titled ranks paid the same as other matriculants, the University Registrar began for the ®rst time to note the occupations of undergraduates' fathers.17 This rather overdue recognition that the old hierarchy of ranks had been largely displaced by a class-based social structure provided the opportunity for the sort of analysis of student origins which Joseph Foster had envisaged. But that was not the issue which primarily interested researchers in the early twentieth century. During the Edwardian period biologists with eugenic interests utilized the University's uninterrupted run of data on successive cohorts of male undergraduates, comparing the performance of fathers and sons, and of brothers, in the Oxford class lists, in an attempt to quantify the strength of heredity as a factor in developing intellectual ability.18 This led to a further inquiry into the correlation between examination performance and success in later life, with the practical object of testingÐin the light of criticism of public expenditure on the scholarship `ladder'Ðwhether the large sums spent in offering scholarships to youths who had excelled at school-work did in fact promote those who were likely to justify the investment.19 The scientists then turned their attention to the physical characteristics of undergraduates. Clement Webb, the Magdalen diarist, witnessed a line of freshmen in Michaelmas 1909 being taken for measurement to the Anthropometric Laboratory, whose professorial head, the oarsman G. C. Bourne, had both an academic and an athletic interest in their size and strength.20 The work of subsequent investigators re¯ected the twentieth-century preoccupation with recruitment to eÂlite positions, and in particular, whether the existing educational system was successfully identifying and nurturing talent. Nearly ®fty years after Jowett's lament that only a fraction of the ability in the country reached the University,21 the MacDon16 RCO (1850), report, 126; L. H. Dudley Buxton and S. Gibson, Oxford University Ceremonies (1935), 70. 17 Stone, `Size and Composition', 142. Such was the tenacity of tradition that the archaic rankings continued to be entered into the register until 1891; the forms on which students recorded their fathers' occupations survive for 1870±9, OUA UR 1/1/1±14. 18 E. Schuster and E. Elderton, The Inheritance of Ability, being a study of the Oxford class lists and of the school lists of Harrow and Charterhouse (Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs No. 1, 1907). 19 It was found that `success both at the Bar and in the Church has a quite well-marked causal relationship with success in the Oxford ®nal schools', E. Schuster, The Promise of Youth and the Performance of Manhood (Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs No. III, 1907), 10. 20 Webb diary, 8 Oct. 1909, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1155, fo. 180. The tabulated comparisons between the head sizes of Oxford undergraduates, Cambridge undergraduates, and 3,000 English criminals revealed, inter alia, that `Cambridge appears in weight and breadth of head to exceed Oxford, but Oxford men are taller and longer headed', E. Schuster, `First Results from the Oxford Anthropometric Laboratory', Biometrika, viii (1911), 49n±50n. 21 See p. 21 above.

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nell Commission, investigating civil-service recruitment on the eve of the First World War, was anxious to discover whether Oxford excluded men whose natural abilities ®tted them for the service of the state. During the inter-war period evidence from pre-1914 Oxford was again examined to illuminate the relation between education and the achievement of high positions in public life.22 Two of the most active inter-war investigators in this ®eld, R. H. Tawney and Harold Laski, were products of Edwardian Oxford in which privilege in education had already come under ®re. It was at the suggestion of one of their contemporaries, G. D. H. Cole, that the largest survey of Oxford's undergraduate intake, covering the period from 1895 to 1936, was undertaken in 1944 under the auspices of the Nuf®eld College social reconstruction survey. Conceived at the moment when a system of universal state secondary education was brought into being, the Nuf®eld research focused on Oxford's historic dependence upon the products of the public (i.e. independent) schools and the loss of talent which this entailed.23 These surveys had nothing to say about university women. There was no clearly de®ned set of privileged schools for girls corresponding to the boys' public schools.24 Nor were women represented signi®cantly in the eÂlites that were under scrutiny. Schooling and university education, moreover, were of less signi®cance to women as avenues to fame and distinction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; those who achieved prominence were rarely university educated. The traditional avenues to distinction open to women are re¯ected in Frederic Boase's collection of obituaries of persons who died between 1851 and 1900, Modern English Biography (6 vols, 1892± 1921). Two-thirds of the women who were listed were writers, artists, musicians, or actresses. In the early years of the women's societies, the careers of former women students were, however, analysed for evidence of the effect of higher education on women's nuptiality rates.25 Later, the careers of alumnae were advertised by the women's colleges in connection with the appeal for funds in 1923. The record of service was put on display 22 E. L. Clarke, `The Recruitment of the Nation's Leaders', Sociological Review, xxviii (1936), 247; see the analysis of Oxbridge scholarship awards in 1913/14 in D. V. Glass and J. L. Gray, `Opportunity and the Older Universities. A Study of the Oxford and Cambridge Scholarship System', in L. Hogben (ed.), Political Arithmetic: A Symposium of Population Studies (1938), 450. 23 Mrs B. N. Clapham and Miss E. Brunner, `Oxford Undergraduates: their school and university records' (unpublished typescript 1944, Nuf®eld College Social Reconstruction Survey Papers, Nuf®eld College Library). For a similar approach to the Cambridge evidence see H. Jenkins and D. Caradog Jones, `Social Class of Cambridge University Alumni of the 18th and 19th Centuries', British Journal of Sociology, i (1950), 93±116. 24 J. Howarth, `Public Schools, Safety-nets and Educational Ladders: the Classi®cation of Girls' Secondary Schools, 1880±1914', Oxford Review of Education, 11 (1985), 60. 25 Mrs H. Sidgwick, Health Statistics of Women Students of Cambridge and Oxford and of their Sisters (1890).

576

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with the main object of showing that an Oxford education was not wasted on women.26 For the men, the central question of how the University's intake changed between 1800 and 1914 requires some attempt to interpret the pre-1870 matriculation register. While many entries in the register are either clear or relatively traceable (that is, sons of the nobility and clergy), the most numerous categories (those described as sons of esquires or gentlemen) are highly ambiguous as occupational statements. These latter can still shed some light on the types of students coming to Oxford in the early part of the nineteenth century. Since the register records the father's name, and the place and approximate date of the student's birth, it is possible to collate many of the entries with other sources, such as genealogical compilations of the landed classes, local or professional directories, and, occasionally, baptismal records. The results indicate that, devalued though the term `esquire' had become, it still retained a degree of exclusiveness: fathers of undergraduates admitted in two sample academic years, 1818/19 and 1848/49, identi®able from other sources as landowners, were assigned to this category. All those fathers who were or became MPs were described as esquire, as were those who had attended one of the Inns of Court or Oxford or Cambridge. The son of a professor at a Scottish university was, however, recorded under the lesser designation, `gen. ®l.'. Sons of men traceable as commissioned of®cers in the armed forces or members of the learned professions were almost all described as sons of esquires. So too were all the sons of bankers and brewers, and of most of the merchants, among those matriculating before 1850. But those fathers who were manufacturers proved more dif®cult for the University Registrar to classify, a slight majority being relegated to the gentleman category. There was similar uncertainty about surgeons, solicitors, and attorneys, and farmers, though in general they, like the manufacturers, were assigned to the lower rank. At the same time the `generosus' ranking was assigned to undergraduates whose parental status would, in earlier centuries, have been classi®ed as plebeian (a classi®cation which was by now rarely used in the register). Along with sons of lesser of®cials and tradesmen, examples such as the son of a sergeant in the infantry, a mariner, a blacksmith, a husbandman, and even one whose father was described in a baptismal record as `labourer' were registered `gen. ®l.'. Before 1850, therefore, the designations `armiger' and `generosus' continued to correspondÐalbeit looselyÐto some understood social divide, by which those fathers presumed to have no, or only dubious, claims to gentility were, confusingly, recorded as sons of `generosi'.27 Wealth played a part in determining classi®cation for, as Pusey, who defended the University's 26

Bodl. Dep. c. 707, The Four Oxford Women's Colleges (privately printed Oxford 1923), 7. Engel, 287, ®nds `no instance of a man giving ``armiger'' whose father was not a ``gentleman'''. 27

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577

eleemosynary fee tariff, pointed out, `by courtesy, as soon as one becomes possessed of any property, by trade or otherwise, he is accounted and addressed as esquire.'28 Some signi®cance may therefore be attached to the fact that before 1850 sons of esquires never accounted for fewer than 40 per cent and touched 50 per cent of matriculations. Those described as sons of gentlemenÐthe description least likely to indicate landed position, considerable wealth, or membership of one of the higher professionsÐrarely exceeded a quarter of Oxford admissions before 1850. This information about the earlier period can, with considerable quali®cations, be compared with the occupational data for the late nineteenth century. With the former, the main dif®culty remains the large number of fathers whose occupations are untraceable; nearly a quarter of the fathers in the ®rst year surveyed, 1818/19, have to be accounted `not known'. This is much less of a problem after 1870, though the more complete information gathered after that date is often extremely ambiguous, dependent as it was on the way that an individual undergraduate chose to describe his father.29 Moreover, occupational descriptions inadequately re¯ect the social distinctionsÐwhether of wealth or statusÐwhich were important to the Victorians. The term `merchant' is an obvious example, concealing what was regarded as the critical divide between retailers and those more substantial commercial men who had no direct dealings with the public.30 Table 24.1, which summarizes the available information, should be viewed with these cautions in mind. In one respect the ®gures bear out the disappointment felt by some contemporaries at the limited results of university reform: T. H. Green commented in 1877 that the University still did not reach much beyond the sons of `the landed gentry, the people of private fortune, the clergy of the Establishment, and the wealthier members of the other professions'.31 His observation is in line with a comparison of the sample years of pre-and post-reform intakes (1848/49, 1878/79). From these it appears that, despite the lifting of religious tests and an expansion in matriculations which reached levels in the 1870s not seen since the 1630s,32 undergraduates 28

[E. B. Pusey], `On the Principles of University Taxation', OUA WP 28 (3a). Stone, `Size and Composition', 66±7; by the end of the century there are particular dif®culties surrounding those undergraduates who described their fathers as `gentleman'. Some clearly were landed gentry, but the title was often used by sons of businessmen who had acquired estates or who had retired from trade. There was also a tendency, particularly among undergraduates from Queen's and St Edmund Hall, possibly as a matter of college policy, to use the designation as a matter of course in the old sense of `generosus'; that is, where their fathers were not clergy or members of the higher professions. Where possible such instances have been checked against other sources. 30 In the following tables, local directories have been used to attempt to distinguish the two categories; cf. the examples of ambiguous occupational descriptions discussed in Green, Lincoln, appendix 4A, 648. 31 Green, Works, iii. 392; see also Goldman, Dons and Workers, 36. 32 See S. Porter, `University and Society' in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 33. 29

578

`the muddied oafs at the goals'? TA B L E 24 .1

fat h e r s ' o c c u pat i o n s o f ox f o r d m e n m at r i c u l at i n g i n f o u r aca d e m i c y e a r s , 1 8 1 8 / 1 9 , 1 8 4 8 / 4 9 , 1 8 7 8 / 7 9 , 1 8 9 7 / 9 8 , a n d o f ox f o r d wo m e n a d m i t t e d 1 8 8 1 ± 3 , 1 8 9 1 ± 3 , 1 9 0 1 ± 3 , 1 9 1 1 ± 1 3 ( ro u n d e d p e r c e n tag e s ) 1818/19 Landowners, No Profession Clergy (CofE) Professions Business (owners/managers) Tradesmen, Clerks, Working Class Not Known Total N

Men 1848/9 1878/9

Women 1897/8 1881±1913

23 25 15 12 1 24

23 23 27 9 2 16

18 25 29 18 4 6

12 16 37 27 5 3

5 13 38 22 3 19

100 378

100 444

100 740

100 795

100 959

Note: Excludes men who matriculated as non-resident candidates for the B.Mus. degree.

continued to be largely drawn from those social groups who traditionally looked to the University to educate their sons. Oxford, like Cambridge,33 was proving slow to change: in 1878/79 over two-®fths of Oxford matriculants were sons of clergymen or landowners, a proportion that was only slightly lower than their share of admissions (about one half ) in the years before the ®rst Royal Commission. Indeed, the number of students from these backgrounds coming to the University was actually larger in 1878 than a generation earlier.34 In the case of clergy fathers, this was a natural result of the expansion of the clerical profession in an earlier generation; sons of those ordained in the Tractarian years began to arrive at the University in the 1860s.35 It was not until the last decade of the century that the male intake of the University showed a decisive break from the earlier pattern. Contemporaries detected a distinct weakening of the connections which had formerly existed between the University and the clergy and the English county families, as the agricultural depression and family limitation within those classes took their toll.36 In the mid-1890s W. W. Jackson, the Rector of Exeter College, found that undergraduates `come largely from sections of society which have no 33 The Cambridge data cited by Jenkins and Caradog Jones suggest the similarities between the two Universities, although precise comparison is impeded by differences in the form of their respective matriculation records. 34 Haig, `The Church, Universities and Learning', 201n. 35 Haig, Victorian Clergy, 2, 20 n. 9. 36 C. H. O. Daniel and W. R. Baker, Worcester College (1900), 239±41.

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long-standing hereditary connexion with the universities'.37 This may have been an exaggeration, but one index suggests a de®nite change. Earlier in the century the proportion of Oxford undergraduates whose fathers had attended either Oxford or Cambridge had been remarkably consistent: among those who matriculated in 1818/19 it was 32 per cent, remaining at 33 per cent in 1848/49 and 1878/79. In 1897/98, however, the proportion had fallen considerably, to 24 per cent. By then clergy and gentry sons were a declining element among matriculations, a decline also registered among entrants to the army, the bar, and the Anglican ministry.38 Their places were ®lled by undergraduates from lay professional backgrounds, who were almost equally divided between the older-established professionsÐlaw, medicine, and the armed forcesÐon the one hand, and newer groupsÐsons of civil servants, journalists, university teachersÐon the other.39 Sons of businessmen, who were always more numerous in the University than has sometimes been thought, also represented a growing share of admissions. Their presence before 1870 was concealed by status categories in the matriculation register,40 and was understated after 1870 by a reticence on the part of some matriculants whose fathers were in trade to declare the fact on the Registrar's form.41 These data are, of course, of limited use in determining how far University reformers had managed to overcome the deep-rooted denominational and cultural divisions in English society which lay at the root of their successful campaign to repeal religious tests. In 1873 John Percival, headmaster of Clifton College and a former fellow of Queen's, launched an in¯uential plea for university extension to end the `divorce' between the universities and `the great gathering-places of commercial population' in provincial cities.42 An earlier such attempt had been made during his mastership of Pembroke, from 1844 to 1864, by Francis Jeune, a former headmaster of King Edward's School, Birmingham, who brought to the college several students from commercial families in that city.43 Individual examples show 37

Bryce Commn, v. 181. E. H. Brabant, `Lessons of the War', Monthly Review, 9 (1902), 24±5; W. C. D. Whetham and Mrs Whetham, `The Extinction of the Upper Classes', Nineteenth Century, 66 (1909), 103; Church Congress Report 1902, 387; M. Ginsberg, `Interchange between Social Classes', Economic Journal, 39 (1929), 563. 39 Clapham and Brunner, `Oxford Undergraduates: Their School and University Records', table 11. 40 Anderson and Schnaper, School and Society, 6, mistook the handful of Oxford tradesmen, whose names were entered on the register as `privileged persons' (see Pt I, 443), for students who were sons of businessmen and as a result put forward a minute ®gure (0.1%) for the proportion of the total student body represented by the latter. This in turn has led to serious under-estimates of the unreformed University's association with ®nancial and mercantile wealth; see e.g. H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (1989), 372. 41 Some simply wrote `Esq' or `Gentleman'; some of those fathers stated to be of `no occupation' were retired businessmen. 42 J. Percival, The Connection of the Universities to the Great Towns (1873), 5. 43 Macleane, Pembroke, 470. 38

580

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

that during the 1870s students from those types of provincial, urban backgrounds, encompassing Nonconformity and radical Liberalism, were beginning to matriculate in signi®cant numbers though not, as yet, large enough to alter the overall complexion of the student body.44 An incident during the Welsh tithe war in the late 1880s, when Nonconformist farmers resisted payment of tithe rent charges to Christ Church, brought to light the extent of diversi®cation at that college. Challenged to show that the tithes were not used exclusively to bene®t members of the Established Church, the Christ Church authorities analysed a list of undergraduates receiving ®nancial support from the college in 1889 and identi®ed seven non-Anglicans among thirty-nine scholarship holders: two English Dissenters, a member each of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, a Wesleyan Methodist, a Roman Catholic, and a Hindu.45 Another new element was a group of Jewish students, of whom there were reported to be twenty-®ve in 1882, mainly scholarship boys from urban day schools.46 By 1900 the President of Corpus, Thomas Fowler, believed that the `large accession of nonconformist students . . . coming for the most part from simple and religious homes . . . have sensibly reinforced the more serious and diligent section of undergraduates', though estimates vary as to exactly how numerous they were.47 In none of the men's colleges was the concentration of Nonconformists as great as it was at the undenominational women's college, Somerville. Protestant Dissenters accounted for about a third of Somervillians by the early twentieth century. But the Tractarian interest which had inspired the foundation of Keble also led to the establishment of the Anglican Lady Margaret Hall, which was joined by two other halls with a de®nite church ethos, St Hugh's and St Hilda's. Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's proved especially attractive to clergy daughters, where they accounted for a ®fth of all students at the turn of the century. At Girton College, Cambridge, despite its nominal links with Anglicanism, they amounted to less than 10 per cent.48 The problem of supporting unmarried daughters particularly exercised the clergy during the agricultural depression. Even the higher clergy might have dif®culty in making adequate provision for widows and dependent daughters, as 44 See pp. 163±4; A. Kadish, The Oxford Economists in the Late Nineteenth Century (1982), 278. For similar trends at Cambridge see R. MacLeod and R. Moseley, `The ``Naturals'' and Victorian Cambridge: Re¯ections on the Anatomy of an EÂlite, 1851±1914', Oxford Review of Education, 6 (1980), 180. 45 E. F. Sampson to H. G. Liddell, 8 Nov. 1889, CA MS Estates 50, fo. 1839; J. P. D. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1974), 214±19. 46 D. M. Lewis, The Jews of Oxford (1992), 24. 47 T. Fowler to Sir Joshua Fitch, 7 Jan. 1900, CCCA MS DXLV. For estimates of the number of Nonconformist students in residence, see pp. 103±4. 48 G. Sutherland, `The Movement for the Higher Education of Women: its social and intellectual context in England, c. 1840±80', in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton 1987), 101, Table 4.1.

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is shown by the case of Annie Moberly, who took the post of Principal of St Hugh's reluctantly on the meagre salary of £40 a year after Bishop Moberly's death left his widow and unmarried daughters in straitened circumstances.49 This was a generation of middle-class women whose chances of marriage were low and who might therefore need to earn their own living. The crisis of nuptiality was of particular concern to professional and business families who relied on earned or precarious income. As we have seen, a growing proportion of male undergraduates was also drawn from this class. It embraced a wide range of income and status, and there is no means of measuring the numbers of women students who came either side of the line that divided the genteel haute bourgeoisie from the mere middle class, a distinction which was still faintly echoed in the Latinized status categories of `armigeri' and `generosi' among the men. Although women could not matriculate as members of the University until 1920, registers kept by the women principals took note of students' backgrounds in the same way that the University Registrar did for men, and these form the basis for comparisons between the two. The evidence summarized in Table 24.1 indicates that Oxford was not so attractive to the daughters as it was to the sons of the aristocracy and gentry. The halls very occasionally admitted well-born foreigners such as the Indian princesses, Bamba and Catherine Duleep Singh, who went to Somerville in 1890. Ume Tsuda, daughter of a samurai, stayed at St Hilda's in 1899, and St Hugh's in 1906 admitted a Russian princess. But these were exceptional cases. At the same time, there were fewer women than men drawn from the lower end of the occupational scale. The women's societies had fewer scholarships and they were of lower value than those available to men. Lady Margaret Hall was particularly anxious to cultivate a lady-like toneÐfor clergy daughters were `ladies', however poorÐand although they did not follow Dorothea Beale's practice at Cheltenham Ladies' College and in the early years at St Hilda's of barring tradesmen's daughters, there is a suspicious absence of tradesmen's daughters in LMH's admission records. This was not true of the other women's societies. Even St Hilda's admitted its ®rst unequivocally lower-middle-class student in 1913 (an elementary schoolteacher, Maud Grif®ths) through Elizabeth Levett's contacts with the Workers' Educational Association. But before 1914 only 3 per cent of women students were daughters of tradesmen, minor of®cials, or clerks; a class which supplied about 15 per cent of women students at Royal Holloway College, Mason College, Birmingham, and Aberdeen University.50 Thus women at 49 C. A. E. Moberly to B. Johnson, 28 Oct. [1894], St Anne's College archives, Bertha Johnson MSS. 50 J. Howarth and M. Curthoys, `The Political Economy of Women's Higher Education in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain', Historical Research, 60 (1987), 217; R. D. Anderson, The Student Community at Aberdeen, 1860±1939 (Aberdeen, 1988), 138.

582

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

Oxford, as at Cambridge, were drawn from a narrower spectrum than men, very few of them having been recruited from the two extremes of the social scale.51 It was at these margins that much interest in male admissions was directed. Early nineteenth-century Oxford had witnessed a remarkable aristocratic resurgence, dating from the 1760s and continuing until about 1835.52 Sons of Irish and Scottish peers, who represented a signi®cant contingent in the 1820s, swelled the totals further. This was, as Lawrence Stone pointed out, probably the most socially exclusive period in the University's history.53 Aristocratic patronage of the University was particularly sensitive to political considerations and changes in fashion. Sixty-three peers' sons matriculated during 1825±9, but the number fell away sharply to thirty-three during 1835±9, a decline which coincided with the University's absorption in theological controversy and its sudden political isolation. The recession to pre-1780 levels of aristocratic entrants lasted until about 1870 (thirty-six peers' sons matriculated during 1865±9), when the University ®nally abolished the privileges accorded to noblemen's sons, such as the elaborate gowns and the right to graduate after only two years' residence. Aristocratic students now stood in a position of formal equality with the rest of the undergraduate population in the University and colleges (the 1867 code of statutes having ®nally ended their special status at Christ Church), a change which was actually followed by a marked recovery in their numbers.54 They ceased, however, to be overwhelmingly concentrated at Christ Church.55 Dean Liddell's excessive tolerance towards their extravagance was the subject of unfavourable comment in political circles in 1866.56 But when the Christ Church authorities attempted to bring the well-born to order, possibly in response to the scandalous ®nancial ruin of the Marquis of Hastings, a former undergraduate, through heavy gambling losses on the Derby in 1867 and 1868, they did so in a heavy-handed way. The Earl of Rosebery, an otherwise conscientious student, was required either to give up his racehorses or leave the college, and chose the latter.57 Meanwhile the future Marquis of Lansdowne, who had been advised to go to Balliol in preference to Christ Church, prospered under Jowett's guidance and later acknow51

Sutherland, `The Movement for the Higher Education of Women', 101. John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (1984), 51, table 14; the trend also appears in the data in L. Stone and J. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540±1880 (1984), table 7.4. 53 Stone, `Size and Composition', 63. 54 E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform, 1850±1867 (1970), 181. 55 Of the 48 peers' sons who matriculated during 1885±9, 19 were admitted at Christ Church, 12 at New College, 7 at Magdalen, and 5 at Balliol. By comparison, of the 58 who matriculated during 1820±4, Christ Church admitted 43, Brasenose and Oriel took 4 each, Magdalen and New College 2 each, and Balliol none. 56 J. R. Vincent (ed.), Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative party (1978), 250±1 (1 May 1866). 57 R. R. James, Rosebery (1963), 49±52. 52

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ledged the formative in¯uence of his tutor. George Curzon, who had also been to Balliol, strenuously argued in 1909, as University Chancellor, that Oxford should continue to play a part in the education of the nobility, attacking those radicals who sought to drive out the leisured classes. The `frivolity or dissipation' of the sons of the richer classes on the continent of Europe pointed, in Curzon's view, to the importance of educating `the wellto-do to a sense of responsibility and a capacity for public affairs'.58 He might have added that since the turn of the century, the University had increasingly attracted from overseas representatives of the `richer classes'. Sons of the American plutocracy, and of the nobility and landowning classes of central Europe and Russia, appear in the matriculation register in the years before 1914, their presence contributing to something of a revival in the popularity of ®eld sports at the University.59 By contrast, the barriers which stood in the way of working-class students seeking to enter late nineteenth-century Oxford were powerfully evoked in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), although the circumstances which the novel described did not actually represent the problem in its starkest form. Adult students like Jude Fawley, from backgrounds not usually represented among the undergraduate body, occasionally did matriculate; intending ordinands were more likely than other disadvantaged students to ®nd external means of support. JowettÐif he was Hardy's `Master of Biblioll' who snubs JudeÐwas, of all the heads, the most active supporter of university extension. As Ernest Barker, who entered Balliol in 1893 from a manual labouring background, later pointed out, Hardy's narrative also overlooked the existence of the Non-Collegiate scheme which, if it failed to revolutionize the University in the way that reformers in the 1850s had hoped, nevertheless represented a route which Jude might have taken to gain access to its lectures and libraries.60 Unusually for boys of his class, Barker had been enabled to complete his secondary education at Manchester Grammar School from where he won a scholarship to the University. Alexander Grant, described as the son of a Bolton coalminer, achieved an even more remarkable ascent from attendance at an elementary school and two years spent in half-time education while working in a factory, before gaining an exhibition to Manchester Grammar School which led him to a scholarship at Merton (1884) and eventually a fellowship of All Souls (1890).61 Such extreme examples 58

Principles and Methods (1909), 47. For the Germans see T. Weber, `A Stormy Romance: Germans at Oxford between 1900 and 1938' (Oxford M.St. thesis 1998), 9±10; see also below pp. 723, 808. 60 E. Barker, Age and Youth (1953), 71. On Barker as an example of the operation of the educational ladder, see J. Roach, Secondary Education in England 1870±1902 (1991), 82±3. On the social origins of Non-Collegiates see pp. 197, 200, 204±6. 61 The Times, 27 March 1941, 7; his birth certi®cate described his father as a journeyman brushmaker. For two other such `ascents' in the 1880s see ch. 33, n. 58. 59

584

`the muddied oafs at the goals'?

have to be set against the perhaps more typical experience of a near contemporary, Albert Mansbridge, who was forced by family circumstances to leave Battersea Grammar School at the age of 14 to become a clerk. When, in about 1895, he sat for a scholarship at Oriel, having like Jude felt a vocation for the priesthood, he found himself in competition with well-schooled candidates against whom he stood little chance.62 One result of his failure was the impulse to found the Workers' Educational Association; another was his later, frequently cited assertion that `the most dif®cult time for the poor scholar to get to Oxford or Cambridge was from 1854 to 1904.' 63 Had the transition from a charitable allocation of endowments, in which a preference was allowed to the claims of locality and even of poverty, to one in which ®nancial support to students was awarded on the basis of examination success, led to a reduction in opportunities for poor students? Along with others who contended that the position of those from humble backgrounds had worsened, Mansbridge argued that the competitive method was not strictly meritocratic, since the provision for secondary education was very incomplete and, other than for those who had access to an endowed grammar school, it tended to favour those who had received an expensive education. Before 1854, in theory at least, the interests of poor students were protected by the limitations of scholarships and fellowships to favoured districts or schools, property disquali®cations attached to the tenure of fellowships, and by the existence of a handful of servitorships and bible clerkships, which offered free or heavily subsidized board and education. Moreover, the social theory of the old order offered a mild English variant of the celebrated Scottish symbol of the `lad of parts', which justi®ed the social hierarchy by making possible some movement within it.64 Such mobility, often promoted by the gentry or clergy, was likely to bene®t personal servants or retainers, who had direct contact with possible patrons.65 Three bene®ciaries of this opportunity for social elevation under the old order acknowledged through extensive benefactions their indebtedness to the University: William Gifford, who had risen from cabin boy to the editorship of the Quarterly Review after a clergyman had enabled him to secure a bible clerkship at Exeter College, founded, on his death in 1826, two local scholar62

B. Jennings, Albert Mansbridge and English Adult Education (1976), 4. A. Mansbridge, The Older Universities of England (1923), 109. His views are echoed in B. Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780±1870 (1960), 299; G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1962), 258; and K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation (1998), 601, who suggests that Oxford and Cambridge `may well have become more rather than less socially exclusive' between 1870 and 1914. 64 See, for example, the evidence of J. A. Ogle and Joseph Phillimore, RCO (1850), evidence, 40, 234. On the Scottish ideal see Robert Anderson, `In Search of the ``Lad of Parts'': the Mythical History of Scottish Education', History Workshop Journal, 19 (1985), 82±104. 65 In 1826 the son of the manciple of All Souls secured the nomination to the Bishop's fellowship at Lincoln through the Warden of All Souls, who took an interest in the boy's career, Green, Lincoln, 419n. 63

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ships at the college;66 his schoolfellow, John Ireland, a butcher's son, gained a bible clerkship at Oriel and went on to accumulate great wealth as dean of Westminster, which he used to found the Ireland scholarships and a chair of divinity;67 Edward Ellerton, who had matriculated `pleb. ®l.' and become a tutor of Magdalen, went on to endow, among other things, scholarships to encourage the study of Hebrew. All three became staunch defenders of the established order. In their enthusiasm for the pauperes Christi of the Middle Ages, whom they rediscovered in their studies of early college statutes, the Tractarians placed the question of access in a new perspective. James Hope, a fellow of Merton, envisaged the colleges drawing `pure water' by recruiting from parochial and grammar schools into the service of the Church.68 In 1853 Pusey spoke of attracting sons of tradesmen, who in former ages had supplied divines for the Church, and sought the revival of the status of plebeians among Oxford entrants, `through which gifted men may be raised out of the ranks'.69 To carry this into effect Provost Cotton of Worcester persuaded the Hebdomadal Board in 1853 to earmark £20,000 of University money to help poor students, but the funds were soon diverted to meet the competing demands of the natural sciences.70 This failure anticipated the unsuccessful last stand in defence of what were described as the claims of the indigentes, in April 1856, when the supporters of the old HighChurch establishment, headed by Cotton as Vice-Chancellor, joined by the Tractarian remnant and a few radical liberals, petitioned the Privy Council in opposition to the Executive Commission's ordinances which abolished poverty preferences in college statutes.71 A counter-petition, setting out the case `against the expediency of limiting places on college foundations to ``pauperes et indigentes''', signed by the leading liberal reformers, including H. G. Liddell, Francis Jeune, H. H. Vaughan, Jowett, and Lewis Campbell, prevailed; rejecting the idea of colleges as `almshouses', they argued that allocating resources on the basis of poverty ran counter to the wider object of `stimulating meritorious exertions, and ®lling the University with able teachers'.72 They thought it likely that the new system would be to the advantage of less well-off students, since they had the strongest motives for exertion, but the widening of opportunities was not their main purpose in promoting open competition. 66

Memoir of William Gifford. Written by himself (1827). E. Hawkins, An Inaugural Lecture upon the Foundation of Dean Ireland's Professorship, with brief notices of the founder (1848), 46±8. 68 R. Ornsby, Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott (2 vols 1884), i. 186. 69 Report and Evidence (1853), evidence, 81. 70 SCOC (1867), 282. 71 PP 1856 xlvi. 632±3. There was a similar alliance in Scotland; Anderson, `In Search of the ``Lad of Parts''', 93. 72 PP 1856 xlvi. 649. 67

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The outcome of this debate about eligibility for scholarshipsÐought ®nancial support to be awarded on the basis of merit or need?Ðhad wider implications for English education. The ordinances of 1857±8 for the Oxford colleges set a precedent for the replacement of free education in local grammar schools by a system of selection by competitive scholarships, a policy promoted by the Schools Inquiry Commission and subsequently carried out by the Endowed Schools Act (1869).73 By then, Oxford conservatives and High Churchmen re¯ected that the poor had lost out in the statutory reforms of the previous decade,74 an argument developed in 1888 by John Burgon, Dean of Chichester. Linking the secularization of endowments to the exclusion of the poor, he complained that scholarships had become prizes for those who had been most expensively trained: `Oxford has become exclusively an University for the rich.'75 Burgon's testimony was drawn upon by Mansbridge, who was also heavily in¯uenced by the Christian Socialist Charles Gore;76 in the early twentieth century the organized labour movement renewed the allegation that an act of expropriation had been committed by the mid-Victorian commissions.77 A weak point in the expropriation argument was its failure to demonstrate that poor students had been any more numerous in the ®rst half of the nineteenth century than they became in the later period, an objection which has been convincingly stated in relation to the Cambridge evidence.78 There is no doubt that Oxford had undergone a historical process of social closure but, as previous volumes in this series have shown, the trend long pre-dated the Act of 1854.79 In his Creweian Oration of 1839 John Keble dwelt on the fact of the exclusion of plebeian students, while in 1847 Osborne Gordon believed that there were no more than ®fty poor men among the resident undergraduates.80 Gordon would have been familiar with the Christ 73 For the application of the competitive principle see Simon Green, `Archbishop Frederick Temple on Meritocracy, Liberal Education and the Idea of a Clerisy', in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine (1993), 149±67, esp. 156. 74 See the evidence of Pusey and Montagu Burrows, SCOC (1867) Qs. 3406, 3682, and the report of subcommittee on university extension chaired by R. L. Cotton, ibid. 283. 75 J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men (2 vols 1888; new edn 1891), 186. 76 On the link between Mansbridge and the High Church tradition see A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy (1984), 55. 77 C. Griggs, The Trades Union Congress and the Struggle for Education 1868±1925 (Lewes, 1983), 122±3. 78 See S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1968; new edn 1981), ch. 1. 79 See V. H. H. Green, `The University and Social Life' and G. Bennett, `University, Society and Church 1688±1714', in The Eighteenth Century, 314, 367. S. Porter, `University and Society', in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 54, shows that by the 1680s sons of clergy and gentlemen had come to outnumber the plebeians and paupers. For sixteenth-century evidence of the usurpation of places intended for the poor see J. McConica, `The Collegiate Society' in The Collegiate University, 679. 80 S. Prickett, `Church and University in the Life of John Keble', in G. Rowell (ed.), The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Wantage, 1992), 204; O. Gordon,

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Church servitorships, of which just a dozen remained; of these about a half were said to be held by the sons of parsons or gentlemen in reduced circumstances, the rest by tradesmen's sons.81 No source for the pre-1850 period brings to light any more than the occasional undergraduate from a labouring family, and not surprisingly so, for the value of college scholarships was often very small, and rarely suf®cient to meet the costs of undergraduates otherwise destitute of means. By 1850 Queen's was an exceptional instance, where a closed local foundation was still bringing in undergraduates from humble backgrounds; the northern grammar schools with which Queen's was linked had remained a viable avenue to the University, and the survival of a yeoman class in Cumberland and Westmorland provided conditions not unlike those to which Aberdeen University's democratic pattern of recruitment has been attributed.82 As the University had increasingly become the preserve of the wealthy, college endowments were viewed as protections for the relatively hard-up, and the indigent clergy in particular. The latter were the most numerous single occupational group to receive support on the unreformed foundations. Where election was by nomination, as in the case of Magdalen demies, the clergy were often well placed to put their claims before the electors.83 In 1839, criticizing the appropriation of places on college foundations by the wealthy or the high-born, G. R. M. Ward of Trinity argued that such positions were rightfully the prizes of the sons of clergymen, for their fathers had `but a life-income in their profession' and a university education was an essential investment in their sons' future.84 Burgon dwelt on how the old charitable system enabled the impoverished clergy to send up their sons to Oxford, citing the remarkable Greswell dynasty, ®ve sons of a perpetual curate who all obtained fellowships in the early decades of the century.85 Other instances suggest that endowments were also viewed as safety nets to relieve the children of distressed gentlefolk, including Burgon himself, the son of a failed Levant merchant, whose claims to an Oriel fellowship in 1846 were preferred to those of Goldwin Smith, whose father was a railway director, on the grounds of Burgon's greater need. Considerations on the Improvement of the Present Examination Statute and the Admission of Poor Scholars to the University (1847), 29. 81 D. Winterbottom, T. E. Brown: His life and Legacy (1997), 39±46; BL Add MS 44380, fos 88±9. On the decline in the number of servitors since the late seventeenth century see E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church Oxford, 1660±1800 (1988), 191±4. 82 R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (1983), 9. 83 See the letters from bishops to Dr Routh supporting applications for demyships, MCA MS486. Over one half of the fellows elected at Magdalen (mainly from among the demies) between 1810 and 1849 were sons of clergymen. 84 G. R. M. Ward, An Appeal to the Bishop of Winchester, Visitor of Trinity College, Oxford, on the misappropriation of the endowments of that society (1839), 68. See also Richard Gilbert, Liber Scholasticus (1829), v. 85 Burgon, 293.

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When, therefore, opponents of reform in the 1850s spoke of the opening of endowments to meritocratic competition as tantamount to the `con®scation of the birthright of the poor scholar', they were not generally referring to the labouring poor.86 `It is the numerous poor men of the middle class,' D. P. Chase claimed in 1858, `the clergy, with incomes in inverse ratio to the number of their children, the hard-working, struggling professional men, whose interests are threatened.' These were the intended clientele of the new hall for poor scholars which Charles Marriott projected in 1849, of St Mary Hall under Chase's principalship, and eventually of Keble College itself.87 With hindsight the anxieties expressed by Chase and others in the 1850s proved to have been overstated. In 1922, re¯ecting on nearly seventy years' experience of the reformed scholarship system, the Asquith Commission concluded that the opening of scholarships had been `to the particular advantage of the cleverest sons of professional men of small means'.88 When, in 1882, the maximum value of open scholarships was ®xed at £80, a ®gure which was taken to represent about half the cost of a year's residence, it was assumed that most scholarship holders would have some means of their own; the emoluments were accordingly adjusted to meet `the circumstances, not of very poor men, but of the class taken as a whole, to whom assistance is likely to be useful'.89 Exceptionally gifted individuals without private means, for whom £80 was insuf®cient to cover the costs of their Oxford residence, were able to supplement their scholarships with schoolleaving exhibitions and funding from external sources such as city companies or, after 1902, county council awards.90 The majority of scholars, if not absolutely poor, were considered to be needy in the sense that many of them could not have afforded to come to the University without their awards; biographies commonly record their pride at being able, through their exertions, to relieve their families of some or all the costs of their University education.91 Although most scholars were, like commoners, recruited from what could very broadly be described as the middle classes, marked differences between the two can be identi®ed.92 Sons of salaried 86 D. P. Chase, A Plea for John Lord Craven and the Eleemosynary Purpose of Founders Generally (n. p. n. d. c.1857), 8; J. B. Mozley, `The Oxford Commission', Quarterly Review, xciii (June 1853), 213±19. 87 D. P. Chase, The Rights of the `Indigentes' in Respect to College Foundations. A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir J. Pakington, Bart., M. P. (1858), 9; Guardian 28 Nov. 1849, 781. For Keble see p. 174. 88 RCOC (1919), report, 25. 89 M. Bernard, A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone on the Statutes of the University of Oxford Commission (1882), 41. 90 See the return of entrance scholarships and exhibitions awarded to students beginning residence in the University of Oxford in October 1911, Royal Commission on the Civil Service 2nd Appendix to 4th Report (Cd. 7340, PP 1914 xvi. 573±6), Appendix liv. 91 M. Moore, Winfrid Burrows 1858±1929 (1932), 41; E. P. Swain (ed.), Bishop Seaton of Wake®eld (1940), 3±4; L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (1979), 2±10. 92 Clapham and Brunner, `A Study of Oxford Undergraduates', tables ii (a), ix, and xi.

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professionals (particularly civil servants and schoolteachers) and employees in commercial occupations were disproportionately likely to be awardholders; scholarships tended to be won by undergraduates whose fathers were dependent on earned incomes rather than capital.93 Here the parallels with the demand for women's higher education were most obvious, for the few scholarships at the women's societies helped girls from the same sorts of families. Ida Farnell, like her three brothers (one of whom, L. R. Farnell, was a future Vice-Chancellor) came up to Oxford with a scholarship after their father's drapery business had failed. Two of the `Somerville novelists', Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel Jaeger, were clergy daughters who came up with scholarships.94 Scholarship boys like Ernest Barker, who had ascended the narrow educational ladder from labouring backgrounds and elementary school to Oxford, remained a small minority among college award-holders.95 During the proceedings of the MacDonnell Commission in 1912, W. J. Ashley, the son of a journeyman hatter, who gained a Balliol scholarship in 1878, was pressed by the New College tutor Percy Matheson, the son of a Nonconformist minister and winner of a Balliol scholarship in 1877, to agree that there had been `a fair number' of scholars from similar backgrounds to his own when they were undergraduates. While dissenting from this rather optimistic view, Ashley recalled `a good many people, I should say, of the lower middle class'.96 No one was able to produce an exact ®gure. Anxious to demonstrate to the commissioners that Oxford was not closed to students from poorer backgrounds, the Hebdomadal Council produced an impressive list of individual examples, but without any indication of how complete the selection was, or what proportion of the total intake these types of student represented.97 Among the Council's cases were four sons of railway workers, including a foreman in the Great Western Railway works at Swindon: other types were represented by the sons of a commercial traveller, a clerk in a bookseller's of®ce, a farmer, a church organist, a shoemaker, and a labourer. An additional list supplied by one (un-named) college was submitted to the Commission, recording individuals who had received assistance from a special hardship fund. These showed support being given to undergraduates 93 Though to describe them as the `lower part of the middle class' is a considerable stretching of the point. W. D. Rubinstein, `Education and the Social Origins of British Elites 1880±1970', Past and Present, no. 112 (1987), 185. 94 Susan Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville Novelists (New Brunswick 1989). 95 Samples from the matriculation register indicate that in the early twentieth century undergraduates from lower-middle-class and working-class families accounted for between 7.5 and 12.5% of scholarship holders. 96 Royal Commission on the Civil Service, Appendix to 3rd report (Cd 6740, PP 1913 xviii. Q.21, 286). 97 Ibid. 2nd Appendix to 4th Report (Cd 7340 PP 1914 xvi, 576±8), Appendix liv, `A selection from the special cases reported by the colleges'.

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whose mothers had been widowed and left in straitened circumstances, or else to supplement scholarships held by students from labouring families. Several colleges had taken advantage of the provisions in the 1882 statutes to create exhibitions allocated on the basis of need, and these were used to support students who got into dif®culties during their residence.98 In 1913 a British Association inquiry found that able students who managed to ®nd a way into a college were unlikely thereafter to have to give up their studies for want of means.99 Hence the characteristic Oxford pattern of narrow access but comparatively high completion rates for the undergraduate course. The peculiarities of the University matriculation register prevent any decisive conclusion being drawn as to whether access at the lower end of the social scale narrowed or broadened in the half-century after 1850: the `not knowns' are too numerous and too heavily weighted towards the ®rst half of the century to permit an accurate comparison.100 Schooling, discussed in Chapter 23, is also an inconclusive indicator for this purpose; at the same time as the public-school community came to dominate admissions, day schools where secondary education was provided comparatively inexpensively enjoyed notable success in the competition for college scholarships.101 Other factors suggest a modest opening over the period, though this was undoubtedly limited and not obvious to all contemporaries. Apart from overlooking the Non-Collegiate scheme, the Burgon±Mansbridge line of argument failed to acknowledge several developments which helped to diversify access to the University. They did not, for example, note the effect of scholarships in natural science which, few as they were, brought students from backgrounds (and schools) noticeably different from the University's traditional sources of recruitment.102 Nor did they take account of the signi®cant number of undergraduates (nearly forty a year) who came to Oxford after attending English civic, Scottish, and Welsh universities, the latter two in particular supplying a link with more democratic systems of secondary education. Initiatives such as the Day Training College for ele98 H. B. George, New College, 1856±1906 (1906), 49; J. R. Magrath, The Queen's College (2 vols 1921), ii. 202; Boase, Reg. Exeter, clxix. Opposition from the colleges and halls, however, ensured that far-sighted proposals in the mid-1870s to apply University funds to ®nance exhibitions for Non-Collegiates came to nothing; see the petitions of May 1876 and March 1877 in UOC (1877), appendix, 396±8. 99 Report of the Eighty-Third Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Birmingham 1913 (1914), 309. 100 It cannot be assumed that the fathers were unidenti®able because they were of a lower class; half of those not known before 1850 were recorded as `armigeri'. 101 OM 26 Oct. 1887, 19. 102 Elections to scholarships and exhibitions in Natural Science at Christ Church, 1890±9, strikingly illustrate this: only 4 of the 21 awards were gained by former pupils of the 50 public schools listed in Ch. 23; 11 were won by pupils at grammar schools on the fringes of or entirely outside the public-school community; and 3 by students at civic universities (the institutions attended by the other 3 are not recorded), CA GB xii c. 2, fos 185±99.

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mentary teachers also contributed to the opening which is quanti®able in the twenty years after 1890, when more consistent occupational recording makes comparison possible. During that period the proportion of male undergraduates entered in the matriculation register from lower-middle-class (shopkeepers, minor of®cials, clerks, commercial travellers, and the like) or working-class backgrounds rose from about 5 per cent to nearly 10 per cent.103 Compared to other British universities, of course, the representation of these classes at Oxford (and, so far as the evidence goes, Cambridge),104 remained low. In 1910 44 per cent of male students at Glasgow University were sons of small businessmen, clerks, or manual workers. At Aberdeen the equivalent proportion was 30 per cent, but there was also a large intake from among sons of farmers, another group which Oxford scarcely touched. Among the Welsh university colleges the intermediate and manual classes made up over a half of students. In the English civic universities it appears that in some cases those classes accounted for over 40 per cent of students.105 In universities where a high proportion of students both lived at home and were admitted at a younger age than at Oxford, and where students pursuing teacher-training courses assisted by government grants were a numerous element of the student body, the conditions were favourable to recruitment from a relatively broad social range. A further index of Oxford's relative closure was the pattern of occupational inheritance, that is, sons following fathers in their various occupations. In the early nineteenth century a signi®cant proportion of undergraduates were from landowning backgrounds. Their future prospects depended crucially on their position in the family, a fact recognized by the recording of birth order in the matriculation register. Elder sons came to the University to prepare for hereditary responsibilities. Younger sons, of course, had lower expectations, and their experience of mobility through education might be predominantly downward. The descent of younger sons of the aristocracy into the ranks of commoners was an element of the English `open eÂlite' idea, though the Oxford evidence suggests a slight quali®cation. Only three of twenty-®ve younger sons of peers matriculating in 1820±4 entered the Church; and only four in twenty-three of those coming up in 1840±4. Most (setting aside those for whom the death of an elder son opened the way to succession) remained in the ranks of those able to declare themselves, in contemporary parlance, as having `no profession'. The nobility were 103

Clapham and Brunner, `A Study of Oxford Undergraduates', 22a, table xi. H. Jenkins and D. Caradog Jones, `Social Class of Cambridge University Alumni in the 18th and 19th Centuries', British Journal of Sociology, i (1950), 99; cf. the ®gures on the social origins of students at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in Rothblatt, Revolution of the Dons, appendix ii, 280. 105 R. D. Anderson, `Universities and Elites in Modern Britain', History of Universities, x (1991), table 3; M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry 1850±1970 (1972), 98±9, 138. 104

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generally wealthy enough to provide maintenance for younger sons;106 and just as ascent into the nobility was likely to take three generations, descent from that rank was cushioned. For younger sons of baronets and knights an Oxford education was more often a preliminary to service in the Church. Outside the titled ranks birth order was of decreasing importance: elder sons of esquires were markedly less likely than their younger brothers to enter the Church; this was marginally the case for sons of clergymen. But for those designated sons of `generosi' order of birth generally had little or no bearing on their careers: there was unlikely to be landed property for them to inherit, and each probably had to make his own way in the world. There remained a comparatively high incidence of occupational inheritance among undergraduates who came up after 1870, even though the number of those assuming landed responsibilities or likely to have no profession was in decline. In samples of undergraduates matriculating before 1850 nearly two-®fths (37 per cent) of undergraduates whose origins and careers were known entered the same occupations as their fathers; in samples after 1850 the proportion had fallen, but was still over a quarter (28 per cent).107 One explanation lay in the tendency of the Church to become more inward-looking as it became less able to attract new blood from the University into the ranks of the ministry: in the ®rst half of the century a quarter of Oxford ordinands were sons of clergymen; by the end of the century this proportion had risen to over a third. Self-recruiting tendencies were also strong in the lay professions: John Galsworthy, the son of a solicitor, was sent to Oxford in preparation for the bar; and Willie Elmhirst, whose freshman's diary on the eve of the First World War presents the archetype of the `good commoner', was intended for solicitors' articles in his uncle's practice.108 Of all occupations, the strongest incidence (60 per cent) of sons following fathers was in business; many could look forward to positions in their family ®rms.109 While these were the forces tending to retard mobility in the second half of the century, the scholarship system promoted a degree of ¯uidity within the middle class (though not much beyond it). In the early period the inheritance rates were only marginally lower for scholars than for commoners (or their equivalent), and not surprisingly so for, as we have seen, scholarships enabled the clergy to educate their own sons to that calling. By the later part of the century a gap had opened up between award-holders and 106

F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), 22. Among Corpus men coming up between 1880 and 1914 the occupational inheritance rate, excluding not knowns, was about 23%. 108 Willie Elmhirst, A Freshman's Diary 1911±1912 (1969), 115. 109 Figures for Corpus, 1880±1914, con®rm these trends: 29% of Corpus men who entered the law were sons of lawyers; 66% of Corpus men going into business were sons of businessmen. 107

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the rest; about a ®fth (18 per cent) of scholars following their fathers, compared to nearly a third (31 per cent) in the case of commoners. The new career avenues which emerged for Oxford men in the second half of the nineteenth century were comparatively open, and it was to these that scholarship holders were likely to be drawn. Government appointments in the home and Indian civil service, and the academic profession in its widest senseÐschool-teaching, university teaching, research, museum and library postsÐdrew in large numbers of graduates, only a small proportion (under 10 per cent) of whom were following their fathers. These occupations all paid an immediate salary, and were therefore open to those who lacked substantial private means. Of the 104 cases gathered by the Hebdomadal Council in 1912 of students who had received ®nancial assistance to complete their studies, 92 found employment in government service, higher education, or school-teaching. An objection to requiring those Oxford graduates intending to become schoolmasters to undergo a course of training was that they were, as a rule, the least likely to be able to afford a delay in commencing paid employment.110 With this pattern of limited upward mobility in mind, the promoters of Ruskin Hall had every reason to be apprehensive that workers brought to Oxford might be lost to the service of their class and drawn into the lower ranks of the professions. The range of paid careers open to women is discussed in Chapter 10. It did not change much after the 1890s. There was very modest growth in openings in central and local government and paid welfare work, and a corresponding fall in the numbers whose careers were spent as voluntary workers.111 `Everlasting schoolmarming' was Margery Fry's phrase for the prospects that faced women graduates between the wars, yet the world of education had much to offer.112 Headships included some that were very well paid, and the number of girls' secondary schools grew after the Balfour Act of 1902. In 1914 about 10 per cent of secondary headmistresses had been educated at Oxford.113 The expansion of women's higher education created jobs for both academics and administrators. Miss Fry herself moved from the librarianship at Somerville to be warden of the women's hostel at Birmingham University. The growth of adult education provided openings for work that inspired much contemporary idealism. Maude Royden was among the early lecturers for the WEA. For women as for men, the proliferation of schools and universities in the empire created opportunities for work overseas. How many women went into paid work at some time after leaving Oxford? To offer a ®rm ®gure for workforce participation among these early generations of women students is extremely hazardous; the usual 110 111 112 113

Select Committee on Teachers' Registration and Organization Bill, PP 1890±1 xvii. 4851. See Table 10.6. E. Huws Jones, Margery Fry (1966), 145. Directory of Women Teachers (1914).

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problem presented by lacunae in college registers is compounded in this case by uncertainty whether the absence of recorded career details about an individual is simply a gap in information or means that the individual had no paid work. In the generation coming to Oxford women's halls in 1881±3, about whom information is sparse, only a third are recorded as having had paid employment. For those who came in 1911±13, the proportion recorded as doing paid work at some time after leaving Oxford had shot up to twothirdsÐeven when temporary employment in the two world wars is excluded. The proportion who followed continuous careers in paid employment nearly doubled over the same period (from 12 per cent to 24 per cent). But there was little change in the marriage prospects of women students, which remained extremely low, at about 30 per cent, although starting to rise in the early twentieth century.114 The proportion of those with continuous paid careers, who also married, was tiny (no more than 3 per cent): one thing that did not change signi®cantly over this period was that few who married ever did paid work after marriage, except for war work. Marriage could of course be a career in itself, or it might bring opportunities for literary, scholarly, or public work, as in the cases of Barbara Hammond, Rachel Lane Poole, and Lettice Fisher. These three were relatively unusual in their generation in that they found their husbands at Oxford. Miss Wordsworth was clearly right when she warned the mother of a prospective student, `few of our girls marry really well.'115 We have seen some of the effects of social origin upon men's careers; background also played a part in in¯uencing women's life chances, in particular their chances of marriage and the likelihood that they would take paid employment. The daughters of bankers, merchants, and industrialists were about twice as likely to marry as the daughters of schoolmasters, tradesmen, and clerks. Students educated at girls' private schools were very signi®cantly more likely to marry than those who had come to Oxford from schools which quali®ed for the higher rate of government grant under the 1907 secondary school regulations (by allocating a quarter of their places free to scholars from elementary schools) or from training colleges or other universities in the United Kingdom, and they were less than half as likely to follow a continuous paid career.116 There are even faint traces in the women's careers of the pattern of occupational inheritance observable among the men: at least in the case of daughters of academics and schoolteachers, and also the daughters of Nonconformist ministers (who noticeably became missionaries).117 There were daughters of public men too, such as Eleanor Rathbone, Gertrude Bell, and Eglantine Jebb, who left their mark on public life. Men's 114 115 116 117

See ®gure 10.1 G. Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer: A Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth (1978), 87. Howarth and Curthoys, `Women's Higher Education', 225, table 5. Ibid. 218±19, table 3.

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colleges had always had to deal with two types of studentÐon the one hand the man who came up with an assured position on leaving the University, or with the private means to obtain one,118 and on the other the man who depended on academic achievement at Oxford for his future prospects. This was as true for the early women students, even though the social spectrum represented in their colleges was narrower. Oxford graduates bore witness, throughout this period, to the formative impact of the University experience. Oxford men were thought to share the `Oxford manner', the `Oxford accent', and the `Oxford sneer'; both men and women might look back to `the secret thing' which set Oxford apart. But analysis of the great mass of records which the University and colleges accumulated shows that other powerful in¯uences were at work to shape their lives: family, birth order, schooling, gender. Rose Macaulay, who came up to Somerville in 1900, depicted in Potterism (1920) a pair of twins at Oxford on the eve of the First World War: `Both saw every reason why they should make a success of life. But Jane knew that, though she might be one up on Johnny as regards Oxford, owing to slightly superior brain power, he was one up on her as regards Life.'119 118 119

Stone, `Size and Composition', 9. R. Macaulay, Potterism (1920), 5.

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25 The Self-Governing University, 1882±1914 j a n e t h owa r t h For the historian of twentieth-century Oxford it is tempting to regard the years before 1914 as belonging to an ancien reÂgime.1 Yet a sociological perspective on the British system of higher education suggests, in A. H. Halsey's words, that `the modern university. . . began with the Victorians.'2 From an international standpoint, again, the years between the 1860s and the 1930s are recognized as a transformative phase in the history of Western universities, marked by professionalization, diversi®cation, and a dramatic expansionÐoccurring most rapidly in the pre-war era, when admiration for the achievements of German universities was at its peak.3 If we narrow the focus to Oxford and Cambridge, there is no doubt that in the three decades before the First World War they moved perceptibly closer to their modern form, as communities of professional scholars, in the business of education and the advancement of knowledge across an increasingly wide range of disciplines. Their students, though less democratically recruited than those of the ancient Scottish universities, now included a growing middle-class element, and they were destined overwhelmingly for secular careers and often for eÂlite positions. The collegiate character of Oxford and Cambridge still set them apart from the universities of the Continent; and, as the historians of Wadham have reminded us, many of the `traditional' features of college life, its academic routines and patterns of sociability, date only from the late nineteenth century.4 But the institutional framework of the modern University had also begun to take shape. The Faculty Boards set up 1 A term used, though with quali®cations, for the pre-1930 regime in University government and administration in The Twentieth Century, 683±4; see also `Fin de la tour d'ivoire' in F. du Sorbier (ed.), Oxford, 1919±1939 (Paris, 1991), 13±17. 2 A. H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century (1992), 23. 3 K. H. Jarausch (ed.), The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860±1930: Expansion, Diversi®cation, Social Opening and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States (Chicago, 1983). 4 C. S. L. Davies and J. Garnett (eds), Wadham College (1994), 49±50.

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in 1882 issued termly lecture lists and had a voice in appointing examiners, while the Common University Fund af®rmed the principle of college liability to contribute to university purposes. At Oxford the General Board of the Faculties, which later became the main forum for coordinating academic policy, was set up in 1912. An in¯ux of overseas students, starting before 1900, bore witness, moreover, to a modest recovery in the University's academic reputation: nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of those who matriculated on the eve of the First World War had been born overseas.5 The processes of modernization in post-Commission Oxford, the subject of the ®rst half of this Chapter, worked unevenly and with setbacks, often the product of tension between colleges and the University and competition for scarce resources. Jowett's Vice-Chancellorship (1882±6), the ®rst under the new Statutes, though it enlarged his in¯uence through proteÂgeÂs installed at the Press (P. Lyttelton Gell), the Bodleian (E. W. B. Nicholson), and the committee responsible for university extension (M. E. Sadler), saw the defeat of many of his ambitious projects. The next two Vice-Chancellors, James Bellamy of St John's and Henry Boyd of Hertford, were both conservatives. The years of agricultural depression were recalled by T. H. Warren (then a young fellow of Magdalen) as a time of `arrestation and almost conservative reaction'.6 Warden Spooner thought reaction had set in rather earlier, in response to the breathtaking pace of change imposed on the country by the ®rst Gladstone government: symptomatic was a revival in the mid-seventies of the practice of drinking port instead of claret in common rooms.7 Yet the 1880s saw the opening of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Indian Institute, the beginnings of Oxford's modern medical school, the admission of women to undergraduate examinations, and the inauguration of the popular Extension summer meeting. Lord Curzon, in his review of the Edwardian University, maintained that `No conclusion will emerge more clearly. . . than that Oxford, ever since the last Commission, has been and still is engaged in reforming itself.'8 This was not, admittedly, a disinterested verdict: as Chancellor his concern was to protect the University from the attentions of a new, and perhaps highly unsympathetic, Royal Commission. One motive behind the process of incremental `reform from within', which Curzon himself attempted to promote, was precisely this senseÐmore potent while the Liberals remained a party of government than in the inter-war years of Conservative hegemonyÐthat a willingness to change with the times was the price of survival for Oxford as a self-governing University. 5 Stone, `Size and Composition', 101, table 8. 17% of matriculants in 1911±14 had been educated abroad, perhaps a more telling ®gure (since sons of British expatriates were often sent to school in the UK). The proportion educated abroad among matriculants in 1894±8 was 4%. 6 H. H. Henson (ed.), Memoir of the Rt. Hon. Sir William Anson 1843±1914 (1920), 110. 7 Spooner MSS, `History', chapter 6, NCA. 8 G. N. Curzon [Lord Curzon of Kedleston], Principles and Methods of University Reform (1909), 18.

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Released from its bonds with the Anglican Church andÐunlike the newer British universities and university collegesÐnot yet dependent for funds upon the State, Oxford was in some senses freer from external control than at any other period of its history.9 Perceptions of the University, both at the time and in retrospect, re¯ect an awareness of the problematic relationship between this wealthy and autonomous corporation and the changing needs of the nation. Academic politics and linkages between the University and the outside world are discussed in the second half of this Chapter. Did the `nationalization' of Oxford and Cambridge, as has been suggested, leave them `isolated . . . more completely than ever from the great currents of the national life'?10 The repeal of the religious tests in 1871 marked the end of an era in which University and national politics had been closely aligned and University reform a national party issue. When Gladstone visited the Union in 1890 he addressed it on the subject of Homer and proclaimed his love of Oxford, to a rapturous reception that underlined the apolitical nature of his interest in it. Archdeacon Edwin Palmer hailed him, in terms inconceivable twenty years earlier, as a `characteristic Oxford man'.11 National issues did, of course, still impinge on the University. The offer of an honorary degree to Cecil Rhodes in 1892 celebrated the cause of empire, while the protest signed by 94 members of congregation when he visited Oxford to receive it in 1899 re¯ected Liberal and Christian distaste for his methods.12 But some narrowing of outlook was to be expected as a by-product of the professionalization of academic life and the emergence of a class of university-based intellectuals, whose livelihoodÐunlike that of earlier `men of letters'Ðdid not depend on cultivating a popular following.13 The image of the `don' came in for criticism from contemporaries, sometimes wryly acknowledged from within the profession by individuals who worked to defend or rede®ne the value of Oxford's contribution to culture and society.14 Edwardian dons were themselves active in the renewed agitation for University reformÐlike their Victorian predecessors and their successors in the 1960s during the Franks enquiry. Motives were various: they included both professional, academic concerns and the sense that Oxford was failing to respond adequately to new social needs, above all the 9 By 1914 universities and colleges in receipt of government grants were deriving about a third of their income from the State, while local authorities provided a further 15%; R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (1992), 18. 10 Ward, Victorian Oxford 315; Lewis Campbell used the term `nationalisation' in the title of his account of University reform, Pt 1, 698. 11 H. A. Morrah, The Oxford Union, 1823±1923 (1923), 267±8. 12 Journal of Education, July 1899, 445. 13 T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (1982), 225±6, 238. For a discussion of this at a slightly earlier phase see p. 40 above. 14 Compare, for example, J. A. Hobson, `The Academic Spirit in Education', Contemporary Review, 63 (1893), 230±47 and A. L. Smith, Frederick William Maitland, Two Lectures and a Bibliography (1908), 46.

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demand for higher education now made on behalf of the working classes. But there was also a widespread feeling (much as opinion differed on speci®c issues) that many problems had resulted from decisions takenÐor evadedÐ by the nineteenth-century commissions.

une v e n de v elopm ent Higher Education after the Commissions The Victorian Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge left them a dif®cult legacy. Fundamental issues were never addressed, in the ®rst place, about their role in meeting the demand for higher education in an increasingly competitive age. As early as 1883 James Bryce made the point. The Commissioners had failed to consider `the great and vital problems which lay before them, how to make the universities, with their immense wealth and unequalled authority, serviceable to the whole nation, not only to the upper classesÐhow to enable them to give in abundance the highest teaching through the ablest teachers on all subjects'.15 England remained a country which, unlike Bryce's native Scotland, treated higher education as a luxury for the few. Although the ancient Universities had doubled their intake in the past thirty years, they educated a mere 5,000 students in a population of over 25 millions. Scottish universities took in 6,500 students from a population of only 4 millions; German universities, 22,500 students from a population of 43 millions. And (Bryce added) the German universities' pre-eminence in scholarship, attracting American academics, made it impossible for Oxford and Cambridge to play their part in strengthening bonds between the English-speaking peoples. Thirty years later a Cambridge liberal attributed much of the dissatisfaction that surfaced in the Edwardian university reform agitation to the `practical English' approach of the Victorian Commissions which `dealt with obvious abuses and de®ciencies, and avoided as far as possible decisions on questions of principle', leaving altogether open the question of how the ancient Universities should ®t into a national education system.16 His plea for a third and last Commission to deal with that issue was never to be answered. In the absence of state initiative, Oxford and Cambridge were left to work out a role for themselves in a context of rapid university expansion over which they had little control. Some still clung to the belief that the ancient Universities might undergo vast expansion to cater for the whole nation's demand for higher education.17 This was never a realistic proposition. The 15 J. Bryce, `The Future of the English Universities', Fortnightly Review, 39 (1883), 382±403. For this article see also pp. 53, 92 above. 16 A. I. Tillyard, A History of University Reform from 1800 to the Present Day (1913), vii. 17 H. Hensley Henson, `Oxford and its professors', Edinburgh Review, clxx (Oct 1889), 303±27; G. C. Brodrick, `The University of Oxford in 1898', Nineteenth Century, 44 (Aug. 1898), 208±23.

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future lay with the advocates of autonomous teaching universities in London and the provinces; they included Bryce himself and the leading university statesman of the pre-war years, the GoÈttingen- and Edinburgh-educated R. B. Haldane. The University of London, reconstituted in 1900 as a huge, diverse teaching university which also examined external degree candidates, British and overseas, became a convincing rival to Oxford and Cambridge as a `national' university; it was there that the ®rst Conference of Universities of the Empire was held in 1912. Lewis Campbell, Jowett's pupil and biographer, cherished the hope that the civic universities, many of them outgrowths of Oxford and Cambridge Extension, would continue to look to them for leadership and he welcomed the emancipation of the federal universities of Victoria and Wales from dependence on London's degree examinations.18 But the civic independence that inspired Joseph Chamberlain to transform Mason College into the University of Birmingham in 1900 led also to the breakup of the Victoria University federation and the emergence by 1914 of autonomous universities at Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Shef®eld, and Bristol. Oxford and Cambridge, still by far the largest producers of honours graduates, supplied the newer universities and university colleges with much of their teaching staff and most of their vice-chancellors and principals. Yet at the time their relationship with the modern universities caused some unease. `Will the newer growth ultimately supersede the old? Have the Universities created a Frankenstein that will threaten his makers?'19 It was in London and the provinces that student numbers shot up after 1902, in response to reform of secondary schooling under the Balfour Education Act and an exponential increase in government funding for higher education. The piecemeal evolution of higher and secondary education produced much debate on University matters, not all of it critical or alarmist. `We are feeling our way towards great changes,' wrote Michael Sadler shortly before the war. `Many present shibboleths will be discarded. Many things which are at present on a small scale will become immensely important. But at this moment no one is able to predict in detail the main educational tendencies of the next twenty years. It is not possible to deal with questions of university education apart from those of national education as a whole.'20 There was little support for A. I. Tillyard's notion of a rationalized education system. Dons might admire continental scholarship and envy the research funding that supported it, but they were not attracted by Napoleonic traditions of state control. There was con®dence, too, in the capacity of Oxford and Cambridge to contribute, as self-governing Universities, to the evolu18 19 20

Campbell, Nationalisation, 235. Ibid. 236. Sadler to Mansbridge, 1 Oct. 1912, BL Add. MS 65216, fo 54.

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tion of national education. Hastings Rashdall claimed in 1895 that `During the last hundred years the college buildings and the college system alike have silently adapted themselves to the altered needs of the present with that power of spontaneous self-development which is the happy peculiarity of English institutions.'21 In practice this was no silent operation, but one accompanied by vigorous controversy both within the University and in the press. `We are led by Commissions, we are lashed by the magazines; we are pulverized by the ferocious rhetoric of the larger Reviews,' complained the Oxford Magazine in 1886.22 Dons were aware that `universities are much in the public eyeÐmore so than at any time since the Reformation.'23 This was particularly true of Oxford, partly because it remained a more worldly University than Cambridge, contributing more graduates to Westminster, Whitehall, the episcopal bench, and the worlds of journalism and letters. It was also overshadowed by the mid-Victorian debate on the `Idea of a University' which had produced from Newman and Matthew Arnold, Pattison and Jowett statements of ideals speci®cally associated with Oxford, sometimes in con¯ict with each other and sometimes readily shown to contrast with Oxford's actual performanceÐPattison's `ideal of a national university' that was `co-extensive with the nation' was a case in point.24 Public interest in the University was not necessarily a disadvantage and it was encouraged by a system of University government that included a large non-resident element, the MAs in Convocation. Dons made use of the national press in their professional controversies and engaged in debate with outsiders, often Oxford graduates keen to promote, or sometimes to deplore, changes within the University. This was also the age of the anonymous `Oxford correspondent', contributing his regular column of news and more or less partisan commentary on academic affairs; among those who can be identi®ed were, in the early twentieth century, Arthur Sidgwick in the Journal of Education, R. R. Marett in the Athenaeum, and Sidney Ball in the Manchester Guardian. But press comment on Oxford was often critical and efforts by dons to improve its public image were not always well conceived. Too often, according to the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller, they weakly colluded in perceptions of the university as `a beautifully preserved model of medievalism', still dreaming `beautiful dreams of the bygone ages . . . and of a Hellenism that was as beautiful as herself and as free from any taint of sordidness, commercialism, and practicality,' and did little to counter the impression given in the halfpenny papers that `Oxford and Cambridge exist essentially to compete with each other in a variety of manly sports.' Oxford 21 22 23 24

H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (3 vols, 1936 edn), i. 513. Quoted in R. E. Berdhal, British Universities and the State (1959), 197. W. W. Jackson, `The Reform of Congregation', 21 Apr 1893, Bodl. Firth b 36, fo 79. John Sparrow, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (1967), 138.

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contrived to advertise its aesthetic charms and sporting prowess, but it was slow to advertise itself as a `seat of learning' and challenge the impression that `the University of Oxford strongly resembles the lilies of the ®eld, in that she toils not neither does she spin.'25 University governance Public image problems were compounded by an issue that primarily affected the resident academic community: the de®ciencies in Oxford's machinery of government and administration. This was a legacy from the Oxford Act of 1854. In Hebdomadal Council, whose functions Curzon likened to the Cabinet, it had aimed to create a balance of academic opinion by allocating six seats apiece to elected representatives of heads of houses, professors, and resident MAs.26 Congregation, which elected Council and operated, with Convocation, as the University's legislature, had been envisaged as a body representing the teaching members of the University. The intended balance of interests was undermined by changes in the population of both the University and the city. College tutors, some of them as in¯uential within colleges as heads or as active in scholarship as professors, complained that Council was weighted against them. The Oxford residents who made up Congregation became increasingly unrepresentative of the academic community, about two-®fths of them by 1910 being graduates without University or college appointments. This was a serious matter, since all proposals for legislation on academic matters, including curriculum reform, were drafted by Council and Congregation had the power to veto them. But the ®nal hurdle for legislative or ®nancial measures was Convocation, whose membership grew between 1852 and 1909 from 3,300 to over 6,700 MAs and was more readily mobilized in the railway age.27 Notionally representing Oxford graduates, membership was in practice con®ned to those who were able and willing, for professional purposes or out of college loyalty, to ®nd the fees and dues payable to University and colleges for the MA degree. Clergymen and schoolmasters were especially well represented. The principle of graduate representation in University government was not peculiar to Oxford and Cambridge (where non-residents voted in the Senate) and it still had its advocates, not least because MA fees were a signi®cant source of revenue. When Convocation did muster in force, however, it was almost always in response to the cry of `the Church in danger' and recalled a bygone Oxford, still enshrined in popular myth that depicted it as a place where `they raise pa'sons . . . like radishes in a bed.'28 Here Oxford was at a special disadvantage. In 1913, when the Senate agreed and Convocation refused by 25 26 27 28

`Oxford and the Working Man', Fortnightly Review, 99 (1913), 766. Principles and Methods (n. 8), 23. Ibid. 33. For Congregation see also p. 64 above. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), 23.

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a large majority, to countenance the secularization of Theology degrees, a Cambridge correspondent was able to re¯ect that `the essential difference between Oxford and Cambridge was once more emphasised.'29 Denounced by one of Curzon's informants as `the worst form of government ever devised by the wit of man', Oxford's constitution attracted criticism across the political spectrum.30 The unrepresentative composition of Hebdomadal Council was attacked by conservatives during Jowett's ViceChancellorship and by liberals under his successors. Council's reluctance to press ahead with the new English school demanded by 108 MAs in 1891 led to a petition for the disfranchisement of the non-academic residents in Congregation. Brought forward again in 1910, the proposal was ®nally carried in 1912. In the last resort, however, it was not clear that the votes of the non-academic residents were a more serious barrier to reform than the reluctance of academic members of Congregation to follow Council's leadÐ and the sheer effort needed to pilot measures through the legislative process. `We choose our Council, and won't take anything from it,' complained Walter Raleigh to Gilbert Murray as they worked to promote a settlement on the thorny issue of compulsory Greek. `This will perhaps always be so, and is the only reason why rules have to be made for us by outsiders every twenty-®ve years. If you and I said it's important to get the ten best men in Oxford on Council, and if we toiled like niggers to do it, and backed our men like thunder, and if everyone did this, I believe the old show might run. But it would be a horrid silly fag.'31 Large assemblies by out-voters in Convocation were in fact relatively rare; the cost of sending out a whip by post, estimated at £100 to £150, was a deterrent to conservative minorities who were, in any case, often able to in¯ict surprise defeats in poorly attended sessions of one or other legislative body. Tactics of this kind, for example, sealed the fate of proposals to introduce schools of Anthropology and Agriculture in the 1890s. In the case of Congregation, they continued to be effective until postal voting was introduced in the 1960s.32 It had to be admitted that `the resident MA does not (collectively) shine as a legislator. He often does not care; he is very busy; in the summer time he has many distractions; he not unfrequently forgets.'33 The intervention of non-residents was, however, particularly resented when it overturned decisions on academic matters which had been passed in well-attended sessions of Congregation. 29

`Cambridge Notes', Athenaeum, 12 July 1913, 38. Principles and Methods, 24. 31 Raleigh to Murray, 15 Nov 1910, Bodl. MS Murray 17 fo 137. 32 The impression current in later generations that poor attendance and `irresponsible' voting in Congregation were a new phenomenon was not altogether correct; The Twentieth Century, 687±8, 692, 732. 33 Journal of Education, July 1895, 436. 30

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Perhaps the most striking weakness in the University's system of government was its administrative structure. It was anarchically decentralized and placed heavy burdens on the dons who ran the place. Responsibility for University ®nance was divided between the Chest and the CUF; after 1907 the Trustees of the University Re-endowment Fund became a third independent body to whom applications might be made for funds for university purposes. `The public spirit and the common sense of all the parties concerned have alone enabled this system to work without any conspicuous breakdown,' was Curzon's comment.34 There was virtually no central bureaucracy. The Vice-Chancellor had no secretary or of®ce and yet his of®cial duties grew. `On several days I have been at work from 5 am to 7 pm and . . . cannot attempt to give an answer today without the danger of an utter breakdown,' wrote Thomas Fowler, faced with a demand that he should reply at once to the memorialists against Cecil Rhodes's honorary DCL. `The strain of work last week arising mainly from the almost intolerable burdens in¯icted on the VC by the Exam. Statutes, was beyond anything which I have ever experienced.'35 The Registrar, elected by Convocation, the Assistant Registrar, who deputized for him and acted as secretary to the Faculty Boards, the secretary to the Curators of the Chest and his `clerk or clerks' were the only salaried administrators employed directly by the University.36 Among the Boards, committees, and Delegacies to which much University business was devolved there were some that generated income and employed staff of their own. Sometimes they provided a means of circumventing tricky issues. The Delegacy of Local Examinations enabled Council to postpone giving of®cial University recognition to women students and their societies by continuing to administer examinations for them between 1884 and 1910; it also ®nanced the introduction of the Diploma in Education for secondary schoolteachers in 1897. The system worked, however, only with `much delay and dissipation of energy'.37 It was not viewed with favour, either, by advocates of democratic control of the University, since it could function only if there was a signi®cant overlap between the membership of Council and the ever-growing thicket of Delegacies and the like. One critic of `of®cial pluralism' claimed in 1885 that ®fty-®ve of®ces were shared among nine persons: Sir William Anson, Ingram Bywater, H. G. Liddell of Christ Church, J. R. Magrath, William Markby, F. Max MuÈller, Henry Pelham, Bartholomew Price, and Alfred Robinson.38 Meanwhile the work of Council itself escalated, as shown by the increase in

34

Principles and Methods, 167. Fowler to Caird, 18 and 19 June 1899, Caird MSS 7, BCLP. See, however, Letter's of P. S. Allen, ed. H. M. Allen (1939), 30±1. 36 Principles and Methods, 175±6. 37 Ibid. 178. 38 `How We are GovernedÐ1. Our Governors', Oxford Review, 18 Nov. 1885, 109±10. 35

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volume of its annually printed papers between the early 1890s and the years immediately before the First World War from under 200 to over 1000 pages. This was one area where Curzon's reform initiative produced some rationalization of University government in the Edwardian era. The new General Board of the Faculties took over Council's functions in drafting curriculum changes and also the administration of the CUF. In other respects, too, the Victorian Commissions had left Oxford some freedom to work out internal controversies. The most important of these concerned the role of colleges in relation to faculties and the professoriate. Some believed, with Bryce, that the Selborne Commission had taken a wrong turn by leaving colleges discretion in creating new chairs and selecting the objects on which they would spend for `university purposes'.39 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, advocates of modernization made a strong case for that view. The expansion of science at Cambridge was facilitated by the University's freedom to ®nance new appointments out of a CUF income that was cushioned against the fall in college income in the agricultural depression.40 In the longer run, however, the increased number of dons holding University posts at Oxford told another tale. The number of University teachers increased nearly threefold between 1875 and 1912, when they numbered over 150, by comparison with 192 college tutors and lecturers. At the same time the academic practices and ethos of colleges changed: there was inter-collegiate co-operation in the organization of teaching and some colleges developed a strong commitment to research. If colleges still had the leading say in appointments and if professors in the big Arts schools lacked power to control examinations and lecture lists, many thought that a good thing. The wasteful duplication of lectures complained of in the 1870s was by the early twentieth century in practice a problem only in Lit. Hum., and ceased to represent a strong argument for increasing the authority of the Faculties.41 In other respects, however, the 1882 statutes left the University conspicuously ill-prepared to face the future. They laid down a pattern of Faculties and Boards of Studies that rapidly became obsolete and resulted in underrepresentation of the sciences on the CUF Delegacy and the absence of any representation for the new Arts schools created in later years, English and Modern Languages. The University did possess statutory powers to modify this pattern but shortage of funds prevented any initiative beyond the creation in 1886 of a new Faculty of Medicine.42 The Selborne Commission had turned a blind eye to the onset of agricultural depression, which forced both University and colleges to review priorities and the programme of commit39

Bryce, `The Future of the English Universities' (n. 15), 384, 391. J. Howarth, `Science Education in late-Victorian Oxford; a curious case of failure?', EHR cii (1987), 356. 41 Principles and Methods, 128. 42 Ibid. 127. 40

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ments with which they had been charged. Dons keen to promote research, or new disciplines, or Extension, or scholarships for the poor could see no case for spending on prize fellowships for aspiring men of affairs; college tutors anxious to secure readerships became critical of spending on `science and specialism'.43 By the turn of the century the accounts of the University, as distinct from the colleges, showed intermittent de®cits and the colleges' record of contributions to University purposes came again under public scrutiny. Now a further problem became apparent: the form of statutory accounts laid down by Parliament made it impossible for the layman and hard even for the well-informed to see how colleges did spend their money. The Commissions had played a part in raising expectations that could not be ful®lled and had done little to dispel suspicion that Oxford still harboured serious abuses. The prospect of further reform by Commission, which came under discussion in the early twentieth century, drew a cynical response from one seasoned University statesman: A Commission means dislocation, uncertainty, and practical paralysis for at least four years. In the case of the last Commission everything was at a standstill from the beginning of 1876 to the middle of 1882. You will understand then that I look forward with apprehension to another such period. And in the end though some good was done a great deal of miscalculation was made, and little opening left for further developments. So I should like to get on without a Commission if we can.44

Dons, teaching, and scholarship One positive consequence of the 1882 statutes was change in the character of Oxford's academic communityÐthough even here the transformation was less dramatic than some had predicted. Vested interests were protected and celibate lay life fellows elected between 1856 and 1877 lived on in some cases well into the twentieth century. Some, like F. H. Bradley and W. Warde Fowler, became scholars or tutors indistinguishable from dons elected under the new statutes: a number remained the archetypal `Idle Fellow', often nonresident but returning to cast a vote on crucial issues like the election of a head of house.45 Secularization took effect relatively quickly: by 1892 less than one college fellow in three (31 per cent) was in holy orders and by 1912 less than one in ®ve (18 per cent). But the typical don was still a classicist by training: despite the proliferation of new degree courses in the 1850s and 43 Engel, 202±56; M. J. Jones, `The Agricultural Depression, Collegiate Finances, and Provision for Education at Oxford, 1871±1913', Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 57±81. 44 Anson to Barnett, 19 May 1907, Tawney MSS, 21/2, BLPES. Compare the experience of London University, reviewed by three Royal Commissions between 1888 and 1913: Negley Harte, The University of London 1836±1986 (1986), 146±56, 185±94. 45 Oman, Memories, 192±4; G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 103±4; P. A. Wright-Henderson, Glasgow & Balliol and other Essays (1926), 55±6.

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after, 67 per cent of college fellows and heads in 1912, regardless of Faculty, had read Greats. Fewer were married than is sometimes supposed. Among the effective teaching community in 1912, including tutors, lecturers, and heads of houses, 54 per cent were single: even among college tutors no more than a bare majority (52 per cent) were married. To some extent this re¯ected the age structure, which did not change as much as might have been expected now that a fellowship offered, in most cases, tenure for life. At the turn of the century about a quarter of college tutors were over 50 (24.5 per cent) but about a third (32.5 per cent) were under 36.46 The turnover among junior dons was sustained by an out¯ow that often included the ablest and most ambitious, for whom there were now many more openings in British and colonial universities, as well as opportunities in Church and State, journalism, and the public schools. Some, like Gilbert Murray, Henry Scott Holland, Michael Sadler, A. E. Zimmern, and H. A. L. Fisher, eventually returned to Oxford as professors or heads of houses; others, like L. T. Hobhouse and William Temple, did not. To Murray, writing in 1930, it seemed that if Oxford was `narrow, provincial, stick-in-the-mud', that was because `the wide-minded people leave it.'47 Yet there were also, as in the past, marked differences in outlook between generations. `Young Oxford' of the 1880s included a vocal contingent of traditionalists, rebelling against the ascendancy of `ageing radicals'.48 By the early twentieth century, politically active young dons burned once more with enthusiasm for reform. The Selborne Commission played some part in broadening the University's range of studies by providing for new posts, and these were added to incrementally over the next thirty years from the University's revenues and by private benefactors. Of the new chairs projected by the Commission only ®ve came into being before 1900Ðthe Interpretation of Holy Scripture (1882), Physiology (1882), Classical Archaeology and Art (1884), English Language and Literature (1885), and Pure Mathematics (1892). The CUF, on the other hand, did ful®l one of its purposes by supporting new posts in ®elds in which Oxford possessed rich library and museum holdings but which lay outside the range of college teaching interests. Early examples included CUF readerships for Adolf Neubauer, sub-librarian at the Bodleian, rabbinical scholar, and the ®rst Jewish academic to hold a University appointment; the anthropologist and keeper of the University Museum, E. B. Tylor; and the Icelandic scholar, GuÂdbrandr VõÂgfuÂsson, who was working (in collaboration with Frederick York Powell) on an edition of Old Norse classics for the Press. In the 1890s extraordinary chairs were created forÐ among othersÐTylor; the Assyriologist and veteran of the `endowment of 46 47 48

Engel, 294, Appendix 11. D. Wilson, Gilbert Murray OM, 1866±1957 (1987), 318. Engel, 207±16.

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research' party, A. H. Sayce; and (although in his case, without stipend) the Zend philologist, Lawrence Hedworth Mills, an independent scholar who had come to Oxford to work on Max MuÈller's series of `Sacred Books of the East'. In 1886 the resources of the CUF enabled the University to accept an offer from the Royal Geographical Society to ®nance half the cost of a new readership in Geography, held between 1887 and 1905 by Halford Mackinder.49 In the early twentieth century the rate of creation of new chairs picked up, as college ®nances recovered from the agricultural depression and new benefactions were secured from wealthy patrons or through the Re-Endowment Fund. Teaching needs were met by chairs in Physics (1900), Engineering Science (1907), and Pathology (1907), in English Literature (1904), German Language and Literature (1907), and Romance Languages (1909), in Colonial History (1905), Military History (1909), Ancient History (1910) and Political Theory and Institutions (1912). At the same time the University maintained its policy of recognizing scholarship in recondite ®elds. A CUF readership in Phonetics was created in 1909 for Henry Sweet. An American heiress, Mary Wallace Shillito, endowed a readership in Assyriology in 1908, while Walter Morrison was persuaded to divert a benefaction he had offered for the demolition and rebuilding of Balliol chapel to the creation of a readership in Egyptology (1912). Con¯ict persisted into the twentieth century over funding for teaching posts in areas not well provided for by the colleges: these included not only the sciences but some modern Arts disciplines. Among the latter, Law and Modern History were well placed, with an array of chairs at All Souls and a college tutorial strength that built up in response to the ¯ow of students. But the English school was set up on the understanding that it would make no additional claim on University or college resources, while the problem of ®nancing teaching in Modern LanguagesÐmade worse by reluctance to draw on the expertise of women donsÐwas resolved only by the willingness of the Curators of the Taylorian to dig into their own pockets.50 Oxford's recovery of its position as a `studium generale' meant extending the range of its taught courses into areas previously left to learned societies or professional bodies. The major innovationsÐnew honour schools in Oriental Languages, English Language and Literature, and Modern Languages; the improved provision for medical teaching and introduction of an Engineering degree within the Natural Sciences school; and (by 1914) eleven diploma coursesÐwere the outcome of interaction between the changing 49 At the LSE, by contrast, the Royal Geographical Society's offer to contribute to the cost of setting up a school of geography came to nothing because it proved impossible to ®nd matching funding; R. Dahrendorf, LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895±1995 (1995), 73±4. 50 E. M. Wright, Joseph Wright (2 vols 1932), ii. 501.

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market for higher education and the research interests of scholars. One of the ®rst instances was Oriental Languages. In¯uenced by representations from the Royal Asiatic Society and Max MuÈller, who stressed the importance of the study of ancient Oriental languages for comparative philology, but also by the prospect that Oxford would attract India Of®ce probationers as students, the Selborne Commission had recognized Oriental Languages as a separate division in the Faculty of Arts. A new honour school that provided for both Indian and Semitic studies was introduced in 1886. Later developments followed a similar pattern. University extension lectures and the involvement of dons in examining secondary schools created awareness of the demand for teaching in modern English and European languages, geography, economics, politics, and technical and scienti®c subjects: scholars in these ®elds urged the duty of Oxford to provide it. The market for modern subjects also grew with the arrival of women students. In the case of Modern Languages, dons taught women at honours level and examined them through the Delegacy for Local Examinations for two decades before the honour school was set up. Some diploma courses proved particularly attractive to womenÐand this led to the appointment of the ®rst women to hold University teaching posts, Alice Cooper, responsible from 1897 for women students for the Diploma in Education, and Nora MacMunn, geography demonstrator from 1906. The demand for more courses with a vocational bearing, already recognized in the mid-Victorian period by the introduction of honour schools in Theology and Law, was met by belated provision for the needs of medical and engineering education and the introduction of more modern options, such as Military Subjects, into the pass school. The view, urged by Jowett, Liddell, Rashdall, and others, that the University ought to be a place of education for the professions, gained ground in these yearsÐand it also became increasingly apparent that attracting more undergraduates could be a way of ®nancing more posts and augmenting resources for research. At the same time there was still a prevailing belief in the superiority of Classics in the hierarchy of disciplines and in the value of a general, liberal education, at least as a preliminary to specialist or vocational studies. This was re¯ected in the distribution of undergraduates by subject: even in the early twentieth century nearly half Oxford's graduates (48 per cent) read Greats or `Pass Greats'. A further 23 per cent read Modern History, commonly regarded as offering a broad liberal education to the less academically able honours student. Debate over the merits of general as opposed to specialist education took a confusing turn at Oxford, where it was often assumed that modern subjects were `specialisms' while generalists would study Classics. With the exception of the historians, modernists did little to dispel this assumption: they tended to offer unattractively specialized degree courses, whereas Greats retained its character as a wide-ranging course in

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language, literature, philosophy, and ancient history. On the issue of professional education and its compatibility with `liberal' ideals there was still more confusion.51 Spokesmen for disciplines with a vocational bearing stressed the `liberal' character of studies that led to Oxford degreesÐwhich remained, of course, strictly `pre-professional' and distinct from the quali®cations bestowed by professional bodies. Yet proposals for new applied or vocational courses generally ran into opposition and some were defeated. Most vulnerable were courses that encroached on established vested interests; the Professor of Botany's efforts to prevent the creation of honour schools in Agriculture and Forestry have been mentioned in Chapter 20. Curzon's suggestion of a `substantial two-years course . . . specially constructed for the requirements of a business career' came to nothing partly because it seemed likely to attract students away from the Diploma in Economics and Political Science and the pass school.52 There was some ritual denunciation of the principle of vocationalism but Oxford was not consistent in resisting it. A university that taught military surveying might as well also teach accountancy.53 Although the curriculum evolved in response both to the demand for higher education and advances in scholarship, there were many areas of tension between the two. The interest of philologists in developing studies in English and Modern Languages reassured those who believed that modern literary courses would foster a `dilettante spirit'.54 Yet it contributed to the failure of the ®rst attempt to introduce these subjects into the undergraduate curriculum. In May 1887 Congregation approved a proposal for a School of Modern European Languages: sometimes referred to as `the Philology School', it was to include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Celtic languages (Irish and Welsh).55 But when the statute was amended by the addition of Scandinavian and Letto-Slavic languages it proved all too easy to drum up opposition, and in November it was defeated on a tied vote (92 votes to 92). As in the case of this abortive scheme, the initiatives that ®nally brought into being separate honour schools in English and Modern Languages did re¯ect awareness of a growing demand for University courses in language and literature. Yet the syllabuses that were adopted in these 51 Cf. S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1981), 248±53. For the Diploma courses, other than Ophthalmology and Public Health, see the Index. 52 Principles and Methods, 118±19. Norman Chester notes, however, the prejudice shown by some against the idea of business education at Oxford; see his Economics, Politics and Social Studies in Oxford, 1900±85 (1986), 24; see also pp. 855±6 below. 53 Oxford and the Nation (1907), 21. The article from which this passage is reprinted appeared ®rst in The Times, 5 Apr. 1907. 54 OM, 3 Feb. 1886, 21. See Oxford Review, 9 Nov. 1887, 87. 55 C. H. Firth, The School of English Language and Literature. A Contribution to the History of Oxford Studies (1909), 24; see also his Modern Languages at Oxford (1929), 69±72.

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schools continued to invite the criticism that they were shaped by the interests of scholarship rather than education. Weighted towards the study of medieval language and set texts at the expense of modern literature and, in the case of Modern Languages, giving little credit for pro®ciency in colloquial usage, these were not courses that catered well for the needs of prospective schoolteachers, foreign students of English literature, or those requiring language skills for a business career. In other disciplines too, there were those who felt that Oxford did not strike the right balance between training scholars and offering a general education. The Natural Science syllabus re¯ected the specialized interests of researchers and had less to offer the intending schoolteacher or doctor than Part I of the Cambridge Natural Science tripos. Repeated proposals were made to shorten the length of the Lit. Hum. course in order to make it a more realistic and attractive preliminary to advanced or professional studies. The case for a three-year course was debated at length in the 1880s and after, and was not decisively rejected until 1909.56 The chief problem was that Greats was simultaneously under pressure from scholars who wanted to adapt the curriculum to re¯ect the progress of learning. New archaeological discoveries in Greece and Asia Minor, the application of anthropology to the ancient world, the interest of philosophers such as J. A. Smith and Schiller in psychologyÐall pointed to a need to expand rather than cut back the scope of undergraduate studies. Long-running controversies within Lit. Hum. were paralleled by the dispute among the modern historians between Charles Firth, Regius Professor (1904±25), and the tutors who made up the Modern History Association. The increasing sophistication of research methods, as Firth pointed out, made the BA course an inadequate training for scholars. Yet tutors were aware that most of the undergraduates who read this popular school were not destined to become professional scholarsÐfor whom openings were scarcer in the UK than in France, Germany, or AmericaÐbut to follow non-academic careers. This was a persuasive argument against substituting for `a liberal education through history a system and a curriculum bene®cial only to a very small minority'.57 It was in the context of disputes over the curriculum and resources that the charge was most frequently made that Oxford was backward in research. Here Curzon emphatically differed: `if we contrast the present provision and attitude with those of twenty-®ve years ago, the change is really immense'Ð facilities for advanced study and research were `considerably in excess of the popular impression'.58 Schiller, who had held a lectureship at Cornell University in the 1890s and ended his career in a chair at the University of 56

Principles and Methods, 201±3. A Letter to the Regius Professor of Modern History on the Teaching and Study of History at Oxford (1905), 5; see also pp. 370±2 above. 58 Principles and Methods, 181, 186. 57

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Southern California, supported this claim. Although he criticized the ancient Universities for their reluctance to `pose before the public as places where knowledge is advanced and ideas are created', they were `in point of fact . . . quite as ef®cient, if not as productive, as universities elsewhere'.59 The view that the function of the University was to preserve and disseminate but not to advance knowledge received a decisive check from the Commissions of the 1870s which, while resisting the programme of the endowment of research party, had largely endorsed its values.60 The older English view of a university `not as a seat of learning but merely as a place of education' was, dons complained in the Edwardian era, still current outside the profession and symptomatic of the fact that `the English public has not yet learnt to believe in knowledge.'61 But within universities opinion had changed, as may be seen from the efforts of Lewis Campbell to restore Jowett's reputation by showing that he was not, as tradition had it, hostile to research but on the contrary favoured generous study leave for professors and the allocation of funds to particular research projects and sinecure posts to eminent scholars.62 Institutional provision for research grew, if slowly: Curzon found `nearly twenty' college fellowships assigned to research or advanced study and about two dozen cases where college scholarships were held by postgraduate students or researchers, supplementing the funds which the University made available to researchers through the CUF and its prizes and scholarships.63 The most important single source of patronage for research was the University Press, which subsidized from pro®ts on the sale of Bibles and school-books an increasing ¯ow of scholarly publications. These included monographs, grammars, and dictionaries across a vast array of languages and also collaborative ventures, among them Anecdota Oxoniensia (a series of editions of unpublished manuscripts in Oxford libraries), the Oxford Classical Texts, and critical editions of the classics of English literature.64 The Press also paid the staff of researchers working on James Murray's New English Dictionary, an enterprise originally sponsored by the Philological Society and brought to Oxford on Jowett's initiative, which developed, in one estimate, into `the greatest effort probably which any university, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing'.65 The advancement of learning was not by any means the sole purpose of the 59

`Oxford and the Working Man', 768. G. Haines, Essays on German In¯uence upon English Education and Science 1850±1919 (1957); Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life (see n. 13). 61 Oxford and the Nation, 47; cf. Bryce's comment in 1910 that `learning qua learning receives little recognition in England'; quoted in W. S. Holdsworth, `Professor Sir Thomas Erskine Holland, 1835±1926', PBA xii (1926), 319. 62 L. Campbell, `Oxford Reform', University Review, 5 (1907), 493. 63 Principles and Methods, 182. 64 Ch. 26 and P. Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978), 45±6, 91± 2, 131. 65 Oxford Times, 16 Oct 1897, 3g. 60

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Press. It was also an important source of revenue for the University, making a regular annual contribution of £5,000 a year to University revenues between 1883 and 1906, and additional capital transfers amounting to nearly £50,000 between 1886 and 1897.66 Jowett and Gell were often criticized for placing pro®t before scholarship. At the turn of the century, moreover, the Press moved into general publishing, with such popular works as Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), H. W. and F. G. Fowler's The King's English (1906), and two new series, the World's Classics and the Oxford Library of Translations. Yet the policy of subsidizing unremunerative publications led, under Gell's successor as Secretary, Charles Cannan, to a large cut in the Press's subsidy to the Chest, which fell in 1907 to £2,000. The willingness of the Delegates to agree to this, at a time when the University was under ®nancial pressure, is in itself evidence of a renewed commitment to scholarship. Oxford's contribution to learning in these years cannot compare with its own record in the thirteenth, seventeenth, or high twentieth centuries, nor with the contemporary output of some of the universities and research institutes of the Continent. Much of it was in some sense derivative from German scholarship, whether in natural science or the humanitiesÐphilology, philosophy, theology, and history. Some reputations that stood high at the time have come in for criticism: one might cite the Swinburnian translations of Gilbert Murray or the crude excavating techniques used by the papyrologists B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, renowned for their discoveries at Oxyrhynchus, and equally by the founder of Romano-British archaeology, Francis Haver®eld, said by F. G. Simpson to have `dug like a rabbit'.67 Verdicts on Oxford Idealism, at that time a powerful (though never uncontroversial) in¯uence on British philosophy, have been affected by changing fashionsÐchallenged by the ideas of the Edwardian Cambridge philosophers, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and the mid-twentieth-century hegemony of logical positivism, it has been rehabilitated in recent years for its contributions to social theory.68 But there were certainly areas in which Oxford scholars contributed little to knowledge. In physics the record of the Clarendon laboratory was barren and though one NSS graduate, H. G. J. Moseley, ranks with the most important physicists of the past century, little credit for his achievements was due to Oxford.69 In the social sciences, 66 Murray to Cannan, 11 Jan. 1913, Cannan to Gamlen, 6 Mar. 1913, Finance Board papers, Bundle 1, OUA; Pt. 1, 390±1. 67 Wilson, Gilbert Murray, 195; S. Frere, `Roman Britain since Haver®eld and Richmond', History and Archaeology Review, 3 (1988), 31; H. I. Bell, `A. S. Hunt 1871±1934', PBA xx (1934), 323±36. 68 J. Harris, `Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870±1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy', Past and Present, 135 (1992), 116±41; S. Den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought (1996). 69 See Ch. 20.

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politics was weakly represented and the `Oxford school' of historical economics that derived inspiration from the work of Thorold Rogers was devastated by the appointment of the austere statistician F. Y. Edgeworth to the Drummond chair of Political Economy in 1891.70 In Modern History the output of dons fell short of expectations raised in the generation of StubbsÐthere was no one to compare, as A. L. Smith admitted, with the Cambridge medievalist, F. W. Maitland.71 In the last two ®elds, however, Oxford scholars contributed to the classic compendia produced in this period as works of collective scholarship: the Dictionary of National Biography, the Victoria County Histories, R. H. I. Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, H. D. Traill's Social England, and the distinguished 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the sciences there was a vigorous research tradition in chemistry and biology, while Sir William Osler, recruited from Johns Hopkins, brought an international reputation to the Regius chair of Medicine. E. B. Tylor was, in effect, the founder of a new University discipline of anthropology, and the work of his admirer Marett on pre-animistic religions was quickly recognized on the Continent.72 The Oxford school of historical jurisprudence, inaugurated by Henry Maine and developed by Bryce, Dicey, Anson, Holland, Pollock, and Holdsworth, broke new ground in the transformation of Law into a university discipline. Many Rhodes scholars chose to read Law at Oxford. In Geography too, the claim was made after A. J. Herbertson became Reader that the School was recognized as the best in the United Kingdom and that foreign specialists visited it `to learn and not to teach'.73 Of the Laudian Professor of Arabic D. S. Margoliouth it was said that `no scholar of our generation has left so deep and permanent a mark on Oriental studies.'74 For Theology a new era began when the University's exclusive links with Anglicanism were broken, clearing the way for a commitment to Lehrfreiheit uncomplicated by questions of orthodoxy. There was an abrupt change of generations when S. R. Driver and William Sanday succeeded in 1882 to chairs previously held by Pusey and Liddon, and three years later T. K. Cheyne replaced John Wordsworth in the Ireland chair of the Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These were scholars committed to `the principle of free enquiry' and the way was opened for the development of a historical and critical Theology school, in¯uenced by the contributions of Jewish and Protestant Nonconformist scholarship.75 It is to Driver and 70

A. Kadish, The Oxford Economists in the late Nineteenth Century (1982), 176, 197±208. Smith, Maitland, 44, 52. H. J. Rose, `Ronald Ranulph Marett, 1866±1943', PBA xxix (1943), 357±70; Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford, 156±61. For Osler's work in Oxford see Ch. 21 Note A. 73 OM 3 Feb. 1910, 173; for Rhodes scholars in the Law School see p. 396 above. 74 G. Murray, `David Samuel Margoliouth, 1858±1940', PBA xxvi (1940), 389±97. 75 A. Cowley, `Samuel Rolles Driver, 1846±1914', PBA vii (1915±16), 549±4; for Driver and Cheyne see also pp. 97,100 above. 71 72

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Cheyne, Ernest Nicholson tells us, `more than to any other that the modern study of the Old Testament in England owes its foundation'.76 Of the ®rst hundred members of the British Academy, a body that included independent as well as university scholars in the humanities, thirty-four held posts at Oxford and forty-four were Oxford graduates. Some Oxford-based academicians produced works of lasting importance: editions of Aristotle (Ingram Bywater), John of Salisbury (C. C. J. Webb), Cicero (A. C. Clark), John Wordsworth's Vulgate New Testament; early volumes of P. S. Allen's edition of the letters of Erasmus and A. J. Carlyle's in¯uential History of Medieval Political Theory in the West also came out before 1914. In the same vein of high scholarship were D. B. Monro's Grammar of the Homeric Language, W. M. Lindsay's Latin Language, and Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. Other academicians wrote also for a wider audience, especially through the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, a series developed for the publishers Williams and Norgate by H. A. L. Fisher and Gilbert Murray together with the scientist, J. Arthur Thomson. These little books, designed to `bring as far as possible the fruits of the best living thought into the reach of great masses of people, who have little spare money and little previous education', expressed a new con®dence in the achievements of British scholarship.77 Fifty years earlier, Mark Pattison had been regarded by his admirers as `the only classical scholar in Oxford at that time who really understood what was meant by learning'.78 `Learning' in this context meant the academic style of nineteenth-century Germany, with an emphasis on rigour of method, systematic research, and analysis of the causes and philosophical implications of phenomena. It contrasted both with writing in a literary genreÐ belles lettres, or elegant but inaccurate translations of classical texts (of a kind associated with Jowett)Ðand with Oxford's traditional antiquarian `folio and quarto learning'.79 From the 1860s, as Oxford graduates in both science and the humanities increasingly spent a period of study at GermanÐor, by the late nineteenth century, FrenchÐuniversities, the gulf between continental and British scholarship narrowed. The foundation of the British Academy in 1902, at the request of the continental Academies, created an institutional link with the international academic community of a kind already available to scientists through the Royal Society. Other links were forged by a growing range of learned periodicals: Oxford's part in that process is exempli®ed by the foundation in the 1880s of the Law Quarterly 76

14.

77

E. Nicholson, Interpreting the Old Testament: A Century of the Oriel Professorship (1981),

Wilson, Gilbert Murray, 188±92; Bodl. MS Myres 88, fo 2. W. W. Fowler, Reminiscences (1921), 26. W. Sanday, `John Wordsworth (Bishop of Salisbury, 1885±1911), 1843±1911', PBA v (1911± 12), 530±48; W. W. Jackson, `Ingram Bywater, 1840±1914', PBA vii (1915±16), 521±31. 78 79

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Review and the English Historical Review, and, at the turn of the century, Man and the Quarterly Journal of Medicine. Few Oxford scholars of his generation had Ingram Bywater's wide circle of continental acquaintances, but his friend, Henry Pelham, created opportunities for the future by his part in founding the British School in Athens and as sole founder of its counterpart in Rome.80 Some progress was made towards meeting complaints from scholars whose research interests were not recognized in the curriculum. New optional Special Subjects were introduced in Greats, and, as a concession to Firth, Modern History candidates were permitted to offer a thesis in addition to the usual complement of papers in schools. Provision for training in research was also made outside the BA curriculum. The introduction of the research degrees of B.Litt and B.Sc. in 1895 took pressure out of the campaign to recognize research and not merely examination knowledge in awarding degrees. Among the diploma courses there were some, such as Anthropology, Classical Archaeology, and Geography, that attracted graduates interested in research. Oxford and Cambridge were criticized for their failure to introduce the Ph.D., by the early twentieth century a mandatory quali®cation for academic employment in the United States.81 But here there was a mis®t between established Oxford practice and that of American and continental universities. On the one hand the specialized character of some honour schools and diploma courses, often taken as a second quali®cation by graduates, created a sense that the Ph.D. was redundant. On the other hand, doctorates had traditionally at Oxford been reserved to established scholars and carried seniority over MAs within the University. The dif®culty of grafting a new system on to the old was illustrated when new senior doctorates were instituted in 1900 to recognize learning in science and letters: much irritation was caused in establishing the seniority of holders of the D.Litt and D.Sc degrees in relation to heads of houses without doctorates, and on examining boards. The German university paradigm never acquired the same hold in Oxford as it did in America. The reasons for this were partly institutional, partly cultural: the outcome for research generated lasting controversy. The reformed college system and BA courses were designed primarily for other purposes. Academic competition between colleges focused (then as now) on successes in the schools. There was no institutional incentive for colleges to encourage undergraduates to offer a Greats Special Subject or a thesis in Modern History, since they did not improve the chance of a ®rst, nor to recruit students for the B.Litt or B.Sc. Very few Oxford graduates took these 80

F. J. Haver®eld, `Henry Francis Pelham, 1846±1907', PBA iii (1907±8), 365±70. R. Simpson, How the Ph.D. Came to Britain (Guildford, 1983). For the optional subjects in Mods and Greats see above pp. 335, 350±1; for the Modern History optional thesis see pp. 372, 378. 81

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research degrees. Those with academic ambitions were encouraged instead to enter for prize essays and to go abroad to acquire language and research skills. But college tutors carried heavy teaching loads and colleges were under no obligation to require them to undertake research. In making appointments colleges might opt for a recent graduate who was a good `college man' rather than a scholar with proven research capacities. British Academy obituaries of scholars who failed to get fellowships, or had to wait many years before their achievements were recognized by an appropriate appointment, show that this was seen as a particular cause for reproach, suggesting that Oxford did not value learning.82 There emerged none the less a rationale for the Oxford system that stressed its individualistic character and advantages over the more centralized and regimented German university. Even among scientists, though some chafed at the lack of resources that would allow them to build up research schools, there were those who valued the freedom of the college laboratory. In the humanities, not only the threat of professorial domination but the very idea of establishing `schools' or orthodoxies came under ®re. F. H. Bradley, it was said, was viewed by the world as the leading representative of `Anglo-Hegelianism . . . in spite of his own persistent protests against the whole spirit of ``discipleship'', and formal repudiation of membership of a Hegelian ``school'''.83 The Oxford style followed instead `the Socratic tradition, which treats philosophy as a perpetual process of discovery, with friendly conversation between older and younger learners'.84 Individualism in scholarship created some resistance to the professorial seminar, although there were exceptions: Herbertson, Sanday, the medievalist P. G. Vinogradoff, and the classical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay all ran successful seminars, the last two by 1914 supported by grants from the General Board.85 More characteristic of Oxford were groups of scholars, often interdisciplinary, sometimes including visitors from outside the University, which met regularly to discuss particular ®elds of learning. The Philological, Aristotle, and Dante Societies were among the earliest and most in¯uential of these. Important in later years was the Political Philosophy and Science Club started in 1909 by A. J. Carlyle, which drew to its three meetings each year `nearly everybody, in Oxford, Cambridge and London who was actively engaged in the writing and teaching of political philosophy' as well as economists such as Keynes, journalists such as R. C. K. Ensor, and civil 82 See, for example, C. H. Firth, `Dr. S. R. Gardiner', PBA i (1903±4), 294±301; H. W. Garrod, `Percy Stafford Allen, 1869±1933', PBA xix (1933), 381±407; J. L. Myres, `John Knight Fotheringham 1874±1936', PBA xxiii (1937), 551±64; C. C. J. Webb, `Reginald Lane Poole, 1857±1939', PBA xxv (1939), 311±20; F. M. Powicke, `Alexander James Carlyle, 1861±1943', PBA xxix (1943), 313±27. 83 A. E. Taylor, `Francis Herbert Bradley, 1846±1924', PBA xi (1924±5), 458±68. 84 R. R. Marett, `Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, 1864±1937', PBA xxiii (1937), 538. 85 General Board Acta and Agenda, 1913±14, OUA GB M/2/1.

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servants.86 Obituaries of Oxford academicians who died after 1914 re¯ect a particular concern to distance them from what were taken to be the distinctive vices of German scholarship. The Armenian scholar F. C. Conybeare (Max MuÈller's son-in-law) `could out-German the Germans in microscopic analysis; though he was never one that lost the scholar in the pedant'.87 The historian and Dante scholar Edward Armstrong wrote books in which `the references . . . carefully understated his research . . . Parade of learning disgusted him just as much as did hasty generalization.'88 H. A. L. Fisher combined the scholarship of the Sorbonne (he had studied there as well as in Germany as a graduate) with the `literary power . . . traditional in his English and Oxford surroundings'.89 The philosopher J. Cook Wilson was admired for his `cultivated distrust of phrases and formulae' and insistence on the use of plain language rather than technicalities.90 In the humanities, especially, the pre-war decades saw the beginnings of a distinctive academic style in Oxford scholarshipÐdespite ample evidence that the institutional and cultural context was not conducive to proli®c publication. As the Pelican Record put it in an article which referred to the much admired but under-published Corpus Classics tutor and Reader in Greek, Arthur Sidgwick, `Some men are known to the world by their books: the English universities produce men of another type, whose immediate in¯uence upon their academic contemporaries is profound, though its secret may be unguessed by the outer world.'91 Not only the duties of college life but also the atmosphere of critical discourse on which Oxford prided itself could prove inhibiting. In Cook Wilson it encouraged the belief that there was `a greater danger of ®xing one's thoughts by publication, and arresting one's own progress, than is generally recognized'.92 Even at the time such sentiments were not always viewed indulgently, as is shown by a review of Friedrich Paulsen's The German Universities and University Study, translated in 1906 with an introduction by Michael Sadler: The bad side of [the German system], to which Professor Paulsen is fully alive, may perhaps be seen in the excessive number of dissertations produced by students in haste to make a reputation for original work before they have mastered their subject. This, however, is a generous fault, and is greatly to be preferred to the indolent modesty of the English Don, who spends his life in preparing for a book which he never writes.93 86

F. M. Powicke, `Alexander James Carlyle, 1861±1943', PBA xxix (1943), 325. A. C. Clark and J. Rendel Harris, `F. C. Conybeare 1856±1924', PBA xi (1924±5), 469±78. 88 W. H. Hutton, `Edward Armstrong, 1846±1928', PBA xiv (1928), 395±404. 89 G. Murray, `Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher, 1865±1940', PBA xxvi (1940), 455±65. 90 H. W. B. Joseph, `Professor John Cook Wilson, 1849±1915', PBA vii (1915±16), 555±65. 91 Pelican Record, v (Dec. 1900) 152±3. The passage comes in a condolence to Arthur Sidgwick on the death of his brother Henry, who had both reputations. 92 Joseph, `Cook Wilson', 560. 93 Westminster Gazette, 8 Sept. 1906, 12. 87

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Plenty of Oxford dons would have applauded these comments. The shortage of funds for research irked not only scientists but colleagues in the humanities like the archaeologist and keeper of the Ashmolean, Arthur Evans, who ®nanced their work largely from private means, or who hoped in vain to progress from the slog of college tutoring to the relative leisure of a readership. The sense that Oxford, while it made research possible, was not organized to promote it, contributed to the ground swell of opinion within the University after 1900 in favour of further reform.94 Students In the outside world (as Curzon pointed out) there was, however, less concern about matters of this kind than about Oxford's perennial image as a rich man's university. `Of all the criticisms passed upon modern Oxford, none can compare in the earnestness . . . with which it is urged, or in the interest it excites, than the complaint that neither the education, the endowments, nor the social advantages of the University are suf®ciently open to the man of humble means.'95 As Chapter 24 has indicated, despite a steady growth in numbers of scholars and exhibitioners and a marked decline in the proportion of the undergraduate population who were sons of the gentry and clergy, Oxford remained a socially exclusive university. The picture was similar at Cambridge, as were the reasons for it. College life was inevitably more expensive than life in a non-residential university. Efforts to open an alternative route to an Oxford education through the Non-Collegiate system had met with limited success. The comparatively low level of access to secondary education in England also created problems of recruitment. Some progress had been made towards drawing in the `poor man' who had concerned reformers in the mid-nineteenth century (when he was thought of as the son of middle-class parents with limited means), chie¯y through the expansion and reform of the public schools and endowed grammar schools. But the State did little before the twentieth century to develop a progressive system of secondary schools that would allow Oxford and Cambridge to cater for a wider clientele. At the same time their exclusiveness was in part a matter of choice. Compulsory Greek became a hurdle that an increasing proportion of secondary schoolboys could not surmount. And by the turn of the century these were the only British universities that denied degrees to women. New perspectives opened on an old controversy in the early twentieth century. Anxieties had been aired in the 1890s about over-production of graduates and overcrowding of the professions, especially law and schoolteaching. These were now overtaken by a concern to extend university 94 95

W. S. Holdsworth, `Professor Sir Paul Vinogradoff, 1854±1925', PBA xi (1924±5), 486±501. Principles and Methods, 42.

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education to `captains of industry' and army of®cers and a growing demand for graduates in government and in council secondary schools.96 There was also new evidence of a demand for higher education from the working classes, shown by trades-union support for Ruskin Hall, the college for working men founded at Oxford (though independent of the university) in 1899 and for the Workers' Educational Association, founded in 1903. Meanwhile the success of Oxford men in winning places in the civil and colonial services drew criticism from other quarters.97 The charge of `eÂlitism', in substance if not in name, was ®rst heard in these years: the only defence could be that Oxford graduates won their success by merit. Within the University there was much debate over means to exclude the idle and broaden the basis of recruitment. But proposals for a reformed University entrance requirement came to nothing. As always, the obstacles to change were partly practical. Despite the increase in the proportion of undergraduates who read for honours, the weaker colleges still depended on the fees of pass men: it was not until the era of mandatory state grants that it became possible for them to adopt a strictly meritocratic policy for admissions. There were ®nancial constraints on the University, too, which made it hard to envisage a signi®cant growth in student numbers. Pressure on library and lecture space was one reason urged against conceding degrees to, and thereby attracting more, women students. The terms of the Rhodes benefaction, providing 300 scholarships without an accompanying contribution to the cost of accommodation or tuition, caused dismay. Crucial to the success of the scheme was the agreement of the Rhodes Trustees to put up additional funds. Even the tutorial class system, Oxford's most innovative contribution to working-class adult education, depended on Robert Morant's good of®ces in securing a grant from the Board of Education. Among Oxford residents, however, a common response to critics of the University's exclusiveness was to point out that changes were already taking place. The opening of the Nonconformist colleges and revival of extension had prompted W. L. Courtney to publish as early as 1890 an account of `Oxford Democratic and Popular'.98 In the early twentieth century Manchester and Mans®eld were joined by halls for Roman Catholic students. Undergraduates apart, there was also an ever-growing population of women and men students who did not matriculate but whose presence in the University it was impossible to ignore. Ruskin students attended lectures, sat for the Diploma in Economics and Political Science and preached socialism from the steps of the Martyrs' Memorial. The even tenor of college life was affected by the summer invasions of extensionists, especially when 96

R. B. Haldane, Education and Empire (1902), preface. Pt 1, 502±3. Macmillan's Magazine, 61 (Feb. 1890), 282±7. For the denominational institutions see pp. 103±4, 120±1 above. 97 98

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they began to include more manual workers.99 Perhaps the biggest change of all in this period was the appearance of overseas students and scholars, among whom Americans were prominent even before the advent of Rhodes scholars. As early as 1887 there were enough Americans in Oxford to hold a Thanksgiving dinner.100 Ten years later Edward Nicholson commented on the numbers of graduates, professors, and other visitors from the United States among the readers in the Bodleian: Oxford had `become Americanised to such a degree that [it] was now almost a suburb of the Transatlantic cities'.101 Residents were conscious of major changes in Oxford's clientele. Whereas efforts to develop the University as a place of learning entailed largely internal controversies, the issue of student recruitment was viewed from different perspectives in Oxford and the outside world.

p o l i t i ca l re a l i g n m e n t s The Oxford scene: parties, pressure groups, issues In Francis Cornford's classic parody of Edwardian academic politics, the `Great World' is depicted as `a distant and rather terrifying region, which it is very necessary to keep in touch with, though it must not be allowed on any account to touch you'.102 In Oxford, as in Cornford's Cambridge, the academic microcosm now stood in an uncertain relationship to the Great World. In political terms most dons aligned themselves somewhere on a liberal±conservative/conservative±liberal continuum that re¯ected controversies of the 1860s and 1870s but had little relevance to the national party system of later decades. After 1886 the great majority voted Unionist: only 75 resident graduates could be found to sign a memorial of support sent to Gladstone in 1888.103 Arthur Sidgwick's activities as Chairman of the Oxford City Liberal Association (1886±1910) may have cost him the presidency of Corpus in 1904; similarly St. John's, electing a new head of house shortly after Lloyd George's 1909 Budget, rejected the Fabian Sidney Ball, a longstanding and popular senior tutor, in favour of a clerical headmaster, H. A. James. Yet though national politics could sometimes raise the temperature of local rivalries, and though Liberal and Conservative caucuses continued to meet and put up candidates for Hebdomadal Council, University parties developed on lines of their own and were sometimes divided within themselves on the issues of the day. Con¯icts over distribution of resources and professional in®ghting at times took a purely factional character. A. L. Smith 99

J. M. Winter and D. Joslin, R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book (1972), 16. OM 30 Nov. 1887, 113. 101 Oxford Times, 31 July 1897, 3h. 102 F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (1908), 8. See G. Johnson, University Politics: F. M. Cornford's Cambridge and His Advice to the Young Academic Politician (1994). 103 Records of the OU Home Rule League, Bodl. G. A. Oxon. b. 146. 100

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once suggested that `the preponderance of the critical over the constructive activities' in Oxford was `encouraged by the sheltered nature of the academic life, a cell, but a padded cell'.104 Some academic questions, on the other hand, were complicated by the interest of other professionsÐclergymen and schoolmasters, doctors, and scientistsÐin the affairs of the University. A brief clerical reaction in 1882±4 suggested that there might be a return to the party alignments of the 1860s. Noisy assemblies in Convocation defeated the nomination of the Congregationalist divine R. F. Horton as examiner in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion and tried unsuccessfully to stop the building and upkeep of a physiology laboratory for the `vivisectionist' J. S. Burdon Sanderson.105 H. P. Liddon stirred up clerical opposition to the admission of women to undergraduate examinations. But that issue caused a rift between older and younger generations of High Churchmen. The Church party fragmented and it was not until 1904, when the secularization of examining for the Theology honour school was proposed, that Oxford residents were again to behold `country parsons waving their umbrellas and hissing like geese' in response to a conservative whip.106 Within late Victorian Oxford the Christian Socialism that in¯uenced many Anglicans tended to place the Church above party.107 As for University liberals, Jowett's Vice-Chancellorship did nothing to heal breaches that had opened up in the aftermath of the tests campaign. Herbert Warren recalled how, attending as a newcomer a caucus for `holders of Liberal opinions', he saw President Percival of Trinity, schoolmaster head and enthusiast for Extension, proposed as a candidate for Hebdomadal Council by Jowett and his associates but `cold-shouldered not only by Sir William Anson and the Moderates, but by Pelham and his friends'Ðthe latter representing the Pattisonian cause of research.108 The `moderates' became in time a distinct group, as Anson forfeited Liberal con®dence. By the 1890s the activity of party caucuses in Council elections had come to seem increasingly anomalous: `The old issues are settled; and each new issue creates new cross-divisions.'109 New caucuses and tendencies emerged which partly, though never completely, superseded older party divisions. The ®rst to take shape was the Non-Placet Society, formed in the early 1880s to oppose `Progress falsely so called' and the oligarchic hold of Jowett and his friends on University government. Originating in a group of young conservative dons, including Charles Oman, Joseph Wells, and A. D. Godley, who launched the Oxford 104

A. L. Smith, by his Wife (1928), 314. On Horton's rejection see Pt 1, 357 and p. 58 above; on the anti-vivisectionists and the physiology laboratory see Pt 1, 578 and p. 483 above. 106 H. Anson, T. B. Strong. Bishop, Musician, Dean, Vice-Chancellor (1949), 34. 107 Clergy attached to Pusey House and Wycliffe Hall as well as the Nonconformist colleges were among the signatories of the Rhodes protest of 1899. 108 W. Temple, Life of Bishop Percival (1921), 75. 109 Journal of Education, Nov. 1896, 659. 105

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Review (1884±8) in rivalry to the (then liberal) Oxford Magazine, and were supported by contributions to the national periodical press from W. L. Courtney, H. Hensley Henson, and others of the same generation, it voiced among other things the grievances of the young at the diminished fellowship openings and absence of a career structure in post-Commission Oxford.110 But the Society's claim to speak for a generation was somewhat tendentious: its following was concentrated in the more conservative colleges and it acknowledged the leadership of two older men, James Bellamy, President of St John's (1871±1909), an old ally of Pusey's and convener of the Conservative caucus, and the philosopher Thomas Case, Wayn¯ete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from 1889 and from 1904 President of Corpus. Case's lifelong commitment to resisting modern innovations was later to extend to Curzon's Oxford Re-endowment Fund, the principle of relativity, and the First World War.111 The Non-Placet Society had its heyday in the later 1880s and early 1890s. Two notable victories came in 1887, when its canvassing helped to defeat plans for an electricity laboratory to supplement the resources of the Clarendon, and also the new honour school of Modern Languages and Literature, upon which Congregation had at ®rst looked favourably. The Society's mood is conveyed in an Oxford Magazine feature on its annual dinner: the menu began with `ConsommeÂe du conseil hebdomadal' and went on to `Langues modernes sauteÂes', `Cervelle de speÂcialiste', and `Devilled Professors on toast'.112 `The Non-Placet,' wrote Cornford, observing similar tendencies among his Cambridge colleagues, `is a man of principle. A principle is a rule of inaction, which states a valid general reason for not doing in any particular case what, to unprincipled instinct, would appear to be right. The NonPlacet believes that it is always well to be on the Safe Side, which can be easily located as the northern side of the interior of the Senate House.'113 At both Universities, however, the Non-Placet stoodÐon the whole and in the long runÐfor lost causes. As one commentator noted with satisfaction, members of Hebdomadal Council `elected ``to conserve'' (i.e. obstruct)' had a tendency to turn moderate, or even become `useful and practical reformers'.114 Case, Oman, and Godley, who continued to lead resistance to `progressive moves' in the early twentieth century, scored victories chie¯y when they could play on the concerns of broader and less entrenched sections of opinion. They mobilized support from classicistsÐuneasy in 110 Oman, Memories, ix, 141±5; Engel, 208±9, 254±5. The ®rst proprietors of the Oxford Magazine were Herbert Warren and Richard Lodge: on its early years see OM, 1933, 294±7. 111 R. B. Mowat (ed.), Letters to The Times, 1884±1922, written by Thomas Case; Grundy, Fifty-®ve Years, 109±11; p. 863 below. 112 OM, 7 Dec. 1887, 141. 113 Microcosmographia Academica, 4. 114 Journal of Education, 1 July 1894, 404.

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the 1880s after the latest assault on the old common curriculum had freed scientists and lawyers from Moderations, and from the clerical interestÐ worried in the 1890s and after about declining numbers of ordinands and the `dearth of clergy'.115 `College-men' would rally in defence of any college that had a dispute with the University. Proposals to divert University resources to new objects could also attract broadly-based opposition. Science in particular was regarded warily by North Oxford residents and lovers of wild life, cricket, and football, as new laboratories encroached on the Parks. Others could be relied on to oppose the proliferation of social `distractions' to sound learning, whether in the form of women students or undergraduate participation in theatrical productions, controversially encouraged by Jowett.116 Non-Placetism would undoubtedly have been a more effective brake on reform but for the formation in 1889, in Lewis Farnell's rooms in Exeter College, of a rival caucus, broadly identi®ed with the values of Mark Pattison and pledged `to maintain the character of the University as a home of learning and science'.117 `The Club', as it was known (somewhat confusingly, as there were other groups of a non-partisan kind with similar names), adopted a programme drafted by Frederick York Powell, one of the sponsors of the ill-fated Modern European Languages school:118 1. To take the professorial, as distinct from the tutorial, and the university, as distinct from the College, points of view in questions of education. 2. To have the examination system kept within limits rather than extended. 3. To have the Bodleian Library managed as a place of study and research for mature students.119 4. To act on academical not on purely political grounds in voting for Council etc.

Few records of the Club's early activities appear to have survived.120 But there is no reason to doubt Farnell's claim that its achievements included the passage in 1893 of the statute establishing an English school, forced upon a sceptical Hebdomadal Council, and also the introduction of research degrees.121 Club members dined together on the Friday before each term, circulated petitions and ¯ysheets, supported colleagues who were from time to time on Council, and worked within their respective faculties and colleges 115

Guardian, 7 Feb. 1900, 1 Jan. 1902. H. Carpenter, OUDS: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, 1885±1985 (1985), 27±8. 53±6. 117 The original draft of its programme is in Bodl. Firth b. 36, fo 184. 118 On other dining clubs see F. Madan, Records of the Club at Oxford, 1790±1917 (1917); P. E. Matheson, The Society, 1886±1911 (1932); Anon., A Hundred Years of the Ashmolean Club, 1869±1969 (1969). 119 Edward Nicholson's controversial regime at the Bodleian is discussed in Edmund. Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845±1945 (1952), 152±8, 163±4, 174±6, 202±4 and L. R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1932), 272±3. 120 Club minute books for the years 1906±46 are in Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. d.561/2±4. 121 An Oxonian Looks Back, 271±2; L. R. Farnell, `Academic Politics', in O. H. Ball, Sidney Ball: Memories and Impressions of `an ideal don' (1923), 193±5. 116

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to promote `the research spirit' and the coordination of college and University teaching. In the late Victorian era this was the most important pressure group for reform. The membership of the ClubÐrecalled by Farnell as about thirtyÐsuggests a coalition grounded primarily in ideals rather than interests. Neither York Powell nor Sidney Ball (for many years the Club's secretary) were proli®c researchers, but they supported the idea of the University as a place of learning and the view that the `don' should be a professional scholar, not just a professional tutor to the cadets of the governing classes.122 The Club supported scienceÐ`the colossal Ray Lankester with his Olympian voice and manner' was an early member and useful spokesmanÐbut its leaders were always drawn from the humanities.123 Classicists were well represented. Early members included Farnell's mentors, Ingram Bywater, Henry Nettleship, and Henry Pelham: among Ball's successors as secretary were J. L. Myres and A. E. Zimmern. Professors and `specialists' with an axe to grindÐArthur Napier, Joseph Wright, Charles Firth, Percy Gardner, Arthur EvansÐfound support from fellow members who were college tutors. Nor were the latter all `ageing Radicals': among them was Charles Oman's New College contemporary, Francis Haver®eld. The Club stood for a vision of the University that was, in Oxford terms, genuinely radical, at least in the sense that it contested the dominance of college teaching, exempli®ed by Jowett's Balliol (`that Do-the-boys Hall across the way', as Bywater of Exeter described it).124 Ultimately it favoured the more centralized and faculty-dominated structure which had begun to develop at Cambridge under the 1882 statutes. In 1907 it discussed a proposal that three-quarters of student tuition fees should be handed over to a Council of Faculties, which would control academic appointments. `College Tutors not approved by a Board of Faculty, or in whose appointment no Board has had a voice, should not be entitled to be members of a Faculty or to give a public lecture.'125 The Edwardian reform agitation, which formed the background to this proposal, is discussed in Chapter 32. For various reasons the Club proved less effective than might have been expected in mobilizing internal support for that movement. Its agenda, in the ®rst place, was purely academic: moves to `democratize' the University, the prime concern of non-resident reformers, were supported by some Club members but not others. But also, and more important, changes within Oxford had by that stage complicated 122 For the role of the Modern History Association in developing the ethos of the `professional tutor' see P. R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester (Manchester, 1986), 99±101. 123 Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back, 271. 124 Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford, 110. 125 Bodl. G. A. Oxon. 48 286.

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perceptions of the way forward for the advocates of `learning and science'. In 1905±6 efforts to bring the Club's programme up to date culminated in a split: the more militant members, including Farnell and Ball, seceded and those who remained, chaired by Charles Firth, settled for retaining the original Club programme and discussing current issues on an open-ended basis.126 Farnell's group and the Club continued to confer and act together from time to time but this parting of old alliesÐfor which the exact cause remains unclearÐwas symptomatic of a real dilemma. The Selborne Commission had made colleges an important vehicle for reform; they had responded, to some extent, positively. Should reformers now treat colleges as potential allies in their efforts to create a modern universityÐor continue to regard them as enemies of that cause? Could the professoriate, identi®ed in the later nineteenth century with the cause of research, really offer better leadership? Edwardian scholars were divided on that issue. Critics of college autonomy by that stage included professors who had experience of continental universities, including Paul Vinogradoff, formerly a professor at Moscow University and from 1903 Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, and also the Professor of Comparative Philology, Joseph Wright, perhaps the most remarkable example of working-class autodidacticism; the son of a Yorkshire quarryman, he had gone on to study at Heidelberg and Leipzig.127 Yet the state of Oxford's professoriate did not encourage con®dence. Some professorial appointments, made by electors without expertise in the ®eld or, in the case of the Regius chairs, by Crown patronage, were regarded as undistinguished.128 The less well-endowed chairs had become ®nancially less attractive than a college tutorship with prospect of a pension; and since there were no retirement pensions for professors, some departments were saddled with heads who lived on into unproductive old age, such as the physicist R. B. Clifton, the chemist William Odling, and the botanist S. H. Vines. Nor were professors always friends of academic liberty. Burdon-Sanderson dismissed F. A. Dixey, a demonstrator who ventured to speak out for compulsory Greek.129 Joseph Wright arbitrarily removed a Taylorian teacher. The latter case drew even from Vinogradoff the comment `put a peasant in power and you create a tyrant.'130 It is hardly surprising that some dons who were active scholars, such as G. B. Grundy, Hastings Rashdall, and P. S. Allen, were `college men' and opposed to anything that would undermine Oxford's 126 Bodl. MS Myres 76, fos 1±12; MS Top. Oxon. d. 561/2, fo. 2. Others who resigned were Arthur Evans, Percy Gardner, Gotch, Miers, Macan, Macdonnell, Napier, and Poulton. 127 The Collected Papers of Paul Vinogradoff. With a Memoir by the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, vol. 1 (1928). C. B. Firth, `Joseph Wright 1855±1930', PBA xviii (1932), 422±38. 128 Principles and Methods, 188±9; see also chs 14 and 20. 129 R. Dixey, Recollections (1967), 9. 130 Grundy, Fifty-®ve Years, 125±7.

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character as a confederal, collegiate university. Both Curzon and the Asquith Commission found entrenched resistance to signi®cant increase in the powers of Faculty Boards and professors.131 Such puzzling alignments of opinionÐwhere did Oxford really stand on research?Ðseemed to show academic politics at their most parochial. But there were other issues, of greater interest to the lay public, on which the University came to appear equally out of touch with the perspectives of the outside world. `The misogynists carried the day,' commented the Daily Telegraph when Congregation refused to open the BA degree to women.132 Parliament gave a clear lead in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in legislating for the admission of women to degrees at other British universities. Curzon, who revived the issue at Oxford, was a prominent anti-suffragistÐevidence in itself of the broad base of public support for women's higher education. Equally straightforward to the layman seemed the case against compulsory Greek. Yet both questions generated passionate controversy within Oxford that cut across party lines. On degrees for women, the Club was divided and so too by the early twentieth century were the advocates of Extension. Opposition was particularly strong among college tutors in Modern History who counted many women among their pupils. More support for opening the BA came from the non-academic voters in Congregation, normally considered a conservative element with Non-Placet leanings. The rami®cations of the women's degree question are discussed in Chapter 10. Alignments on the Greek question proved no less confusing. The erosion of the classical tradition in schools and universities throughout Europe has been represented as the product of a utilitarian attack on the shared culture of its educated classes.133 Yet this was not, in early twentiethcentury Britain, a straightforward issue. It affected professional interests in various ways. Classical scholars were by no means united in defence of the modicum of Greek needed to pass Responsions. The Club was for abolishing the requirement. Schoolmasters, too, were increasingly against it, as was shown by a poll of the Assistant Masters' Association in 1905.134 But the Church's interest in retaining the Greek requirement was pressed strongly and in terms designed to appeal to academic sensibilities: ```Theology without the Greek Testament'' . . . is not progress, but a return to the Middle Ages.'135 As in the 1870s, some scientists and medical men argued that their professional status would suffer if they were cut off from the common culture that they shared with the humanities. By the early twentieth century few Oxford 131

For the retreat of the Asquith Commission on this issue see The Twentieth Century, 40±1. Daily Telegraph, 4 Mar. 1896. 133 N. Stone, Europe Transformed 1878±1919 (1983), 389. 134 Athenaeum, 25 Feb. 1905, 242. The Headmasters' Conference had taken this view since 1900: The Twentieth Century, 111. See also n. 168 below. 135 Guardian, 17 Nov. 1911. 132

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scientists took that view. But it was represented by Dixey and R. T. Gunther on the Greek Defence Committee and endorsed by one of Acland's successors as Regius Professor. Osler reiterated that it was for Oxford and Cambridge to supply a classically educated eÂlite for the medical profession: `The method, manners, and morals of Medicine are essentially Greek, and I should not like to see the profession deprived altogether of the opportunity of having a few of its members learned in the wisdom of our fathers.'136 A new factor in Edwardian debates was, however, the Hellenistic revival, which encouraged renewed efforts to popularize the study of the ancient world. Cultural idealism led some academic liberals to defend compulsory Greek.137 This was the golden age of classical editing at Oxford and there was a feeling that Oxford had a special responsibility to halt the decline of Greek in the schools. Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek from 1908, became an in¯uential convert to that view, promoted by the Classical Association, of which D. B. Monro, Vice-Chancellor from 1901 to 1904, had been the founding president.138 The argument that the University put off potential benefactors by continuing to exclude Greekless students cut little ice. Clement Webb thought it simply `base'.139 `The time when plutocrats are attacking Greek is the time for Socialists to take it up,' asserted the St John's tutor, Tom Snow.140 Winston Churchill's claim that the Greek requirement had prevented his going to Oxford drew a sardonic response:141 By still maintaining Necessary Greek And causing thus the schoolboy in his school To go on learning Necessary Greek We lose the chance of Thirty Thousand Pounds And WÐÐÐn ChÐÐÐll.

Oxford and the Nation: new relationships and aspirations The gulf between University and lay perceptions of such questions was no doubt in part a product of weakened institutional linkages between Oxford and national politics.142 For more than twenty years after Henry Smith's defeat in the by-election of 1878 the University seats were held by two ageing and non-resident Conservative burgesses, Sir John Mowbray and J. G. Talbot, who had little contact with University opinion.143 Salisbury's 136

OM 23 Nov. 1911, 104. Rothblatt, Revolution of the Dons, (n. 51), 252±4. 138 Both Monro and Murray were academic liberals. 139 Webb diary, 30 Apr. 1909, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1154, fo. 43v. 140 T. C. Snow, How to Save Greek and Other Paradoxes of Oxford Reform (1910), 31. 141 `The Bait', OM 20 May 1909, 313; Curzon cited an offer of £30,000 on condition of abolishing compulsory Greek; Principles and Methods, 103. 142 C. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (1976), 174±217. 143 Mowbray was brie¯y Father of the House of Commons (1898±9). Talbot's younger brother, the ®rst Warden of Keble, E. S. Talbot, left Oxford in 1889. 137

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unsuccessful efforts in the House of Lords in 1882 to block the statute giving Faculty Boards a say in the appointment of examiners turned out to be his last initiative as Chancellor.144 University Conservatives continued to complain of neglect in his distribution of Church patronage.145 University Liberals remembered him as `a pungent critic but not a reformer'.146 His temperamental distaste for University life was an open secret. `If I had to do literary work of an absorbing character, Oxford is the last place in which I should attempt to do it,' he told William Sanday, trying to lure him from his Divinity chair to the deanery of Exeter.147 So rarely did Salisbury set foot in the University that George Goschen, who succeeded him in 1904, was made aware of a Cecil family impression that it was `against etiquette for the Chancellor to go to Oxford'.148 Nor did Parliament show much interest in Oxford, despite the efforts of Thorold Rogers to acquaint the House of Commons with the unsatisfactory position of the professoriate.149 In 1892 an unsuccessful Radical candidate, Joseph King, graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, a Congregationalist who was among the founders of Mans®eld House University Settlement, attempted to place University reform once more on the Liberal agenda, in terms that foreshadowed the controversies of the Edwardian years. Oxford and Cambridge were privileged corporations, unacceptable to the democratic spirit of the age, and should be brought under a standing University Commission or Education Of®ce which would complete the programme of secularization and modernization begun forty years earlier.150 This whiff of grapeshot produced a brief but perceptible quickening in the pace of internal reform. Yet when Gladstone visited All Souls in 1890 he revealed a nostalgia for the Oxford of his undergraduate days, with its nobleman-commoners and absence of `undergraduettes', that even Charles Oman found striking.151 Changes at the turn of the century did something to restore Oxford's links with Westminster. The death of Mowbray in 1899 led to the unopposed election of Sir William Anson. Anson's appointment in 1902 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education con®rmed the revival of the University's political in¯uence. His politicsÐmore Unionist than Liberal and, after 1903, Tariff ReformÐwere, some felt, of less consequence than his 144

Ward, Victorian Oxford, 309. T. O. Wethered to Cranbrook, 7 Dec 1886; W. H. Crooke to Mowbray, 11 Aug. 1888; copies of letters about Oxford, Salisbury MSS, Christ Church Library. 146 T. H. Warren, in Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 92. 147 Salisbury to Sanday, 30 May 1900; Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. d. 126, fo 25. 148 Goschen to Matheson, 22 Apr. 1905; Goschen MSS, Bodl. Dep. c 183. 149 Return of Particulars with regard to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (Mr. Thorold Rogers), PP 1886, 51, 519±74; J. E. Thorold Rogers, `Oxford Professors and Oxford Tutors', Contemporary Review, 56 (1889), 926±36. 150 J. King, `Democracy and Our Old Universities', Contemporary Review, 62 (Nov. 1892), 692±708. 151 Oman, Memories, 140±1. 145

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status as an academic and a loyal Oxford man.152 Prompted by Herbert Gladstone, the University Liberals nevertheless attempted to divide the Unionist vote in 1906 by running the Unionist Free Fooder Lord Hugh Cecil (who, though not an academic, was at least a former fellow of Hertford).153 Cecil was defeated in 1906 but succeeded Talbot without contest in 1910. All Souls retained the second University seat on Anson's death in 1914, when he was succeeded by its Bursar, the author and agriculturalist R. E. Prothero. The revival of resident in¯uence in burgess elections coincided with the election of Chancellors willing to identify more closely with the University's interests. In Goschen's time the practice began, continued under Curzon, of appointing a correspondent to keep the Chancellor in touch with University affairs; before the war this role was ®lled by Percy Matheson of New College. Goschen, like his successor, saw the Chancellor's role as involving guidance to the University on matters affecting its public image. But nothing in these developments did much to clarify the relationship between national and academic politics. Goschen was accepted by University Liberals as `the most Liberal Conservative they could get' and by Conservatives because Curzon was in India.154 Curzon was reputedly the choice of the out-voters in a contest with Rosebery in 1907 that was confused by the loyalties of Balliol and All Souls to the former and Christ Church to the latter. `Canvassing proceeded furiously up to the last as open minds abounded. After all, there was an uncertain sound about such warcries as ``Christ Church and Reform!'' or ``Balliol and the Conservative Interest!''.'155 Nor were the priorities of academic politics easily understood by Chancellors. Goschen found it `curious' that Congregation was as exercised over a proposal to place bicycle-sheds in the proscolium of the Bodleian as over the cause ceÂleÁbre of compulsory Greek. Equally odd, after the Liberal victory in the general election of 1906, was Oxford's lack of interest in the threat posed to the University seats by the government's Plural Voting BillÐ`No±one has so far written me a single word on the subject.'156 Parochial tendencies in academic politics coexisted, however, with a belief in Oxford as a source of cultural leadership. `It is the supreme function of the Universities, I suppose, to guide the thought of those who mould the destiny of the nation and the empire.'157 William Temple, then Headmaster of 152

Strachan Davidson to Fisher (draft), n.d. [Dec. 1905], Strachan Davidson MSS, BCLP. Bryce to Fisher, 25 Nov. 1905, Bodl. MS Fisher 59. 154 Warren, in Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 92. 155 Athenaeum, 23 Mar. 1907, 355. 156 Goschen to Matheson, 26 Nov. 1905, 7 Nov. 1906; Goschen MSS, Bodl. Dep. c 183. Among University Liberals, at least, this indifference to the fate of the University's seats was understandableÐan earlier survey showed much support for their abolition, given that the majority of electors were non-resident members of Convocation; Pelham to Bryce, 9 Dec. [1885], Bodl. MS Bryce 160, fo 113. 157 William Temple, in Alex Hill (ed.), Congress of the Universities of the Empire, 1912. Report of Proceedings (1912), 287. 153

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Repton and President of the Workers' Educational Association, formerly fellow of Queen's College, archbishop's son and future archbishop, represented a Broad Church tradition common to both ancient Universities and stretching back to Coleridge and Arnold. An older tradition, shaken but not destroyed by the Oxford Movement, associated Oxford in particular with a duty to lead the Church. A common defence of the general and philosophical curriculum of Greats was, moreover, that it trained `guardians' for the service of the state.158 Certainly, as Leslie Stephen noted, it produced (by contrast with the austere mathematical ethos of Cambridge) more than its share of `prophets' with a message for the wider world.159 Such ®gures did much to counteract the narrowing of horizons that accompanied the professionalization of academic life. A dominant in¯uence in this generation was T. H. Green, who exempli®ed a sense of secular mission to promote the `common good', whether by engagement with the affairs of the local community or in a national context, which was echoed in the work of many of his Oxford associates who did not embrace his Idealist metaphysics. It was A. V. Dicey, Green's undergraduate friend, who produced the key Unionist text in 1886, England's Case against Home Rule. Sidney Ball, who was never a particularly orthodox Fabian and acknowledged Green and Arnold Toynbee as formative in¯uences, was among the founders both of Toynbee Hall in 1884 and the centre for social and political studies in Oxford, Barnett House, by which its ®rst warden was commemorated in 1914.160 He was also on the committee that produced in 1908 Oxford and Working-Class Education (1908), a key text in adult education: at the conference with working-class and educational organizations in the Examination Schools which set up that committee he asked, `Is it too much to hope that we may discern the beginning of a new Oxford movement?'161 The in¯uence of Green is also apparent in the restatement and popularization of liberal catholic beliefs by the group of Oxford clerics who in 1889 produced Lux Mundi. Though unremarkable as scholarship, these essays gained a wide audience and marked `the decisive adoption of the evolutionary principle as a ruling idea in theology by the party which inherited the tradition of the Tractarians'.162 The foundation of the Christian Social Union in the same year was largely the work of Henry Scott Holland, a member of the Lux 158

Athenaeum, 25 Mar. 1905, 370. L. Stephen, `Jowett's Life', in Studies of a Biographer, ii (1898), 125. 160 Samuel Barnett (1844±1913), rector of St Jude's, Whitechapel, 1873±94; canon of Bristal, 1894±1906; canon of Westminster, 1906±13. 161 Ball, `What Oxford can do for workpeople', in `Papers submitted to the National Conference of working class and educational organisations, held in the Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford, on Saturday Aug 10, 1907', typescript, WEA archive, Temple House, Bethnal Green, London. 162 C. C. J. Webb, quoted in G. Stephenson, Edward Talbot (1936), 56. For Lux Mundi's theological signi®cance see also pp. 101±2 above. 159

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Mundi group, and another, Charles Gore, Principal of Pusey House, was prominent in the active Oxford branch of the CSU. These initiatives came from individuals and groups who could not claim to speak for the University. The days of of®cial orthodoxies and heresy hunts in Convocation were past: after the 1860s, in the words of one Edwardian don, Oxford became `a  o!o, a general warehouse of opinions'.163 Nowhere was this more evident than in religion. The opening of Mans®eld and Manchester colleges strengthened links between University liberalism and Nonconformity, and ultimately did much to bring Oxford in¯uences to bear on the Protestant Free Churches.164 It also brought to Oxford scholars and teachers of theology who were not Anglicans. The Unitarian Manchester College was viewed with particular alarm by orthodox Anglicans. William Sanday was warned that his presence at the of®cial opening of `an institution which professedly allows such fundamental Christian truths as the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation to be treated as open questions' would `tend to the severance of the friendly relation subsisting between the University and the Church'.165 But within the Theology faculty there was no hesitation in welcoming such distinguished scholars as A. M. Fairbairn and Joseph Estlin CarpenterÐboth were given the degree of D. Litt. (since the DD was reserved to Anglicans). Other Nonconformist divines whose lectures were placed on the Theology lecture list were George Buchanan Gray, W. B. Selbie, and J. V. Bartlet.166 The denominalization of Anglicanism itself was shown in the rival appeals of the Tractarian Pusey House and Wycliffe Hall, which became under F. J. Chavasse an in¯uential centre for evangelicalism. Even within High and Low Church traditions there were major differences. Gore, for example, became an increasingly controversial ®gure, criticized by fellow liberal catholics both for his socialist leanings and, when he became Bishop of Oxford, for his intolerance towards those who applied critical scholarship to the New Testament. Oxford remained important in the increasingly pluralistic world of British Christianity. Even though, as W. R. Ward has put it, the University had no claim, after the abolition of the tests, to be a `theological oracle', it was by no means isolated from currents of religious opinion.167 Rather, it was in this period feeling its way towards a new kind of relationship with the Churches, based on a multiplicity of in¯uences rather than authority. The same could be said of secular aspects of the Great World with which Oxford had never 163

Wright Henderson, Glasgow & Balliol, 98±9. See E. Kaye, Mans®eld College: Its Origin, History and Signi®cance (1996). 165 Ince to Sanday, 13 Oct. 1893, Sanday MSS, Bodl. Eng. Misc. d. 124 (1), fo 15. However, Sanday attended the opening, and dedication of the chapel, 18±19 Oct. 1893: Proceedings and Addresses on the Occasion of the Opening (1894), 148. 166 E. Kaye, C. J. Cadoux. Theologian, Scholar and Paci®st (Edinburgh, 1988), 33. 167 Ward, Victorian Oxford, 315. 164

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had clearly de®ned institutional links. Three in particular are worth closer consideration: education, the Empire, and social welfare. The ancient Universities had done much in the mid-Victorian era to in¯uence the development of English secondary education, both through the examinations they initiated with a view to broadening and modernizing the curriculum (the separate Oxford and Cambridge Local examinations and those of the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board) and through the work of the Clarendon and Taunton Commissions. There was something of a retreat from this pioneering role in later years, when the Universities were called on to respond in their turn to change within the schools: the spread of `modern sides' in public schools and of grammar schools that taught Latin but not Greek. Even the public schools now complained about their insistence on knowledge of the rudiments of Greek and the `scandalous scramble' of college scholarship examinations as competition mounted for a limited number of classically trained schoolboys.168 Nor was there any response to calls for rationalization of secondary-school examinations on continental lines by the introduction of a combined school-leaving and university entrance examination like the baccalaureÂat or Abiturienten.169 At Oxford there was particular reason to doubt whether the University had the will to keep abreast of new educational developments. In the 1870s the lead in Extension, women's education, and teacher training had passed to Cambridge. In the 1880s Cambridge forged ahead in medical and science education. The Technical Instruction Acts (1889 and 1891), ®nanced by Goschen's `whisky money', stimulated demand for teaching of the kind Oxford was least well-equipped to provide. These were years when Oxford lost the initiative but groups of reformers, resident and non-resident, struggled to recover it.170 The most conspicuous success was the take-off of Oxford's Extension movement after Michael Sadler became its secretary in 1885. Although this revival was initiated by academic liberals of Jowett's circle, Extension had practical advantages that were recognized in other quarters. Even Bellamy grudgingly admitted that `it provided work and pay for young Oxford men who were not good enough to get Fellowships'.171 It offered, especially through the summer meetings in Oxford, a means of advertising the university's wares and concern for national education: `this is the sandwich-man side of the university,' as T. B. Strong, Dean of Christ Church, once put it.172 In the 168

Report of the Headmasters' Conference, Dec. 1912, 17, 20; Bodl. Per. 2624 d 18. On Jowett's support for this move see Abbott and Campbell, ii. 424±5, n. 4. 170 P. Gordon and J. White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The In¯uence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (1979), chs 6±8. 171 Journal of Education, Sept. 1890, 463. 172 Webb diary, 19 May 1905, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1151, fo. 130. 169

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early twentieth century Oxford's role in the tutorial class movement encouraged claims on its behalf to leadership in working-class adult education. These were not universally conceded. `More than half our students are from the working classes,' wrote a Leeds correspondent, protesting against the notion that `this tardy step by Oxford is absolutely the opening of the academic gates to workers for the ®rst time.'173 Moves to provide for teacher training also came rather late. The ®rst effective initiatives came from Samuel Barnett, who used the connections of Toynbee Hall with Oxford and Cambridge to lobby for the training of elementary schoolteachers within universities.174 Oxford's own Day Training College for elementary schoolmasters opened in 1892 and a Diploma in Education for secondary teachers, open to women as well as men, was introduced in 1897. Neither attracted many students, nor the reputation enjoyed by the Cambridge department.175 These developments did, however, show some renewal of interest in questions of national education. In 1894 the Oxford women's societies combined with the men's colleges to host the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers. One observer commented, `It is very striking, to a resident in Oxford, to see the wider views and sympathies that prevail on educational matters in quarters where ten years ago they might have been looked for in vain.'176 Among non-resident graduates, the chief initiator of moves to draw the University into educational policy-making was A. H. D. Acland, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education and an in¯uential member of the Liberal cabinets of 1892±5.177 With his encouragement Michael Sadler made Oxford the forum for a national conference on the state of secondary schooling. Meeting in October 1893 in the Examination Schools, this was the ®rst conference of teachers to be of®cially hosted by the University. Participants included headmasters and headmistresses from a wide range of schools, representatives of local authorities, universities, the Church, and other interested parties. It resulted for once in a corporate initiative, the petition from Convocation for a public enquiry that led to the appointment of the Bryce Commission in 1894.178 Hubert Llewellyn Smith, A. M. Fairbairn, and Sadler became members of the Commission, which paved the way for the expansion of State secondary education under the 1902 Education Act.179 In 1895 Sadler was made Director of a new Of®ce of Special 173

Macgregor to Mansbridge, n.d., TCC Early Papers, OUA. H. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Friends and Work (2 vols, 1918), i. 293±4, 344±52; Bodl. G. A. Oxon. b. 138, fo 53. 175 For a sympathetic account of the Oxford department see `The Training of Secondary Schoolteachers at Oxford', Educational Review, 28 (1904), 518±22; see also pp. 555±9 above. 176 Journal of Education, 1 Nov. 1893, 606. 177 Gordon and White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers, 138±45. 178 G. Sutherland and others, Education. Government and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Commentaries on British Parliamentary Papers (Truro, 1977), 141. 179 `Cambridge feels a little ``left out'',' was Oscar Browning's comment on the membership of the Bryce Commission; Browning to Bryce, 5 Mar. 1894, Bodl. MS Bryce 161, fo 11. 174

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Enquiries and Reports; his assistant in this `think tank' was R. L. Morant, another Oxford graduate who went on to a powerful term as Permanent Secretary to the Board of Education (1903±11). Acland's own role as chairman (1900±16) of another advisory body, the Board of Education's Consultative Committee, strengthened links between Whitehall and the universities. Further channels for in¯uence were opened up by the extension of the role of the State in higher education. Oxford did not share in the Treasury grant to universities and university colleges (inaugurated on a small scale in 1889 but amounting, in one estimate, to £250,000 by 1914) beyond a small subsidy to its engineering department.180 It did receive ad hoc payments from other of®cial sourcesÐthe India Of®ce, for instance, subsidized the teaching of Indian languages and forestry probationers and a grant from the Development Fund was obtained in 1913 to set up an Institute of Agricultural Economics. But the possibility of more substantial state funding, though discussed in the early twentieth century, was regarded warily, as likely to lead to State control. Meanwhile the Treasury grant offered a lever by which pressure could be brought on the new civic universities to adopt a `balanced' curriculum rather than concentrate, as some of their founders and benefactors had wanted, on science and technology. Oxford and Cambridge were always well represented on the committee that reported on grant-receiving places of higher education and they played some partÐthough in alliance with the University of LondonÐin promoting the idea of the university as a studium generale and preventing the development of exclusively technological universities comparable to the Technische Hochschulen.181 Nevertheless Oxford also (rather to Goschen's annoyance) joined Cambridge in backing the campaign at the turn of the century organized by Norman Lockyer, the editor of Nature, for greatly increased state funding for university science.182 At a more general level, we can see in the engagement of Oxford graduates, and occasionally of the University as a corporate body, in educational issues with a national bearing, forces at work that counteracted the parochial tendencies of academic life. Dons were drawn into debates on national education by networking among Oxford graduates and professional colleagues and by the University's need to defend its own values. More positively, there were still enthusiasts who believed that those values had an important contribution to make to the wider world of national education. The distinctive contribution of Oxford Idealism to this belief, and to the formation of national education policy, remains a matter for debate. Idealism, with its commitment to the value of self-development, was (as Lawrence Goldman has suggested)183 a philosophy that did not necessarily originate but clearly 180 181 182 183

P. Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain 1850±1920 (1987), 34±5. M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, 1850±1970 (1972), 19. Goschen to Matheson, 28 June, 2 and 16 July 1904, Bodl. MS Goschen. L. Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (1995), 54±60.

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reinforced the concerns of University men and women with the social functions of education. Speci®cally, it helped to condition them to resist both narrowly utilitarian educational policies and also the urge to distance high culture from `the masses' that characterized some modernist intellectuals in the early twentieth century.184 But Oxford-educated policy-makers in this generation were exposed to other in¯uences besides IdealismÐMorant, for example, had Fabian associations. In later generations the ideas of late Victorian Oxford were sometimes adapted in unexpected ways. Hastings Rashdall's study of the medieval university inspired his pupil Henry Morris, founder of the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges (the precursors of the comprehensive `community college'), and also the inter-war student radicals recalled by Brian Simon.185 Edwardian debates on national education were, on the whole, inconclusiveÐstill hamstrung by a Victorian legacy of religious controversy and class-segregated schooling which subverted optimistic contemporary beliefs in the capacity of English institutions to evolve spontaneously. It is easier to register the ways in which Oxford was implicated in these debates than to tease out its in¯uence on them. Imperialism and social welfare, dominant political themes of the pre-war decades, were on the other hand issues on which Oxford graduates did much to form opinion and they had a reciprocal in¯uence on the University itself. On educational issues academic liberals usually made the running, but these were causes that had a bipartisan appeal. Keble's connection with the mission ®eld and Balliol's with the Indian civil service were paralleled by the two London settlements with which they were respectively associated. `Come and be the squires of East London,' urged Scott Holland, recruiting on behalf of the Anglican Oxford House.186 Toynbee Hall, undenominational and with strong trade-union links, cultivated a more democratic ethos: Barnett insisted that its residents came from the universities to learn as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give.187 The Volunteer movement and its successor, Haldane's Of®cers' Training Corps, appealed similarly to a wide spectrum of opinion among senior as well as junior members. They included the philosopher and staunch Home Ruler, J. Cook Wilson, Keble's chaplain and a future bishop, Nugent Hicks, and Lewis Farnell, a militant advocate of research, who in his spare time commanded a troop of mounted infantry. `Nearly a third of the UniversityÐ1,190 of all ranksÐare soldiers,' reported R. R. Marett in 1910; and he, an old Liberal friend of Leonard 184 J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880±1939 (1992). 185 H. Ree, Educator Extraordinary: The Life and Achievements of Henry Morris, 1889±1961 (1973), 9, 16; B. Simon, The State and Educational Change: Essays in the History of Education and Pedagogy (1992), 85±6. 186 M. Ashworth, The Oxford House in Bethnal Green: 100 Years of Work in the Community (1984). Its ®rst head, Father James Adderley, was, however, a keen socialist. 187 A. Briggs and A. Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (1984), 5.

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Hobhouse, was among those who approved the suggestion (®rst made at Cambridge) that service in the OTC should be made compulsory for undergraduates.188 A vein of liberal imperialism, in¯uenced as always by idealism, has been traced from the circle of Arnold Toynbee, recalled with `veneration' by his Balliol friend Alfred Milner, through Milner's kindergarten and the Round Table movement to Lionel Curtis, `prophet and evangelist of the new Commonwealth'.189 Again, if we think of William Beveridge, Clement Attlee, or the pioneer of social feminism, Eleanor Rathbone, as typical Oxford products of their generation, so was the Wadham graduate who became in 1911 chairman of the Unionist Social Reform Committee, F. E. Smith. Rhodes's bequest, singling out his old university for a special role in drawing together the Anglo-Saxon world, suggested the idea of `an Imperial Oxford . . . a conception which may well ®re the mind and elevate the sentiment of every British citizen from Gibraltar to Vancouver'.190 Sentiment apart, what were the effects on Oxford of its enhanced imperial role? To some extent it acted as a spur to change. The coming of the Rhodes scholars prompted the university to consider its provision for graduate students and to publish its ®rst graduate prospectus, an annual `Programme of Special Studies' with an `account of opportunities for Special Work or Research' that ran to ®fty pages of detail exclusive of lecture lists.191 As in the past, new courses and posts were established to meet the needs of the moment. The Forestry diploma trained men for service in India. Alfred Beit endowed a chair and lecturership in colonial history. Initiatives in developing such `relevant' ®elds of study did not always come from outside the University. That astute academic entrepreneur Marett, Reader in Anthropology, ®rst persuaded Asquith of the importance of his subject in the training of colonial civil servants and then extracted a benefaction from the Drapers' Company on the grounds that many of his students were `of®cers of the public service whose duties bring them into contact with peoples of lower culture in various parts of the British Empire'.192 But when statesmen of Empire did turn their eyes on Oxford, they did not necessarily seek to modernize it. As Curzon was reminded by one defender of the traditional curriculum, `Rhodes thought the ®rst four books of Aristotle's Ethics (Group A) the most valuable of all his intellectual studies.'193 Lord Rosebery, though a critic 188

Athenaeum, 17 Dec. 1910, 765. A. Kadish, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852±1883 (Durham, NC, 1986), 24; D. Lavin, `Lionel Curtis and the Idea of Commonwealth', in F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (eds), Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays presented to Sir Edgar Williams (1982), 97. 190 `The Needs of Oxford', Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, clxxiii (1903), 421. 191 Bodl. Per. 2626 e. 243. 192 Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford, 294; Athenaeum, 27 June 1914, 891. 193 Magrath to Curzon (copy), 19 Nov. 1907, MSS Handlists, 2 V. 97, Queen's College. 189

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of compulsory Greek, did not want to see Oxford and Cambridge developed `on modern lines', claiming that they would never be able to compete with the newer universities in `practical and technical branches of knowledge'.194 He saw the universities as above all `machines for producing men, the best kind of machines for producing the best kind of men who may help to preserve our Empire'.195 From this standpoint the intellectual content of Oxford's courses was less important than the role of the college system in forming `character'Ðwhich was, according to Curzon (invoking his experience as Viceroy of India), `more precious than rubies and more potent than regiments of armed men' in the business of running an empire.196 Even Haldane, inspecting the Oxford OTC, praised the `national spirit' in the ancient Universities and the advantages they offered for the education of of®cersÐ`the training of the cricket and football ®elds and the river, and the power of commanding men gained from the discipline of British college life'.197 As John Darwin has shown, in the inter-war years Oxford's contributions to colonial studies did advance its reputation as a `world university'.198 But in the short run the concept of an `Imperial Oxford' did as much to entrench support for the educational value of classical studies and college camaraderieÐeven the cult of the `young barbarian'Ðas to encourage reform.199 The rise of interest in social welfare and its corollary, the forging of links between Oxford and the labour movement, had more radical implications. These were to a large extent new developments.200 Dicey remembered T. H. Green as practically alone among his undergraduate friends in the 1860s in his concern for the welfare of the labouring classes.201 The young scientist Baldwin Spencer found Oxford in the early eighties, by contrast, preoccupied with `the social question'.202 Another undergraduate of that time, A. S. Peake, reassured anxious parents about his involvement with `Oxford socialism': `An Oxford socialist is one who takes a deep interest in the welfare of the people . . . I think decidedly that if Christ had lived at this day he would have been an Oxford socialist . . . a Christian socialist is one who sees that the 194

For `Lord Rosebery on the future of Oxford and Cambridge', see p. 472 above. Congress of the Universities of the Empire, 6. 196 Ibid. 75. 197 Oxford Times, 12 June 1909, 9. 198 The Twentieth Century, 616±20. 199 Madden and Fieldhouse, Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth, 90. 200 B. H. Harrison, `Oxford and the Labour Movement', Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991). Goldman reminds us that a new interest in contacts with the working classes was common among intellectuals throughout the developed world at this time: Dons and Workers, 54±60; the involvement of dons in social questions in the city of Oxford is discussed in Pt 1, Ch. 13, esp. 466±8. 201 R. A. Cosgrove, The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist (1989), 18. 202 Spencer to H. Goulty, 25 Nov. 1883, Baldwin Spencer MSS, Pitt Rivers Museum. 195

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masses must one day have their place, and tries by all the means in his power to make them a God-fearing, religious element in society.'203 There was much overlap in membership between Christian socialist societiesÐthe Oxford branch of Stewart Headlam's Guild of St Matthew, formed in 1884, and after 1889 the CSUÐand others that belong more distinctively in the genealogy of `Red Oxford', traced by inter-war members of the Labour Club, such as the branch of the Socialist League set up by William Morris's friend Charles Faulkner (a mathematician and fellow of University College), or the branch of the Fabian Society formed in 1895 with Sidney Ball as chairman.204 The language of `Oxford socialism', as Sandra Den Otter has noted, had much in common with the message of social regeneration conveyed by the `lay sermons' of Green and Edward Caird.205 Translating it into practice depended, however, on a small group of politically committed dons who built bridges between a largely conservative academic community in a `rather misty out-of-the way place' and the concerns of London socialists and local trade unionists.206 From the early years of the Fabian Society Ball was its link with Oxford, inviting speakers to the Social Science Club in the 1880s.207 Hobhouse, Llewelyn Smith, Caird, Arthur Sidgwick, and Alexander Carlyle worked to encourage trades unionism in Oxfordshire.208 Coexisting with these activities was a less politicized concern with social problems. J. H. F. Peile's Bampton Lectures of 1907 on `The Reproach of the Gospel: an Inquiry into the Apparent Failure of Christianity' drew packed houses. The CSU remained a speci®cally Christian society which included members who were Unionist in national politics. Warden Spooner agreed to join after reading a paper on `The Principles and Practice of the Poor Law', recording in his diary, `The Union has socialistic leanings but received my paper tolerantly and kindly.'209 It also attracted members whose interest in social questions was academic as much as political and for whom the CSU's periodical the Economic Review was a rival to Alfred Marshall's Economic Journal.210 In the same way the settlements attracted individuals like the young Beveridge, in search of an opportunity to make a name as a social scientist. The diverse origins of Oxford's interests in social questions guaranteed that they would never form the basis of a `movement'. Yet there were many 203

L. S. Peake, A. S. Peake. A Memoir (1930), 55±7. M. P. Ashley and C. T. Saunders, Red Oxford: A History of the Growth of Socialism in the University of Oxford (1933). An active women's branch of the Fabian Society was formed by Somervillians in 1897: OU Fabian Society Minute Book, MS Top. Oxon., d 465. 205 British Idealism, 118±19. 206 J. A. Hobson and M. Ginsberg, L. T. Hobhouse: His Life and Work (1931), 26. 207 Ball, Sidney Ball, 237. 208 P. R. L. Horn, `The Farm Workers, the Dockers and Oxford University', Oxoniensia, 32 (1967), 60±70. 209 Spooner diary, vol II, 23 Mar. 1892, NCA. 210 Kadish, The Oxford Economists, 184±92. 204

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local associations that suggested the possibility of a special relationship between Oxford and the world of Labour. The work of Thomas Hughes and E. V. Neale for the co-operative movement was commemorated by the Hughes and Neale Scholarships for co-operators at Oriel (1884 and 1890); Acland and Toynbee made efforts in the early 1880s to develop these links with the movement. Ruskin's name, commemorated in the college for working men in Walton Street, was highly regarded in the Labour movementÐhis writings were much reprinted and reached a wide audience after his death.211 The dons who supported trades unionism in the 1880s recalled the activities of the Wadham positivists of Frederic Harrison's generation, and foreshadowed a connection with organized labour that was to bear fruit in the twentieth-century `Oxford school' of industrial relations.212 As a launching pad for graduates who wanted to make their mark on the labour movement, Oxford had much to offer. By the eve of the First World War one young Magdalen don, G. D. H. Cole, drawing his socialism chie¯y from William Morris, had revolted against the bureaucratic, centralizing tendencies of London Fabianism, carrying a motion in the Oxford branch in 1913 in favour of syndicalism.213 Alfred Zimmern, fellow of New College and tutor to early Ruskin students, explored in his The Greek Commonwealth (1911) what democracy could learn from the ancient world. R. H. Tawney, moving to socialism from a Christian background and through his association with Toynbee Hall, had a hand in shaping the education programme adopted by the Labour party in 1914. The WEA, with its monthly magazine the Highway whose circulation reached 10,000 by 1912, was moreover an organization that in Mansbridge's day attached particular importance to its links with Oxford.214 It was from these quarters that the strongest pressures for change within the University would come in the years before 1914. `The affection with which its sons regard [Oxford] . . . is sometimes mingled with exasperation. The magician seems to them unconscious of its power, so rich in secrets of sane and joyous life, yet so slow to reveal them to those who need them most.'215 Tawney's evocation of the mood of the `conspirators' who set out in the Edwardian period to make University reform once more a national issue illustrates a phenomenon more or less unique to Oxford. Remote as academic politics often were from the Great World, there were still Oxford men who wanted their University to lead it. 211 R. Barker, Education and Politics, 1900±1951: A Study of the Labour Party (1972), 5±7; L. Goldman, `Ruskin, Oxford, and the British Labour Movement 1880±1914', in D. Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), 57±86. 212 Harrison, `Oxford and the Labour movement', 268±70. 213 Ibid. 243; G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (1913). 214 WEA General Minute Book, 12 June 1912, WEA archive, Temple House, Bethnal Green, London. A. Mansbridge, University Tutorial Classes (1913) and The Older Universities of England (1923). 215 Barnett, Canon Barnett, ii. 110.

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26 The Oxford University Press peter sutcliffe Oxford shared with Cambridge and the King's Printer the exclusive privilege of printing the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. For most of the eighteenth century Oxford leased its privilege to master printers: the most successful of these was Thomas Baskett, a tycoon among Bible printers. Towards the end of the century, however, the market for Bibles was uncertain, partly because of the collapse of the American trade during the War of Independence.1 A chronic anxiety about the privilege prevailed, a feeling that it could not be upheld inde®nitely. In Oxford the lease fell vacant in 1780 and nobody was prepared to pay the modest sum of £815 at which the privilege was valued. The Delegates of the Press were told by Convocation that they must decide whether to give up the exercise of the privilege or manage the Bible business themselves. Neither alternative seemed feasible, but the honour of the University was at stake (the privilege derived from Charles I's Great Charter of 1636). A compromise was reached in the form of a joint stock company: of fortyeight shares the University as owner partner would hold half. The rest were allocated to master printers or others experienced in the book trade. They would take upon themselves `the care and trouble of managing the trade for our mutual advantage', the Delegates recorded with satisfaction.2 So began the Partnership, a form of coexistence which worked effectively and lasted nearly a hundred years. The privilege survived. The ®rst two partners were the local capitalist, William Jackson, and Archibald Hamilton, a wealthy publisher in London who was to be responsible for the sale and distribution of Oxford Bibles. Each held twelve shares. The Delegates had no money put by (their assets were estimated at £8. 14s 5d at the end of 1781) so that it was not easy for them to raise the £6,000 that Convocation had committed the Delegates to paying. Much of it had to be borrowed from William Jackson. 1

H. Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (1975), i. 355. Report of the Delegates appointed by Convocation to take into consideration the future management of that moiety of the Clarendon Printing House now in lease to Messrs. Wright and Gill, with the Privilege of printing Bibles, Common Prayers, etc, 12 Feb. 1780, Partnership Account Book, 1780±1855, UPA. 2

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At ®rst the Delegates appear to have continued their traditional policy of leaving everything to the managers; but in 1796 they appointed a Bible Committee to ensure a closer liaison with the managing partners.3 It was the ®rst standing committee of the Delegacy and consisted of William Cleaver, Bishop of Chester; John Randolph; George Williams; and John Parsons, Master of Balliol. By then the partners were Joshua Cook, William Dawson, and Thomas Bensley, a printer of distinction. The Bible Press acquired a new identity; upon it the prosperity of the nineteenth century depended. But to this prosperity the Learned (or Classical) Press, the other half of the University Press, contributed nothing. It existed in a state of impoverished neglect. Before 1804 there was an average of four publications a year. Later there was some improvementÐan unaccountable peak was reached in 1820 with twenty-one titles.4 The stock of the Learned Press, however, took up a lot of space. It was stored in ¯at sheets which inexorably ®lled all available space as the years went by and books were not sold. Sales indeed showed little relationship to copies printed. The old Clarendon Building not only became too small but, after a hundred years of hard wear and tear from the Bible printers, it was said to be `in a very ruinous condition'. By the 1820s an entirely new printing house was needed. Advised by the Bible Committee the Delegates agreed to put the proposal to Convocation, with the assurance that the whole expense should be defrayed out of the funds of the Press.5 Land was bought in Jericho, off Walton Street, north of Worcester College. The partners at the time were Joseph Parker and Samuel Collingwood: they chose an architect (Daniel Robertson, noted for his insobriety), and advised him of the special requirements of a printing house. It was to be built on a quadrangular plan, the South Wing for the Bible Press, which was built ®rst, and the North Wing for the Learned Press. The building was completed by 1830. The Press contributed £1,000 towards repair of the Clarendon Building, and later paid £2,000 for its conversion into University of®ces. The Parker family had much to do with the development of the Press. The connection went back to the 1780s when Joseph Parker had been warehouseman and bookseller to the University. He eventually became a partner in 1810,6 and when he died in 1850 he held eight and a half shares, valued at £17,457.7 Joseph was succeeded as warehouseman by his nephew, John Henry Parker. As a successful publisher and bookseller himself he might have expected to be admitted to the Bible partnership. But he was not. There 3 Orders of the Delegates of the Press, iii. 20, 10 June 1796; Clarendon Bible Press Committee Minute Book 1796±1910, UPA. 4 See the list of publications in Calendar 1821, 67±76. 5 Orders of the Delegates of the Press, iv. 172, 29 Apr. 1825, UPA. 6 Orders of the Delegates of the Press, iii. 285, 26 Oct. 1810, UPA. 7 Partnership Account Book, 1780±1855, UPA.

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was talk of `an invasion of the privilege', after he had issued what was no more than a thinly disguised Authorized Version, and frictions occurred. The interests of the Press and those of Parker were no longer compatible, for a more competitive spirit was abroad. The Delegates resolved in future to be their own warehouseman, and a warehouse committee was appointed in 1862.8 Samuel Collingwood retired in 1838 after forty-six years with the Press, and was succeeded by Thomas Combe, the Press having advertised for a `regularly bred printer'. He remained at the Press until his death in 1872. The Bible Press made him rich, as it did others. He became a patron of the arts, built the high church of St Barnabas, and attended to the spiritual needs of the population of Jericho.9 Publications of the Learned Press had often involved great expense, and the processes of production had been slow. It was said that Robert Payne Smith's Syriac Lexicon (1879±1901) was thirty-three years in the press and the death of thirty-one compositors. `A ponderous monument of operose ignorance and vain expense' was how the Edinburgh Review described the Clarendon Press edition of Strabo (1807), in an attack on the backwardness of Oxford scholarship generally.10 The two folio volumes of the Strabo had taken twenty-three years to print. Before that some ten years had been spent collating manuscripts in Paris, Moscow, and Spain. The reviewer found little but the paper and the ink to praise. Thomas Gaisford was a Delegate from 1807 until his death in 1855. Perhaps he fell short in the more sublime reaches of higher scholarship, but his importance as a Delegate lay in his continuity. For ®fty years he kept a reasonably business-like eye on the Press, sat on many committees, corresponded with authors, made a little money from Parker for his school editions of the classics, and lost the Press considerable sums on his more learned works. He witnessed many changes. By the time he died there were actually books, and saleable books in English too, coming from the Press. Gaisford had reached, if he had not introduced, a new era, one epitomized by the mathematician Bartholomew Price, who became a Delegate in 1861 and Secretary in 1868. In 1863 Robert Scott, an active Delegate for several years, addressed a letter to John Murray III in London on behalf of the Delegates. `We want more energy in our publishing department,' he told him.11 There scarcely was a publishing department, and what the Press was looking for 8

Orders of the Delegates of the Press, v. 72, 12 Dec. 1862, UPA. Orders of Delegates of the Press, 1811±53, 257, UPA. For Combe's tractarianism and patronage of young Pre-Raphaelite painters see F. MacCarthy, William Morris (1994), 73. 10 Edinburgh Review, xiv (July 1809), 441; Pt 1, 135. 11 R. Scott to J. Murray, 17 Mar. 1863, Robert Scott's copy letter book, 1860±64, fos 200±1, UPA. 9

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was a man like Murray with experience in publishing and the selling of books. Murray was not tempted, but Alexander Macmillan, in the process of moving his publishing house from Cambridge to London, was. He was appointed `Publisher to the University of Oxford' in October 1863, and remained in the post until 1880.12 To some Delegates it was reassuring to have a professional to guide them. Macmillan on the other hand was surprised to ®nd how professional his donnish masters could sometimes be. To some he was just `the salesman'. Having decided that it was `expedient' to publish a series of `Educational Works', the Delegates had formed a School-Book Committee consisting of R. Scott, H. G. Liddell, J. Grif®ths, H. L. Mansel, Bartholomew Price, and W. W. Shirley.13 Its ®rst report appeared in February 1864. There had been no dif®culty in drawing up a plan for ®fteen volumes of the classics, but that was as far as the committee felt able to go. `A History of England to the close of the Reign of Henry VII' by Goldwin Smith had already been accepted by the Delegates, though, like its successor by York Powell, it was never written. The Committee reported that it had made inquiries in other quarters but was not yet in a position to recommend any other works. The general management of the Clarendon Press Series was to be entrusted to G. W. Kitchin, later Dean of Winchester and Durham. He acquired the title of Secretary to the Board of Delegates, the ®rst of a distinguished line. He was paid a salary of £220. No provision having been made in Walton Street for a publishing house, Kitchin worked at home. He met Macmillan at Delegates' meetings or in London and corresponded regularly. `He always has his own Publishing interests to consider,' he told J. S. Brewer, `and one is not sure of a quite fair opinion from him; though he behaves very well toward usÐScotchman, though.'14 For three years the Clarendon Press Series showed little visible sign of growth. Macmillan wondered whether the Series so con®dently launched might quietly wither away. `You must have patience,' Kitchin told him. `We deal with a large and slow going body here, as you know . . . who object in principle to quick movements.'15 Macmillan had been talking to Gladstone, who expressed an interest in the sales of Clarendon Press books. Macmillan had to admit that they were small, but blamed the Tractarian movement for the sudden interest in the works of seventeenth-century divines.16 At great expense of time and money, and much too late to cater for the original 12

C. L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (1910), 204. Orders of the Delegates of the Press, v. 80±1, 12 June 1863, UPA. 14 G. W. Kitchin to Prof. Brewer, 25 Apr. 1866, Kitchin's letter book 1865±6, fos 126±7, UPA. 15 G. W. Kitchin to A. Macmillan, 15 June 1866, Kitchin's letter book 1865±6, fos 187±9, UPA. 16 Macmillan to Gladstone, 27 July 1865, Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan, 239. 13

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fanaticism, these formidable tomes were still working their way through the system. The works of Bishop Joseph Hall (1574±1656) in ten volumes ®nally appeared, unwanted, in 1863. Macmillan was con®dent that a quite different class of book would soon begin to appear from Oxford. Plans were afoot there for making that barely existent publishing department a reality. Professor Mountague Bernard put to the Delegates a long memorandum on `The Business of the Press and the means for transacting the same'. Bartholomew Price wrote on `The Duties of the Secretary'.17 It was he who in 1867 took on this onerous role. One of the requirements of the Secretary was that he should be ready, and have the necessary stature, to `expostulate' with the partners, and even with Macmillan. He must exercise that `Vigilant Superintendence' of the whole business that the 1850 University Commission had said could never be expected from a committee of dons. He required an of®ce and a clerk. His salary was to be £500. The Delegates, in view of the changed status of the publishing department, decreed that a Finance Committee be set up, consisting of the Vice-Chancellor and four Delegates. Those nominated were the Warehouse Committee members: Price, Scott, Grif®ths, and Mountague Bernard. The Warehouse Committee became the Finance Committee, recognized as a committee of general management ever since. `My work is chie¯y ``business'' and ®nance,' Price wrote to Macmillan. In 1850 the Vice-Chancellor had reported to the Hebdomadal Board that the Bible Press had a surplus of £60,000 from past pro®ts for which it had no further use. It was duly paid over to the University. By 1865, however, pro®ts from the Bible, though still substantial, were showing signs of diminishing. More Bibles were being produced than ever before (over a million copies), but they were of the cheapest kind and two-thirds were being sold to the British and Foreign Bible Society, with little pro®t. Hence the relative bustle which began to show in the Learned Press in the 1860s. On Thomas Combe's death in 1872, the undisclosed purpose of the Delegates came to light; it was to wind up the partnership and assume full control. Price was the man to bring this about. First he was to take an active part in the management of all the businesses, assuming Combe's general responsibilities as senior partner. Combe's eight shares were acquired by the Delegates for £25,000.18 E. Bensley Gardner, who ran the bound book business in London, died in 1873. He had held ®ve shares, which were now absorbed by the Delegates. That left John H. Stacey, who spent half his time in Walton Street and half as the manager of the Paper Mill at Wolvercote, which Combe had bought in 1855 and sold at a pro®t to the Delegates ten days before he died. Stacey had one share; Pickard Hall, who was in charge 17 18

Delegates Order Book 1853±81, 5 Feb. 1868, 134±5, UPA. General Fund Balance Sheet, 1872±3, UPA.

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of the Bible Press and the printing works generally, retained four shares. To neither of them did Price show any affability. Stacey complained of his `vexatious interference'. He reminded Price of the many occasions `when I have suffered under a tyranny which could only be borne with equanimity by one devoid of all manly feeling . . . Such treatment had made my present life miserable.' Pickard Hall was 76, a partner for thirty years, immensely hard-working, taking pride in the night school he ran for Press children, proud of his brass band, of his choir, and of the games at weekends he enthusiastically watched. With Combe dead, the spiritual welfare of Jericho also fell upon his shoulders. He was the next victim. Jowett was ViceChancellor and had various ambitious notions for bringing new distinction to the typography of the Press. In January 1884 the Delegates ordered Hall's retirement. `The blow to me and my family is unspeakably painful,' he wrote to Price. The departure of Hall and the death of Stacey in the previous year brought an end to the partnership.19 Price had expostulated and the Delegates had the forty-eight shares. Horace Hart was appointed `Controller' of the University Press. The Clarendon Press Series did at last ful®l its purpose. It proliferated and the School-Book Committee found its task of selection very much easier. New universities opening in London and the provinces created a demand for English texts: Kitchin before very long was telling prospective editors that his English list was fullÐthough it never was. The big catch was Aldis Wright from Cambridge, whose editions of Shakespeare's plays became staple commodities of the Press for several generations.20 The gaps in the history list were also being ®lled; and law books now began to appear. The School-Book Committee was eventually abolished when Jowett was Vice-Chancellor: it was replaced by a Publications Committee. The Series, vastly heterogeneous, was felt after twenty years to have had its day. The only thing the books all had in common was the headline on the title-pageÐClarendon Press Series. Max MuÈller was an energetic but sometimes confused Delegate. There had always been a body of opinion that held that remunerative books offended against some basic principle and were unworthy of a great University press. Max MuÈller had that feeling. The reputation of Oxford as a centre of research would suffer from the display of sordid gain. It was a perennial debate in one form or another but Max MuÈller's contribution to it was unusual. He proposed to approach the Commission chaired by Lord Selborne, appointed in 1877 to revise University and college statutes, to request it to provide that a sum of £1,000 a year be set aside to enable the Press to publish learned but unremunerative books.21 Max MuÈller added that the 19

Orders of Delegates of the Press, 1881±92, 136, UPA. G. W. Kitchin to Aldis Wright, 3 and 11 July 1866, Kitchin's letter book 1865±6, 258±62, UPA. 21 Orders of the Delegates of the Press 1853±81, 407 (1 Nov. 1878), UPA. 20

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Press was in fact already embarked on several literary undertakings from which no commercial pro®t could be expected. His choice of examples was unfortunate. He mentioned the new translation of the Bible (the riches from which were only three years away), The Dictionary of the English Language (which in another context he could describe as a money-spinner), and his Sacred Books of the East, the forty-eight volumes of which were sponsored equally by the Press and the Government of India. Max MuÈller distinguished between books that the Press published as booksellers, and those which they published as Delegates of the University Press. The former could safely be left `in the hands of our experienced Secretary', though Max MuÈller added that even the excellent Clarendon Press Series was a commercial speculation that might safely have been left to private enterprise. The Delegates agreed that a letter should be sent, and Price rephrased Max MuÈller's draft. The unremunerative books the Delegates hoped to publish `would add lustre to the University and justify, in the eyes of all men, the existence of a great Academical Press'.22 Price must have felt certain that nothing would come of the letter. It was widely known that the Press was not impoverished. `The ®rst element in a concern like ours,' he had written to Macmillan many years before, `must be commercial success.' Even so, the opening of the London Branch of the University Press eventually achieved the dichotomy that Max MuÈller and others had sought. On 1 March 1879 the Delegates embarked upon a project that few would live to see completed. The new dictionary being compiled by the Philological Society had been offered to Price by Henry Sweet in 1877. Sweet was dif®cult to deal with, and F. J. Furnivall (the dictionary's part-time editor since 1861) even more so. The ®rst approach had been to Macmillan, whose original interest was sapped by Furnivall's explosive temper. The Cambridge University Press had a similar experience; Oxford made its offer to publish just a week after the Syndics had decided to have nothing further to do with the dictionary. Alexander Macmillan's son, George, wrote at that time, `I do not think we had any reason to regret that the enterprise passed out of our hands into those of the Clarendon Press.' M. H. Black, however, with more prolonged hindsight wrote, `This was possibly the largest wrong decision in publishing history.' That the Delegates decided, and decided moreover with a sense of heroic adventure, was largely due to Max MuÈller's reports to the Delegates. `In an undertaking of such magnitude,' he wrote, `in which one might almost say the national honour of England is engaged, no effort should be spared to make the work as perfect as possible.'23 In conclusion 22

Orders of the Delegates of the Press, 1853±81, 412±15 (29 Nov. 1878), UPA. Observations by Prof. Max MuÈller on the lists of readers and books read for the proposed English Dictionary, Orders of the Delegates of the Press, 1853±81, 395 (10 May 1878), UPA. See also K. M. E. Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: J. A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1978). 23

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he felt able to assure the Delegates that from a commercial point of view they had nothing to fear. For many years the commercial point of view, exacerbated by the perfectionism of lexicographers, caused the Delegates real anguish. Initially the drain on resources could be overlooked, for not far away on the horizon was the Revised Version of the New Testament. Its publication on 17 May 1881 was acclaimed as the greatest publishing event in history.24 It was a triumph for the Bible Warehouse Manager, Henry Frowde, who was to be an increasingly important ®gure in the development of the Press. Jowett found time to delve inquisitively into many aspects of the Press. He showed a lively interest in the Dictionary, persuading the Editor, James Murray, to leave his home in Mill Hill, and his occupation as a schoolteacher, and to settle permanently in Oxford. He asked for a list to be put before the Delegates of all unpro®table books published between 1861 and 1880. Fiftyone titles fell into this category, and considering how few books were published annually before the advent of the Clarendon Press Series, this was a disconcerting tally. The losses incurred were estimated at £26,304 out of production charges of £31,657.25 Like Price, Jowett was ®rmly of the opinion that to make money rather than to advance learning was the primary function of the University Press. In 1886 he appointed a subcommittee to `investigate the alleged deterioration in the quality of printing at the University Press'.26 This could not be denied, and as a result Horace Hart visited Germany, returning with thirty new fountsÐonly eighteen of which were ever used. One of Jowett's favourite projects was a series of the principal Greek classics, based on the best German texts, but nothing came of this in the end. His worst offence in the eyes of the Delegates occurred halfway through his term as Vice-Chancellor. Bartholomew Price had decided to retire as Secretary. By 1884 it seemed that there was scarcely a board or committee upon which he was not active. His successor would have to be selected with scrupulous care, for the Press was now a business (or several businesses) of rare complexity. Jowett had his own candidate. He thought the time had come to appoint a Secretary with experience of commercial publishing in London; and he knew a young man called Philip Lyttelton Gell, aged 33, a Balliol man with a second in history, currently employed by the publishing house of Cassell and Galpin. Jowett thought his proteÂge would do very well. Gell was a close friend of Alfred Milner, and the two young men held Jowett in the highest esteem. Arnold Toynbee had been their inspiration; after Toynbee's death Gell became the ®rst chairman of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. 24 25 26

See the report in The Times, 21 May 1881, 10c. Orders of the Delegates of the Press, 1881±92, 87, UPA. Orders of the Delegates of the Press, 1881±92, 231, UPA.

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It would not have been easy to persuade the Delegates that this outsider without a ®rst in Greats was a suitable candidate, but Jowett saw his opportunity. Price had left for his holiday in July, imploring Ingram Bywater to be present at any Delegates' meetings that might be called, and if necessary defer decisions until next term. But at the extraordinary meeting called by Jowett for 31 July, Bywater was not there.27 He was in Harrogate, attending the funeral of his old friend Mark Pattison. In fact only ®ve Delegates, apart from Jowett, were still in Oxford to offer Gell the job. Bartholomew Price was appointed Chairman of Finance Committee, a formidable overseer. Not for many years would a Secretary be appointed who had no previous experience either as a Delegate or as a senior of®cer of the Press. And future appointments would not be made in the middle of the Long Vacation. There followed fourteen more or less turbulent years. Gell's health became precarious, a result of stress and overwork, as he readily pointed out. His assistant, C. E. Doble, who had been appointed to help Price out in 1879, also complained of ill-health though he heroically carried on. He became Assistant Secretary. A graduate of Worcester College, he was appointed to `exercise a general superintendence over the printing of all Delegates' books', and to correspond with authors.28 He remained at the Press uncomplainingly for thirty years and performed every conceivable editorial function. Gell set great store on business ef®ciency and it sometimes seemed that the Delegates failed to appreciate the managerial skills of their Secretary. `What makes our chariot go so heavily,' he wrote towards the end of his career in Oxford, `is the fact that it is always carrying the dead weights of scores and scores of matters which no-one will nerve themselves to ®nish.' But he could assure the Delegates on one point: the Press was basically sound, and could if necessary be conducted within `Commercial limits'. The Delegates would only have to curb their liberality in the production of unremunerative books to secure the desired result. The ¯aw in such an assurance was the Dictionary, recipient of the Delegates' most reluctant liberality. It was hoped that the appointment of a second editor would accelerate production. Henry Bradley, a redundant cutler's clerk from Shef®eld, with a knowledge of almost all European Languages, and author of several classic entries in the OED, joined the Dictionary staff in 1888. At the time of Gell's appointment there had been 400 titles listed in the Delegates' catalogue; seven years later, in 1891, there were 800, and 100 titles were listed as `New Works in Progress'. In the period 1885±91 the Press 27 Resolution to offer the Secretaryship to Philip Lyttelton Gell, 31 July 1884, Orders of Delegates of the Press, 1881±92, 163±4, UPA. The delegates present were Jowett, John Grif®ths, Max MuÈller, Edwin Palmer, William Markby, and Alfred Robinson. 28 Orders of Delegates of the Press, 1853±81, 410, 503, UPA.

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contributed £55,000 to the University Chest. Writing to one of the Delegates, Henry Gerrans, in 1896, Gell noted that the amount of the Press's contribution was now about £120,000, adding that without it `in these times of agricultural depression and increasing Academical demands, the University could have been in great straits.' The Delegates renewed his contract for another ten years (until 1901), and raised his salary to £1,800. But all was not well. Gell's criticisms, which he con®ded to one or two apparently sympathetic DelegatesÐGerrans, and more often Sir William MarkbyÐwere acerbic and even mutinous. His attitude was bound to be re¯ected in his manner, and a belief that he was regarded as no more than the Delegates' lackey had for long gnawed at his pride. His interest in social and political issues was not shared by those in¯uential Delegates who in Gell's time found their vocations in the Press. York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern History, was one of those: everything to do with the Press fascinated him. His biographer, Oliver Elton, wrote: `The Press was the chief . . . means he found for following his profession in life.' His failure to write more was attributed by The Times obituarist in 1904 to the fact that his time was spent in helping others or in giving counsel to the Clarendon Press.29 Bywater too was wedded to the institution.30 As H. W. Garrod said, `there are a great many books in the world which would never have come there but for Bywater.' Max MuÈller had a proprietorial attitude towards the Press; and Jowett (greatly admired by Gell) was more meddlesome than anybody else during his years as chairman of the Delegates. Gell welcomed the interest shown yet always feared that in the hands of individual Delegates all plans would go awry. Even Price was blamed for leaving matters to Delegates instead of handing them over to the administrators. In 1895 a new Delegate was appointed, Charles Cannan. To welcome him Gell wrote a letter that was singularly ill-judged. `You will soon perceive that we have strong Conservative forces to deal with,' he wrote, and at the moment I am weary of the long struggle over questions that have been debated again and againÐand always left unsettled . . . StillÐthere is the vast business of which some of the Board to this day cannot form a conception, and what its future may be will depend upon the sagacity and resolution of OUR generationÐnot upon traditions drawn from a different era.31

Cannan was a conservative; in his fastidious way he probably preferred not to share generations with Gell, who was ten years older than himself, and much less clever. The size and complexity of the Press he could fully 29

O. Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life (2 vols 1906), i. 216; The Times, 10 May 1904, 11. W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater: The Memoir of an Oxford Scholar 1840±1914 (1917), 90. Quoted in P. Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978), 99. The ®nancial help given to the University by the Press, 1836±1914, is summarized in Pt 1, 390±1. 30 31

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appreciate, and he had in mind a new era in which it would grow larger and ever more complex. Cannan was classical tutor and Dean of Trinity, but as a Delegate he harboured great ambitions. He relished the company of Bywater, which in itself distanced him from Gell, and his ®rst interest would be in the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, a series of classical texts which Bywater was trying to launch, as others had before. By 1911, when Bywater's edition of Aristotle's Poetics came out, there were seventy volumes in printÐa remarkable achievement. In October 1897 the Vice-Chancellor, John Magrath, gave a dinner in honour of James Murray, to celebrate the completion of the third volume of the Dictionary. A third editor had been appointed, W. A. Craigie from St Andrews University, son of a jobbing gardener. He was to stay with the Dictionary to the ®nish. At the end of the previous year, 1896, grave doubts had been expressed about the possibility of continuing with the work. The pace was excruciatingly slow, production costs and overheads were sapping the very foundations of the Press. But at the Vice-Chancellor's dinner Sir William Markby rose to his feet and said: `We have never hesitated in the performance of what we consider to be a great duty to the University and to the nation; and we have never felt any doubts as to the ultimate completion of the work under the able editorship of Dr. Murray.' Gell was seriously ill in the winter of 1897±8, and while he convalesced in the South of France the Delegates resolved that it was not desirable that he should return to the of®ce. Bartholomew Price, now almost 80, was acting Secretary, and Cannan and Gerrans were made pro-Secretaries. `There seems to have been a great battle in my absence,' Gell wrote to Milner, `Magrath, Price and Cannan determined to seize the opportunity to plant Cannan permanently in the of®ce.'32 `On the whole', Milner replied reassuringly from South Africa, `I don't think there is any fate so enviable as that of being unjustly ``sacked'' in a civilized country.' In the end Gell was not sorry to leave. He always believed that he and Hart and Jowett were responsible for putting the business on its feet in 1884. Years later, in 1915, he wrote to Hart who had reluctantly retired at the age of 75. Gell recalled the Press of 1883Ð in a medieval muddle, with no telephones, no speaking tubes, no typewriters . . . Do you recall the monotony of the old Press type, and the traditional Clarendon Press page, and all the efforts you made to equip the Press with the variety of Type which has lifted its Typography up to its present level? . . . That `dead-lift' required to modernize the Press would not have to be faced twice . . . It took a good deal out of all concerned.

Gell recalled the `enormous stride' which separated the Press of 1898 from the press of 1883; `when Jowett ®rst stirred the ®re and set us all running'.33 32 33

P. L. Gell to A. Milner, 26 May 1898, Bodl. MS Milner dep. 206 fo. 270. P. Lyttelton Gell to Horace Hart, 18 Mar. 1915, UPA.

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Yet when Cannan became Secretary in 1898, he seemed to be entering into a `medieval muddle' himself. Cannan's awesome intelligence became a legend in the Press. R. W. Chapman, his successor as Secretary, went through many stylistic convolutions in an attempt to characterize the man, but probably never improved on his Times obituary, at least in terms of elegant obfuscation: `there can seldom have been a mind so acute, that was so completely master of its own dexterities; he was preternaturally clever but his wit was always under government.'34 His manner, Chapman admitted, was formidable; and he came to be known as the `Alligator' among the staff. He was a master of the sustained silence. The output of books from the Clarendon Press soared in the ®rst decades of the twentieth centuryÐfrom 56 titles in 1900 to 223 in 1909. But the London Business ¯ourished still more, as Henry Frowde completed his transformation from Bible Warehouseman to Publisher to the University and one of the most esteemed publishers in London. The further development of the London business was at the expense of the Bible Press. In 1906 it was decided in Oxford that Frowde should take responsibility for the printing of Bibles and Prayer Books. The Bible Press would no longer have any control over the accounting and stock control, and would simply take its orders from London. Hart was deeply grieved. One of the most surprising assertions of independence from Frowde had occurred in 1895, when his dissatisfaction with Thomas Nelson & Son, who distributed Oxford Bibles in the United States, had caused him to make a hurried visit to New York. His worst fears of extravagance and inef®ciency were con®rmed and he had set up a telegraphic code with Gell to enable the Delegates' sanction to be obtained quickly (it was the middle of the Long Vacation). Frowde described the state of negotiations with Nelsons' representatives in a letter to Gell at the end of August, and received authority to obviate the long-standing agreement with Nelsons' on behalf of the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford.35 It was then up to the lawyers, and particularly Markby, to consider the legal issues involved in setting up a department of the Press which was directly responsible to Henry Frowde and not to the Delegates in Oxford. Once the initial step had been taken, branches sprang up all over the world, as if an urgent imperial mission had descended upon the Press. In little more than a decade branches were opened in Canada (1904), Australia (1908), India (1912), and South Africa (1915). Humphrey Milford, educated at Winchester and New College, joined the Press as Assistant Secretary on taking his ®rst in Greats in 1900, at the age of 34

The Times, 16 Dec. 1919, 16. Frowde to Gell, 23 Aug. 1895, 21 Sept. 1895, UPA ®le on termination of agreement with Nelson, 1895. 35

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23. He remained with the Press until his death in 1946. He was to be Frowde's successor, but Frowde stubbornly refused to retire until 1913, by which time Milford had spent six years being groomed by Cannan and seven years ¯exing his muscles in London. He had set up a Medical and a Juvenile department, known as the Joint Venture, in co-operation with Hodder and Stoughton.36 Milford was advised by Sir William Osler, a Delegate, as far as the medical side was concerned. For the Juvenile department two editors were appointed, Herbert Ely and Charles L'Estrange, who produced hundreds of books under the name of Herbert Strang. Both of these lucrative `ventures' reverted to OUP in due course. Frowde acquired the World's Classics, following the bankruptcy of Grant Richards, and published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (number 67) as the ®rst Oxford title in the series. Meanwhile in Oxford Cannan was dallying with the Clarendon Aristotle, a series which was to occupy him during all his days in the Press, having enjoyed his grand escapade with York Powell and his friend Arthur QuillerCouch and produced The Oxford Book of English Verse. The Oxford English school was demanding a good deal of attention, and the new professor, Walter Raleigh, was asked to act as literary adviser to the Press for a fee of £100 a year. Cannan approved of rapid growth, and the arrangement whereby the London Business handled most of the extra work appealed to him as a proper distribution of labour. `His power of using other men's ability and labour was very great,' wrote Chapman. A translation of Lucian in four volumes appeared in the Oxford Library of Translations in 1905. It had been done by H. W. and F. G. Fowler, scholars unknown to the Press. It was followed by a modest proposal for a little book on English composition, for those who `being uneducated cannot write a page without a blunder or cacaphony or piece of verbiage or false pathos or clumsiness or avoidable dullness . . . It might possibly. . . be mildly entertaining.' Cannan was fascinated, and watched over The King's English, published in 1906, with a special care. He then had a question to put to Henry Fowler. Would he and his brother compile a short dictionary, using what had already been done for the big dictionary and ®lling the gaps themselves? Cannan knew nothing of their quali®cations for such a task. He was very anxious that the Press should recover some of its investment in the OED. After much thought the Fowlers agreed, in 1906, to accept the job, and said that it would take ®ve years. The Concise English Dictionary was published in 1911. With the second edition of 1929 Fowler wrote, `When we began . . . more than 20 years ago . . . we were plunging into the sea of lexicography without having been ®rst taught to swim.' It was one of Cannan's 36 For the Joint Venture as it affected Hodder and Stoughton see John Attenborough, A Living Memory (1975), 51±2, 74, 82.

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most inspired decisions, and ever since dictionaries, in all their many formats, have sustained the Press rather as the Bible once did. Cannan also shared the imperialistic mission: he believed that the most striking achievement in these decades, the Dictionary and the Oxford Classical Texts apart,37 was the publication of numerous volumes on imperial themes. The most important was the Oxford Survey of the British Empire, in six volumes, with seventy-three contributors. It was published on 11 June 1914. In the ®rst General Catalogue of 1916, the Survey was given pride of place: it `must always be a standard book, for it gives a complete picture drawn at ®rst hand by those who knew the Empire in its last year of peace, and even its statistics need never be revised, as they are the last of the old order of things and will always be wanted for comparison.' 37 The Oxford Classical Texts were triumphing in a ®eld long dominated by Teubner: see E. Henge and H. Marx, `The Firm of B. and G. Teubner and its Connection with Classical Learning', Arethusa, 2 (1969), 203±11.

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27 `Extension' in all its Forms a n n e o c k w e l l a n d h a ro l d p o l l i n s In 1878 the University of Oxford supplemented its machinery for the conduct of local examinations when a committee of the Delegates was established to initiate university local lectures.1 No hint is given in the statute of the importance attached to the scheme by its promoters: `The Delegates [of Local Examinations] shall receive proposals for the establishment of lectures and teaching in the large towns of England and Wales, and shall be authorized to appoint Lecturers and Examiners for carrying out such proposals.'2 Hitherto, the term `extension' had been largely limited to activities broadening access to Oxford itself, either through the foundation of new colleges or halls, or the admission of Non-Collegiate students. In 1857, however, the ®rst activity `outside the walls' had begun when the University was persuaded to set up a Local Examinations Delegacy to organize external `middle-class' examinations. Now, two decades later, the University was to organize extramural teaching, which became familiarly known as university extension. The provision by the University of local examinations had been regarded by many of those involved as a ®rst step. `We must not allow ourselves to be carried away by a feeling of exultation at the triumphant success of so liberal a measure at Oxford,' Professor Max MuÈller urged, `we ought to look at this victory as only a beginning . . . great battles are yet to come.'3 Frederick Temple, who had assisted Thomas Acland in organizing the scheme, later explained to a gathering of Oxford University extensionists, `it was as much

1 We wish to record our indebtedness to the late Frank Pickstock for providing us with the bene®t of his researches into the history of the University's association with adult education. 2 Gazette, viii (7 May 1878), 356; Standing Committee of the Delegates of Local Examinations, Minutes, 13 July 1878, OUA DES/M/1/1. For lectures given in the great towns earlier by Oxford fellows see Mandell Creighton, 64, and UOC (1877), Q 1388 (Robert Laing); John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (1990), 56. Creighton and Laing were lecturing to women. By 1877 Laing had given some 17 courses of these lectures. 3 T. D. Acland, Some Account of the Origins and Objects of the New Oxford Examinations (1858). On the local examinations see Pt 1,668±9,704 and pp. 559±61 above.

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as at that time we could get the schools to accept, and it was therefore as much as it was wise to attempt.'4 The responsibilities of the University as a national institution had been much debated. As early as 1850 William Sewell of Exeter College had suggested that funding should be provided for professorships at Birmingham and Manchester. This idea of links with great cities or external institutions was revived in 1873 by John Percival, then headmaster of Clifton College, and prompted Balliol and New College to make grants to the new university college at Bristol.5 In October 1877 Jowett, ever anxious to promote Oxford, urged upon the Selborne Commissioners the need for the University to involve itself with the local colleges growing up in the large towns: `we ought not to allow a great movement to slip entirely out of our hands.' Oxford, he contended, could ensure that the education provided was not `exclusively con®ned to the needs of business, perhaps the mining or engineering wants of the locality' but was of `a much higher and more liberal character', embracing classical and literary studies.6 Like Temple in relation to local examinations two decades earlier, he envisaged Oxford's role as mainly a supervisory and organizational one. He proposed that direct ®nancial assistance from the University should be limited to setting up an of®ce for university extension, paying a secretary to run it, and setting aside nonresident fellowships to pay for extension lecturers in large towns. The names of the leading promoters of the innocuous-sounding agency set up in 1878 were an indication that, from its inception, it was to carry aspirations which went far beyond its dry brief, and which were to take it well beyond the particular objectives which Jowett and many organizers of local colleges had in mind. The major preoccupation of T. H. Green, the ®rst chairman of the new committee, was, as his pupil Lewis Nettleship pointed out, to state what a free and just society ought to be, and it was `to political and social life that he naturally turned for the concrete embodiment of his ``theories'''.7 The ®rst secretary, A. H. D. Acland, was one of Green's closest friends and a zealous convert to his teaching. Acland's determination that local lectures should provide an outlet for some practical implementation of Green's social philosophy, as well as his own acute political sense and radical sympathies, ensured that Oxford's contribution to the university extension movement was unique in its presentation, direction, and achievement. 4 Report of a Conference in the Examination Schools, Oxford of the Representatives of the Local Committees and of others interested in the Extension of University Teaching, on April 20 and 21, 1887 (1887), 26. 5 J. Percival, The Connection of the Universities and the Great Towns (1873); Ward, Victorian Oxford, 285; L. Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (1995), ch. 1. 6 UOC (1877), evidence, Q 2646. 7 Green, Works, iii, pp. v±clxi; M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (1964).

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The Aclands, leading landowners in the south-west of England, were well established both in Oxford and in wider political circles. Sir Thomas, Arthur's father, had spent nine years as a fellow of All Souls after his graduation from Christ Church. He was president of the Oxford Union immediately before Gladstone, his lifelong friend. His brother, Sir Henry Acland, was Regius Professor of Medicine; at Sir Henry's house in Broad Street, Arthur, as an undergraduate at Christ Church and then as a tutor at Keble College, met many of the great and good of Victorian England. He later recalled having grown up among the reports prepared by his father as one of the Schools Inquiry commissioners in the 1860s. It was to be a quest for educational reform, linked to a determination to promote social justice, which, after a false start in the Church, informed his life. In the 1870s a painful personal odyssey, ending in his resignation of holy orders, was lightened by the rapport he found in the company of members of the Cooperative movement in the north of England. His success as a lecturer to large gatherings of co-operators provided not only a direction for his own future but also for Oxford University extension. `Our Rochdale connection makes Oxford a most important place to stay at,' he wrote, as a strategy began to form.8 It is probable that the secretaryship, tacked on to the administrative structure of Local Examinations, which had been largely his father's creation, was instituted for him. During the years of his secretaryship Oxford extension was to develop in his image. His own deeply democratic stance and his ease in the company of working men did much to lay a basis of mutual trust and respect which was to underpin later developments. At the 1878 Co-operative Congress Acland heard the veteran co-operator Tom Hughes, himself an Oxford graduate, issue a clear challenge: the power of association to lift the masses of the people in every country to a fuller and higher citizenshipÐto give them a steadily increasing in¯uence, not only on the conditions of their own lives, but on national affairs and national life, is the most obvious, as well as the most important phenomenon of the last half-century of the nineteenth century.9

The working class, Hughes warned, had reached the brink of realization of the extent of its potential power. How that power was exercised would depend largely on the type of leadership that emerged. It was this challenge that Acland felt that he and a group of like-minded University men from Oxford could go some considerable way to meet. Local lectures could be an instrument capable of providing the type of education vital not only for the realization of the higher ideals of co-operation but also 8 MS Journal of A. H. D. Acland, 29 Dec. 1877. Arthur Acland's journals are currently being prepared for publication by Anne Ockwell, with the kind permission of his great-grandson, Sir John Acland. 9 Annual Report of the Co-operative Congress, 1878, 61.

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for the eventual accommodation of the working classes within a national community. He therefore devoted his time as Secretary to the creation and strengthening of links with co-operators, and along with T. H. Green and another Balliol friend, Arnold Toynbee, to the provision of an appropriate educational programme. Signi®cantly, co-operators were not to be invited to sample the delights of higher education simply for its own sake. They were to be offered an education in democratic participation, `a social and political education such as no other institutions have offered.'10 Acland worked tirelessly to bring the 1882 Co-operative Congress to Oxford and to ensure that the question of a suitable education for co-operators would play a major part in the proceedings. It was an opportunity to introduce sympathetic Oxford dons to leading co-operators. Some, like Goldwin Smith, had a long history of participation in campaigns for educational and political reform. Others, like T. H. Warren and A. L. Smith, were to play a vital part in later years. In an impassioned speech to the co-operators assembled in the Sheldonian Theatre, Arnold Toynbee urged them to recognize the need for teachers with the requisite impartiality of mind and width of knowledgeÐteachers capable of instructing them in what was deemed `citizen-education'. Acland and Toynbee were more than willing to provide such an education through extension lectures but, as Toynbee pointed out, they needed an effective channel: `Only through associations like yours can an effective citizeneducation be given to the great masses of the working people.'11 In the winter of 1882±3 Acland delivered a series of lectures to co-operators in the north of England in order to persuade them of `the power for good that the artisans' co-operative societies may exercise if they will, in raising through education the general level of intelligence among the working classes and so increasing both their ef®ciency and happiness.' Acland made it clear that his concern extended to the whole of the working classes, `but I believe that in addressing co-operators, I address some of the most forcible and thoughtful members of that bodyÐpersons who are likely to carry out in a practical form any part of this scheme which may appear to be worth carrying out.'12 A programme of `citizen-education' was outlined. Co-operators were to meet `for ten or twelve weeks at least in succession, once every week, a capable and well-educated teacher' to consider seriously `leaving as far as possible, all class prejudice and political party spirit aside for a time,' such subjects as `the labour and capital question, health, education, the poor law, what our English Government (central and local) is as a machine, what the 10

Annual Report of the Co-operative Congress, 1882, 61. Ibid. Co-operative News, 1883, 62. See also pp. 412±13. A. Kadish, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852±1883 (Durham, NC, 1986), ch. 7. 11 12

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machine does, and in what directions we think it ought to work'. Further courses could be spent in systematic study of the `lives of some of our great Englishmen and women of bygone days . . . such as Carlyle, Cobden, Mrs Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Robert Owen, John Stuart Mill' and on the `history of the past half-century' in order to modify many `onesided or party judgments of the past'. Above all, and permeating the whole programme, `the duties of an English citizen' were to be imbibed, `if England is to be what she ought to be'. Such an education would not necessarily `elevate the individual or bring material bene®t', nor was its object `to make us rise out of our surroundings'. Instead it was to engender `a sense of social and moral purpose, a sense of duty and obligation essential to the well-being of the national community'.13 It was soon clear, however, that although Acland had made a considerable personal impact on the co-operators and although his educational proposals were favoured at the Congress, they were judged both too costly and too exotic by the majority of local centres. At the 1883 Co-operative Congress Acland had to concede that a large-scale response would not be forthcoming at this stage. `There is not a widespread demand for this sort of work as yet, and it is useless to try and imagine a demand or force a demand where there is none.' His conclusion was prophetic: the most intelligent persons among those working for schemes of popular education in our large towns for adult persons . . . feel that such schemes will not become great successes, that the adult members of our working classes will not be largely and continuously attracted to the education provided, unless their own leaders and their own organisations are identi®ed with the work, are supporting it, and taking part in its management.14

This was to achieve realization with the foundation of the Workers' Educational Association and the Joint Tutorial Classes, and it is interesting that from this early stage Acland was aware that university extension in relation to the working classes would not succeed until a true partnership of equals emerged. Yet, convinced as he was that education must precede progress, he was determined to struggle on persuading co-operators of their best interests. I believe that those who are in earnest in believing that neither co-operative production nor any other important step on behalf of working-class progress will ¯ourish till there is much more sound and systematic education among the working-class than at present, will hammer away, in spite of any amount of discouragement, in the hope that the working-class organisations themselves will take up the matter far and wide.15 13 14 15

Co-operative News, 1883, 312±13. Annual Report of the Co-operative Congress, 1883, 8. Co-operative News, 1884, 412.

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Such optimism was not misplaced. A bond had been created between the University and the Co-operative movement which was eventually to enable Oxford to play a major role in the provision of adult working-class education. Also, a moral philosophy had been provided which was later to inspire Albert Mansbridge and to permeate the WEA. In 1885 Acland, having decided to enter the political arena, retired from the secretaryship. That year he was elected Liberal MP for Rotherham. He had chosen Michael Sadler, a young acolyte, as his successor. Determined to make a success of his ®rst appointment, Sadler launched a vigorous campaign to introduce Oxford extension lectures on a large scale. He had at his disposal a group of young graduates who, under Acland's tutelage, had developed a willingness to serve with missionary zeal as peripatetic lecturers in the cause of University extensionÐmen such as Hudson Shaw, Cosmo Gordon Lang, W. J. Ashley, H. Llewellyn Smith, L. L. Price, and W. A. S. Hewins. Financial dif®culties bedevilled their efforts. In 1886 it was reported that: It had been found that the cost of University Lectures is too heavy for the poorer neighbourhoods, which are those where such teaching is most needed, and that it is dif®cult to retain the services of the most ef®cient lecturers in consequence of the inability of the University Delegates to guarantee them the permanence of their work.16

As a result of an appeal for subscriptions Sadler was able to guarantee Hudson Shaw an annual income of £300 including lecture fees.17 It is signi®cant that it was Shaw, above all, whose services Sadler hoped to retain. Shaw, who had already won a reputation for his rapport with audiences of working people, threw himself with messianic fervour into a punishing routine of extension lectures in Yorkshire and Lancashire. The of®cial University position on the ®nancing or subsidizing of extension lectures was one of detachment. The Vice-Chancellor, Dr Bellamy, gave due warning to Acland, Sadler, and their supporters at a conference on extension held in the Examination Schools in 1887: I think it must be obvious to everybody here that the movement depends upon two thingsÐpartly intellectual and partly material. There is need not only for the best®lled and best-cultivated brains, but also a tolerably well-®lled treasury. . . The ®rst necessity the University is able to supply; the second must be supplied by persons outside it. The University is not a rich body in comparison to the demands made upon it, and I shall always hold, even if the University were tenfold as rich as it is, 16 Oxford University Delegates for Local Lectures, Annual Report, 1885±6, 12; S. Marriott, `George William Hudson Shaw' in J. E. Thomas and B. Elsey (eds), International Biography of Adult Education (Nottingham, 1985), 533±40. The titles of the organizations under which these activities have taken place have been: Delegacy for the Extension of Teaching beyond the Limits of the University (1892±1924); Delegacy of Extra-Mural Studies (1924±70); Department for External Studies (1971±90); Department for Continuing Education (from 1990). 17 Annual Report 1886±7, 17.

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that the funds of the University ought to be spent upon supplying those appliances in the University itself which are necessary in every branch of learning to bring its students up to the requirements of learning which is daily extending the ®eld of knowledge. Our business is not to spread learning, but to make learning, and for the funds for spreading it in different towns it is necessary that we should look to others outside. I think that it is a wholesome state of things, because if we had money to supply all this demand, yet it would have the effect of paralyzing the demand rather than exciting it.18

Hudson Shaw, no respecter of persons, did not hesitate to reply forcefully: There are some of us who, on the invitation of the Delegates, have undertaken this work because we conceived that we might in some degree assist the working-men of England . . . Our lectures are accepted with great enthusiasm and hearty support by the great bulk of the better part of the working men. . . . We have been told over and over again that this is a missionary movement. I altogether believe that; if it is not a missionary movement there are a good many of us who do not want to have anything to do with it, but if it is a missionary movement then I take it that the University of Oxford is the ®rst missionary society which ever started forth on its enterprise, and expected the people amongst whom it is to work to pay its expenses. [Apparently at this point there was loud laughter and prolonged applause] . . . I do hope that we shall be told that there is some prospect in the not distant future of the University doing its part to extend its operations amongst the great masses of the country. If it is a missionary enterprise the working men will ask us `How much do you believe in it?' and they will estimate our belief in it by the amount of subscriptions to it. I believe that if we charge them a moderate amount at the beginning we shall soon ®nd the whole movement self-supporting, but at the beginning we must help. The University must make some sacri®ce.19

The University, however, did not change its position and there was therefore no opportunity of reducing the ®nancial strain which many working-class centres experienced. Faced with these dif®culties Sadler used his organizational and entrepreneurial skills to great effect. By meeting the demand, which could be self®nancing, he turned the Oxford Extension movement into an educational empire which stretched from Cornwall to Lancashire. Administratively the Oxford Extension Delegacy, with Sadler as secretary, followed the pattern already determined by the Cambridge Local Lectures Syndicate.20 The `centres' were managed by independent local committees and peripatetic lecturers divided their time among several `centres'. The lecture was followed by a discussion class for the most earnest students. Written work was to be set and marked by the lecturer. At the end of each course there was an 18

Report of a Conference . . . 1887, 28±9. Ibid. 74±5. 20 For Cambridge's contribution to university extension see E. Welch, The Peripatetic University: Cambridge Local Lectures, 1873±1973 (1973). For the extension movement in London see John Burrows, University Adult Education in London: A Century of Achievement (1976). 19

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examination for any who cared to enter for it, the examination papers being assessed by a University teacher other than the lecturer. Lecturers' fees could not be reduced, if the best were to be attracted. Yet courses had to be self-supporting, and workmen and their societies could not afford the expense of courses of twelve lectures. The remedy was to offer short courses. As Sadler pointed out, `it was particularly desirable that University Extension should spread exactly in those places and among those classes to which experience had shown the cost of twelve lectures to be often prohibitive.'21 From the autumn of 1885, therefore, Oxford initiated six-lecture courses, while Cambridge, fearing charges of dilettantism, continued to provide twelve-lecture courses. It is clear that the introduction of shorter and cheaper courses largely accounts for the very rapid expansion of Oxford Extension. By 1888±9 Oxford lectures were being held in about eighty centres as compared with about ®fty centres having Cambridge courses. In that season 75 per cent of the Oxford courses were six lectures in length, while all but two of the Cambridge courses were twelve lectures in length. Sadler, beavering away from his new of®ces in the Examination Schools, could claim that his policy had `practically brought University Extension within the reach of every town in England.' In the 1890±1 session Oxford provided 192 courses of lectures, and these were attended by 20,248 students, 1,388 of whom took examinations. Many of these were schoolteachers, as the Vice-Chancellor's Certi®cate could replace the Queen's Scholarship examination.22 Despite these successes, Sadler was acutely aware of the inherent dif®culties. The extent of recruitment was, to a considerable degree, a re¯ection of the inadequacies of other types of educational provision, exposed by Acland and Hubert Llewellyn Smith in their thoroughly researched Studies in Secondary Education (1892). The subsequent Royal Commission on secondary education was seen as an opportunity for Acland, promoted to Cabinet of®ce with responsibility for education in Gladstone's fourth administration, to carry through his ambitious plans for `a great modi®cation of the attitude of the State to National Education'.23 Sadler, meanwhile, continued to tax himself with efforts to provide greater stability and continuity in Extension provision. In December 1894 one local organizer, Miss J. D. Montgomery of Exeter, accused the University authorities of a lack of vision and abnegation of responsibility: Now is their opportunity for deepening, for extending, for systematizing their in¯uence; will they see it? Will they rise to it? Or will they repudiate their debts to 21

H. J. Mackinder and M. E. Sadler, University Extension, Past, Present and Future (1891), 87. See the maps of University Extension centres, ibid. 4. Acland to Sadler, 17 Oct. 1894, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. c. 550, fo. 120. For Oxford involvement in the Bryce Commission see above, p. 637. 22 23

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the nation at large, and content themselves with exercising only an indirect in¯uence on it . . . What we want is that some University Fellowships should be given to experienced `Extension' workers, thus enabling them to devote their whole time to organizing the educational work of a district.24

In 1890 Balliol College had elected Hudson Shaw to a fellowship which enabled him to continue his work lecturing in the north of England in mainly working-class centres. Balliol's example was followed by Christ Church which, in 1892, appointed Halford Mackinder, another highly successful lecturer in working-class centres, to a Studentship in order to enable him to devote himself to developing an extension college at Reading. These were, however, the only major ®nancial contributions made by colleges. The movement looked instead to the state for assistance. In 1891 a joint deputation from the four extension authorities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Victoria, Manchester) was received by the Lord President of the Council and ®nancial help was asked for the stronger centres in order to enable them to develop more systematic programmes of study. A grant of £50,000 was asked for in order to put the work on a more secure ®nancial footing. No state aid was forthcoming. Acland wrote, explaining the prevalent current of feeling in the House of Commons, to Sadler: It was quite a surprise to me to hear that there was any expectation in Oxford of new reforms by a Liberal Government . . . My feeling has always been that until bodies so wealthy (comparatively) as the colleges make some fairly generous contribution to Women's Education or University Extension (they could easily give £2000 a year between them if they cared to do so to either cause) it is very dif®cult to get general consent in the House of Commons to a State Grant.25

Critics accused the movement of having run into the sands of gentility as the impetus of university extension was seized by the middle-class leaderships in the larger towns, especially in the industrial north and the midlands, to establish university colleges and other higher education institutions, in the process of which the goal of working-class participation was obscured. If, by the 1890s, only a quarter of extension students came from the working classes, an educational lifeline was being provided for many middle-class women for whom educational opportunities remained severely restricted. Their great uptake of extension classes and the summer meeting was encouraged and defended by Hudson Shaw: `If we have done the least thing to help on one of the greatest modern revolutions which the historian of the future will notice, the higher education of the women of England, we have no cause to fear to look our enemies in the face.'26 24

The Oxford University Extension Gazette, Dec. 1894, 24. Acland to Sadler, 8 Oct. 1892, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. c. 550, fo. 117. The English Universities and the English People. Report of a Conference on the Extension of University Teaching among Workmen, Oxford, 3 August 1892 (1892). 25 26

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Nevertheless, Oxford extension did maintain a number of large workingclass centres. Where there was the combination of a gifted lecturer, a sympathetic local committee, and an active Co-operative education committee, working-class centres ¯ourished. Thus, two of Oxford's most popular lecturers, Hudson Shaw and E. L. S. Horsburgh, were for many years able to draw audiences of between 500 and 1,000 in centres such as Oldham and Hebden Bridge. Moreover, it had established a nationwide network of local committees experienced in operating a system of `distance learning', pioneering the educational techniques which were to be so valuable later in the WEA and university tutorial classesÐthe printed syllabus as a guide to systematic reading and home study, the travelling book-box sent by train from Oxford to ensure essential library facilities, the discussion class and the essay, all leading up to the Summer Meeting which each year brought the hundreds of Extension students into direct contact with the University.27 But Oxford University Extension was more than an educational system. Of equal signi®cance was its role as a focus for the interests and activities of those belonging to the informal groupings seeking to increase the momentum of reform within the University. The founding of Toynbee Hall, the universities' Settlement in East London, in 1884, and the dynamism of its ®rst warden, Samuel Barnett, were, through the contacts they gave with public life, politics, and journalism, to increase the potential in¯uence of this coalition and the signi®cance of Extension within it. The universities' settlement movement was based on the idea, not a new one, that the universities could help to revitalize the life of the great cities and of the nation. Many individual University men, such as J. R. Green, Edward Denison, and Samuel Barnett, had already chosen the East End of London as their base for such activity and it was the plight of the East End which, by the 1880s, had become the focus of the nation's attention. In particular, the publication in October 1883 of the penny pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which was taken up by W. T. Stead in his Pall Mall Gazette and by the Daily News, with its revelations of `the great dark region of poverty, misery, squalor and immorality' had `powerfully touched the heart of the nation'.28 According to the Illustrated London News, there had probably never been a `time when the desire to alleviate their wretchedness was so widespread'.29 Philip Lyttelton Gell recalled how `the newspapers were full of East London. For the ®rst time the actual condition of the people ¯ashed upon the generous feelings of the universities. There were stirring debates at Oxford and Cambridge. For the ®rst time men were 27 Mackinder and Sadler, University Extension, 37. From 1893 Oxford and Cambridge alternated in hosting of the Summer Meetings. 28 Pall Mall Gazette, 16 Oct. 1883. 29 Illustrated London News, 22 Dec. 1883.

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startled into a feeling of responsibility towards the toiling millions whose labours made possible the academic life.'30 It was in this climate of quickened interest that Samuel Barnett, then vicar of St Jude's, Whitechapel, came to St John's College in November 1883. In his address to a group of undergraduates in the rooms of his friend, the classics don, Sidney Ball, Barnett made his appeal to `bring to bear the life of the University on the life of the poor.'31 Among those present were Arthur Acland, Michael Sadler, and many of those already engaged in Oxford University Extension. T. H. Green had died the previous year and Arnold Toynbee earlier that year. The Oxford Magazine of 21 November 1883 described the frame of mind of the young men who had assembled in Sidney Ball's rooms in St John's: The question has been asked, `Is the new Oxford movement to be a socialistic one?' and if this be interpreted to mean, `Is the most living interest of Oxford now that in social questions?' the answer must be distinctly, `Yes.' Oxford has turned from playing at the Middle Ages in churches, or at Re-Renaissance in cupboards; and a new faith, with Professor Green for its founder, Arnold Toynbee for its martyr, and various societies for its propaganda, is alive amongst us.32

In a burst of optimism Barnett urged that settlement would go some way to encounter the pressing problem of class division. A University Settlement will at any rate keep alive and consolidate the interest between a centre of education and a centre of industry. . . It will meet the sorrow and misery born of class division and indifference; it will bring classes into relation; it will lead them to know and learn of one another, and those to whom it is given will give. Settlers may look to ideals higher than that of self-helped respectabilityÐan ideal that stops not short till beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalised, and every noble source of joy is opened to the people.33

College missions were rejected by Barnett as not being `the form best ®tted to receive the spirit which is at present moving the universities. As a form more adequate I would suggest a settlement of university men in the midst of some great industrial centre.'34 Barnett wanted not only `settlement' but sharing of experience, not only contact but community, because `the needs of East London are often urged, but they are little understood.'35 Barnett therefore asked for involvement based on knowledge. He could 30 P. L. Gell, `The Work of Toynbee Hall' in Arnold Toynbee (Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, 1889), 58; A. Briggs and A. Macartney, Toynbee Hall, the First Hundred Years (1984). 31 The full address is reprinted as the ®rst appendix, in J. A. R. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, Fifty Years of Social Progress, 1884±1934 (1935), 267. 32 OM 21 Nov. 1883, 384. 33 Ibid. 387. 34 Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 268. 35 Ibid. 271.

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speak with authority as one who had laboured in Whitechapel since 1872, `confronted by some of the hardest problems of city life'.36 Many Oxford undergraduates, including Arnold Toynbee, had spent their vacations working with Barnett in the East End long before he made his appeal at St John's. Barnett had also long been a member of the circle which had gathered around T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee and Arthur AclandÐAlfred Milner, L. R. Phelps, Sidney Ball, A. L. Smith, and Lewis Nettleship were particularly remembered by Henrietta Barnett when she wrote her memoir of her husband. It was because of the value Barnett placed on his connection with this Oxford group that he strove to establish a systematized and permanent connection between the old universities and east London. Oxford gives another answer to the question `What makes life worth living?' In London the universal answer is `Money.' In Oxford quite another standard is set up. There the search is for knowledge. There it is by taste, by powers of talk, by culture, that one is exalted over another, and there manners make the man.37

Barnett never lost his veneration for the potential power for good which Oxford could exercise, and it was some of this power which he hoped to channel to the East End. After the memorial service for Arnold Toynbee in Balliol chapel on 10 March 1884, at which Barnett delivered the sermon, it was decided that a settlement should comprise the major part of a memorial to Toynbee and be named Toynbee Hall. At a meeting of like-minded Cambridge men, it was resolved to co-operate with Oxford in setting up the settlement, which therefore became known as the Universities' Settlement in East London. Not all Oxford men, however, felt that they could throw in their lot with Barnett. Edward Talbot of Keble College led a movement to establish another settlement, Oxford House, in Bethnal Green, with a traditional `missionary' emphasis. `The Keble people are also very vigorous,' Barnett wrote to his brother, `and it will strain one's charity to be in spirit ``their fellow-workers''.'38 Yet J. G. Adderley, the ®rst head of Oxford House, did not con®ne himself to spiritual matters, and his aim of helping `the masses realise their spiritual and social solidarity with the rest of the capital and the kingdom'39 won Barnett's sympathy. Other Oxford colleges continued to run missions in east and south London. Sectarian and non-religious settlements were 36

H. O. Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends (1918), 244. Toynbee Journal, Aug. 1886. Samuel Barnett to Frank Barnett, n.d., Barnett MSS, London Metropolitan Archives. 39 J. Adderley, In Slums and Society (1916); see also the entry on Adderley by Ian Goodfellow in J. M. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, ix (1993), 1±4. Oxford House, like Toynbee Hall, was active in extension lectures during the early years, but those activities were sustained more successfully by Toynbee Hall: Goldman (n. 5), 116; M. Ashworth, Oxford House (1984), 13±14, 17. 37 38

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established. It was Toynbee Hall, however, which a burgeoning international settlement movement was to acknowledge as its model. It was also Toynbee Hall which, during Barnett's wardenship, maintained the closest links with Oxford in order, it was hoped, both to emulate and instruct. The Toynbee residents were to live `in a fellowship like that of a College', linked by `the common method of making friends among their neighbours and the common object of improving social conditions'.40 Barnett was the obvious choice as warden and on Christmas Eve 1884 the ®rst two residents moved into Toynbee Hall. Since 1877 Barnett had organized London extension classes in east London. With the active support of his new residents this work rapidly expanded and Toynbee Hall became a `®xed home' for a wide variety of educational activities. In 1887 a students' hostel named Wadham House, after Barnett's old Oxford college, was opened at Toynbee Hall and a second hostel, opened one year later, was named Balliol House after the Oxford college most directly involved in Toynbee Hall's activities. It was Barnett's hope that they would be followed by `a long succession of Colleges' which would `grow up in Whitechapel naturally and to meet a felt need, just as Colleges sprang up in Oxford and Cambridge in the Middle Ages'.41 At the of®cial opening of Balliol House on 20 March 1891, Asquith, the future Liberal Prime Minister, spoke of the `democratizing of the Universities' and complained that in the great national institution of Oxford, which embodied English history, `learning and culture which were not to be obtained elsewhere . . . had become in time the patrimony of a particular class of society.'42 Toynbee Hall could serve as a living reminder of the original purpose and function of the old Universities. By the early 1890s 130 different subjects were being taught under the aegis of extension and over 1,000 students were enrolled. Ambitious pioneering social research was being conducted by Charles Booth with the help of Toynbee residents and associates. But Barnett had begun to detect complacency within the extension movement and was distressed by the fact that ®nancial obstacles deterred many workmen. His dissatisfaction made him look for other methods of presentation. It was at Toynbee Hall that tutorial classes were ®rst set up to supplement extension lectures and where support was to gather not only for the recasting of university extension but beyond that for the means of further educational and social progress. A particularly signi®cant feature of Toynbee Hall was its close connection with the organized labour movement. It was Arthur Acland who introduced 40

Gell, `Work of Toynbee Hall', 58. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, 63. 42 Toynbee Record, Apr. 1891, 77. In March 1902 Asquith `spoke in Balliol Hall for Toynbee Hall to a large audience of undergraduates': Asquith to his wife, 9 Mar. 1902, Bodl. MS. Eng. c. 6689, fo 162. 41

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Benjamin Jones, the leading London co-operator, to Barnett. He became a Toynbee associate in 1886 and thereafter Toynbee Hall paid particular attention to persuading London co-operators to devote greater attention to the educational side of their movement through classes held in both Toynbee Hall and the headquarters of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in nearby Leman Street. Toynbee Hall became the meeting-place of occupational unions like the Co-operative Brass Dressers, the Stick Makers, the Boot Makers, and the Cigar Makers, and it was drawn inevitably into the industrial disputes resulting from the ®rst attempts by previously unorganized workers to achieve acceptable working conditions. Help was given both to shape strategy and to win sympathy. It was Acland's close friend Llewellyn Smith, then a Toynbee resident, who was to write the contemporary of®cial history of the dockers' strike, described by Tom Mann, one of the strike leaders, as `the best account'. Through the involvement of some of the leading residents with the match girls' strike of 1888 and the dockers' strike of 1889, Barnett became aware that the status of the Co-operative movement had altered. `It is in the increasing strength of the Trades Unions and in the hope of bringing Cooperators and Trades Unions more closely together rather than in the hopeful anticipation of separate action on the part of the former that sympathies are now apt to dwell with most satisfaction.'43 Toynbee Hall could also go some way to meet the aspirations of the new leaders of the trade unions. They are well aware that unity and cohesion among their members are all important, and that to bring this about social and educational opportunities must be afforded. They know that while men are ignorant of one another and of the movement in which they have instinctively enrolled themselves, its history, its possibilities and the relation which it has to bear in public life, their societies cannot ¯ourish. But what is to be done? They have no time to make arrangements for discussions, classes, lectures, social gatherings and the rest.44

Oxford had to be informed, so in 1890 an `Oxford Conference on Trade Unionism' was organized by the Oxford committee of Toynbee Hall. Chaired by Arthur Acland and Leonard Courtney and attended by over 500 people, the conference was addressed by leading politicians, workers' representatives, and representatives of the employers.45 Barnett's feelings were already well known, for in articles and sermons he had frequently challenged critics of trade unionism with hard-hitting frankness. The links forged by Toynbee Hall with working-class movements were eventually to play their part in enabling Barnett to realize some of his vision of a reformed Oxford with special provision for working men. 43 44 45

Toynbee Record, Dec. 1888, 33; Sept. 1888, 132; T. Mann, Memoirs (1923), 78±9. Toynbee Hall Annual Report, 1890, 27±9. Toynbee Hall Annual Report, 1891, 30; Toynbee Record, Jan. 1891, 48.

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The leading University extensionists most committed to the education of working men always knew that their ultimate success would depend on initiatives and organization from working men themselves. The ®rst such overt moves came at the annual congress of the Co-operative Union in 1896, where dissatisfaction was expressed at the level of interest in education in many societies.46 This led to the setting up of a special committee of inquiry.47 The interest it engendered was to have two important outcomes. The ®rst was the establishment in the Oxford Summer Meeting of a conference for working men, mainly from co-operative societies, to discusss aspects of co-operative or working-class education. The second was that Albert Mansbridge, then a clerk in the tea department of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, attending the 1898 Co-operative Congress at Peterborough, became involved in the continuing debate about education and was stimulated to begin formulating ideas for closer and more permanent cooperation between university extension and the co-operative and trade union movements.48 The Oxford Summer Meeting was to be Mansbridge's public platform from which to launch in 1903 his workers' education movement which, with the unobtrusive help of Barnett at Toynbee Hall, had already assured itself of the support of in¯uential labour leaders. Meanwhile an even more striking development had taken place in Oxford itself. This initiative, late in 1898, came neither from University Extension nor from the working-class movement, but from two Americans temporarily resident in Britain.49 Charles Austin Beard, who graduated that year at DePauw University, Indiana, arrived in the autumn for graduate study under York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern History. In Oxford he met Walter Watkins Vrooman, who was on holiday with his wife. Out of their discussions they rapidly produced an educational scheme for working people, consisting of three elements: a residential college in Oxford, correspondence courses for home-based students, and extension classes in various towns and cities. This was the origin of Ruskin College, at ®rst called Ruskin Hall. The meeting between Beard and Vrooman was not entirely fortuitous; Beard was an acquaintance of one of Vrooman's brothers. But it is quite possible that if Beard had chosen to study at another university and their discussions had taken place there, Ruskin College would not have been located in Oxford. Yet, given Oxford's interest in working-class education the site was appropriate, and while the founders made great efforts to recruit the support of working-class organizationsÐtrade unions, trades councils, and co-operative societies (one of the ®rst successes was with Oxford and 46

Annual Report of the Co-operative Congress, 1896, 113. Ibid. 149. 48 Annual Report of the Co-operative Congress, 1898, 159. 49 This account of developments at Ruskin College is based largely on H. Pollins, The History of Ruskin College (1984). The Hall's name is explained on p. 12 in this account. 47

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District Trades and Labour Council)Ðthey quickly found congenial assistance from Oxford reformers. Ruskin Hall had the backing of extensionists and Toynbee Hall supporters such as Edward Caird, Master of Balliol, Sidney Ball of St John's, William Markby, as well as the Revd A. J. Carlyle, rector of All Saints Church. As well as an enthusiasm for working-class education, Beard and Vrooman, who were both Nonconformists, shared with these sympathizers a strong Christian background. Religious organizations were among the groups they visited to spread their publicity and to solicit support. Premises for the Oxford college were soon found. A proposal to lease Paradise House in St Ebbe's fell through but 14 St Giles was leased from Balliol. This was a suitably symbolic building for an adult college. It had once been the house of T. H. Green and had been used for the accommodation of needy Balliol men, an early effort at widening entry into the University. It was probably Vrooman, the slightly older man (29 as against Beard's 24), who initiated the idea. His ill-health had prevented him from attending university but he came from a family with a long tradition of activity in American reform and radical movements. Primarily a political activist, he produced in his short lifetime (he died in 1909 aged 40, having spent the last six years in a mental hospital) many schemes, which from their marriage in 1897 to 1903 were ®nanced by his wife Amne. The bulk of the money for Ruskin Hall's ®rst year came from her.50 Ruskin Hall's purpose was to provide education for the working classes, who were to occupy their rightful place in a political democracy. The new institution was to be consciously different from traditional higher education, and its location in Oxford can be seen as a challenge to the existing order. This was made clear in the advertisements, early in 1899, for the inaugural meeting. Signed by Beard, described as `Correspondent' of 41 Banbury Road (his lodgings were in fact 11 Grove Street, now Magpie Lane), they were partly an attack on the University. Whereas the colleges of the University aimed to `polish gentlemen and train professional people', Ruskin Hall would provide `a liberal education to men not seeking to become barristers, clergymen, military of®cers or ®nanciers'. On the contrary, it would give special training `for those wishing to become Political Leaders and Speakers, or Educators of the Rising Democracy'. Or, as Vrooman put it, it was for those who would become `vestrymen, county councillors, members of Parliament, trade-unionists, fellows who harangue crowds in the streets'. (He had made his name as a `boy orator' in America.) There was much advocacy of `raising the class' rather than of individual social 50 R. E. Paulson, Radicalism and Reform: The Vrooman Family and American Social Thought, 1837±1937 (Lexington, Ky, 1968), 147±58; E. Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Portrait (Carbondale, Ill., 1983), 14±27.

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mobility. Students were expected to return to their jobs after their period of study.51 No formal entry quali®cations would be needed and the college would be open for ®fty-two weeks in the year. Students could come for short periods at any time and the fees would be low: £25 a year or 10s a week for board and accommodation, plus £6 a year or 12s 6d a month for tuition. The ®gures were kept low to encourage working-class men to take part; all the domestic work, including cooking, was to be done by the students. Such intentions soon proved impractical. The fee was raised to £52 a year and a cook was appointed. There were to be no examinations, nor were quali®cations awarded. Alcohol was not permitted on the premises. But Ruskin Hall was not just to be different from the University: there was an element of opposition, which surfaced in the magazine Young Oxford. Such an attitude is not surprising in view of working-class suspicion of Oxford University (even though the critical pieces were written by such middle-class people as Vrooman). Yet the attitude towards the University was ultimately ambivalent. On the one hand there was mutual hostility between Ruskin and many in the University; on the other there was no reason why the under-privileged should not share the bene®ts that Oxford could supply.52 The enthusiastic response by working-class people to the new scheme showed clearly that it was needed. Students enrolled for the college and for the correspondence courses even before the inaugural meeting, and local Ruskin Halls were established, often on local initiatives, in Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool in 1899, and in 1902 in Stockport. These premises were used for classes but some residential accommodation was provided. At ®rst the `distance' activitiesÐthe correspondence courses and the local classesÐprospered more than did the residential Oxford college. In the ®rst year or so, while Ruskin Hall certainly attracted men who had been active in their local trade unions and communities, and for whom the scheme was intended, others who came for short periods were hardly of the appropriate type. Some were foreigners who came to learn English; others were delinquents of some kind sent by their families to a useful repository. Mrs Vrooman commented, in May 1900, on the `rather amusing proof of the tendency, of even the so-called educated classes, to misinterpret what they read', in Ruskin Hall being `almost universally regarded as designed for the relief of deceased clergymen's sons ambitious of entering Oxford University'.53 This was by no means the whole story. Among the 1899 entry was 51

148.

Ruskin College cuttings book A fo. 1; ibid. fo. 2 (from The Clarion, 14 Jan. 1899); Paulson,

52 P. Yorke, Education and the Working Class: Ruskin College 1899±1909 (Ruskin Students' Labour History Pamphlets No. 1, 1977), 10±11. 53 Young Oxford, 1 May 1900, 11.

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Joseph Pointer, a pattern-maker, who stayed for six months and was a Labour MP from 1909 until his death in 1914.54 Similarly a Welsh miner, Edmund Stonelake, having already pursued a Ruskin correspondence course, obtained a two-year scholarship in 1901. Being 28 years old, married with three children, he could not bear the separation and left after ®ve months. He returned to Aberdare, where he spent the rest of his life as a major ®gure in trade-union and political activities.55 By that time the Vroomans had returned to America and, although still associated with the Ruskin Hall activities in England, they were busy with other things. One was the establishment of a Ruskin Hall movement in America, where Avalon College in Trenton, Missouri, became Ruskin College. In 1903 this merged with Midland University to become Ruskin University, located at Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Charles Beard, who had given the ®rst lecture at Ruskin Hall's opening on 27 February 1899, went to America later that year to marry and returned with his wife to settle in Manchester, from where he ran extension activities through the Ruskin Hall Educational League. Early in 1902 they returned to America, where Beard began his long career as an eminent historian. Despite the early problems, Ruskin was now making a signi®cant impact. Working-class people, with minimal education, could undertake residential or extension education and bene®t from it. Enthusiastic reports appeared in newspapers, some reprinted in Young Oxford. The headlines of one such report appeared in one of the Swansea newspapers on 7 November 1902: THE MOVEMENT IN WALES. TO DRIVE OUT IGNORANCE. OXFORD ENTHUSIASTS ON THE WAR-PATH. BLOCK-HOUSES ESTABLISHED AT YSTALYFERA AND SWANSEA.

They heralded `the vigorous campaign which is now being waged by Ruskin Hall workers in South Wales against the forces of ignorance and indifference'. The report went on to describe a number of talks which resulted in at least one class being formed. It continued: The movement is advancing. Soon in the busy towns and teeming villages of South Wales little groups of men and women will be diligently pursuing R. H. courses and helping to purify the social and industrial life of the community.56

In addition to correspondence courses, extension lectures and classes, and the Ruskin Halls, there were Ruskin Hall reading circles. The members were advised to make use of the book-boxes available from the Fabian Society. Yet the whole venture almost collapsed through lack of money as well as the loss of the leadership of Charles Beard. The position at Oxford was 54 55 56

Ruskin Collegian, 4 (Dec. 1914), 101. A. MoÂr-O'Brien (ed.), The Autobiography of Edmund Stonelake (n.p. 1981), ch. 7. Young Oxford, 4 (1902±3), 121.

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particularly acute. Mrs Vrooman had provided some two-thirds of the £3,000 spent in the ®rst year. From 1900 she promised £500 a year for four years. The difference had to be made up from other sources and efforts were made to obtain cash both from rich benefactors and the labour movement. It was slow to arrive from either. The year 1903 was a turning-point for Ruskin. It moved from its ®rst home, 14 St Giles, to its permanent site in Walton Street next to Worcester College, and appropriately on the edge of Jericho, then a working-class district. It changed its name to Ruskin College and gradually withdrew from most of its extramural activities. The local Ruskin Halls closed and the local classes left the college's ambit, although a few remained until 1914. Those in Lancashire and Yorkshire played an important part in launching WEA branches and were virtually absorbed by it. The correspondence courses remained until 1964, but from 1903 Ruskin College was essentially the institution in Oxford. It was a dif®cult period and the efforts to replace Mrs Vrooman as the supplier of ®nance did not produce results quickly. Private individuals were initially the most important sources, but some unions soon began to provide funds for both the building and scholarships for their members. Levies by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers produced one scholarship in 1903, three in 1904, six in 1905, nine in 1906, and six in 1907. British Steel Smelters similarly levied their members and the Weavers Amalgamation paid for members to become resident students. By 1907 more than half the total income was coming from unions. The numbers of students had grown to the extent that extra rooms in Worcester Place were rented to accommodate them. Of 52 in residence in 1907, 24 were miners and three other main groups (weavers, railwaymen, and engineers) totalled 15. Most subscribers, whether individuals or organizations, contributed small sums of money which were aggregated to provide scholarships. These would often be offered to unions, sometimes as half-scholarships provided the unions paid the other half. The methods of recruitment varied. It is clear that the correspondence courses and, in the early days, the extension classes, were seen as both `missionary' activities and sources of residential students. An early description of the Ruskin Hall Correspondence School concluded with the appeal, `Many scholarships are needed to enable some of the young men to come to Oxford.' Miss M. P. Giles, the secretary of the correspondence school (or department), kept in close contact with the students and engaged in a lively correspondence with them, some of the letters being printed in Young Oxford. A progression from home-based to college-based study was made possible and some students, who included Jack Lawson, a Durham miner, later a Member of Parliament and cabinet minister, followed that path.57 In March 1907 the college, having accumulated enough 57

Ruskin Hall, Oxford (n.d. n.p. [?1901]), 10; J. Lawson, A Man's Life (1932), chs 14±15.

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the university reaches outwards

money for six scholarships, offered one to a Welsh miner, `a member of the Correspondence School'.58 But often unions made their own selection. 1903, a turning-point for Ruskin, was a year of equal signi®cance for University Extension. John Marriott, who succeeded Sadler as Extension secretary in 1895, allocated a day of the 1903 Summer Meeting to a special conference of `Trade Unionists, Co-operators and Extensionists', on `The Higher Education of the Working Man'. This was the opportunity for Albert Mansbridge to present his `Association to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men', a title changed two years later to the more manageable Workers' Educational Association, which had been launched at Toynbee Hall in the previous month as a grouping of working-class organizations concerned with adult education.59 John Percival, then Bishop of Hereford, presided in the morning and G. W. Kitchin, the Dean of Durham, formerly Censor of Christ Church and one of the ®rst Censors of the Non-Collegiate students, in the afternoon. Both men had given support to the founding of the Oxford Extension movement and had remained in sympathy with its original ideals. It was stressed that the methods that the Association would employ `would be primarily those of the Extension of University Teaching' and would be `a new means for the furtherance of long-recognised aims'.60 Mansbridge's background as a co-operator, a university extension student, his friendship with Charles Gore, his enthusiasm for `the glory of education', and his recognition of the inspiration of Arnold Toynbee, drew a warm response from University extensionists. As Marriott reported, `the Delegates believe that the Association contains the promise of much usefulness in the future and that it may do much to rally the working classes to the future support of an educational movement which, largely initiated for their bene®t, has already won a large measure of their con®dence.'61 Aided and abetted by supporters notable in University and labour circles, Mansbridge's Association received wide publicity. The ®rst branch was established at Reading in 1904 with the support of the highly successful university extension college there. It was W. M. Childs, an experienced extensionist and recently appointed principal of the college, who devised the constitution for branches of the Association (later used by the WEA itself). By 1905 the WEA had a full-time secretary, Albert Mansbridge, and `a name which was becoming widely known in the educational world, a number of branches and a large number of working-class organizations'.62 58

Ruskin College, House Committee Minutes, 1 Mar. 1907. Oxford University Extension Delegacy, Summer Meeting, 1903. Report of Proceedings Part 2 (1903), 27, OUA DES/SB/3/3/10. 60 Ibid. 32. 61 Annual Report, 1902±3, 5 OUA DES/SB/3/10. 62 M. Stocks, The Workers' Educational Association, the First Fifty Years (1953), 35. 59

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At the 1905 Summer Meeting at Oxford `a largely attended conference' to `report upon and further the work of the Association' was presided over by the Dean of Christ Church and addressed by Mansbridge, the Bishop of Hereford, the Earl of Crewe, Michael Sadler, and Will Crooks.63 Alongside the campaign to promote the Association, however, a new and closely related campaign began to be planned which was crucially to alter the fortunes of both Mansbridge and his educational movement. Inspired by `the rising sun of labour', Barnett judged that the time had come to press for University reform and recruited William Beveridge and R. H. (`Harry') Tawney, recent residents at Toynbee Hall, for the campaign. He had already introduced them to Albert Mansbridge and recommended his cause. Early in 1906 Beveridge reported to his parents that `Canon Barnett has written an article in the Tribune on ``Labour and Culture'' in which a passing allusion to the endowments of Oxford and Cambridge has caused quite a storm in Oxford.'64 Barnett thus paved the way for Beveridge and Tawney and their young University friends to pick up their pens in the resulting war of words. On 31 January 1906 Beveridge was writing of a talk `with Zimmern who is to be one of Harry's and my collaborators in an assault on our University. Harry's article in the Westminster ought to be appearing soon, and might cause great excitement.' Tawney, under the guise of `Lambda', did indeed elicit just such a response. As Beveridge put it, `the outraged University is blaspheming horribly.'65 Beveridge and Tawney, with schoolboy devilry, began to plan what Beveridge described as `THE GREAT CONSPIRACY': Seven of us, the three mentioned (Beveridge, Tawney, A. W. Pickard-Cambridge), Zimmern, W. Temple, R. W. Livingstone and E. J. Palmer being Fellows of six different colleges, and Harry. . . took rooms at Boars Hill, above Oxford, and morning and evening discussed topic by topic the reform of that blessed University. . . At the last meeting we then divided the subject into chapters which were allotted to each of us to be written by our next meeting in October. I have to tackle Finance, and the relation of Oxford Education to the professions. Others have Oxford and Secondary Schools, the Teachers, the Teaching, the Taught, Government Research.66

Barnett's links with the press ensured that the articles written by this group received wide national coverage. At Barnett's house in Westminster Cloisters the Oxford `reformers' discussed strategies with London sympathizers such as Arthur Acland, J. A. Spender, then editor of the Westminster Gazette and one of Acland's earnest followers in Oxford in the early 1880s, and Charles Gore, Mansbridge's mentor. 63 University Extension: Oxford Summer Meeting, 1905. Report of Proceedings, Part I (1907), 37, OUA DES/SB/3/3/11. 64 Tribune, 18 Jan. 1906. 65 Beveridge to his father, 31 Jan. 1906, Beveridge MSS, BLPES. 66 Ibid. 18 Mar. 1906.

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In July 1907, Gore carried the campaign into the House of Lords by proposing that a Royal Commission be set up to inquire into both Oxford and Cambridge, `in order to secure the best use of their resources for the bene®t of all classes of the community'.67 The next day the Westminster Gazette noted the wide acceptance of the need for some degree of University reform: the Times, the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph, are at one in this respect with the Liberal Papers, and even in the House of Lords itself there was no voice raised in opposition, unless it was that of the Bishop of Oxford, pleading for what may be called the Eton and Christ Church view of the University. . . We ourselves remember vividly how when the question was ®rst raised . . . remonstrances poured in against the zeal of the `young fanatics' who would lay rash hands on venerable institutions. We have now got to the point when the desirability and even the necessity of doing a large number of the things proposed is admitted as a matter of course, and the question resolves itself into that of the best way of going to work.68

University reform was no longer, as Zimmern put it, `a subject for academic debate', but `one of the most urgent questions of national policy'.69 The campaigners thus arrived at the Oxford Summer Meeting the next month with considerable con®dence. Marriott had, some months before, asked Gore to chair a conference during the Summer Meeting and suggested the theme of `The University and the Working Class'. He had also arranged for a leading co-operator, Walter Nield, to present a paper on `What Workpeople want Oxford to do', and for Sidney Ball, the radical don from St John's, to respond with `What Oxford can do for Workpeople', and for Mansbridge to send out invitations. Mansbridge's Oxford friends seized the opportunity which Marriott had unwittingly offered. Here also was a chance for those who placed their trust in the internal reform of the University to show what could be done. On Saturday 10 August 1907 the conference, which was held in the Examination Schools, attracted 420 delegates from 220 organizationsÐmostly trade-union branches and trades councils. Among the array of notables present were three heads of houses (including Sir William Anson, recently Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education), Philip Snowden MP, and Sir Robert Morant, Permanent Secretary at the Board of Education and a former Toynbee Hall resident.70 Morant's presence was signi®cant, for he came with the message that the Board was willing to provide ®nance for solid educational work of a high standard in small classes. Who better to stand guarantor for this than the 67

Parl Deb. 4S clxxviii. 1526 (24 July 1907). Westminster Gazette, 25 July 1907. 69 Fortnightly Review, 81 (1907), 744. For the reform campaign and its outcome see below, ch. 32. 70 University Extension: Oxford Summer Meeting, 1907. Report of Proceedings, Part I (1907), 41±7, OUA DES/SB/3/3/12. 68

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University of Oxford? Messages of sympathy with the aims of the conference were received from the Chancellor, Lord Curzon, and the Vice-Chancellor, T. H. Warren, a long-standing supporter of extension. The principal speakers had been well briefed, and, as Tawney later revealed, `the similarity of their tone' was no accident.71 The `further cooperation' suggested by Nield and Ball was that, since the WEA now provided an effective and authoritative basis for joint action between working-class organizations and the University, the way was open for experiments with small `tutorial classes', with the subjects, tutors, and methods of tuition tailored to meet the needs and circumstances of working-class groups under the guidance of the University. In addition it was hoped that a path could be opened for selected working-class students from those classes to come to Oxford and be admitted to read for diploma courses. It was clear from the tenor of the contributions from the ¯oor, as well as from the opening speeches, that Oxford would be expected to meet some of the costs from her endowments. Mansbridge has recorded that it was a ®ery speech of J. M. Mactavish, a Portsmouth shipwright and Labour councillor, which moved the Oxford conference. Not only are workpeople deprived of the right of access to that which belongs to no class or caste, the accumulated knowledge and experience of the race, but Oxford herself misses her true mission, while the nation and the race lose the services of its best men . . . Democracy will realize itself, with or without the assistance of Oxford; but if Oxford continues to stand apart from the workpeople, then she will ultimately be remembered, not for what she is but for what she has been.72

The conference passed a formal resolution, moved by Walter Nield and seconded by Sidney Ball, which, `af®rming the growing desire on the part of the workpeople for higher education, and anxious for the further cooperation of Oxford in the systematic teaching of historical, economic, and other liberal subjects' asked for the formation of a committee of seven persons nominated by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and seven persons nominated by the executive of the WEA, in order to suggest `the best means of carrying into effect the suggestions made in the two papers read before this Conference'.73 71

Ball to Barnett, 21 Mar. 1907, WEA Archives. Tawney's annotations were made in 1914. A. Mansbridge, University Tutorial Classes (1913), 194. See also the report in Oxford Summer Meeting, 1907, 46, OUA DES/SB/3/3/12. 73 Oxford Summer Meeting, 1907, 44; `Suggested Agenda', OUA DES/F/14/1; Oxford and Working-Class Education, being the report of a joint committee of university and working-class representatives on the relation of the university to the higher education of workpeople (1908; 2nd edn 1909), preface; B. Jennings, `The Making of the Oxford Report' in the introductory essays to the reprint of the 1908 report, ed. S. Harrop (Nottingham, 1987); Goldman, Dons and Workers (n. 5), 117±27. 72

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In a letter to F. E. Hutchinson, the secretary of the Delegacy, written a few months before his death in 1930, Sir Herbert Warren wrote, `I am pleased to think that it fell on me as Vice-Chancellor to start the alliance with the WEA.'74 It was no doubt this goodwill on the part of the then Vice-Chancellor and other in¯uential ®gures in the University, including the Chancellor, Lord Curzon, and Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls, which helped the setting up of the proposed joint committee of inquiry in Michaelmas term 1907. The seven University members nominated by the Vice-Chancellor were all extensionists and, apart from T. B. Strong and J. A. R. Marriott, among those extensionists most anxious to form an alliance with the WEA. Professor H. H. Turner, A. L. Smith, Sidney Ball, Alfred Zimmern, and H. B. LeesSmith were closely involved with Toynbee Hall and Ruskin College. Lees-Smith was chairman of the executive committee of Ruskin and its former Vice-Principal. The WEA side was both representative and powerful. Besides Mansbridge, the general secretary of the WEA and by then a member of the consultative committee of the Board of Education, it included D. J. Shackleton and C. W. Bowerman, two of the outstanding labour leaders of the time, also connected with Ruskin. J. M. Mactavish and Alfred Wilkinson represented the then small band of Labour town councillors. W. H. Berry represented the educational committee of the Co-operative Union and Richardson Campbell represented the National Conference of Friendly Societies. Contemporaneous events in some local centres forced the pace. The Oxford Extension Delegacy standing committee minutes of 13 August 1907 record the formal request for a two-year tutorial class for Rochdale with twenty-four to twenty-six sessions in each of two years and the number of students attending limited to thirty. This was referred to the full Delegacy meeting on 10 October, called by order of the Vice-Chancellor, which unanimously decided that `the Delegacy is willing to grant half the expenses of the proposed class at Rochdale out of the special funds at its disposal.'75 At the next meeting of the Delegacy on 29 November it was resolved to provide thirty-six classes (until Easter 1909) at Rochdale and to invite R. H. Tawney to act as tutor.76 On 7 February assistance was offered to run a tutorial class in Longton.77 At both Rochdale and Longton highly successful university extension classes, which had attracted large numbers of working men, had been conducted for several years by E. L. S. Horsburgh and Hudson Shaw on historical, political, and economic subjects, and the local 74

L. Magnus, Herbert Warren of Magdalen (1932), 172. Minutes of the Extension Delegacy, 96th Meeting, 10 Oct. 1907, OUA DES/M/1/4, p. 104. 76 97th meeting of the Delegacy, 29 Nov. 1907, ibid. 122. 77 99th meeting of the Delegacy, 7 Feb. 1908, ibid. 130. For the 1911 report on these classes see p. 849 below. 75

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university extension committees now organized the ®rst two tutorial classes. Thus within one month of the ®rst meeting of the joint committee on 26 and 27 December 1907, the ®rst two experimental tutorial classes had started. By the time of the third meeting on 18 and 20 April, detailed reports were available on the two experimental classes. This helped the committee to come to its interim conclusions which were presented as a private document to the Hebdomadal Council on 27 April 1908. The conclusions had been carefully drafted by T. B. Strong to conciliate and disarm potential critics. Although the WEA had started off by proposing a special delegacy for the education of workpeople, Strong persuaded them that it would be advisable to suggest that `by comparatively small changes, effects of the greatest value and importance might be produced', and that `the University Extension Delegacy is the natural body to undertake this work,' whose own worth had prepared the way.78 By 16 June the statute drafted by Strong had been approved by Council and promulgated in Congregation. The statute ®nally approved by Convocation on 27 October 1908 stated that: It shall be lawful for the Delegates to appoint persons who are not members of the Delegacy (whether members of the University or not) to be members of any committee of the Delegacy, provided that such persons shall not be present or vote at meetings of the Delegacy, and that the number of persons so appointed to serve on any committee shall not exceed the number of its members who are also Delegates.79

Disliking the administrative arrangements, Marriott, who foresaw that the new joint secretariat would operate to a large degree independently of the Delegacy, asked to be excused service on the tutorial classes committee. The new developments were the culmination of thirty years' effort by Oxford Extension, which had presided at the birth of the WEA. The ®rst two experimental tutorial classes, the success of which had been so vital to the joint committee, had been organized under the auspices of the Extension Delegacy by two of its local committees and arrangements were under way for the Delegacy to sponsor a further six tutorial classes in the winter of 1908±9. Yet however much the many working men by then exercising positions of leadership in the labour movement acknowledged their debt to extension and to Oxford, they and their friends associated with the WEA knew that there was also fear and distrust of Oxford in the working-class movement. That could be allayed only by placing the government of the new tutorial classes ®rmly in the hands of a committee on which it was manifest that they had at least equal in¯uence. The efforts of the Oxford reformers to open up the University to working-class men were similarly received with suspicion 78 79

101st meeting of the Delegacy, 15 May 1908, ibid. 145. Gazette, xxxix (27 Oct. 1908), 115.

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by some of those, including Ruskin and ex-Ruskin students, who were caught up in the burgeoning socialism of the day. They regarded the University as anathema, a bourgeois institution whose object could only be to suborn the leadership of the working classes and to integrate them into established society and thus to neutralize them. To them the report of the joint committee of inquiry (published as Oxford and Working-Class Education in October 1908) supplied further, solid evidence that the University wanted to take over Ruskin. Working-class education, they felt, ought to be run by the working class and any connection with the University or with the state was to be resisted. In 1909, after a student strike, the dissident Ruskin students broke away and established the Central Labour College in Bradmore Road, moving to London shortly afterwards. From then until its demise in 1964 the Labour College movement (mainly consisting of evening classes and correspondence courses after the Central Labour College closed in 1929) constantly and bitterly opposed the WEA and its allies, such as Ruskin.80 This was despite the fact that in 1910 Ruskin had adopted a new constitution which essentially met the opposition demand: it restricted its governing body to representatives of working-class bodies. In future University dons would act in a non-voting, advisory capacity. However, although Ruskin remained independent of the University it developed closer contacts. The earlier practice of University dons doing some of its teaching, and Ruskin students attending University lectures, continued; and some of the students thenceforth sat for the diploma in Economics and Political Science. But Mansbridge and the WEA executive had rightly judged that for them Oxford's participation was critical. It was not simply that the WEA stood for the same educational values as the University and wanted these to be embodied in their work; the guarantee of Oxford's participation and share in government was the condition of state support essential to an effective adult education movement. Also, Oxford Extension offered a professional working body experienced in organized educational activities in dispersed centres throughout the country. It had the machinery to deal with problems such as ®nding quali®ed tutors, book supply, ®nding local premises, and above all securing appropriate educational standards. The 1908 Report ensured that this organization would now be directed towards the purposes of working-class education as determined by the working-class leadership. It also provided a further opportunity to urge the University, in terms which 80 Pollins, History of Ruskin College, 17±23; J. Atkins, Neither Crumbs nor Condescension: The Central Labour College, 1909±1915 (London and Aberdeen, 1981); B. Jennings, ```Revolting Students''ÐThe Ruskin College Dispute, 1908±9', Studies in Adult Education, 9 (1977); R. Lewis, Leaders and Teachers: Adult Education and the Challenge of Labour in South Wales, 1906±1940 (Cardiff, 1993), 59±79; Goldman, Dons and Workers, 165±79.

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echoed Jowett's warnings of 1877, to keep abreast of social change, `if Oxford is to continue as a living force in English education' and to be a vital part of `a democratic community'. Ideally `the Universities would become the apex of a single educational system' and the importance of liberal education within that system was pressed: By the avenues of Art, Literature, and History, it gives access to the thoughts and ideals of the ages; its outward mask is a broad reasoned view of things and a sane measure of social values; in a word, it stands for culture in its highest and truest sense. This `liberal' education should be a common heritage.81

Oxford and Working-Class Education recorded in a prefatory note that the immediate aims of the WEA and their Oxford allies had been won. The Joint Committee (H. H. Turner, A. L. Smith, A. E. Zimmern, T. B. Strong, Shackleton, Bowerman, Mansbridge) had been established and tutorial class students could be admitted to read for the Economics and Political Science diploma. In the longer term the Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee, as a national joint committee of the WEA and the University, gave leadership and generated the momentum that was to make the WEA far more successful and in¯uential than its founders ever expected. The Report of 1908 provided a manifesto for the working-class education movement, with detailed information and persuasive argument which could `be referred to for guidance in future by all universities, teachers and working class societies who are dealing with the question'.82 Mansbridge's hope that the report would be a real landmark in the development of education and assist other universities as well as Oxford to make provision was realized. The WEA exploited the lead given by Oxford and local working-class leaderships as well as by its academic friends, and challenged the new civic universities in the north to play their part. By 1913±14 Oxford was running 18 tutorial classes with 418 students and 16 other universities or university colleges were running 145 classes with 3,234 students. Oxford men like Zimmern, Temple, Tawney, and Henry Clay were among the core of the WEA national leadership, and this academic input played a considerable part in establishing the WEA as a force in the labour movement. In 1909 Oxford convened the ®rst inter-varsity co-ordinating committee in England, the Central Joint Advisory Committee for Tutorial Classes, which for many years was to be a leading national adult education institution.83 Also Oxford, both through the Oxford WEA Summer School which started in Balliol in 1910 and through Ruskin College, remained a focal point 81

Oxford and Working-Class Education (1908), paras 67, 82. Ibid., para. 10. Conference on University and Tutorial Classes in Industrial Centres convened by the University Extension Delegacy at Oxford, October 2, 1909 (1909), OUA DES/M/1/4, 256. 82 83

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and meeting-place for what Tawney later described as `An Experiment in Democratic Education'. The participation of Oxford in this `experiment' had been vital and one which justi®ed the groundwork of the extensionists. Oxford had been enabled to play a leading role in `the development of a democratic education and of an educated democracy' and in so doing had furthered its own transformation into a national University capable of responding to the social revolution of the twentieth century.

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28 Oxford and the Empire r i c h a r d sy m o n d s Oxford is still amply reminded of its imperial past.1 A statue of Cecil Rhodes faces the High Street from the building which Oriel College erected with his money, each of his feet planted on the head of a King-Emperor. Opposite, in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, a boss of Mahatma Gandhi looks down on the memorial to the great orientalist, Sir William Jones, who has an even more imposing memorial in University College chapel. Two martyr bishops are commemorated; James Hannington of Central Africa has a stained-glass window in St Peter's College, his halo supported by a rhinoceros and a lion; on the marble ef®gy in Merton College of J. C. Patteson of Melanesia is sculpted the palm branch found on his body, tied in ®ve knots, each signifying one of the kidnapped Paci®c islanders whom he sought to save, but whose kinsmen murdered him. On the walls of the old Indian Institute, controversially appropriated in 1965 for another purpose, tigers, elephants, and Hindu gods may be discerned. In Rhodes House and college halls there are portraits and busts of Oxford men who were founders, statesmen, and proconsuls of the Empire. Oxford's connection with the Empire is as old as the Empire itself. In the ®fteenth century, when the Lancastrian rulers in France sought to counter the in¯uence of the University of Paris, it was an Oxford scholar who was brought to be the ®rst rector of their University of Caen.2 In the next century while Oxford's earliest geographer, Richard Hakluyt, was urging in his writings that colonies be established in North America to relieve unemployment in England, Thomas Harriot of St Mary Hall was teaching mathematics to Walter Ralegh of Oriel and accompanying Sir Richard Grenville as navigator on his voyages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries several Oxford men were involved in founding colonies. John Locke combined the teaching of philosophy with the post of Secretary to the proprietors of Carolina; General James Oglethorpe of Corpus founded Georgia as an asylum for imprisoned debtors and European Protestant 1 Many of the themes in this chapter are discussed in greater depth in R. Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (1991; ®rst published 1986). 2 C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415±1450 (1983), 113.

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refugees, and was brie¯y and uneasily assisted by John and Charles Wesley. The lectures on jurisprudence of William Blackstone were a basis for the arguments of the American revolutionaries. In the early nineteenth century Christ Church provided a succession of aristocratic Governors-General of India. The high period of Empire in Oxford, however, was very short, hardly longer than between Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 and the 1914 war. It was in 1895 that the editor of the Oxford Magazine ®rst mused on the fact that `we are all ``imperialists'' nowadays.'3 From that time patriotic and sentimental poems about the Empire, often sprinkled with metaphors from organized games, frequently appeared in the Magazine, including those which honoured not only Rhodes and Milner but the anonymous Oxford men who ruled the Empire in Asia and Africa, and, inevitably, the defenders of Mafeking. During the Boer War Major the Revd M. B. Furse, chaplain and Dean of Trinity and Acting Commandant of the University Volunteers, used the columns of the Magazine to appeal to prospective ordinands to enlist in the army, to the expressed disgust of Arthur Quiller-Couch.4 Sir Herbert Warren, as Professor of Poetry, devoted lectures to a comparison of Virgil and Tennyson as imperial poets,5 while Mrs Charlotte Haldane made lists of Empire products which wives of dons were encouraged to seek out at Ellistons and Grimbly Hughes, the Oxford drapers and grocers respectively.6 The Canadian, George Parkin, eloquently appealed to Oxford to take up the role which Rhodes had offered her as a great imperial university. Between 1900 and 1914 whoever had an axe to grind or a cause to promote was likely to do so in the name of the Empire. Three broad questions arise concerning the in¯uence of Oxford on the Empire and the reciprocal in¯uence of the Empire on Oxford. First, what was Oxford's perception of empire and contribution to its philosophy? Secondly, what did the various interests in Oxford seek to obtain, and actually obtain, in the name of empire? Thirdly, what was the in¯uence of Oxford on her graduates and senior members who went out to serve in the Empire and on those who came from the Empire to study at the University; and conversely, how did the colonials in¯uence Oxford? The kind of imperialism which grew up in late nineteenth-century Oxford may be understood in the light of two earlier, and as it seemed to many Oxford men, cataclysmic events. One was the Tractarian or Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s: the bitter theological feuds led to a reaction against organized religion. Secondly, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man caused a wide questioning of the truths of 3 4 5 6

OM 6 Feb. 1895, 196. OM 5 Feb. 1902, 189±90, 12 Feb. 1902, 208. L. Magnus, Herbert Warren of Magdalen (1932), 239. L. K. Haldane, Friends and Kindred (1961), 187.

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the Bible. J. Macmillan Brown described in his memoirs how undergraduates at Balliol in the 1870s had broken loose from their religious moorings, in¯uenced not only by Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man (a favourite book of Cecil Rhodes), but also by ethnological works which suggested that much of the fundamental doctrine of the Christian creed originated in the beliefs of primitive peoples, rather than in divine inspiration.7 Jowett obtained a post for Brown at Canterbury College, New Zealand, where his loss of faith proved no handicap, for he became Vice-Chancellor of the university and eventually Chancellor of the University. For a number of men of very different characters such as Rhodes, Milner, the constitutional lawyer, A. V. Dicey, the economist, W. A. S. Hewins, and the historian, H. E. Egerton, the imperial cause came to have a mystical nature which to some extent provided a substitute for, or annexe to, their religious faith. Between Newman's secession and the appointment of Charles Gore as Principal of Pusey House the message of Oxford's prophets was largely secular. Those whose names recur as formative in¯uences upon the makers, supporters, and critics of Empire are Ruskin, Jowett, T. H. Green, and Toynbee. Ruskin, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Fine Art delivered on 8 February 1870, a copy of which was one of Rhodes's cherished possessions, called on Oxford men to go out and colonize for England every piece of land they could lay their hands on.8 He later expressed admiration for the autocratic style of the British rulers of the Punjab.9 Equally important was the impact of his teaching about the dignity of labour and the social role of the state on men as assorted as Milner, Toynbee, Parkin, and Oscar Wilde, who as undergraduates worked on the construction of the Hinksey Road under his direction, and breakfasted with him at Corpus. Ruskin's message was reinforced on a philosophical basis by T. H. Green, who taught that the state should be regarded as a positive moral good, with a duty to introduce social reform. Green's pupil, Arnold Toynbee, as tutor to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) probationers, taught the same doctrine in relation to political economy, maintaining that classical economic theories should not be applied in India.10 Benjamin Jowett, tutor and later Master of Balliol, shared with Ruskin, Green, and Toynbee their dislike for the Manchester School of economics and laissez faire. For him the importance of the Empire lay in the opportunities which it provided for Oxford men to do good. He took great pains with the ICS probationers, about half of whom in the early 1880s studied at Balliol when few other Oxford or Cambridge colleges wanted them. One reason why he did so was that he deplored the attitude of racial 7

J. Macmillan Brown, Memoirs (Christchurch, NZ, 1974), 36ff. Ruskin, Works, xx. 41±2. 9 Ibid. xxxi. 505. First published in A Knight's Faith (1885). 10 A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884), introductory memoir by Jowett. 8

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superiority of most British administrators in India and hoped that, by studying at Balliol, the probationers might acquire a more courteous manner in their later relations with Indians.11 The pupils of Jowett, Green, and Toynbee came to believe that service to the state and to poor and deprived people at home and abroad was the noblest way in which an Oxford man might spend his life. Most of those who, under the in¯uence of those three, went out to the Empire did so in a humanist rather than a religious spirit, and Jowett's tradition of hard academic work caused them to concern themselves meticulously with the details of administration. Several of the Regius Professors of Modern History in¯uenced Oxford's attitudes to Empire; indeed, one of the objects in the founding of the chair by George I had been to train men for government service abroad. In 1842 Thomas Arnold laid down a principle which was to be maintained by Oxford historians for a hundred years, namely that history should be studied for its moral lessons, particularly, as he considered, through observation of the cycle of the rise and decline of former empires and civilizations.12 Two later holders of the chair, William Stubbs and E. A. Freeman, by their enthusiasm for the Teutonic origins of English institutions, contributed to attitudes of racial superiority which came to be held at the end of the nineteenth century. Freeman's ideal empire, `a unity of the scattered English folk', based on what he regarded as the enduring ties between Englishmen around the globe, had no place for Indians or Africans.13 His successor, J. A. Froude, was a fervent and romantic supporter of empire and imperial federation, who audaciously defended Cromwell as `the best friend in the best sense to all that was good in Ireland' and described the slave trade as innocent and even bene®cial.14 Despite the occasional interest of the Regius Professors, however, it appeared to L. S. Amery unsatisfactory that the ®rst Rhodes scholars in Oxford would ®nd no provision for the teaching of the history of the British Empire, and in 1904 he persuaded the South African diamond magnate, Alfred Beit, to endow a professorship and lectureship in colonial history.15 The ®rst Beit Professor, H. E. Egerton, who held the chair from 1905 to 1920, was a graduate of Corpus and a former Colonial Of®ce of®cial, who in his inaugural lecture echoed Arnold in declaring that colonial history should be studied for its moral edi®cation.16 The only justi®cation of an empire, he taught, was the moral one; because of the qualities of British administrators, 11

Jowett to Lansdowne, 4 Jan. 1891, Jowett, Letters, 126. T. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History (1842), 1±43. W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Lettters of Edward A. Freeman (2 vols 1895), ii. 179±80. 14 H. W. Paul, The Life of Froude (1905), 215, and E. E. Williams, British Historians in the West Indies (Trinidad, 1964), 138±40. 15 L. S. Amery, My Political Life (3 vols. 1953±5), i. 183±4. 16 H. E. Egerton, The Claims of the Study of Colonial History upon the attention of the University of Oxford (1906). 12 13

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Britain's expansion was not only in the interests of British trade, but of the people who came under her rule and indeed of the world.17 In his lectures he described the sense of an unseen providence controlling the development of the Anglo-Saxon race.18 Egerton's former colleague at the Colonial Of®ce, C. P. Lucas, who left it to become a fellow of All Souls and write imperial history, shared this emotional, almost religious, approach to the way in which the successive racial virtues of Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans had combined to launch the British Empire.19 Egerton once declared that `every school building is a citadel of empire and every teacher its sentinel.'20 Several Oxford historians, including Egerton and Lucas, wrote textbooks to provide ammunition for these sentinels; the most successful was C. R. L. Fletcher whose school History of England, published by Oxford University Press in 1911, gained great popularity because it included a number of original poems by Rudyard Kipling; it remained in print until 1954 and sold 134,000 copies. The book gave considerable attention to the Empire. Among various national stereotypes, Ireland was described as a `spoilt child' and the West Indians as `lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement'. Democracy in Britain was stated to be `still on trial', and the youthful readers were informed that it would be the duty of the King to refuse to agree to any proposal from Government or Parliament for the surrender of India or the Colonies.21 The in¯uence of the classics, and of those who taught them, though less direct, was as important as that of modern history. Almost every undergraduate reading Greats, and most of those reading for a pass degree, studied Aristotle's Ethics, a work which Rhodes carried with him on the veld, pondering how a man could do the greatest good. Reading it in 1901, the undergraduate and future imperial administrator George Schuster came to see the purpose of his life.22 From both Aristotle and Plato there was a comforting support for rule by an eÂlite, that proportion of the British population who passed from public schools through Oxford and Cambridge. The Platonic virtues of loyalty, courage, responsibility, and truthfulness were admirably suited to imperial administration; more questionable was the belief derived from Plato that inexpert intelligence was the best quali®cation for the highest posts in government. While the study of Aristotle 17 H. E. Egerton, MS lectures on `British colonies in the 19th century', lecture xiv, 32, Rhodes House Library. 18 Ibid., lecture xv, 33. 19 Both Egerton and Lucas were to some extent disciples of J. R. Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge; see J. Greenlee, `A Succession of Seeleys', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, iv (1975±6), 272. 20 Egerton, lecture xv, 33. 21 C. R. L. Fletcher and R. Kipling, A History of England (1911), 21, 240, 220, 228. 22 G. E. Schuster, Private Life and Public Causes: A Personal Record 1881±1978 (1979), 4, and in conversation with the writer.

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and Plato inspired principles of conduct, practical lessons of history emerged from that of Thucydides. Policy-makers and teachers of colonial history would constantly return to the example of the Athenian Empire. To some the loose links between the Greek city-state and its overseas colonies provided a model to be emulated by the British Empire. By others the Boer War was seen as Britain's Sicilian expedition. From the study of Roman history the style of the Oxford men who were to rule the Empire at home and abroad was often in¯uenced by their recollections of the practice of divide and rule, the building of buffer states, and the use of local auxiliaries.23 Two important books which compared the Roman and British Empires were written by Oxford men during the high imperial period. Both C. P. Lucas and James Bryce observed that, whereas Roman rule was based on a class distinction between freemen and slaves, that of Britain was based on race distinction. Bryce considered that the British feeling of separation from brown and black peoples was Teutonic in character and too deeply rooted to be effaced.24 Unlike Bryce, Lucas did not think that Indians were ®t for the higher posts in administration, and made a proposal, later adopted by L. S. Amery as Colonial Secretary, that men from the white dominions be incorporated in the British Colonial Service, a measure which accentuated racial distinction.25 There were two great proconsuls who made an eloquent contribution to the philosophy of empire, and who Oxford felt to be particularly her own, so that each was elected Chancellor of the University. Alfred Milner and George Curzon were near contemporaries at Balliol, where they read Greats and won many prizes; both became president of the Oxford Union and were recognized by their contemporaries as destined for distinguished careers. Milner was converted to imperial federation by George Parkin at the Union. Curzon arrived from Eton already believing that the British Empire was the greatest instrument for good in the world's history; later he was to say that he could not understand how anyone educated at Oxford in his time could fail to be an imperialist. As Viceroy of India Curzon was surrounded by Oxford men; Milner as High Commissioner in South Africa recruited his `kindergarten' entirely from Oxford, and mainly from New College, of which he was a fellow, and All Souls. Yet ironically the Oxford connection was partly responsible for a severe setback in both careers. The Secretary of State for India, St John Brodrick, whom Curzon considered to have manoeuvred his resignation of the viceroyalty in 1905, had been his closest undergraduate friend but was motivated, Curzon believed, by jealousy at his subsequent successes. Milner relied in vain on his Balliol friends, Asquith 23

R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek (1964), 98, 171. J. Bryce, The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1914), 58±9 and passim. 25 C. P. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912), 178 and passim. 24

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and Grey, to restrain the damaging attacks on him by the Liberals over the use of Chinese labour in South Africa.26 There was, however, a signi®cant difference in their philosophy of empire. Milner described himself as a British race patriot and hoped for a union of British peoples, to which the non-white dependencies were seen as a temporary excrescence.27 Curzon, on the other hand, could not envisage an empire which did not include India. As Viceroy he maintained that there was no Indian capable of serving on his Council and that `the millions I manage are less than children,'28 but later, as a minister in the Lloyd George administration, it was his hand which drafted the declaration that responsible government within the Empire was the object of of®cial Indian policy. In his speeches as Chancellor of the University he sought, without much success, to de®ne the links which might hold together a multiracial empire.29 The divergence between the two men became clearer when Milner's young Oxford graduates returned to Britain and set up the Round Table, with the object of applying to the broader problem of imperial unity the principles and methods by which South African Union had been achieved. They exercised considerable in¯uence in Oxford through their connections with All Souls, where Rhodes's business associate, Rochfort Maguire, and several of Milner's young men, including Dougal Malcolm, R. H. Brand, L. S. Amery, and their `Prophet', Lionel Curtis, were fellows. Other groups in which Oxford men were prominent were also examining the possibilities of imperial federation, or of some closer association, particularly among the dining clubs which were a feature of the Edwardian age. Among these were the Webbs' Co-Ef®cients Club, of which Amery, Halford Mackinder, and W. A. S. Hewins were members; the Compatriots Club, founded by Mackinder, Hewins, and Amery to strengthen each other in the imperial faith; and the Pollock Committee, chaired by Sir Frederick Pollock, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, whose recommendations for an imperial conference with its own secretariat became the basis of the Conservative Party's policies. In Oxford itself Curtis and others founded the Ralegh Club for the discussion of imperial problems. More widely, the Round Table's in¯uence was spread through The Times, of which Geoffrey Robinson (later Dawson) became editor in 1912, and L. S. Amery and Edward Grigg 26 K. Rose, Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and His Circle (1969), 354; G. N. Curzon, autobiographical fragment in Curzon MSS, BLOIOC; T. H. O'Brien, Milner (1979), 177, 187. Asquith had been two years Milner's senior at Balliol. With Grey, Milner's Balliol connection was less direct. Milner had left for London in 1879, a year before Grey came up. For Margot Asquith's comments see Bodl. MS Eng. d. 3204 fos 43, 51v. 27 Address by Milner on `The Two Empires', Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, xxxix (1907±8), 329±48; Lord Milner, Questions of the Hour (1925). 28 Rose, Superior Person, 345. 29 e.g. Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Subjects of the Day: being a Selection of Speeches and Writings (1915), 17.

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successively served as Colonial Editor; and in Parliament, of which Amery, Hewins, MacKinder, and Grigg were at various times members. About the same time, however, Richard Jebb of New College in his book Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905) powerfully argued that neither the concept of imperial federation nor that of an imperial navy was realistic. By 1914 most members of the Round Table, though not yet Curtis, were beginning to doubt the practicability of imperial federation in the face of the unwillingness of the white dominions to give to an imperial parliament control of defence and foreign policy or powers of taxation. Although they had originally accepted the objectives of their former chief, Milner, the problem of India was to lead some of them into advocacy of a multiracial commonwealth of autonomous states. Others, like Grigg, strongly resented the abandonment of the vision of Milner, Rhodes, and Rosebery of a union of white races.30 At the same time as making a substantial positive contribution to imperial theory and faith, Oxford produced a continuous line of opponents or critics of Empire. One of the earliest was Goldwin Smith who, as Regius Professor of Modern History, wrote a series of articles in the Daily News in 1862±3 urging that the colonies of settlement be made independent because their existence dissipated Britain's strength and enfeebled her diplomacy. He also described the existing strong points of the Empire, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands, as unnecessary or indefensible, and India as a splendid curse.31 Smith held and expressed these views for ®fty years; although he left Oxford for Cornell and then Toronto, he frequently returned to lecture, and in his old age expressed his indignation that the University was being used as a pedestal for Cecil Rhodes.32 As a fellow of University College in the early 1850s Smith had associated with a group of Wadham men who were also to become critics of Empire, though from a different impulse. His own objections to Empire were economic; he described himself as the last of the Manchester School.33 The Wadham Positivists, on the other hand, took up an anti-imperialist position on ethical grounds because their leader, the French philosopher Auguste Comte, had proclaimed that no nation was ®t to rule over another. When Richard Congreve, fellow of Wadham and one of the most in¯uential tutors in the University, forsook his evangelical Christianity to become a Positivist, Comte asked him, as the movement's most important British follower, to 30 On the Round Table see W. B. Nimocks, Milner's Young Men (Durham, NC, 1968); J. E. Kendle, Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto, 1975); H. V. Hodson, `The Round Table 1910±1981', Round Table, 284 (Oct. 1981), 30; and D. Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth (1995). 31 E. Wallace, Goldwin Smith, Victorian Liberal (Toronto, 1957), 183; Goldwin Smith, The Empire (1863). For Disreeli's view see p. 42. 32 Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences (New York, 1910), 369. 33 Ibid. 219.

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take up the question of the relinquishment of colonies by Britain, starting with Gibraltar.34 Congreve was assisted in this task by three of his former pupils at Wadham, Frederic Harrison, a ¯uent journalist E. S. Beesly, and J. H. Bridges. Throughout forty years the Positivists, in their books and articles urged the relinquishment of India to an international commission and that Malta be turned into an international police station; they also opposed the Crimean, Abyssinian, Afghan, and Boer wars. John Morley, who had himself come under Positivist in¯uence at Oxford, opened the Fortnightly and Comptemporary Reviews to their articles.35 Some of the Positivists lived long enough to link up with the next generation of Oxford critics of Empire, the group centred on the Manchester Guardian under C. P. Scott, who, as an undergraduate at Corpus, had acquired a lasting sympathy for minority causes when obliged to attend chapel though a Unitarian.36 He later recruited to the Guardian's staff a number of young Oxford graduates who had taken ®rsts in Greats; these included L. T. Hobhouse of Corpus, whose attacks on the new imperialism were the central theme of his Guardian articles,37 and J. A. Hobson of Lincoln College, who was the newspaper's reporter in South Africa, and whose book on imperialism was to be made famous by V. I. Lenin.38 Two other Oxford critics of Empire on the Manchester Guardian staff were J. L. Hammond of St John's and C. E. Montague of Balliol. On the edge of both the Positivist and Manchester Guardian circles was Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek, who brought his classical expertise to the cause, haunted by the example of how Athens had forsaken democracy, become corrupted by imperialism, and gone to a friendless doom.39 His Irish Catholic family background in Australia gave him a sympathy with all subject peoples. He deplored in particular the contemptuous attitude to Indian intellectuals of many British writers and journalists, pointing out that the tendency of a ruling race to become jealous of its subjects could be disastrous to an empire.40 Those who were critics of Empire usually supported Irish Home Rule. Their numbers were small after 1886; only seventeen senior members of the University were reckoned to have remained faithful to Gladstone when the 34

R. Congreve, Gibraltar; or, the Foreign Policy of England (1857), 4. F. H. Torlesse, Some Account of John Henry Bridges and His Family (1912); F. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs (2 vols 1911); E. S. Beesly, `England and the Sea', in R. Congreve (ed.), International Policy (2nd edn 1884), 113ff. 36 J. L. Hammond, C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian (1934), 12±22. For the problem see p. 22 n. iii and Pt 1, 701. 37 L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (1904). 38 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (1902). 39 D. Wilson, Gilbert Murray, OM (1987), 76±7. 40 `Reminiscences', Gilbert Murray Papers, Box 484, Bodl.; G. Murray, `The Empire and Subject Races', Sociological Review, cxi ( July 1910), 227±32. 35

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Liberal Party split over his Irish policy.41 Among the few critics of Empire who remained in Oxford were Arthur Sidgwick of Corpus, on whom C. P. Scott relied in his recruitment of young Liberals to the Manchester Guardian, and Sidney Ball of St John's. The majority of dons were supporters of the Empire which was bringing to Oxford the benefactions of Rhodes, Sir Abe Bailey, Beit, and others, and was providing employment for their pupils and sometimes for themselves. In a funeral oration for Frederic Harrison in Wadham College chapel, Gilbert Murray suggested that none of Harrison's causes had succeeded.42 Yet in perspective it may perhaps appear that the Oxford Positivists and their successors on the Manchester Guardian exercised as much in¯uence as the members of the Round Table who wrote for The Times, in bringing about the gradual transformation of Empire into Commonwealth. Of all those who were concerned to see what the Empire could do for Oxford, Jowett's idea was the clearest and most successful. As early as 1853 he wrote to Gladstone, then a Member of Parliament for the University, to urge that Oxford be given a share in the Indian appointments as an answer to the question which a college tutor so often heard, `What line of life shall I choose, with no calling to take Orders and no taste for the Bar, and no connections who are able to put me forward in life?'43 Jowett was a member of Macaulay's Committee on the Indian Civil Service which successfully recommended that in future it should be opened to graduates selected by competitive written examination, instead of by nomination through patronage of boys aged about 15.44 Under the new system Oxford won 33 per cent of the places in the ICS between 1855 and 1859. The government, however, progressively lowered the upper age limit for candidates from 23 to 21, and thus graduates became too old to qualify. In the period between 1874 and 1878 Oxford's share in the appointments fell to 3 per cent. In 1878 the age limit was further reduced to 19, but with the provision that the candidates who were selected should subsequently spend two years as probationers at a university.45 Thanks to Jowett a large proportion of them came to Oxford, where in 1886 an honours degree course in Indian Studies was established; the probationers were allowed a third year if they took this course. There was a further 41

OM 16 June 1886, 253. Bodl. Murray MSS, Box 501, fo 83. 43 Cited in R. J. Moore, `The Abolition of Patronage in the Indian Civil Service and the Closure of Haileybury College', Historical Journal, vii (1964), 250. 44 The report of the committee, dated Nov. 1854, was printed in Papers Relating to the Examination of Candidates for the Civil service (East India), PP 1854±5 xl. 112±20. 45 Papers Relating to the Selection and Training of Candidates for the Indian Civil Service, PP 1876 lv. 278±99; Correspondence between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India Relating to the Age at which Candidates for the Civil Service of India are Admitted to Competition in England, PP 1884±5 lviii. 119±57. 42

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change in 1892, however, when the age limit was raised to 23 and the probationary period reduced to a year. This led to the collapse of the degree course in Indian Studies, but to a preponderance of Oxford men in the ICS. Between 1896 and 1914 Oxford men won about 53.2 per cent of places compared with about 30.6 per cent from Cambridge. Oxford's success in this later period was largely due to the persistent efforts of J. L. StrachanDavidson, fellow and later Master of Balliol, to obtain a system of marks in the ICS examination which was highly favourable to men who had read Greats. He achieved and maintained this by constant pressure on a network of Balliol men who included three consecutive Viceroys, a Secretary and Permanent Under-Secretary of State for India, a Chief Civil Service Commissioner, and, after 1908, the Prime Minister.46 There was annoyance in Cambridge at the way in which the ICS competition was advantageous to Oxford men, yet, as the Civil Service Commissioners pointed out in 1911, one reason for Oxford's greater success in the examination was that the University put forward as its candidates its best men of the yearÐwho were overwhelmingly classicistsÐto a much greater extent than Cambridge, whose science and engineering graduates preferred other careers.47 While Jowett had wanted Oxford men to serve in the ICS because of the possibilities which the service offered for doing good, Strachan-Davidson was typical of many classical tutors in seeing the value of the Empire to Oxford partly in terms of how it might be used to maintain and strengthen the dominant position of the Greats school. The development of Indian Studies was in¯uenced by three groups in the University. In addition to those who were primarily interested in them in relation to employment for their pupils, a considerable number of senior members supported them as a means towards the conversion of India to Christianity. A third and smaller group had a scholarly interest in the study of Sanskrit and of Indian culture. Oxford's connection with India was very old, starting with the translation of the New Testament into an epic poem in Marathi by the Jesuit priest from New College, Fr Thomas Stephens, in the late sixteenth century.48 At the end of the eighteenth century Oxford produced two brilliant oriental scholars in Sir William Jones, fellow of University College, and Nathaniel Halhed of Christ Church; the ®rst Boden Professor of Sanskrit, 46

Information from annual reports of the Civil Service Commission (published in PP) and annual tables published in OM. See also the evidence of Oxford witnesses in Appendix to the Royal Commission on the Public Services in India, vol. xi, PP 1914 xxiv. 453±61 (T. H. Warren), 573±84 ( J. L. Strachan-Davidson). In the Balliol `network' were Lansdowne, Curzon, and Elgin; St John Brodrick and Sir Arthur Godley; Lord Francis Hervey; H. H. Asquith. 47 J. L. Hammond (secretary, Civil Service Commission) to India Of®ce, 29 Mar. 1911, Strachan-Davidson Papers, IV.B. 4. iv, BCLP. See also Symonds (n. 1), 2±3, 28, 189±92. 48 Bulletin of the London School of Oriental Studies, 1923±5; 231; The Month 1955, 199.

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H. H. Wilson, was also a scholar of considerable distinction. The Boden chair of Sanskrit was endowed by Lieutenant-Colonel J. Boden of the East India Company and established in 1832 with the object of furthering the conversion of India to Christianity. On Wilson's death the election of his successor by members of Convocation was ®ercely contested between Monier Monier-Williams, supported by Conservative and Evangelical interests, and Max MuÈller, the foremost Sanskrit scholar in Europe, who was supported mainly by the Liberals. Monier-Williams was elected in December 1860 by 833 votes to 610 and the embittered Max MuÈller turned from Sanskrit to philology and comparative religion.49 Monier-Williams, with considerable help from Jowett, was responsible for starting the short-lived degree course in Indian Studies, which included not only Sanskrit but modern Indian languages, history, and economics; he also founded the Indian Institute in Oxford in 1884, built with money raised by private subscriptions in India and Britain. He hoped that the Institute would provide residential accommodation for Indian students and, with its library, museum, and lecture-rooms, would serve as a centre for the ICS probationers and all engaged in Indian Studies at Oxford. It would also instil some knowledge of India into those undergraduates reading Classics and Modern History who might in the future, as Members of Parliament, civil servants, or in other capacities, have an in¯uence on India's destinies.50 Friedrich Max MuÈller had originally come to Oxford from Germany to supervise the printing by the Clarendon Press of the Rig-Veda and was far better known outside Oxford than Monier-Williams for his popularization of Indian studies. He was implacably hostile to Monier-Williams and his Institute, declaring that it would have been much more sensible to spend money on research and fellowships than on `bricks and stuffed animals'.51 In the end, apart from the library, the Institute became little more than a centre for the ICS probationers and acquired an of®cial character which made Indian students reluctant to use it. Curzon, when he visited it in 1909, found that its social gatherings and lectures had ceased, and that its museum was of no service whatsoever to education and useless to art and science. `That the collection is visited annually by more women than men,' he commented severely, `is a suf®cient condemnation of its retention here.'52 A `teacher' in Indian history and law was appointed in 1861 and this arrangement was expanded into two readerships in 1878. The Reader in Indian History was required by statute to lecture on the history of British rule and not on that of India itself. The post (as it evolved) was held from 49

R. Gombrich, On Being Sanskritic (1978); Symonds, (n. 1), 101±11. `Record of the establishment of the Indian Institute' (n.d.), Indian Institute, Oxford. 51 G. Max MuÈller, The Life and Letters of F. Max MuÈller (2 vols 1902), ii. 369. 52 Con®dential note by Lord Curzon, 1909, in Minutes of the Curators of the Indian Institute, OUA II/M/1/13. 50

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1864 to 1908 by Sidney Owen, an Evangelical, who sometimes lectured at white heat on the general moral turpitude of Indian rulers,53 but perhaps fortunately gave his main attention to editing the despatches of Lord Wellesley as Governor-General and of the Indian campaigns of his brother, the future Duke of Wellington. Vincent Smith, who retired from the ICS in 1900 to deputize for the aged Owen, wrote the highly successful but somewhat prejudiced and unimaginative Oxford History of India (1918);54 as an Irish Protestant he passionately disputed any steps towards home rule anywhere. W. H. Hutton, who succeeded Owen as reader, was a proli®c writer of biographies and textbooks, but had no special knowledge of India. It cannot be said that Oxford's contribution to Indian history in this period was nearly as distinguished as that made to Sanskrit by the Boden Professors, Wilson, Monier-Williams, and A. A. Macdonell, and by Max MuÈller. The Oxford University Press, however, published the `Rulers of India Series' edited by Sir W. W. Hunter, an outstanding scholar and administrator who took early retirement from the ICS and settled in Oxford. It also published Max MuÈller's `Sacred Books of the East'; Monier-Williams took exception to the title of the latter series, maintaining that only the Bible deserved to be described as a `sacred book'.55 The complacent view of Oxford's in¯uence on the Empire which was so often expressed by classicists and historians was not shared by the natural scientists. Several of these had studied in Germany and were also acquainted with the Empire at ®rst hand through research travels and through participation in the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which were sometimes held in Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Their work was often concerned with imperial problems; the Hope Department under E. B. Poulton became the entomological centre of the Empire at a time when the subject was of great importance in relation to insect-borne human and animal diseases which hampered colonial development. Poulton and another Oxford scientist, E. R. Lankester, Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy, attacked the system which placed the appointments of the ICS, and of those who made and executed imperial policy, into the hands of Greats men who were ignorant of, and even contemptuous towards, science. They criticized Oxford's neglect of research in general as harmful to the Empire. Lankester contrasted the scienti®c illiteracy of the British ruling class with the position in Germany, and compared Oxford with Nero, as it contentedly produced charming and beautiful studies while Britain was in mortal peril for lack of knowledge of nature.56 In an article on `The Empire and University Life'(1905), Poulton invoked the needs of 53 54 55 56

W. H. Hutton, The Teaching of Indian History (1914), 8. See A. L. Basham in C. H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India and Pakistan (1962), 272. M. Monier-Williams, The Holy Bible and the Sacred Books of the East (1887), 7±19. E. R. Lankester, Romanes Lecture, Nature and Man (1905), 43.

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Empire in support of a broad attack on Oxford's educational methods, by which young men were instructed by purveyors of second-hand knowledge and had their intellectual powers permanently damaged, whereas in German universities experts were trained in the making of knowledge through the association of the pupil with his professor.57 Poulton, who was a member of the Hebdomadal Council, sought through Milner to obtain a million pounds from the Rhodes Trust for the scienti®c equipment which was needed to make Oxford `a great Imperial University'. Though Milner was unable to obtain help on this scale, he was sympathetic and informed Poulton that even the Boers had been quicker than the British in the application of science to war.58 The temporary progress made by the scientists in Forestry has been charted in Chapter 20 (pp. 475±6). The decision by the India Of®ce to close the Indian Government's Forestry School at Coopers Hill originated in the conviction that the members of the ICS were often an obstacle to forestry management because of their ignorance of science.59 To hold their own it was decided that future Indian Forest Of®cers needed the prestige of an Oxford diploma in forestry. The unrealistic requirement that candidates should show knowledge of German, Latin, and Greek, as well as of mechanics, physics, chemistry, and biology, resulted in very few British and virtually no Indian candidates being accepted for the course. The Oxford monopoly was also effectively opposed by Cambridge, particularly after Convocation rejected a Forestry degree course in 1910. The arrangement made in the following year whereby the Forest Service probationers were divided between Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh proved uneconomical; and when Oxford lost its grant in 1913 the outlook would have been bleak but for William Schlich's fund-raising energy and willingness to forgo his salary.60 The two subjects which pro®ted most from the interest in Empire were geography and anthropology. The Royal Geographical Society was concerned that those responsible for imperial policies had little geographical knowledge: the Society's offer in 1886 to pay half the cost of a readership has already been mentioned.61 It was accepted in the following year: modern and indeed imperial geography was largely the creation of H. J. Mackinder, the ®rst Reader. He had taken Oxford degrees both in natural science and in modern history, and had also studied geology and anthropology; he was thus well equipped to obtain broad co-operation within the University in the establishment of a Geography school and diploma course. He was a strong 57

E. B. Poulton, Viriamu Jones and Other Oxford Memories (1911), 258ff. Poulton to Milner, 16 Nov. 1902, Milner to Poulton, 16 Dec. 1902, Bodl. Milner MSS Dep. 180. 59 E. P. Stebbing, The Forests of India (4 vols 1922±62), ii. ch. 2, iii. ch. 3. 60 Schlich's of®cial connection with the India of®ce ended in 1911. He was then appointed to a readership, with the status of Professor of Forestry. 61 D. I. Scargill, `The Royal Geographical Society and the Foundation of Geography at Oxford', Geographical Journal, cxlii (1976), 443±4. See also p. 611 above. 58

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advocate of imperial federation and had a ¯air for popularization; the new political geography was spread through summer schools which he organized for secondary-school teachers.62 When Mackinder left Oxford for wider ®elds in 1904, he was succeeded by A. J. Herbertson, who had an equal enthusiasm for Empire. Under him the Geography school organized lectures for the ICS probationers and taught surveying to those from Sudan. With ®nancial assistance from the South African magnate, Abe Bailey, a library and reading-room were established for students of colonial geography and history, with special facilities for colonial of®cials on leave. Herbertson's dream was to set up an institute of imperial geography and history in Oxford, linked with an imperial intelligence department in the government, and with geographical and statistical services in the colonies; the war and his early death put an end to this scheme.63 The Education Act of 1902 led to a considerable demand for textbooks on the new subject of Geography to which Oxford geographers responded enthusiastically; textbooks by Mackinder and by Herbertson and his wife sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The magnum opus of the Geography school was the six-volume Oxford Survey of the British Empire edited by Herbertson and his colleague, O. J. R. Howarth, and published by Oxford University Press in 1914. The Survey was written by many hands who were allowed full scope for generalizations in `political' geography. Thus in India the disloyal attitude of the Congress Party was unfavourably compared with that of the Indian princes, who were described as `practically English gentlemen'; and the undesirability of mixed marriages was asserted. The incapability of the Ceylonese for self-government, the patriotism of the New Zealanders, the touchiness of Australians, and the extraordinary failure of the South African natives to die out and make room for British artisan immigrants were discussed. These and other con®dent assertions in the Survey throw a fascinating light on Oxford's perception of the Empire in 1914.64 A readership in Anthropology was established in 1884 as a condition of the bequest of the Pitt-Rivers collection. The ®rst Reader, E. B. Tylor, was respected as the father of British social anthropology, but failed to obtain degree status for his subject, being opposed not only by the classicists and theologians but by the natural scientists. His successor, R. R. Marett, was a skilful University politician who shrewdly played the imperial card; he justi®ed a diploma course by the needs of the ICS probationers and Rhodes scholars; he 62 W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (1982) and B. W. Bluet, Halford Mackinder (College Station, Tex., 1987). 63 A. J. Herbertson, `Geography and Some of Its Needs', Geographical Journal, xxxvi (Oct. 1910), 478; L. J. Day, `A. J. Herbertson', Geography, 1 (1965), 358. 64 A. J. Herbertson and O. J. R. Howarth (eds), The Oxford Survey of the British Empire (6 vols 1914), ii. 305, 312, 368; iii. 144; v. 310, 427.

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obtained the support of the Greats teachers by persuading them that anthropology was an extension of their subject.65 The diploma's curriculum was aimed at missionaries and census of®cials as well as colonial administrators. In 1913 out of forty-one students studying for the diploma, twenty were of®cers serving under the Colonial Of®ce and ten were seeking similar posts.66 The pupils of Marett and of Henry Balfour, who was Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1891 to 1939, remained their pupils for life. Among those who consulted them on leave or persuaded Balfour to visit them in the ®eld were a remarkable succession of Oxford scholar-administrators in the ICS who had mostly come to anthropology through study of the classics and then through writing census reports and working with primitive tribes. As one of them said, what the amateur anthropologist needed was training and encouragement, and above all someone to answer letters and give a welcome when he came on leave;67 this is exactly what Balfour and Marett provided over some forty years. While most of the anthropologists had read Classics, the interest of others was derived from studying Zoology and Botany with the Darwinists at the University Museum. Among the most distinguished of these was Sir Baldwin Spencer, fellow of Lincoln College, who became Professor of Biology at Melbourne University, and whose study of Australian aborigines was incorporated by J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough.68 By contrast with Geography and Anthropology, little attempt was made to expand Economics in the name of Empire, though Herman Merivale as Drummond Professor of Political Economy had devoted his lectures between 1839 and 1841 to the subject of colonies and colonization and went on to become Under-Secretary at the Colonial Of®ce and India Of®ce.69 Of the group of young Oxford economists at the end of the nineteenth century who came together to discuss social questions, only Toynbee, who died young, and W. A. S. Hewins, who left Oxford early in his career, gave much attention to the Empire. In 1913, however, A. D. Hall, a Balliol man who was then a member of the Development Commission, persuaded the University to establish an Institute for Research into Agricultural Economics in order to carry out work on speci®c subjects for the government. The Institute was to render considerable service to the Empire both in research and in the training of colonial agricultural of®cials.70 65 Oxford University Anthropological Society, Anthropology at Oxford (1953); R. R. Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford (1941), 156±77. 66 Report of the Committee for Anthropology for the year 1913, Gazette, xliv (28 Jan. 1914), 411. 67 J. P. Mills, `Anthropology as a Hobby', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 83 (1953), 1±8. 68 D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860±1929 (Melbourne, 1983). 69 H. Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (2 vols 1841±2; new edn 1861). 70 Annual reports and ®les, Institute of Agricultural Economics, Oxford. See also E. G. Whetham, Agricultural Economics in Britain 1900±1940 (1981).

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The only part of the Empire for which special provision was made in the study of law was India; the readership in Indian Law from 1878, ®nanced by All Souls, has already been mentioned. It was held successively between 1878 and 1923 by Sir William Markby and Sir E. J. Trevelyan, both former Calcutta High Court Judges. Their main duties were in teaching the ICS probationers. The interest in Empire of Oxford's professors of law, such as Bryce, Dicey, and Pollock, was, as we have seen, mainly expressed through their extracurricular rather than their University activities. In law, as later in medicine, the Empire made as much impact on Oxford as Oxford on the Empire. The Rhodes scholars mostly came from countries where legal education had a more important place in the universities than it had in Oxford. They raised the standards in examinations and became the backbone of the BCL course. A number of them stayed on to teach.71 The Rhodes scholarships are the subject of a separate chapter. Their advent accelerated the abolition of compulsory Greek and led to an expansion of graduate studies. They also brought back to England as their organizing secretary the Canadian George Parkin who, as an undergraduate, together with Milner, had ®rst raised the cause of imperial federation in the Oxford Union in 1874. Between 1904 and 1914 Parkin persistently urged Oxford to respond to the Rhodes scholarships by developing the best schools of law, geography, and history that the world had ever seen, and teaching the languages of all parts of the Empire. Above all he pleaded that a school of Government should be created in which all the constitutional experiments of the Empire would be studied.72 By 1914 Parkin had hardly persuaded the University to share his vision, though he was supported in occasional exhortatory speeches by the Chancellor, Lord Curzon, particularly in respect of the imperial importance of geography and law. Congregation was prepared to accept diploma courses in geography, anthropology, and forestry, but rejected appeals in the name of the Empire to make them degree courses, so that eventually Oxford's early lead was lost to other universities. There was implacable opposition to the teaching at degree level of any subject which could be regarded as vocational. The example of Rhodes's career was cited in support of a proposal to create a business diploma in 1913, but the statute was rejected by Convocation.73 It is not easy to estimate how important the Empire was in providing employment for Oxford men, because many of the college registers contain no information on careers. Of the four colleges whose registers are most informative on this point over the period 1874±1914, the percentage of 71 F. H. Lawson, The Oxford Law School, 1850±1965 (1968), 261. The All Souls Reader in English Law, 1884±96, Sir Thomas Raleigh, had a strong interest in India, becoming Legal Member of the Viceroy's Council. 72 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, xl (1908±9), 74±7. 73 For this episode see pp. 855±6 below.

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members known to have gone on to work in the Empire for at least two years was 27.1 per cent (Balliol), 21.9 per cent (Corpus), 20.4 per cent (Keble), and 16.7 per cent (St John's).74 From Balliol and Corpus by far the largest proportion worked in the Indian and colonial services; the highest proportion of those from Keble and a signi®cant proportion from St John's went out in a religious capacity. The largest number of those from Corpus, Balliol, and St John's served in India, and from Keble in South Africa. Such differing characteristics between colleges make overall estimates dif®cult, but it seems likely that that the proportion of those who worked in the Empire was not less than 20 per cent, and probably rather more if account is taken of those for whom no information is available, and if those who died in the First World War before embarking on careers are discounted. By far the largest number served as government of®cials, missionaries, or teachers. The registers of the ®ve women's colleges all contain information on the careers of some of their former students, but there are many whose careers are not recorded. Of these some were wives of men who worked in the Empire and may themselves have been employed in a voluntary or salaried capacity. There are so many gaps that percentages would not be meaningful. Of those who can be identi®ed as working in the Empire, the largest number came from Somerville (66) followed by Lady Margaret Hall (38), the Society of Oxford Home Students (36), St Hugh's (29), and St Hilda's (17).75 Even these ®gures are partly a re¯ection of the different dates of the founding of the women's societies and variations in their size. Two-thirds of the women known to have worked in the Empire were teachers; India received the largest number, followed by South Africa. Before 1914 appointments to colonial posts were mostly made by the Secretary of State without any systematic selection procedure. Oxford men did well under this system of patronage; a notable example was Sir George Bowen. While he was a fellow of University College he became president of the University of Corfu and chief secretary of the Ionian Islands. Knighted (KCMG) at the age of 35, he went on to serve as a colonial governor in ®ve colonies continuously for twenty-eight years, always spicing his despatches with donnish comparisons of local situations to the history of ancient Rome.76 From 1906 appointments by the Colonial Of®ce to Ceylon, Malaya, and Hong Kong were made through the same written entry examination as the ICS; almost always these were of men who did not come high enough on the list to win a place in the ICS. Special arrangements were also made for the Sudan whose political service, which was responsible to the Foreign 74 See the Appendix of tables on the number, profession, and country of work of Oxford men and women who worked in the Empire, in Symonds, (n. 1), 306±12. 75 Ibid. 76 S. Lane-Poole (ed.), Thirty Years of Colonial Government: A Selection from the Despatches and Letters of Sir G. F. Bowen (2 vols 1889).

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Of®ce, was opened in 1904 to university graduates appointed by interview. In Oxford the University Appointments Committee handled both their recruitment and training. Oxford was to have the same preponderance in this service as in the ICS, though the men chosen for the Sudan tended to be more athletic and less intellectual.77 While the historian of the ICS, Philip Mason (non de plume Philip Woodruff), himself a Balliol man, has compared the ICS members with Plato's Guardians,78 in the muscular Sudan and elsewhere in the colonies the philosophy of trusteeship perhaps owed as much to recollections of public-school relationships between prefects and fags as to the classics. Letters to the Oxford Magazine complained bitterly of the conditions of service both in Asia and in Africa, outside India and the Sudan, and of how few men survived there long enough to earn pensions. Even so, the Appointments Committee placed twenty-eight men in colonial administrative posts in 1908 and thirteen in the following year.79 Vivid impressions of the Empire which they went out to rule were often contained in the letters which the administrators wrote back to former tutors or to contemporaries who had remained in Oxford. Those to L. R. Phelps, fellow and later Provost of Oriel, cover a period of ®fty years. Until about 1900 the letters from India glow with pride in benevolent despotism. Then doubts about the future of British rule and the bene®ts of bureaucracy creep in. In Africa the sequence was to be repeated some thirty years later. The letters often begin with news of other Oxford men and of local sport; they contain requests for books and Oxford gossip and sometimes for recommendations about the social acceptability of individual probationers who are coming out to join the writers. In the letters to H. A. L. Fisher at New College from Milner's young men in South Africa there is frank expression of how fortunate the crude local people are to have cultured Oxford men among them. In such correspondence nostalgia for Oxford, a deep affection for their tutors, and a determination to maintain the standards of their public school and University emerge, often in political, social, and economic situations on which the writers seek advice.80 Oxford took a maternal interest in the new colleges and universities which her alumni helped to found in the Empire. Gifts of books were sent, and from the end of the nineteenth century the University Calendar published a list of universities of the Empire which had been granted `privileges' entitling 77 A. Kirk-Greene, The Sudan Civil Service. A Preliminary Pro®le (1982). For the Appointments Committee see Pt 1, 495. 78 `P. Woodruff', The Men Who Ruled India (2 pts 1953±4), Pt II The Guardians. 79 OM 17 Feb. 1897, 197; 4 Feb. 1909, 170; 3 Feb. 1910, 171; 20 Oct. 1910, 5±6. 80 The L. R. Phelps papers in Oriel College contain many letters from former pupils abroad; on that collection see D. S. Porter, `An ``unrealised proposal'': the Bodleian Library and the Phelps Papers', Bodleian Library Record, xv (1994±6), 51±7. The H. A. L. Fisher papers in the Bodleian contain letters from P. Kerr, L. Curtis, and other New College men in South Africa. See also Symonds, (n. 1), 199±202, 65±6.

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their graduates coming to Oxford a remission of the time required to read for a degree. The most enthusiastic attempt to found an Oxford overseas was made in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1850. Thirty of the ®fty subscribers of the Canterbury Association were Oxford men, many of them members of the Oxford Movement, desirous of putting its principles into practice by establishing an Anglican colony, untrammelled by the state and far from the dangerous attraction of Rome. The Association planned to set up a university college in its settlement which would become `The Oxford of the Southern World'. Oxford University provided a surprisingly vocational plan for the college, where, although all students would belong to the department of classics, there would also be departments of civil engineering and agriculture. The Anglican settlement with its Anglican university was, however, to prove an anachronism. Even in Oxford itself religious tests began to be abolished in 1854. Very soon land had to be sold to settlers of any denomination or none. For many years there was no money to build a cathedral or to provide any post-secondary education except in theology.81 From the middle of the nineteenth century Oxford men, and later women, went out to teach in the Empire in considerable numbers. The Colonial Bishoprics Act led to the establishment in the new dioceses of `Bishops' Colleges' to train the clergy. These were often staffed from Oxford or Cambridge, according to the antecedents of the Bishop. Some Oxford men went out because they wished to marry, and would thus lose their college fellowships, but felt no vocation for the work of a parish clergyman at home. Some were radicals, escaping from the restrictions and conventions of Oxford and England into the more democratic societies of the colonies of settlement. There were also conservatives, many of them among the Canterbury Pilgrims, who ¯ed from the threat of revolution which spread through Europe in 1848. Several went for their health, the Oxford climate being notoriously dangerous before Jowett as Vice-Chancellor caused a proper drainage system to be built. Most probably went because there were not enough attractive posts at home in the civil service, the law, the Church, or in teaching to absorb Oxford's increasing output of graduates. Some originally went out as farmers; if they failed at that, as a number did particularly in the conditions of the late nineteenth century, education was the only profession for which their degrees in classics or history ®tted them. Whereas Cambridge men predominated in mathematics, Oxford men were most likely to be found as teachers of classics. Often they had to teach other Arts subjects as well, which their grounding in the Oxford classical school usually seems to have enabled them to take up rapidly and effectively. They mostly brought with them a strong, even obstinately held view that it was not the business of a university, or even of a grammar school, to provide 81

Canterbury Papers (1850), 101 and passim.

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vocational education. As John Woolley, fellow of University College, declared at the inauguration ceremony in 1852 of Sydney University, of which he was the ®rst Principal, `The soundest lawyers come from schools in which law is never taught. The most accomplished physicians are nurtured where medicine is but a name.'82 Such attitudes frequently brought them into con¯ict with leaders of colonial opinion. Some of the earlier emigrants also carried with them the seeds of religious controversy. Later, the men who came from Jowett's Oxford were mostly laymen of great earnestness who believed that a national education system, though aimed at producing an eÂlite, should open the road to the top to the ablest boys from all ranks of society. Several of them brought from Oxford a zeal for extramural education and talent for public exposition which gave them considerable in¯uence in the colonial communities, especially in Australia and New Zealand. The lectures of MacMillan Brown in New Zealand were delivered with such emotion that students were seen to emerge from them as if from a sacrament.83 Arnold Wood, also from Balliol, asserted in his inaugural lecture as Sydney's ®rst Professor of History in 1891 that `The purpose of the study of history is to enable the student in his turn to make history. . . The study of history is the study of noble ideas.'84 The earliest generation of women students at Oxford felt both a duty to make good use of their rare education and a spirit of adventure, liberated as they were from the prospect of purely domestic lives. From the letters, often published in college magazines, of those who went out to the Empire as teachers it appears that the uncouth behaviour of their kith and kin in the old dominions caused more shock to the Oxford women than that of their pupils in India, where attitudes were expected to be different, and where there were often long family connections with missionaries and with the ICS. Eventually discipline was introduced everywhere. The shy and timid pupils were developed and the careless and frivolous were sobered and deepened until institutions worthy of the ideals of LMH and Somerville had been brought into being. The letters written by the early Oxford women to their old colleges seldom complain. They bubble with enthusiasm at the almost unlimited scope which they have to use their education.85 Among both senior and junior members there was a lively interest in missionary work in the Empire; up to a thousand people would attend the missionary breakfasts of Canon A. M. W. Christopher, rector of St Aldate's, 82

J. Woolley, Lectures Delivered in Australia (1862), 13. Macmillan Brown (n. 7), 28. R. M. Crawford, A Bit of a Rebel: The Life of George Arnold Wood (Sydney, 1975), 132. On other Oxonians in Australia, see R. Symonds, `The Foundation of All Good and Noble Principles, Oxonians and the Australian Universities in the Nineteenth Century', in H. Morphy and E. Edwards (eds), Australia in Oxford (1988). 85 See the LMH Brown Book, Somerville Students Association Report, St Hugh's College Chronicle, The Ship (OH/St Anne's), and St Hilda's Chronicle. 83 84

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to hear a visiting Bush Bishop. There were two missions for which the University felt a special responsibility; the Oxford Mission to Calcutta for whose work, according to the Oxford Magazine, `Oxford men have an aptitude, as others have not,' and the Universities Mission to Central Africa, which had a high death rate and was described as `The Church's Forlorn Hope'.86 Of all Oxford's lost causes none received more enduring support than that of the conversion of India to Christianity. In 1681 John Fell, Bishop of Oxford and formerly Dean of Christ Church, persuaded the East India Company to endow scholarships at Oxford for its future chaplains.87 Early in the nineteenth century University prizes were offered for essays on the conversion of India,88 which was also the subject of Ruskin's Newdigate prize poem in 1839. The prospects had never seemed better than in 1880 when a group of High-Churchmen, meeting in Christ Church, founded the Oxford Mission as a celibate order; just as early Christianity had spread through the Empire from Rome, so it was now believed that the critical point in India was its capital city of Calcutta. The Oxford men were to work closely with Calcutta University; it was hoped that Brahmo Samaj would provide an intellectual bridge with Hinduism and that the conversion of India would proceed rapidly from the top downwards.89 The Mission soon established a students' hostel (which was named `The House' and its yard `The Meadow') and a complete system of boys' education. It was strengthened and broadened by the arrival of Sisters led by Mother Edith Langridge, a former Vice-Principal of LMH. Yet by about 1910 it became apparent that there was to be no rapid breakthrough, as powerful elements in the rising nationalist movement came to be identi®ed with the preservation of Hinduism. The Mission now had to try to be content with indirect results through the in¯uence of Christian teaching on Indian thought and character, and with the hope that the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Indian nationals which they founded would have more success in later generations. Though they made few converts, they were admired for their evident holiness, and provided a rare atmosphere in which the Bengali middle class, ridiculed and feared by many British of®cials and writers, could discuss intellectual problems freely with British graduates.90 The Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was launched jointly by Oxford and Cambridge in 1857 in response to an appeal from David 86

OM 12 Feb. 1902, 200; 26 Oct. 1887, 31±2; 1 June 1892, 400. W. W. Hunter, `A Forgotten Oxford MovementÐ1681', Fortnightly Review, lxv (1896), 689±703. 88 OUA NW/16/1, NW/16/6. 89 G. Longridge, A History of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta (1900; 2nd edn 1910). 90 Father Douglass of Behala [Frederick Wing®eld Douglass], by some of his Friends (1952), Sister Gertrude, Mother Edith [Edith Langridge] (1984). 87

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Livingstone. Under its second bishop, W. G. Tozer of St John's College, it acquired an Anglo-Catholic and Ritualist character much more representative of Oxford than of Cambridge churchmanship and the sombre disciples of the Cambridge Evangelical saint Charles Simeon.91 H. M. Stanley described Tozer in his scarlet robe, haggling over prices in the Zanzibar Bazaar, as `the most ridiculous sight I have seen outside a clown show'.92 Between 1860 and 1900 the UMCA attracted twice as many graduates of Oxford as of Cambridge, while in the Evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS), Cambridge men outnumbered Oxford men by about three to one over the same period.93 In the late nineteenth century Oxford missionary work in both India and Africa was strengthened by the disciples of Charles Gore, who as Principal of Pusey House exercised an in¯uence comparable to that of Newman at St Mary's ®fty years earlier. These combined strong Anglo-Catholic views with an equally strong sense of social responsibility. One of them, Frank Weston, created a sensation when Bishop of Zanzibar by charging the bishops of Uganda and Mombasa as heretics because they celebrated Communion together with Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. His practical sympathy with Africans was shown in 1914 when, seeing how brutally the British army treated the porters which it recruited, he raised his own corps of porters and commanded it with the rank of major.94 In 1892 Gore founded in Oxford the Community of the Resurrection in order to provide a home and encouragement to those Anglican priests in Britain who intended to remain celibate. Members of the Community were to make a notable contribution to the organization of the African Church and to both black and white education in South Africa.95 Although the Anglo-Catholics were predominant among Oxford missionaries, an important Evangelical movement also sprang up in 1892, when the Americans John R. Mott and Robert E. Speer came to Oxford with the slogan of `Evangelization of the world in this generation', and undergraduates could be seen walking ten abreast down the High Street, singing hymns and shouting `Hallelujah'. Three students at Trinity College who took the pledge to devote their lives to evangelization were J. H. Oldham, the future missionary statesman, Alek Fraser, who became the greatest of colonial headmasters, and Temple Gairdner, who was to make a scholarly contribution to the work of the CMS in Egypt; their friend, W. E. S. Holland of Magdalen, 91

R. Symonds, Alternative Saints (1988), 175ff. H. M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone (New York, 1872), 19. 93 D. Neave, `Aspects of the University Mission to Central Africa' (University of York, unpublished M.Phil. thesis, 1974), 89, and Centenary Volume of the C.M.S. Mission for Africa and Far East (1902), 695. 94 H. Maynard Smith, Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar (1926). 95 N. Mosley, The Life of Raymond Raynes (1961). 92

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was to run the CMS Oxford and Cambridge Hostel at Allahabad University and later became Principal of St John's College, Agra. These men attached little importance to denominations; Fraser was ordained in the Church of England only at the age of 40 and Oldham remained a layman all his life.96 Among the women students at the British universities who took the pledge in 1892 were some who were determined not to go out as auxiliaries to male missionaries but to their own interdenominational Missionary Settlement for University Women, which was founded in Bombay in 1893. Somerville women were prominent in this mission, whose object was to bring the Gospel to the future women leaders of India, particularly through the Parsees, who had made Bombay the most advanced centre of women's education in India. Their experience paralleled that of the Oxford Mission to Calcutta. In the ®rst twenty years there were only two converts. Eventually the campaign of evangelization was replaced by educational and social work and `missionaries' became `staff' in the annual reports.97 The Oxford missionaries, of whatever denomination, enjoyed the great prestige of their education, by comparison with their predecessors who had been described by Sydney Smith as `the delirious mechanic' and `the didactic artisan'.98 The common University background which they shared with senior British administrators allowed them to act with a degree of independence which was affectionately accepted as characteristic of Oxford eccentricity. On the whole the Oxford missionaries, steeped in classical history and philosophy, seem to have been as successful at understanding new societies and cultures as those from other backgrounds, perhaps more so. The AngloCatholics were less prone than the Evangelicals to associate European civilization and technical progress with religion: because their faith was `catholic', and thus in some sense international, they tended to seek ways of building the new churches upon the foundations of local traditions, preserving whatever in these was compatible with Christianity.99 In 1908 Egerton referred to Oxford as `the nursing mother of the elect of the kindred peoples'.100 Men from the Empire had been coming to study in Oxford for a generation before the arrival of the Rhodes scholars. Ernest Barker remembered the Australians in the 1890s `with sunshine in their veins; they bubbled with ready fun: they blew into the antiquity of Oxford with the challenge of their own and their country's youth.'101 Among them 96 C. E. Padwick, Temple Gairdner of Cairo (1929); W. E. F. Ward, Fraser of Trinity and Achimota (Accra 1965); DNB article by K. Bliss on J. H. Oldham. 97 Missionary Settlement for University Women, Annual Reports, 1895±1919, BLOIOC. 98 Neave, `Mission to Central Africa', 70. 99 H. A. C. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism (1965), 179; S. Waddy, `The Oxford Movement in the Empire', in N. P. Williams and C. Harris (eds), Northern Catholicism (1933), 128. 100 H. E. Egerton, `Oxford and the Empire', Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, xl (1908±9), 65. 101 E. Barker, Age and Youth (1953), 323.

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were Gilbert Murray, his brother Hubert, who became governor of New Guinea, and George Henderson, who took back Balliol's idealism with him to Adelaide University, where he taught that poetry had a message for democracy and was an antidote to materialism.102 Two early Canadians whose families intermarried and formed a dynastic connection with Oxford were George Parkin, who came in 1873±4, and G. M. Wrong a little later. Neither stayed for more than a year, but to Parkin Oxford was the New Jerusalem; later, whether as a travelling salesman for imperial federation, Principal of Upper Canada College, or organizer of the Rhodes scholarships, he never, according to his son-in-law W. L. Grant, `got God and Oxford and the British Empire wholly separated'.103 G. M. Wrong introduced Oxford's teaching methods, and indeed Oxford teachers, into the history department of Toronto University, which was to become the focus of the Canadian Round Table movement and later the cradle of the Canadian Foreign Service. From Toronto he wrote back to Parkin in England, `If young men could be imbued with the ideology of Oxford, they would just think imperially and would prevent Canada from being another America.'104 In the generation up at Oxford on the eve of the First World War, Wrong's two sons and daughter, with Vincent Massey, were the centre of a lively group of Canadians at Oxford who through their undergraduate magazine, the Blue Book, sought to spread a romantic liberal imperialism, while their compatriot Frank Underhill, at Balliol, who later became one of Canada's leading socialists, was frequenting circles critical of Empire and was deriving inspiration from the works of Goldwin Smith.105 From Southern Africa too came men who were to respond to Oxford idealism. W. M. Macmillan was inspired by the lectures of A. L. Smith to interpret the role of a professor of history at Witwatersrand so broadly in economic and political enquiries as to cause him to be rebuked by the Minister of Native Affairs. J. H. Hofmeyr, the young prodigy who came to Balliol, was to become the great political hope of South African liberals. As an undergraduate at Exeter, Kingsley Fairbridge from Rhodesia resolved to devote his life to settling children from English slums in the uncultivated lands of the Empire.106 102

M. R. Casson, `G. L. Henderson', in South Australiana, iii (1964), 22. R. B. Howard, Upper Canada College (Toronto, 1979), 199. 104 W. D. Meikle, `And Gladly Teach: G. M. Wrong and the Department of History at the University of Toronto' (University of Michigan, Ph.D. thesis, 1977), 144 and passim. 105 The Blue Book, 1912±13; C. T. Bissell, The Young Vincent Massey (Toronto, 1981); N. Penlington (ed.), On Canada: Essays in Honour of Frank H. Underhill (Toronto, 1971), xi; R. D. Francis, Frank H. Underhill (Toronto, 1986). 106 W. M. MacMillan, My South African Years (Cape Town, 1975), 78 and 96; The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge, ed. V. F. Boyson (1927), 159 ff; A. Paton, Hofmeyr (1964); M. MacMillan, Champion of Africa. The Second Phase of the Work of W. M. MacMillan (Long Wittenham, 1985). 103

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Indians started to come to Oxford when undergraduates ceased to be required to be members of the Church of England. Between 1871 and 1893 49 Indians matriculated, of whom 22 were at Balliol and 16 were NonCollegiates. A high proportion were Hindus from Bengal and Bombay, or Parsees, but over 20 per cent were Muslims. About half of them became barristers: six entered the ICS.107 The ®rst Indian woman to come to Oxford was Cornelia Sorabji, a Christian from a Parsee family, who was admitted at Somerville in 1889. Though she already had a brilliant degree from Bombay, she was not, of course, at that time permitted to take one at Oxford, but Jowett arranged for a special decree to be passed allowing her to sit for the BCL examination. Her letters describe working in All Souls as `bliss' and Somerville as `a second home'; and Jowett introduced her to all the celebrities. She returned to India to devote herself to the service of women in purdah, who were often cheated of their rights for want of legal advice.108 In 1907 there were 32 Indian students at Oxford, compared with 87 at Cambridge, where they were not required to be pro®cient in Greek or Latin. A government committee on Indian Students, set up in 1907 because of anxiety about their loyalty, found the Oxford students happier and more popular than those at Cambridge, where the larger number and their concentration in three colleges was said to have caused them to form cliques, though less integrated than in some provincial universities in which public school men were not so dominant. The numbers at Oxford rose to 70 in 1914 after Indians were exempted from examination in Greek, Latin, and Divinity, a classical oriental language (Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali, or classical Chinese) and set English texts being permitted alternatives.109 With a sublime disregard for the question of disaffection, the University now examined them instead on Mill's Liberty, Milton's Areopagitica, Byron's Childe Harold, and Burke's Present Discontents and American Taxation.110 A few Africans also started to come to Oxford from the 1870s, the two earliest being Creoles from Sierra Leone. One of these, J. R. Maxwell, who matriculated at Merton in 1876 and later became Chief Justice of the Gambia, remembered his Oxford days as the happiest of his life and never forgot the kindness he received there from tutors and students, in contrast 107 J. Foster, Oxford Men and their Colleges, 1880±1892 (2 vols 1893), ii 684; J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1715±1886 (4 vols 1888), [iv.] 1632. 108 C. Sorabji, India Calling (1934); Cornelia Sorabji papers, BLOIOC; S. Gooptu, `Cornelia Sorabji, 1866±1954; a Woman's Biography', Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1997; Symonds (n. 1), 258±9. 109 See Report of the Committee on Indian Students, the Lytton Report (1922); Appendix iv gives the Lee Warner Report on Indian Students, 1907. See also p. 806. 110 See The Examination Statutes, 1902, 14±15, 24, 27; 1908, 36; 1914, 20. From 1884 to 1907 Indians were exempted in Responsions from either Greek or Latin: after 1907 from both. For the First Public Examination and Senior Status see pp. 512±14, 723 n. 15, 725 n. 21.

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to the sarcasm shown by Englishmen towards educated natives in West Africa.111 From the memoirs of the colonial students, white, brown, or black, three impressions frequently emerge: ®rst, the warmth and intellectual challenge of their relationship with their tutors; secondly, the tolerance and eclecticism of undergraduate society; thirdly, the dif®culty of breaking through the reserve of English students from public schools. Those who succeeded in making the breakthrough often did so by playing games or, particularly the Indians, by debating in the Oxford Union. What the memoirs do not say is equally revealing. Despite the individual enthusiasms of C. R. L. Fletcher and Curtis, there is no suggestion that the University through its teaching or examinations sought to inculcate doctrines of imperialism. On the contrary, the journal of Victoria University, Toronto, in 1914 complained that Oxford did not turn out nearly as many `earnest men' as Canada desired and, faced with Oxford facetiousness, suggested that as the picturesque creepers ¯ourished, the stones behind were beginning to crumble.112 The war of 1914±18 marked a watershed in Oxford's relationship with the Empire. Many of the undergraduates and their seniors were to return from the trenches disillusioned with the propaganda of imperial patriotism. The enthusiasm for Empire which had been profusely illustrated in the sentimental poems of the Oxford Magazine was never quite to revive. So few suitable British candidates entered for the ICS competition that members of the service had to be appointed by nomination. The Colonial Service, selected by interview upon the recommendation of a network of trusted dons, was to include more men who had read Modern History or the new school of PPE than Greats, and few with ®rst-class degrees. The colonial historians would continue to teach the moral lessons of imperial history, sometimes to the boredom of other members of their faculty. The geographers would lose their imperial fervour. The anthropologists would become the medicine men of the Colonial Of®ce. The position of the scientists was to improve most of all, and their greatly expanded research was to render considerable service to the Empire in a University which became increasingly dependent on outside ®nancial support. Members of Lord Milner's kindergarten and the Round Table would continue to in¯uence imperial policies from their base at All Souls and to recruit bright young men, particularly colonials, to the Ralegh Club; but the imperial loyalties of their leaders, Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, Marquis of Lothian, would become blurred in broader international causes. The Oxford Magazine reckoned that between the wars opinion was fairly equally divided between those who hated the Empire, whether on moral grounds or as 111 112

J. Renner Maxwell, The Negro Question (1892), 54. OM 22 Jan. 1915, 137.

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a class symbol, and those who would defend and liberalize it.113 Because there was no longer overwhelming support for the Empire, those old battles which continued within the University and the new ones which commenced were now seldom fought in the name of imperial needs. Despite the unique asset of the Rhodes scholarships, Parkin's dream of the Great Imperial University was quietly to fade away. Alfred Zimmern, a classical scholar who was to become Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and, like many in¯uential members of the University, was as attracted by the ideas of the League of Nations as by those of Empire, probably expressed the unarticulated feelings of Senior Common Rooms when he argued that the duty of Oxford should not be assimilation but cross-fertilization. `If Oxford ever became . . . a self-conscious intellectual metropolis', he wrote: she would very quickly degenerate . . . as Athens stiffened under the Romans when men ¯ocked thither for culture and Greece herself was dying . . . There would be a real empire, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, an empire with provinces, and everything outside of England would be incurably provincial. And to be provincial is to be dissatis®ed, to have your eyes perpetually on the centre. The bond between Oxford men . . . is not that of a common culture. It cannot be so. Nor is it that of politics, because that is outside the sphere of the University. It is simply personal. It is a bond between individuals.114 113 114

`Surviving Peace Twice', OM 20 Jan. 1967, 171±2. A. Zimmern, The Third British Empire (1926), 140±1.

page

29 The Rhodes Scholars e. t. williams Cecil John Rhodes died in South Africa, where he had made his fortune, on 26 March 1902. His estate was valued in the following year at £4,137,000; by 1907, when it was settled up, at £3,345,000.1 `The Oxford system in its most ®nished form,' he had liked to maintain, `looks very unpractical, yet, wherever you turn your eyeÐexcept in scienceÐan Oxford man is at the top of the tree.'2 In his own intermittent undergraduate career as a passman at Oriel (1873± 81), he had been impressed by, without personally experiencingÐfor he himself lived in lodgings in King Edward StreetÐ`the residential system' which he noted that the University of Edinburgh lacked. Oxford, because of its colleges, he had come to regard as the signi®cantly formative setting for a male eÂlite. He was anxious, therefore, that `young Colonists', young Americans, and, as an afterthought (January 1901), young Germans, should be educated there alongside those young Englishmen on their way up the tree, `distributed amongst the Colleges . . . and not . . . in undue numbers to one or more Colleges only'. `In the case of young Colonists studying at a University in the United Kingdom,' he asserted in his will (1 July 1899), `I attach great importance to the University having a residential system such as is in force at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge for without it those students are at the most critical period of their lives left without any supervision.' From this phrasing, the result of much heart-searching, he was envisaging boys from `public' schools overseas being awarded scholarships to Oxford: such was the burden of the hard-wrought list of attributes he sought in them, attributes which perhaps he knew himself to lack. His own elder brothers had been at Winchester and Eton, but Cecil Rhodes, as the ®fth son of the Vicar of Bishop's Stortford, had had to make do at the local grammar school. A bachelor with a shrewd perception where power lay, he purposed to bend 1 Alfred Beit, one of his original Trustees, died on 31 July 1906, and estate duty had to be paid on `his undivided seventh share of Mr Rhodes's residuary estate which he did not dispose of' (Rhodes Trust minute, 2 Aug. 1907). 2 Eleanor Alexander, Primate Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh (1913), 259. Rhodes said this in 1893.

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the future by having his surrogate and therefore idealized sons educated in Oxford colleges alongside the potential rulers of this country, thereby to link together the British and German Empires (since the Kaiser had `made instruction in English compulsory in German schools') and the United States in: the union of English speaking peoples throughout the world . . . without withdrawing them or their sympathies from the land of their adoption or birth. The object is that an understanding between the three great powers will render war impossible and educational relations make the strongest tie.

`His foible,' said Lord Milner, who became one of his trustees, `was size.'3 My desire being that the students who shall be elected to the Scholarships shall not be merely bookworms I direct that in the election of a student to a scholarship regard shall be had to (i) his literary and scholastic attainments (ii) his fondness of and success in manly outdoor sports such as cricket, football and the like (iii) his qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unsel®shness and fellowship and (iv) his exhibition during schooldays of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in his schoolmates, for these latter attributes will be likely in afterlife to guide him to esteem the performance of public duties as his highest aim.

He wanted, he asserted, `the best man for the world's ®ght', a theatre he did not de®ne. Twenty `colonial scholarships' of the yearly value of £3004 and `tenable at any College in the University of Oxford for three consecutive academical years' were to be established `for male students': three from Rhodesia, together with one each from the South African College School, the Stellenbosch College School, the Diocesan College School of Rondebosch, St Andrew's College School, Grahamstown, and Natal;5 New South Wales; Victoria; South Australia; Queensland; Western Australia; Tasmania; New Zealand; Ontario; Quebec; Newfoundland; `the Colony of Islands of the Bermudas', and Jamaica. `Additional ScholarshipsÐtwo each annually' were allocated to `each of the present States and Territories of the United States of North America'.6 The Trustees to administer this benefaction were the Earl of Rosebery, the former Prime Minister; Earl Grey, who had been Administrator of Rhodesia; 3

The Milner Papers, ed. C. Headlam (2 vols 1931±3), i. 106. In the case of the ®ve German scholars each year the stipend was set at £250 (codicil, January 1901). 5 That the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were still at war may explain their omission. 6 The legend persisted for a while that Rhodes had believed that there were still 13 states only; but his ®nancial provisions and evident awareness that territories were becoming states make it clear that he was envisaging up to 100 American scholars in stipendiary residence at any one time. See F. J. Wylie, `Did Rhodes know how many ``States and Territories'' there were?', American Oxonian, 31 (Apr. 1944), 65±9. 4

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Alfred Beit, Rhodes's ®nancial partner; Lewis Lloyd Michell, Rhodes's banker; and Bourchier Hawksley, his faithful lawyer. By a codicil (11 October 1901) Milner's name was added, and a fortnight before Cecil Rhodes died another codicil (12 March 1902) added that of Dr Jameson.7 News of the willÐit was public by 5 AprilÐwas greeted, like most novelties in Oxford, with disdain imperfectly concealing apprehension.8 Implementation betokened a lowering of standards, not only academic, a threat to the monopoly of Greek as a requisite for admission, and to college discipline and resources: a welcome to the vulgarity of Empire. Well accustomed as Oxford was by now to more than the occasional student from overseas, there was a proper reluctance to having `Heaven crammed'. An annual invasion by quite so many Americans (once it dawned that Cecil Rhodes had known that there were more than thirteen American states) not to mention at least twenty other `Colonials', with Germans superadded, took some swallowing: it was clearly important that they should not bunch in too few colleges. The Trustees met at Rosebery's London house, 38 Berkeley Square, on 5 May 1902: Rosebery himself, Grey, Beit, Jameson, Michell, and Hawksley, whose ®rm, Hallams Sons Coward and Hawksley of 30 Mincing Lane, was appointed solicitors to the Trust, Cooper Brothers being appointed as auditors. Milner telegraphed his apologies. Douglas Brodie of 16 Portman Square acted as secretary. It was decided that the scholarships should start from October 1903. In July Rosebery, Grey, Jameson, and Hawksley met at 22 South Street, Park Lane, and agreed to appoint G. R. Parkin as their agent. Hawksley was to inform the Vice-Chancellor of the decision. Brodie was now joined by C. W. Boyd, who was put in charge of the outside and committee work, Brodie of of®ce routine and correspondence.9 By 29 July it was thought expedient that the ®rst scholars should date from October 1904 and that Parkin should go abroad to arrange elections to the scholarships, his appointment to be separate from that of a Resident Agent or Superintendent in Oxford. George Robert Parkin arrived from Canada in the autumn to discuss the new scholarships on behalf of the new Trustees with the all-important heads of houses who controlled the vital admissions to the Oxford colleges. He was an unusual choice. He had been named by Albert Grey in the ®rst place (25 June 1902), although Rosebery himself had known him in the days of the 7 See Colin Newbury, `Cecil Rhodes and the South African Connection: ``A Great Imperial University?''', in F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (eds), Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth (1982), 75ff. See also an exhaustive study of `The Founder' (1988) by Robert I. Rotberg, himself a Rhodes scholar from New Jersey in 1957. 8 See Ch. 31, n. 168. 9 But Brodie soon departed, in Nov. 1905, to become Secretary of the British South Africa Company, leaving Boyd to carry on alone at £250 a year (Rhodes Trust minute signed by Milner, 2 Nov. 1905). Brodie was killed in the First World War. Boyd eventually provided the notice of Rhodes in the DNB.

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Imperial Federation League (1884±93). A New Brunswicker who had come to Oxford in 1873 as a Non-Collegiate student, Parkin had actually been elected Secretary to the Union, where Asquith and Milner were the stars, in his third term. Since 1895 he had been Principal of Upper Canada College, a public school on English lines in Toronto. A tall, rangy, unworldly, dishevelled man, Parkin proved to be a persuasive and optimistic apostle. Comforted by his own interpretation of his reception (of which no minute seems to exist) he set off energetically, aged 56, to explore ways and means of selecting new scholars from overseas. He was to be paid £2,000 a year, with expenses eventually agreed at £1,000. In his ®rst two years he was to travel 140,000 miles, for, after touring Canada and the States, he visited South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand, and Australia. Two matters would seem to have been settled in Oxford before he departed and clearly they hung together: there should be a qualifying examination equivalent to Responsions and candidates for Rhodes scholarships should either have taken it or otherwise gained exemption from Responsions; and the heads generously agreed to ®nd places for successful candidates among whom they would choose: some colleges speci®ed how many they were prepared to take (Corpus, for example, restricting itself to one) at a time. Francis James Wylie was the more orthodox choice to arrange with colleges about individual admissions there. From St Edward's School in Oxford, he had gone on the advice of Edward Caird, his uncle by marriage, to the University of Glasgow, whence he returned to Oxford as Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol. After the necessary ®rsts, he had become in 1892 a fellow of Brasenose at the age of 27, where he lectured on Aristotle's Logic. A member of Leander despite his slight build, he had also tutored two of Rosebery's sons in vacations. At Rosebery's prompting he was invited in February 1903 to become the Oxford Agent (the title with its overtones of Cromer was soon changed by October to that of Secretary) to the Rhodes Trustees. For Wylie `It was not,' as his successor pointed out,10 an easy decision to make. He had an established position in a College to which he was much attached; he was well known in the academic sphere and was about to become a proctor; he was now invited to occupy an of®ce with no academic standing since the Rhodes Trustees were a body outside the University organism, and to assist in launching a scheme which at that time was highly experimental. The project was not universally welcomed in Oxford; the University and Colleges were far more inbred . . . than they have since become and there was considerable scepticism. Wylie was under no delusions about the problem which would face him . . . and he was never a man to shrink from responsibilities.

Having secured places in colleges for the newly elected scholars he was authorized to pay them £75 a term from which they were to meet their own 10

C. K. Allen on F. J. Wylie in DNB.

the rhodes scholars

721

battels and other charges. He was subsequently empowered to make advances of pay and to guarantee their battels. His own instructions were less speci®c: Rosebery, recalling perhaps his own brief sojourn at Christ Church, expressed the hope that he would `ask them sometimes to breakfast'.11 Wylie himself was to be paid £1,000 a year, from 24 June 1904, with an entertainment allowance settled (21 February 1905) at £250. He soon set up house with his newly married American wife, Miss Kathleen Kelly of Lady Margaret Hall (who must have been about the same age as their arriving charges) in 9 South Parks Road, with its extensive garden running down to the Merton playing ®eld to the south. An earlier proposal that the Trustees should rent from Brasenose Frewen Hall in New Inn Hall Street, close by where he had gone to school, had fallen through. The Trustees had already agreed, on 4 November 1902, that the South African scholarships might begin from October 1903 and that the German awards both in selection and nomination should rest entirely with the German Emperor. Nevertheless it was some surprise to Wylie when he returned to college (where he was still living until he married in August) from a muddy round of golf at Hinksey to be greeted in the lodge of Brasenose by the clicking heels of three immaculately top-hatted, frock-coated, young Germans.12 The Trust established itself at a rent of £800 a year in a London of®ce on the second ¯oor of Seymour House in Waterloo Place across Pall Mall from the Athenaeum, but Parkin (who to Wylie's relief was to settle himself at Goring-on-Thames, near, but not too near, Oxford, from 1907 on returning from his major travels) and Wylie, who had soon grown to like and trust one another, found themselves repairing to Mincing Lane to con®de in the ever dependable and in®nitely patient Hawksley, who was Beit's trustee as well as Rhodes's. Parkin, with due Canadian bias, readily gained agreement to increasing the awards from his homeland beyond Rhodes's memory of Upper and Lower Canada, by the addition of British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and even Prince Edward Island, and arranged for scholars to be elected from the North-West Territories too. Further south, on the advice of Theodore Roosevelt, in the hope of avoiding political interference or academic horse-trading, he put the ®rst selections into the hands of college presidents in individual states, one scholar from each state being allowed at a time (Trustees' minute, 22 May 1903). Meanwhile Wylie arranged in Oxford about the qualifying examinations with Henry Gerrans, the mathematics tutor of Worcester College, the Secretary to the Delegacy of Local Examinations who, as Wylie discovered, `was ready 11 Wylie in Lord Elton (ed.), The First Fifty Years of the Rhodes Trust and the Rhodes Scholarships (1955), 72. 12 Ibid. 78.

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to examine anybody, anywhere at any time'.13 Papers were to be set and marked in Oxford but attempted under authorized supervision abroad. 1903 saw the arrival of two young Rhodesians who had been recommended to the Trustees apparently without competition, together with a scholar from Natal chosen by the local Director of Education, and one Rhodes scholar each from the four designated schools in Cape Colony (although P. T. Lewis of the South African College School did not in fact reach Balliol until Hilary term 1904); and a full quota of ®ve Germans. Wylie's 1904 notebook begins: `American 43; Canada 9 (McGill sent 2);14 Bermuda 1; Jamaica 1; Newfoundland 1; Australia 7; South Africa 5; Germany 5; [total] 72. The following failed to produce a candidate capable of passing the qualifying examination: Arizona; Florida; Mississippi; Nevada; New Mexico; from South Africa 5 instead of 8; Rhodesia 1 instead of 3; and South African College sent no scholar.' For 1905 it records: `United States 38; Canada 7; Bermuda 1; Jamaica 1; Newfoundland 1; Australia 7; South Africa 7; Germany 5; [total] 67. Following states were not represented: Alabama; Arizona; Arkansas; Montana; Nevada; North Dakota; Oregon; South Dakota; Utah; Wyoming. From Canada 7 instead of 8 (none from North-West Territory); South Africa 7 instead of 8; Rhodesia 2 instead of 3.' By the end of 1906 Parkin was able to issue a printed statement on behalf of the Trust, evidently prepared by Wylie: There are now in residence at Oxford under the Rhodes Bequest 161 Scholars drawn from the different countries for which Scholarships are provided. Seventy-one came from the British Colonies, seventy-nine from the United States, and eleven from Germany. . . Seventeen are in residence in Balliol, thirteen each at Christ Church and Worcester, eleven each at Oriel and St John's College, ten at New College, nine each at Brasenose, Exeter, Queen's and Trinity, eight each at Hertford and Pembroke, seven at Magdalen, six each at Lincoln, Merton and Wadham, ®ve at University, two at Keble, and one each at Corpus and St Edmund's [sic] Hall.

Although himself a schoolmaster (indeed the chosen biographer of Edward Thring) Parkin was persuaded in the course of his North American deliberations to commend a fundamental change to his new masters, who were convinced in their turn that Rhodes scholars should not be colonial public schoolboys (the Nature's head-prefects of Rhodes's fantasy) but young men with at least two years' experience of a degree-giving institution in their home countries before reaching Oxford; and the pattern was quickly instituted that the age-brackets on election should be 19 to 24 (as was ®rst minuted in the case of Newfoundland in July 1905). These bachelors must 13

Ibid. 63. The Quebec competition had resulted in a tie and both were eventually awarded scholarships. Both gained ®rsts at Oxford, played chess against Cambridge, and were soon elected to college fellowships. 14

the rhodes scholars

723

have taken the qualifying examination in mathematics and Latin: each must also hold a quali®cation in Greek from his university which had been judged equivalent to Responsions Greek before he could be matriculated by his college. Of the 2,000 applicants in the ®rst few years only half succeeded in qualifying, and Parkin reported that in the United States only one-third had the ability and the preparation. The four Cape schools which took precedence in the will only after the eponymous RhodesiaÐRhodes had sanctioned an experimental award from `Bishop's' (the Diocesan College School on his doorstep in Rondebosch) in his lifetimeÐfell into line and their scholars, too, normally went to a University or College in South Africa before reaching Oxford. The result was, in later American parlance, a `graduate program' but of a special sort, since most of the incoming scholars (Wylie said two-thirds of them) were to read for a ®nal honours school rather than attempt graduate work ab initio, a decision sometimes reluctantly accepted, but which, in fact, suited Oxford's own preparedness well enough.15 The Emperor insisted (February 1905) that the Germans should stay for two years only in order not to delay their military service further. This decision prevented most of them from tackling a ®nal honours school; instead, they read for a diploma which proved to be no inducement to overwork. Wylie had eventually to report at least two of them to Berlin for inadequate industry, but three others gained their diplomas with distinction and one achieved the ®rst B.Litt. gained by a Rhodes scholar. They tended, however, partly from failing to read for an honours school (and perhaps being too near home) not to be fully integrated into the inheritance.16 Wylie and Parkin evolved the practice that each scholar should furnish a list of preferences among colleges which Wylie should then approach on their behalf;17 and the drill had come to work smoothly enough; but neither colleges nor scholars were satis®ed that the system operated without bias or, in the case of the colleges, that testimonials intended for other eyes were suf®ciently subdued for Oxford readers. Cyril Bailey remembered A. L. Smith complaining in a Balliol quadrangle of the bunch of dossiers under his 15 Parkin himself considered the benefaction to the four Cape schools to have been misguided. For the required quali®cations in Greek see Exam Statutes, 1910, 308±15 (`colonial and Indian universities'), 319±25 (`Foreign universities'). The earliest of the Decrees de®ning each Greek requirement (Adelaide University) was accepted on 22 Oct. 1903. For Decrees about `Examinations on Behalf of the Rhodes Trustees', 1 Nov. 1904, 26 Jan. 1909, 4 July 1910, see Statutes, 1911, 605. 16 See Sir David Kelly, The Ruling Few (1952), 85. 17 Wylie was to report that in the earliest full years, of 127 scholars, 56 got their ®rst choice, 20 their second, 16 their third, 10 their fourth, 1 his ®fth, 2 their sixth, 1 his seventh, 1 his eighth, and `twenty no College they had named'. Elton (ed.), Rhodes Trust, 66 n. 2. Balliol received 146 ®rst choices out of 440, `followed at a long interval by New College, Trinity, Christ Church, Oriel and Magdalen', ibid. 65 n.1.

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arm: `every one of these men is a cross between the Archangel Gabriel and C. B. Fry.'18 In 1904 elections had been held in forty-eight American states, including some territories assured of admission to statehood. Since each scholar became entitled to three years at Oxford, Parkin soon arranged that competitions should be held in two years out of three, with no elections in the third year. There were American elections therefore in 1904, 1905, 1907, and 1908 and none in 1906, 1909, and so on. The result was a most uneven request for space in colleges. Consequently, by 1914 it was decided to stagger elections over three years, scholars being elected from thirty-two states every year. The Americans differed from their `colonial' counterparts not in this alone. Having arrived together in the same ship (in 1904 in SS Ivernia), they soon had their own club in the Cornmarket, and, unless they were oarsmen or athletes already, their sporting activities differed from traditional Oxford games. Few of them read Greats, but despite the emphasis on Roman Law, they preferred Jurisprudence or Modern History. Most obviously older than the average undergraduate straight from boarding-school, when they had taken schools, as two-thirds of them did, or the BCL, they then speedily returned home to take yet another degree and carve out a career there. So, with a few exceptionsÐthere was only one American exceptionÐdid the Canadians.19 A few scholars failed to ®t in or found Oxford beyond them; most, reconciled uneasily but eventually to reading for a second bachelor's degree, settled into the `tutorial system' and even grew accustomed to deans and closed college gates at nightÐeach scholar by the generosity of colleges was allowed his ®rst two years in collegeÐor, more lightheartedly, to proctors. Few found college walls beyond their climbing. The Englishmen they got to know best were those with whom they came to take their ®nal honour schools, so that these men had been `up' for a year already before the Rhodes Scholars arrived as `freshmen'; or those with whom they learned to row de novo in a lowly Torpids crew. They had been expected to monopolize university (as distinct from college) sports, but apart from a few exceptional performers among the `colonial' scholars at cricket or Rugby football at Lord's or the Queen's Club,20 their sporting in¯uence was perhaps more in 18

Ibid. 67. Of the ®rst 500 Scholars, fewer than 20 settled in England: 2 at the bar; 3 in academic life; 4 as schoolmasters; 2 as surgeons; 3 as physicians; 1 in Imperial Tobacco; 1 in the Board of Agriculture; and the solitary American (naturalized in 1912) in Unionist journalism and party politics. Further, 4 went into the ICS or the Colonial Civil Service. 20 Colonial scholars, Wylie reported (in G. R. Parkin, The Rhodes Scholarships (1912), 229) competed in 100 inter-university events, Americans in 40, Germans in none. Some even played international rugby for England or even for Scotland, whereas at cricket `Phil. Le Couteur's match' in 1910 in which an Australian Rhodes scholar made 160 runs and took 6 Cambridge wickets for 20 runs, then 5 for 46 in their second innings, remained for 75 years incomparable. 19

the rhodes scholars

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inter-collegiate games. To these they brought a new strength and vigour which, because few people watched college games, went comparatively unnoticed. Just as they in¯uenced the average level of competitive games, it was essentially similar in academic matters. After the ®rst few outstanding scholars academically in the ®rst ¯ushÐfrom Australia and CanadaÐthe pattern became (in Wylie's memory many years later) that Rhodes scholars' results in schools were not as good as those of college scholars but more like those of exhibitioners, customarily bettering the level expected by a college of its commoners. Because of their permeation undergraduate society became notably more adult. The Rhodes scholars did not revolutionize Oxford, nor, after their ®rst few often homesick terms, would that have been among their ambitions, but they enriched the life of the place and extended its ambitions: just as Oxford, in its subtle turn, was to enrich their lives and extend their horizons. Most were able to travel, cheaply enough, in Europe in vacations and had `seen the world' before, gladly, returning home. They did not form collectively any party, alliance, or school of thought or prejudice; but they served to leaven the world's lump and did most perhaps, as if by some annual blood transfusion, to raise Oxford from being one of the two outstanding English universities into becoming one of international repute. By 1914 Milner had long been back at work in England. His ®rst attendance at a Trustees' meeting was on 11 August 1905; and he was soon playing a large part in the Trust's proceedings. But until the outbreak of war, and indeed later, Rosebery continued to preside regularly. Grey was away in Canada as Governor-General from 1904 to 1911, but managed an occasional attendance. Michell returned to South Africa for good in 1909, the year after Mrs Dorothea Mavor had succeeded Boyd (who went on leave to Rhodesia in July 1908) as secretary. By now Wylie had become less oppressed by the qualifying examination with the evolution of `Senior' and `Junior' standing, re¯ecting the growing relationship of Oxford with universities overseas.21 But Greek, as he was at pains to point out, was still compulsory. The Colonial Universities' Statute and the Foreign Universities' Statute re¯ected the acceptance of Rhodes scholars in Oxford, as did, more overtly, the award in 1911 to Parkin of an honorary DCL. In that same year Max Beerbohm showed that the Rhodes scholars had become an Oxford institution by satirizing them gently in Zuleika Dobson. 21 Those who had satisfactorily completed two years' work at a university admitted to the privileges of the statutes were designated Junior students; those who had completed three years' work and obtained honours were designated Seniors. Both Junior and Senior students were exempt from Responsions except for Greek; and in that they could provide proof of pro®ciency from their overseas Universities. Senior students were additionally exempt from the intermediate examination (usually Moderations). See Wylie, `The University System' in Parkin, Rhodes Scholarships, 160±7.

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From the beginning the Trustees chose not to interfere in local choices unless their regulations (e.g. about age) might seem to have been ignored. They adopted the habit from May 1908 of meeting on the ®rst Monday of the month, but their agenda was perfunctory and often merely noted successes of the scholars in Oxford, in University prizes or college fellowships, or in the civil service examinations, together with an occasional disappearance through resignation, discipline, or death. There was an annual dinner (from July 1907) for the scholars as enjoined in the will, and an annual photograph of them with Wylie in front of the Divinity School. Objection was raised by scholars from the southern states when an African-American at Harvard was elected from Pennsylvania in 1907,22 but recourse was made by the Trustees to clause 24 of the will that `no student shall be quali®ed or disquali®ed for election . . . on account of his race or religious opinions', and Hawksley, who had helped Rhodes in his drafting, assisted in the interpretation.23 In general the Trustees appear to have left matters other than ®nancial investment, to which Milner paid especial attention, to Parkin and Wylie, who joined together to produce The Rhodes Scholarships which appeared under Parkin's name in 1912. It is not dif®cult even at this remove to suppose why the Trustees rested such reliance in them or the Rhodes scholars such affection. 22 Alain Leroy Locke. See J. Green, `A Black Edwardian Rhodes Scholar', Oxford, xl (Dec. 1988), 71±6. For Max Beerbohm's cartoon see J.G. Lockhart and C.M. Woodhouse, Rhodes (1963), 481. See also p. 804 below. 23 Whereas Rhodes himself had been used in his lifetime, it is believed, to use the word `race' to differentiate between the English and Afrikaner in South Africa and had scarcely conceived `a man of colour' as likely to gain one of his scholarships. Assuredly and not in this alone, he builded better than he knew.

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`OUR BUIL DIN GS SHAP E U S '

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30 Oxford Architecture, 1800±1914* p e t e r h ow e l l `We shape our buildings,' said Churchill in 1943, when moving the resolution for the rebuilding of the House of Commons, `and afterwards our buildings shape us.'1 The architectural decisions taken in a University both re¯ect and in¯uence its development. New buildings are usually erected to replace old ones which are beyond repair, no longer adequate, or merely out of fashion, or to ful®l new needs. For these new buildings to be architecturally distinguished, a combination of appropriate circumstances is required: suf®cient funds must be available, a good architect must be commissioned, he must be properly briefed by the client, and the client must provide him with the necessary resources and with ¯exible but ®rm control. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Oxford was fortunate in that in so many cases these circumstances did in fact prevail. Money was comparatively plentiful, and ®rst-rate architects were glad to work in Oxford. It may seem more surprising that academic bodies, not generally reckoned to be the most satisfactory clients, should so often have been such enthusiastic patrons, but it will be seen that this was indeed the case, and the buoyant con®dence of the architects met its match in the informed and trusting support of the clients. The extensive and distinguished Georgian building campaigns which had, as Sir Howard Colvin points out, `put Oxford for the ®rst time since the Reformation in the forefront of English architecture,' were largely over by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the ®rst quarter of the nineteenth century was equally quiet.2 The only major project was the building of new premises for Magdalen Hall in Catte Street, with the intention of freeing the land occupied by the hall, west of Magdalen College, for the purposes of the expansion of that college, as had been planned ever since early in the previous century.3 The buildings were designed by William * The author is grateful to many people for generous help. Particular mention should be made of Dr Michael Brock; Sir Howard Colvin; Dr Mark Curthoys; Dr Malcolm Graham; Dr John Jones; Mr David Sturdy; Miss Clare Tilbury; and Mr Stephen Tomlinson. 1 2 3

Parl. Deb., 28 Oct. 1943, 5S 393. 404. The Eighteenth Century, 842. Ibid. 840±1.

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`our buildings shape us'

Garbett, who had dealings with Magdalen as Surveyor to Winchester Cathedral; despite this, they were in a handsome classical style. Some building work at other colleges was in response to the revival by Convocation, in 1808, of `a Statute prohibiting more strictly than ever residence out of College'.4 Presumably some colleges had been more lax in this respect than others, but the result at Brasenose was the erection of twelve sets of rooms in the fellows' garden: the subsequent demolition of these barrack-like blocks cannot be regretted. Other colleges which built new rooms in this quarter of the century included Trinity (which added a storey to its Wren building), Oriel, University, and Worcester. Balliol resolved in 1824, `in consequence of the de®ciency of rooms to satisfy the very numerous and pressing applications for admission into the College,' to build extra accommodation. The architect appointed, George Basevi, had a brother who was a Balliol man. The College rejected his design with attached Ionic columns and a pediment in favour of puritan plainness.5 Otherwise the chief building activity of these years, apart from improvements to the lodgings of heads of houses, was cosmetic in character. Already in the second half of the eighteenth century the medievalizing spirit embodied in the Gothic Revival had made members of the University feel that the classical style was out of place in Oxford: hence, for example, the ultraGothicization of the hall of University College, and the re-Gothicization of the chapels of Magdalen and New College.6 None of the work of this sort carried out in the early nineteenth century was on such a scale. For the most part it consisted of the substitution of battlements for parapets (despite the fact that Loggan's views show that battlements were comparatively rare), and the addition of fancy Gothic detail, sometimes to seventeenth-century buildings whose homely `Tudor' must have seemed sadly debased to those infected with the fashionable furor Gothicus.7 One example is the remodelling of the south side of the quadrangle at University College, complete with tall pinnacles (now unfortunately removed), and the insertion of a plaster vault into its chapel, all designed by the Master, James Grif®th, who was celebrated for his skill at pokerwork.8 Another is the Gothicization of the 4 E. W. Allfrey, `The Architectural History of the College', in Brasenose Monographs, i, no. 3, 54. See G. R. M. Ward (ed.), Oxford University Statutes (2 vols 1845, 1851) ii. 74±5. 5 BCA; English Register, 2 June 1824, 19 April 1826. The new building was opportune, for it was in 1827 that the college opened its scholarships to general competition, which increased demand still further ( John Jones, Balliol College (2nd edn 1997), 183±6). 6 Colvin (n. 2), 848±51. 7 Battlements were being added inside the quadrangles at Lincoln as late as 1852. It is remarkable that in 1826 a correspondent in the Gentleman's Magazine (Aug. 1826, 120) reported that `a member of Magdalen' had advised Daniel Robertson that before restoring the front of All Souls he should `study. . . Loggan's prints'. However, Loggan shows that All Souls itself was exceptional in having extensive battlements. 8 Grif®th also made a grand design for a new Master's Lodging, to stand where the Shelley Memorial now is (his drawing hangs in the SCR).

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

731

hall at Exeter, although this was the work of no amateur, but of one of the most fashionable architects of the dayÐJohn Nash. Already colleges were replacing the sash windows which were now considered to dis®gure their old buildings with proper mullioned windows. One of the principal bene®ts of this increased antiquarian feeling was that public outcry was able to prevent Joseph Parkinson from destroying even more of the medieval buildings of Magdalen College than he actually did in his work on the cloister quadrangle. The second quarter of the century began with a notable eventÐthe decision to build new premises for the University Press, and the acceptance in 1825 of the design made by Daniel Robertson, who over the next four years was to do an extraordinary amount of work in Oxford. Why Joseph Parker and Samuel Collingwood, the partners in the Press, should have chosen him is a mystery. He was related to the Adam brothers, and probably their pupil. He and his brother Alexander were in partnership with William Adam (younger brother of Robert and James) in the latter's building business, but they went bankrupt in 1817, and in 1821 William Adam was persuaded to sever all connection with them. The Press's accommodation in the Clarendon Building was inadequate to cope with the increasing, and very pro®table, demand for Bibles and Prayer Books. A site was found on what is now Walton Street, well away from the other University buildings. This was probably because it was intended from the beginning to use steam power (though the ®rst engine was not installed until 1834), and also to facilitate access to the Oxford Canal, which had been opened in 1790. Robertson designed an astonishingly grand classical front for the Press, its centrepiece a triumphal arch with giant Corinthian columns. The ®rst part built, consisting of this front and the `Bible Side' (the south wing), cost the immense sum of £29,085. The `Learned Side' (the north wing) was added in 1829±30, under the architectural supervision of Edward Blore, and not Robertson, who in 1829 had left Oxford under circumstances no less mysteriousÐthough apparently less creditableÐthan those under which he arrived (he subsequently worked in Ireland). Robertson's two major college works were both elaborately Gothic, a new building on the west side of the quadrangle of St Mary Hall (now Oriel College), and the remodelling of the High Street front of All Souls (regrettably much simpli®ed in 1928±9). The latter work, however, included the provision of a new front for the warden's lodging in Palladian style, considered preferable to its previous hybrid character.9 9 The Eighteenth Century, 837. Robertson's work at both places was severely criticized by a correspondent in the Gentleman's Magazine (Aug. 1826, 119±20), who claimed that the bay windows at St Mary's Hall needed three tons of iron to support them. On Robertson, see Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600±1840 (3rd edn 1995),

732

`our buildings shape us'

After Robertson's departure two of the best-known London architects each did a considerable amount of work in OxfordÐSir Robert Smirke and Edward BloreÐbut none of it was particularly conspicuous, except Blore's new cupola for the Sheldonian Theatre (already reroofed in 1801±2). The one really important commission in these years that went to a London architect was the remodelling of the interior of Magdalen College chapel. This was won in open competition in 1828 (against seventeen other competitors) by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, who had a scholarly understanding of medieval architecture which was exceptional for his time. A second premium was awarded to `Mr Plowman Junior', presumably Thomas, who died in the same year at the age of 22 or 23. A pupil of Sir Jeffry Wyatville, his major work was the re®tting of St Mary the Virgin's church, at the expense of the University.10 Here he provided its of®cial church with rich and digni®ed ®ttings in a style matching the late Gothic of the building. The 1830s were a period of comparative inactivity from an architectural point of view. Robertson's successor as the most signi®cant local architect was Henry Jones Underwood, who had come to Oxford in 1830 to supervise Sir Robert Smirke's internal alterations at the Bodleian Library. He provided the city with its two most distinguished Greek Revival buildings, the library and lecture-room of the Botanic Garden, and St Paul's church, but most of his work was in medieval styles. He built a sober front on Broad Street for Exeter College (its ground ¯oor consisted originally of stabling for horses, an innovation which did not catch on), and also remodelled its Turl Street front, but his most celebrated work was the church at Littlemore built to the order of John Henry Newman in 1835±6. In a simple Early English style, its solidity and conviction led the Cambridge Ecclesiologists to describe it in their journal nine years after its consecration as `the ®rst unquali®ed step to 822±3; Architectural History, xxxix (1996), 239. In the same journal, xli (1998), 131±44, Laurence Kinney discusses Sir John Soane's arbitration in the dispute between All Souls and Robertson over his work there. The builder involved, James Johnson, claimed that Robertson had `arrived' in Oxford c.1815, but in 1825 he was described as `residing at HRH the Duke of Cumberland's at Kew, Surrey'. His father-in-law, Dr Thomas Clarke, was chaplain to the Duke, which may explain this (see Frederick O'Dwyer, ```Modelled Muscularity'': Daniel Robertson's Tudor Mansions', Irish Arts Review, xv (1999), 87±97). O'Dwyer suggests that there may have been two Daniel Robertsons (father and son), the pupil of Adam who went bankrupt in 1817, and the architect ®rst known to have exhibited drawings in 1812, but this is perhaps unnecessary. He also points out that the Architectural Publication Society's Dictionary of Architecture (in the article `Oxford') states that the buildings on the north side of St Mary Hall were repaired in 1830±3 by Daniel Robertson. This may simply be an error. 10 T. S. R. Boase, `An Oxford College and the Gothic Revival', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xviii (1955), 170 identi®es `Mr Plowman Junior' as John. Thomas must surely have been responsible for the remarkable church at Churchill, Oxfordshire, built by his father in 1826±8. Unfortunately his work at St Mary the Virgin has been gradually removed in this century, some of it within recent years. On Magdalen, see also J. Myles, `L. N. Cottingham and Magdalen College Chapel', Magdalen College Record (1991); L. N. Cottingham 1787±1847: Architect of the Gothic Revival (1996), 83±9.

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better things that England had long witnessed'.11 For all its simplicity, it had a stone altar, with a cross carved in the arcading above it, and the authentic Gothic of the building was at once linked with the `Ritualist' tendencies of its originator in a way which symbolized the religious tensions gripping the University in the years leading up to Newman's eventual conversion to Rome in 1845. The Protestant reaction to the growth of Tractarianism seemed to many to ®nd its visible expression in the scheme, ®rst proposed in 1838, for a Martyrs' Memorial to commemorate Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, burnt at the stake during Mary's reign. The fact that religious controversy had no effect on architectural connoisseurship is shown by the requirement that competitors for the Memorial should base their designs on the Eleanor Cross at Waltham. The winner was the young George Gilbert Scott, and his elegant design was executed in 1841±3. At the same time as the Memorial, and as part of the same scheme, Scott added a new north aisle to the adjoining church of St Mary Magdalen, which Pevsner described as `the earliest piece of archaeologically respectful Gothic at Oxford'.12 The knowledge of Gothic architecture was fostered in the University and City by the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (later renamed the Oxford Architectural Society), which was founded in 1839.13 Unlike its Cambridge counterpart, the Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society, it contrived to avoid controversy and so became less notorious. However, in its early years the society played a crucial role, under the leadership of E. A. Freeman, in promoting the idea of architectural `development'Ðthe idea which gave birth to High Victorianism.14 The society's indirect in¯uence was considerable. It helped to mould architectural ideas, not only among those Oxford men who, having taken holy orders during the Tractarian period, became responsible for church building or restoration, but among college fellows whose in¯uence was exercised through college patronage of livings. 11 Ecclesiologist, iv (1845), 32±3; P. Howell, `Newman's Church at Littlemore', Oxford Art Journal, vi (1983), 51±6. The chancel, 1848, was designed by Joseph Clarke. For Littlemore's inclusion in St Mary's parish see Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (1962), 196. 12 N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (Harmondsworth, 1974), 294. He goes on, `it proves that Scott was in this not simply Pugin's successor but that he reached the same standards concurrently with, and independently of, Pugin,' but this is surely wrong: Scott's Recollections generously acknowledge his debt to Pugin. It is ironic, in view of Pugin's opinions on the purpose of the Memorial, that Scott should have described it as `better than anyone but Pugin would then have produced': G. G. Scott, Personal and Professional Recollections (1879; new edn, edited by G. Stamp, Stamford, 1995), 90. On Scott, see David Cole, The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott (1980); Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects: The Scott Family (Amersham, 1981). 13 D. Prout, ```The Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture'' and ``The Oxford Architectural Society'', 1839±1860', Oxoniensia, liv (1989), 379±91. 14 D. B. Brownlee, `The First High Victorians: British Architectural Theory in the 1840s', Architectura, xv (1985), 33±46.

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However, a year after the Martyrs' Memorial competition another one was held for a far more important structure on a site nearby. The University had decided to erect one building to house two quite separate institutions, one for the study of modern languages, in accordance with the will of the architect Sir Robert Taylor (who had died in 1788) and the other to house its important ancient marbles (the Arundel and Pomfret collections) and other works of art. Designs were `required to be of a Grecian character', to suit the marbles. It is a decision which we cannot regret, in view of the magni®cent building which resulted, but contemporaries were less happy about it. Twenty-eight competitors entered designs, and the assessor, Sir Robert Smirke, preferred that of Charles Robert Cockerell, who was the most learned and inventive classical architect in Britain at the time. He was duly appointed by the Delegates.15 Considering how often in the nineteenth century the competition system failed to ensure that the best design was the one actually used for the building, the history of this project was fortunate indeed, and the resulting building is a brilliant synthesis of elements not only from Greece and Rome, but also from sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century England. Cockerell was given a surprisingly free hand by the Delegates, and there are many divergences in the executed building from the contract drawings in the University Archives. Even when they saw that he had substituted stone panels in the attic storey of the Taylorian for the windows shown in the drawings, they merely asked politely how the rooms behind were to be lit, and how the panels were to be decorated. Another late alterationÐin this case requested by the DelegatesÐwas the requirement that the Raphael Gallery should be made `®reproof', with iron and brick ¯oor and roof and iron doors. The whole of the upper ¯oor at the western end was one enormous gallery (now subdivided both horizontally and vertically). A striking feature of the ground ¯oor was the provision of three top-lit recesses for the display of sculpture. The largest was the `hemicycle' opposite the main entrance, but there was a smaller apse off the western gallery and a rectangular recess at the end of the main gallery. All three have disappeared in subsequent alterations.16 Not surprisingly, the building, whose materials and ®nish were of the highest quality, was enormously expensive, costing almost £50,000. The Taylorian was paid for out of the bequest, but for the 15 The runner-up was John Plowman, younger brother of Thomas. Three other designs, apart from Cockerell's, survive: that of G. Gutch and E. W. Trendall is in the Bodleian (MS Top. Gen. a.9Ðillustrated in H. M. Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford (1983), 123); that of Salvin is known from a lithograph (illustrated in J. Allibone, Anthony Salvin (1988), 59); what is probably that of James Wilson of Bath is in the RIBA Drawings Collection. On Cockerell, see David Watkin, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell (1974). Some additional detail will be found in Pt 1, 611±40. 16 Drawings of the great gallery and of the hemicycle by Joseph Fisher can be found in Bodleian MS Top. Oxon. b 89 fos 14±15. The apse off the western gallery has been (inexactly) reopened to house a staircase, as part of the recent alterations.

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Randolph Galleries a large sum came from the pro®ts of the University Press. The use of the sculpture gallery for the `Chantrey Gift' (1842) has been described in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, Chapter 20.17 One critic not pleased with Cockerell's building was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who described it in 1843 as an `unsightly pile of pagan details, stuck together to make up a show'. `The man who paganises in the Universities deserves no quarter,' he thundered.18 He had been equally outspoken, though for different reasons, in his attack on the subscribers to the Martyrs' Memorial. However, it was in this same year, 1843, that he had his great opportunity at Oxford. The medieval buildings of Balliol had been falling into decay for decades, although half of the main front had been rebuilt in 1738±43.19 George Basevi had, since his involvement with the college in 1824, been consulted over various repairs, and in 1841 he designed an iron roof for the chapel (not executed). In 1842 he produced a design for the complete rebuilding of the Broad Street front. A new master's lodging would be built at the north end of the Grove. Some of the fellows were not happy with the designs, and in February 1843 one of them, Frederick Oakeley, persuaded Pugin to give his opinion. This was that the plans were `regular, modern collegiate architecture . . . utterly destitute of the true and ancient spirit of design'. Much too much emphasis was laid on external effect, and the result was needlessly extravagant. Pugin claimed that something simpler would be `truly collegiate' and would save at least a quarter of the cost. He argued strongly against moving the master's lodging, chie¯y on grounds of discipline. As Sir Howard Colvin writes, Here we are far from straightforward aesthetic criticism, far even from serious consideration of collegiate planning. Here we have . . . the present weighed in the balance against the past and found wanting, the advocacy of Gothic as a style morally superior to classic, and the planning of a college as the ®rst step in a crusade to put the clock back to an idealised medieval past.20

The result was that Pugin himself was asked to submit designs for rebuilding most of the quadrangle, including the chapel. He responded superbly, but Basevi was outraged, claiming that the Master, Richard Jenkyns, had given him the impression that the job was his, and that the college had behaved in an underhand way in showing his designs to Pugin (a charge that had some justice). Furthermore, a `civil war' broke out among the governing body, the Master's authority being challenged by some of the fellows. The grounds of the dispute were primarily religious, for Pugin's 17 For the contribution by the Press see Pt 1, 390. The enlarged University Galleries became the Ashmolean Museum in 1894, under the Keepership of (Sir) Arthur Evans. 18 An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843), 3 n. 3. 19 Colvin (n. 2), 835. 20 Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 108±9.

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supporters were regarded as being dangerously Tractarian. As a result, both Basevi's and Pugin's designs were shelved, and for the time being only urgent repairs were carried out.21 Pugin's only executed works at Oxford were a charming gateway for Magdalen, erected in 1844Ða commission he received through his friend J. R. Bloxam, a fellow of the collegeÐand two stained-glass windows in the church of St Mary the Virgin.22 The most substantial college buildings of the 1840s were, of course, Gothic, but by architects who lacked Pugin's genius for the style. At University College Sir Charles Barry, having designed an enormously grand building to house both a new library and sets of rooms, actually built in 1840±2 a more modest structure, just for rooms, on part of the same site, on the High Street. The high cost (over £7,000) was largely due to the insistence of the fellows on extra detailing. At Pembroke the ambitious Master, F. H. Jeune, persuaded the College to build, ®rst, a large new block to house the senior common room, bursary, and rooms (1845±6), and then a new hallÐ`the most ambitious of all halls except Wolsey's' (Pevsner). The former is rather clumsy, but the latter, although old-fashioned, has real grandeur. The architect was John Hayward, from Exeter. Magdalen also built a ®ne hall, though not so grand as Pembroke's, for its Choristers' School. It was designed by John Chessell Buckler, whose father (also John), the antiquarian artist, was bailiff of the college's London property. It was somewhat extravagantly praised by John Betjeman, in an early article, as `by far the most satisfactory Gothic Revival building in Oxford', but E. A. Freeman had more justly called it `a good, useful, honest piece of English work'.23 Similar in character to these were two works of the next decade, whose late Gothic domestic style would soon seem sadly out of date. Anthony Salvin built an L-shaped range at Balliol, including a gate-tower on St Giles, in 1852±3. Its old-fashioned nature must have been congenial to the old Master, Jenkyns, who chose Salvin as architect. The need for increased accommodation, however, re¯ected the striking success of the college under 21 Much has been written about this episode: see J. Jones, `The Civil War of 1843', Balliol College Record (1978), 60±8; L. B. Litvack, `The Balliol that Might Have Been', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians xlv (1986), 358±73. Some of Pugin's drawings, which survive in BCA, are illustrated in J. Bryson, `The Balliol that Might have Been', Country Life, 27 June 1963, and Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 105±12. 22 The east window of the south aisle, and the second window from the east in the south wall of that aisle. The former was made c.1844 by William Wailes, and the latter in 1848 by John Hardman and Co. See S. A. Shepherd in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, ed. P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright (1994), 199±200. They commemorate two children of the actor George Bartley. In 1883 the new St Swithin's Quadrangle necessitated the removal of the gateway: a proposal to resite it was unfortunately dropped. 23 `The Gothic Revival in Oxford in the Nineteenth Century', Oxford, vi (1940), 50; Proceedings of the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society (1860±4), 168. It now houses the college library.

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his leadership.24 In 1854±6 J. C. Buckler and his son, Charles Alban, provided Jesus with an attractive new front which represents the beau ideÂal of an Oxford college.25 Exactly contemporary with this work, but much more up to date, was G. G. Scott's completion (with a new gate-tower) of Underwood's Broad Street front at Exeter. Although comparatively simple, and paying respect to Underwood, Scott's work already has a High Victorian feeling, with its tall dormers and use of thirteenth-century elements. The inner sideÐless constrained by the example of UnderwoodÐis particularly novel. Scott's connection with Exeter was owed to the college's search for an architect for a new chapel to replace the decrepit seventeenth-century one. This proposal went back to 1843. In 1846 a committee was set up to consider the site, and presumably choose an architect. William Butter®eld was invited to submit a design, but declined, as did James Park Harrison, so that in the end only Scott and Salvin did so.26 The site was to be the old one, slightly enlarged, but it was unsatisfactorily restricted by the rector's lodging to its east. In 1853 Scott was ®nally selected. Soon a new site, and a far grander chapel, were under consideration: a lofty vaulted and apsidal vessel would have its west facËade set in the centre of the east side of the quadrangle, opposite the main entrance, and would project eastwards into the college garden.27 It is a pity that the College changed its mind again, and decided to move the rector's lodging further east, so that the chapel could occupy the whole of the north side of the quadrangle. As a result, Scott's magni®cent building is sorely cramped, though in return it gains in drama, in a way comparable with the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. The latter is generally stated to have been Scott's model, but the similarity is not close. Nevertheless, the strongly French character of the design was a notable manifestation of the foreign in¯uence which had come to be so important an element in English architecture in this decade. Another signi®cant element is `constructional polychromy' (the use of materials of different colours). Scott is said to have wished to make more extensive use of this, but the fellows would permit only some banding in the stone vault, the use of red and green serpentine shafts (from Devon and Cornwall, in keeping with the college's West Country links), and inlaid 24 Jenkyns was also Dean of Wells Cathedral, where Salvin had been working on the restoration of the choir since 1847. The oriel at the south end of the west elevation was added by Waterhouse in 1877. The building has suffered a good deal: Warren's building was attached to its south end in 1906, and its eastward projection was destroyed and a new wing squashed up against the tower in 1966±8. Salvin was also responsible for the tower at the junction of the hall and library ranges. 25 The original sixteenth-century front had had a new centrepiece added in 1756: the result was unkindly compared with a prison. 26 Richard Cromwell Carpenter was also considered. He was a good architect who regrettably did no work in Oxford. 27 Scott's drawings for this scheme are preserved at the college, as are his and Salvin's for the earlier site.

738

`our buildings shape us'

marble on the splendid screen, which was given by the undergraduates. The lively stone-carving by John Birnie Philip, the stained glass by Clayton and Bell, the iron and brasswork by Francis Skidmore, the mosaics by Salviati of Venice, and the rich tile ¯oors made the chapel a resplendent paradigm of a modern setting for Anglican collegiate worship, and a ®tting symbol of the college's vigour. Scott also built the new rector's lodging and a new library in the garden. This has two storeys, of which the upper one has a wooden vault, with traceried dormers to admit light: it is one of the best, but least-known, Victorian interiors in Oxford.28 Scott's chapel at Exeter met with general approval, but another college chapel built at the same time was more controversial. This was at Balliol, where the college decided after Jenkyns's death in 1854 to ask William Butter®eld to build a new chapel in his memoryÐan odd decision, as he would certainly not have approved.29 The new chapel follows the general lines of its late Perpendicular predecessor, apart from its steeply pitched roof and idiosyncratic bell-turret, but, although conventional enough in this respect, and in its Geometrical Decorated Gothic, its materials and detailing were radical indeed. The exterior is of red and yellow stone laid in alternate courses, and the interior was equally colourful, and elaborately decorated throughout, its walls patterned with inlaid alabaster, and with ®ttings in wood and wrought iron in the architect's characteristically original style. The criticism of it by E. A. Freeman (who called Exeter College chapel `the most glorious building in modern England') as `a personal insult to me and to every Trinity man' shows self-confessed bias.30 In fact Trinity enjoys the best view of the exterior. However, the chapel was not popular at Balliol either, which led to a curious sequence of events in this century. After hearing it criticized by the Master and others at a Gaudy in 1911, Walter Morrison offered £20,000 for the `Rasher of Bacon monstrosity' (as he called it) to be demolished, and a copy of its predecessor erected instead. Designs were prepared by T. G. Jackson, but after much controversy common sense prevailed, and Morrison took his money elsewhere. In 1913 W. R. Lethaby recommended various improvements to what he called `one of the very best of the buildings in Oxford which represent the medieval revival of the nineteenth century', and in 1920 Sir J. J. Burnet prepared at least two schemes for partial or complete remodelling, but it was Sir Walter Tapper and his son Michael who substituted their own efforts for Butter®eld's interior between 1925 and 1937. 28 Scott's domestic buildings at Exeter have been savagely mauled: the rector's lodging was crassly remodelled in 1946, and the new buildings of 1964 involved the demolition of the wing running south from the Broad Street front. 29 Butter®eld had been working on the restoration of Merton College chapel since 1848. See Paul Thompson, William Butter®eld (1971). 30 Proceedings of the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society (1860±4), 169; Pt. 1, 415±16.

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More remarkable still, and more in¯uential, than these two chapels was the University Museum. The signi®cance of this building, as a turning-point in attitudes towards the natural sciences at Oxford, has been explained in Chapter 22 of Part 1. It was also one of the outstanding architectural creations of the nineteenth century. It owed its existence to a heroic band of champions of science, and above all to Dr Henry Acland, who in 1849 engineered a resolution to the effect that, in view of the entirely inadequate provision for the teaching of Natural Science, and the chaotic condition of the University's scienti®c collections, a museum should be built to assemble `all the materials explanatory of the structure of the earth, and of the organic beings placed upon it', together with teaching accommodation. Convocation ®nally accepted the scheme in 1853, and a site in the Parks was bought. A competition was held, the conditions stipulating (after much discussion, and consultation with several architects) that the area within the three sides of a quadrangle should be `covered in by a glass roof', and that the Chemical Laboratory and Dissecting Rooms should be detached. The building should not cost over £30,000. The University actually had twice this sum in hand from the pro®ts of its Press: some thought it wrong to spend the proceeds from printing sacred texts for so profane a purpose, but the whole question of the profanity of scienceÐa burning issue at the timeÐwas settled by the fact that Dr E. B. Pusey eventually gave his support to the project.31 Thirty-three designs were submitted in the competition. The assessors, Philip Hardwick and his son Philip Charles, considered that none of them could be executed for £30,000. Eventually the choice was narrowed to two, a Renaissance design by Edward Middleton Barry (son of Sir Charles) and a design described as `Rhenish Gothic' by the Irish ®rm of Deane and Woodward. The latter was strongly supported by Acland, who held that Gothic was more practical and adaptable, and in December 1854 it was preferred by a large majority of Convocation. Sir Thomas Deane was an old-fashioned Cork architect who had taken into partnership the scholarly Benjamin Woodward, shy and silent, but with a remarkable personal magnetism. After some modi®cations to the design, the estimate for £29,041 from Lucas Bros was accepted in 1855, and work began. Woodward's design was altogether novel for a public building, with a facËade symmetrically arranged about a tall steep-roofed tower, in the manner of a Northern Gothic town hall.32 The facËade is kept as ¯at as possible, with 31 He subscribed in 1856 for three of the hundred `illustrative inscriptions' intended to be `worked . . . into the mouldings or elsewhere, as for instance Consider the lilies of the ®eld' (OUA, N. W. 2/1 items 25 and 27). This was apparently never done. His brother Philip was said to have been responsible for the idea of the iron and glass roof (H. M. and K. D. Vernon, A History of the Oxford Museum (1909), 57). 32 Woodward's design is strikingly similar in this respect to the unexecuted design for a new Rathaus in Hamburg produced by G. G. Scott at exactly the same time (not later, pace Eve Blau,

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a minimum of projections (even the few buttresses on the competition design were omitted in execution). There is constructional polychromy in the bands of different coloured stones and in the patterned slates of the roofs. It was intended that the decoration of the Museum, and even some of its construction, should relate to its teaching function. The shafts of the arcading on the two storeys running around the quadrangle were formed of polished stones from all over the British Isles, and their capitals were carved to represent botanical specimens. The facËade too was to be decorated with carvings of plants and animals around the windows. Woodward brought over carvers from IrelandÐthe brothers John and James O'Shea from Ballyhooly, and their nephew Edward WhelanÐand their work has exceptional vigour. The ¯at carving around the main entrance was designed by John Hungerford Pollen and executed by Thomas Woolner. John Ruskin, who would have approved of the description of the style of the Museum as `Veronese Gothic of the best and manliest type', took a particular interest in the decoration, and made several designs himself. The extent of his involvement in the Museum's overall design is still not entirely clear, and his feelings about it, as expressed over many years, were ambivalent.33 The iron and glass roof of the quadrangle was undertaken by Francis Skidmore of Coventry, well known for his ecclesiastical metalwork, but unused to work on such a scale. Woodward had proposed to use cast iron for the supporting shafts, and, wrought iron for the arched structure above, but Skidmore had a passionate belief in the virtues of wrought iron, and so used it for the shafts as well, charging less for the work. In 1858 the roof showed signs of giving way, and, after a report had been prepared by the engineer William Fairbairn, Skidmore had to take it down and substitute cast-iron shafts. He charged only the difference between the original estimate and his lower charge. The roof is unlike anything else ever erected, with its Gothic arches and use of plant forms for the capitals and spandrels.34 The interior is enlivened by the notched and pierced woodwork so characteristic of the architect. It was intended that there should be much painted decoration, though only a limited amount was carried out, by amateurs, and also statues of distinguished scientists in the quadrangle: of these sixteen had Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward 1845±61 (1982), 80). For the fullest account of the Museum, see Frederick O'Dwyer, The Architecture of Deane and Woodward (Cork, 1997), 152±283. See also Robert Fox, Pt 1, 641±91. 33 The description was by the Revd F. J. A. Hort, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge ( J. B. Atlay, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Bart. (1903), 207). On Ruskin's involvement, see M. W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (1989), 112±42. He supervised the work when Woodward fell ill in 1860, and he gave lectures to the workmen (one of them attended by the Vice-Chancellor, the Mayor, and many senior members of the University). 34 It gave constant trouble (there was a particularly severe crisis in 1876), and it is something of a miracle that it has survived. On Skidmore, see P. Howell in C. Brooks (ed.), The Albert Memorial (2000).

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741

been installed by 1893, together with one of the Prince Consort. The Chemical Laboratory was attached to the south-west corner of the Museum by a passage: its design was based on the Abbot's Kitchen at Glastonbury. There was a separate curator's house to the south-east.35 The building of the Museum, which was opened in 1860, created an atmosphere of intense excitement in Oxford, both for science and for art, which seemed to have been reconciled in a quite new way.36 However, the expense soon outstripped the estimates: by 1867 £87,000 had been spent. To some extent this was inevitable, as the original estimate had been only for the building, and not for its equipment or even services. As a result, it was never completely ®nished: little of the carving on the facËade was executed, nor was the porch over the main entrance. Only the capitals on the western side of the upper gallery were carved in the original campaign: the rest had to wait until 1905±14.37 Woodward's illness with consumption caused many problems during the building of the Museum, and he died in 1861 at the age of 44. However, such was the impact of both his Museum and his gentle personality that within the few years during which he worked at Oxford he acquired several other commissions for the ®rm. The most important was the debating hall of the Union Society (1856±7). Built of brick, notched in the same way as the woodwork, and with a steep-pitched roof, its plan is an elongated octagon. The sheer wall-surfaces, with the windows punched into them, again show the in¯uence of Ruskin. The interior is chie¯y famous for the wall-paintings so unsuccessfully executed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his young friends, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who had met as undergraduates at Exeter College (1853±5).38 During the 1860s the amount of building activity going on in the University was tremendous, and the pace that was now set was to be kept up until the First World War. The chapels of Exeter and Balliol and, above all, the University Museum had given Oxford an architectural prominence unmatched by Cambridge.39 The colleges were building new accommoda35

This was demolished in 1955 to make way for the new Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. For a wonderful evocation of this, see W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (1900), 48±9. 37 They were carved by H. Mills, L. Holt, and others, of the ®rm of Farmer and Brindley. The ®rst subscription came from the Revd H. T. Morgan, who had watched the original carvers at work. 38 Woodward's other Oxford commissions included additions to Dr Acland's house at 40±41 Broad Street, and to Professor B. Price's house, Middleton Hall, in St Giles (both in 1857), and a new east window for the Latin Chapel of Christ Church Cathedral (1860), which was ®lled with gorgeous glass designed by Burne-Jones and made by Powell's (O'Dwyer, Deane and Woodward, 507±20). 39 To these must be added G. E. Street's parish church of SS Philip and James (1860±5). It is surprising and unfortunate that Street, despite his close Oxford connections (his of®ce was in the city from 1852 to 1856, and he was diocesan architect from 1850 until his death), did only two works for the UniversityÐa stained-glass window for Brasenose chapel in 1855, and the 36

742

`our buildings shape us'

tion for their increased numbers of students, new kitchens to feed them, and new libraries which would serve undergraduates as well as dons. G. G. Scott built his second new library, for University College: it was paid for by the executors of the second Earl of Eldon, so as to provide a setting for the massive seated marble statues of Lords Eldon and Stowell by Musgrave Lewthwaite Watson.40 The enthusiasm for restoring medieval buildings and for remodelling chapels to suit contemporary ideas of liturgical propriety carried all before it, transforming the appearance and even the `image' of Oxford. Much the most remarkable of these changes was the magical transformation (1863±4) of the late Georgian chapel of Worcester College into a gorgeous shrine ®lled with colour and symbolism by that unique genius William Burges. Such an eccentric talent might well have been expected to achieve practical expression only under the patronage of a like-minded individual such as the third Marquess of Bute, and it is a tribute to the fellows of Worcester that they swallowed his chapel scheme whole. Unfortunately ten years later they were unable to respond so positively to his scheme for the hall, which was only partially carried out.41 A comparable desire to `improve' classical buildings led to proposed Gothicizations by Waterhouse, for the Fisher Building at Balliol, and by J. H. Parker, for the New Buildings at Magdalen.42 Although there were good local architects, the best jobs tended to go to eminent London men. Woodward's old ®rm, now represented by Sir Thomas Deane's son, Thomas Newenham Deane, received an important commission from Christ Church for a large block of accommodation facing the restoration of Jesus College chapel in 1863±4. He made unexecuted designs for the Gothicization of St Edmund Hall chapel (1861) and for the competitions for the Examination Schools and the St Swithin's Quadrangle at Magdalen. He published a pamphlet in 1853 called An Urgent Plea for the Revival of True Principles of Architecture in the Public Buildings of the University of Oxford: it included a sketch of a design for the Museum, but it is doubtful if he entered the competition. Evidence of Oxford's architectural prominence is provided by the remarkably extensive coverage of building works in Oxford in the architectural journals. The Building News published a particularly interesting series of critical articles, by an author signing himself `Vivian', in its second and third volumes (1856±7), and the next year covered at length the `General Architectural Congress' organized by the Oxford Architectural Society (iv (1858), 623±30). The most important journal, the Builder, devoted several leading articles to Oxford, and in the 1860s began to publish regular articles based on the annual surveys of new architecture published every October in Jackson's Oxford Journal and the Oxford Chronicle. The Architect, ®rst published in 1869, did the same. 40 See T. S. R. Boase, English Art, 1800±1870 (1959), 266±7. The library has since been sadly maltreated, and the statue group moved twice. 41 In 1964 Burges's work in the hall was removed in favour of the safe good taste of reproduction Wyatt. Luckily a home has been provided for the great chimneypiece, and for the buffet, by the National Trust at Knightshayes, Devon. On Burges, see J. M. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (1981). 42 See P. Howell, `The Fisher Buildings at Balliol', Oxford Art Journal, iv (1981), 51±3 (also Balliol College Record (1981), 31±5).

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

743

Meadows. It was designed in Deane's usual manner, a somewhat coarsened version of Woodward's. Predictably Deane continued to be employed for work around the Museum, in what was inexorably becoming the `Science Area'. This included the Clarendon Laboratory, built in 1867±9 at the expense of the Clarendon Trustees for the study of physics, and attached to the northwest corner of the Museum, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, with its towering galleries, to its east (1885±6).43 For the Physiology Laboratory north of the Museum (1884±5) the ®rm used a more up-to-date Jacobean style. In 1866 a new architect appeared on the Oxford scene. When the sculptor Thomas Woolner wrote to congratulate Balliol on its choice of Alfred Waterhouse as architect for the new front to Broad Street, Benjamin Jowett replied: I think that we have made a good choice, and am glad to hear that you think so too. Certainly no building is so universally approved in this critical age as the Assize Courts at Manchester. In choosing Mr Waterhouse we hope to avoid eccentricity and un-English styles and fancies. Simplicity and proportion and not colour always seem to me to be the great merits of architecture.44

Clearly Jowett is thinking of Butter®eld's chapel (the building of which he had opposed). The college had been enabled to undertake the long-deferred enterprise of a new front by an unexpected offer of ®nancial help from Miss Hannah Brackenbury, who believed that she had an ancestor in common with John Balliol. Waterhouse was shown Pugin's drawings, and his front bears an overall similarity to Pugin's proposal, but in its style and manner it is entirely of its own period. Good-sized sash-windows, a prominent and lively skyline, and original and characterful detailing make it both thoroughly practical and picturesquely handsome. It was praised by C. L. Eastlake in his History of the Gothic Revival for its `breadth and vigour', as well as for the boldness with which it contrasts with its neighbours.45 Balliol was well pleased with Waterhouse's ef®ciency and artistry, and employed him again when the increasing size of the college under Jowett's mastership required yet more rooms and also a large new hall (1873±7). Jowett raised the funds himself by an appeal. The new buildings were placed at the north end of the Garden Quadrangle. Waterhouse's other major work at Oxford was a new debating 43 The Clarendon Laboratory was completely remodelled externally in 1946±8 to become the Department of Geology and Mineralogy, but some of Deane's interior survives. 44 Bodleian Library, MS English Letters e. 28 fo 114. The Assize Courts, built in 1859±64, were destroyed by bombing in 1940. See also The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. H. House and G. Storey (1959), 136. On Waterhouse, see C. Cunningham and P. Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse (1992). They point out (p. 64) that the donor, Miss Brackenbury, suggested Henry Woodyer as architect. It is surprising that this excellent architect did no work in Oxford. 45 C. L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), 361±2.

744

`our buildings shape us'

hall for the Union Society: Woodward's was already too small, and became the library. For this building Waterhouse used red brick and the yellow terracotta of which he was such an eager advocate: the obscure situation of the building meant that such materials were not out of place.46 Butter®eld had lost Balliol, but Merton had remained faithful, commissioning him to design the Grove Building. Its position overlooking the Meadows caused it to become the victim of such loathing, at a time when High Victorian architecture was least in fashion, that it was remodelled in 1930 `into something of the sort that Americans expect to ®nd at Oxford'.47 However, Butter®eld's greatest opportunity came with the commission to design the ®rst complete new college built since the seventeenth century. This was to be named after John Keble, who had died in 1866, and was to be above all a religious foundation, but also one where life would be more economical than at the older collegesÐ`a College wherein sober living and high culture of the mind may be combined with Christian training based upon the principles of the Church of England'.48 Butter®eld was the obvious choice as architect: he was a High Churchman, and he was known for his radical approach to planning and design. In addition, he had worked for Keble at the latter's Hampshire living of Hursley. The college buildings were begun in 1868, and were complete (in all essentials) by 1883. The whole college cost about £150,000, and the chief benefactors were the Gibbs family. William Gibbs of Tyntes®eld paid for the chapel (£40,000), while the hall and library were paid for by his sons. Although the college owed its being to Anglican conservatives, the architectural planning was brilliantly unconventional. The huge Liddon Quadrangle is dominated by the mighty chapel, on its north side. Butter®eld made an advantage out of the declivities in the ground which resulted from its former use as a gravel-pit by sinking the central lawn, in order to increase the apparent height of the buildings. Along the southern side are placed the hall and library, both at ®rst-¯oor level, and approached by a lofty staircase vestibule between the two. Beneath them were common rooms, including a Junior Common Room which may have been the ®rst one purpose-built at Oxford (though the institution went back to the eighteenth century).49 46 In 1876±8 Waterhouse designed a large new block for Oriel College, to stand on the north side of Oriel Square: drawings survive in the college archives. For his Mans®eld scheme see below, 84. 47 H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, Vitruvian Nights (1932), 157. Contrary to common opinion, the Grove Building was faced in stone. 48 Charter of Incorporation, 6 June 1870. For the ®rst intake of undergraduates in 1870 the fees were £81 per annum (p. 182 above). In 1865 it had been suggested that, although the cost of an Oxford education need not exceed £130 per annum, it was not advisable for a man to go up with less than £200 (Cornhill Magazine, xi (1865), 224). See also Pt 1, 155±7, 308. 49 The Eighteenth Century, 343; S. Rothblatt, `The Student Sub-Culture and the Examination System in Early Nineteenth century Oxbridge', in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society (2 vols Princeton, 1975), i. 255). The former JCR is now part of the library.

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Accommodation was in three-storey blocks, varied by slightly taller and projecting blocks containing fellows' sets. The entrance gate-tower was ingeniously placed at the south-east corner of this quad, so that on entering one ®rst sees the buttresses of the hall and library wing, before the quad and chapel appear on the right, while to the left one looks into the smaller and more irregular Pusey Quadrangle. This is dominated by the octagonal clocktower on the former Servants' Building, on the west. At the southern end is the warden's lodging, complete with private chapel, and a walled garden sunk for privacy.50 The most revolutionary feature of the planning was that the rooms opened, not off the traditional staircases, but off corridors. The reason for this was economy, both in building and in subsequent servicing.51 Sittingrooms and bedrooms were set side-by-side along the corridors. The provision of a sitting-room with a smaller bedroom opening off it was the normal one in all colleges, though men generally preferred to have their own scout's pantry and an `oak' or outer door as well. At Keble the `oaks' took the form of sliding doors, which was another original and ingenious device. (They have now been removed.) The planning of the major buildings of the college was equally radical. In the chapel the seating was not arranged in the traditional way, with facing stalls: instead, all faced east, in keeping with the Tractarian emphasis on the Eucharist. The hall was the longest in Oxford, not for bravado, but so that all members could be accommodated at one sitting, which would be more economical. A curiosity is the minstrel's gallery, supported on iron columns, not over the entrance, as was traditional, but opposite the ®replace. Aesthetically, the most controversial aspect of the college was the choice of materials. Brick was cheaper than stone, and the local stone was in any case poor and the source by this date of widespread problems in Oxford. Keble was situated some way away from the older University buildings, close to the newly developing suburb of North Oxford, where brick was the normal material. In addition, brick could provide the colour and pattern which the architect wanted. In answer to critics, Butter®eld pointed out that brick was practical and ®re-resistant, and that patterned brickwork was a common local tradition. He himself referred to the walls as `gay'.52 50

The warden's chapel has long been converted into a cloakroom. The legend that the reason was primarily a moral oneÐso that the dons could keep an eye on the undergraduatesÐis disproved by the fact that not every corridor had a don living at the end of it. According to Basil Champneys (Journal of the RIBA, xix (1912), 292), the effect on discipline was adverse, since the corridors were used for `bear-®ghting, cricket and football', and `they have had to cut them up to prevent such uses.' Bodley and Garner, in their report on their 1879 Magdalen scheme, described corridors as `noisy and open to serious objections'. See also p. 174 above. 52 In a letter of 11 Dec. 1869 to Philip Webb ( John Brandon-Jones, `Letters of Philip Webb and His Contemporaries', Architectural History, viii (1965), 55). The blinkered and mindless 51

746

`our buildings shape us'

The interior of the chapel is especially magni®cent. The decoration is arranged in three horizontal tiersÐarcading below, mosaics in the middle, and stained glass above. Mosaics and glass were by Alexander Gibbs (no relation to the benefactors), whose work exactly suits the architecture. The east end is adorned by a great constructional reredos in marble, alabaster, and mosaic. Butter®eld's tenacity is shown by his winning a battle in 1873 with H. P. Liddon over the scene to be represented above the altar (as recorded in Chapter 6, Liddon wanted the Cruci®xion, Butter®eld Christ in Majesty). A complete contrast with Keble is provided by the large block of four staircases of rooms built for New College along Holywell Street in 1872±4 to the design of Sir Gilbert Scott (as he now was). The block also contains two large lecture-rooms, a new type of accommodation only just coming to be demanded by colleges. Scott deliberately used a style `generally in accordance with the date of the College', and the building is faced in Milton stone. It is signi®cant that in 1879 E. A. Freeman wrote to Scott's son George Gilbert that his father's work here was `of special importance, as the return to plain English and commonsense in Oxford buildings, after so many years of Ruskinian tomfoolery'.53 Scott's range has been much criticized for its overbearing height, but it was the college which obliged him to add an extra storey to his original design, and also to reduce the external ornament and put the plumbing on the street side. The requirement for more accommodation at New College was in response to the eagerness of energetic fellows for a great increase in the college's undergraduate numbers, made possible by its 1857 Ordinances. In 1875±7 Scott added two more staircases and a tutor's house (the ®ve-storey block) to the west. Scott was also responsible for a great deal of restoration work at Oxford, not surprisingly, in view of his reputation for scholarship and sensitivity in this ®eld. In 1856 he had restored the Founder's Tower at Magdalen, providing richly decorated rooms for the President.54 In the same year he repaired the spire of St Mary the Virgin, later going on to restore the rest of the churchÐpart of a lengthy and contentious saga of restoration which covered some ®fty years. In 1863 he not only commended the Vicar, J. W. Burgon, for rescuing Laud's porch from destruction, but persuaded him to spare also the eighteenth-century gate piers in front of it.55 In 1862±3 he provided University College chapel with a new roof and a new eastern bay, together with prejudice against Keble's brickwork, still prevalent at Oxford, goes back to contemporaries: in 1869 it was called the `holy zebra style', and in 1871 `not inaptly compared to a pile of ham sandwiches' (Building News, xvii (1869), 284; Jackson's Oxford Journal 14 Oct. 1871). On the new suburb, and Keble College's place within it, see Tanis Hinchcliffe, North Oxford (1992). 53 Quoted by Gervase Jackson-Stops in J. Buxton and P. Williams (eds), New College, Oxford, 1379±1979 (1979) 263 n. 39. 54 Much of the decoration (some of which was by Crace) has been removed. 55 See Burgon's introduction to Scott's Recollections (n. 12), xviii. On the restorations of the church see T. G. Jackson, The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford (1897).

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

747

a lavish carved reredos and arcading.56 In 1865 he put an excellent new roof into New College hall, and he did the same for Merton in 1872±4, as part of a general rebuilding of the hall. In 1873 he succeeded Henry Clutton as architect for the restoration of All Souls College chapel, the college having decided that it would be inappropriate for Clutton to restore the great medieval reredos as he was a Roman Catholic.57 Between 1870 and 1876 he carried out a major restoration of Christ Church Cathedral (where work had been done earlier in the century by John Billing and E. G. Bruton). He restored the east end (removing a window of 1853) so that it would be seen again as, according to his investigations, it had looked in Norman times, and designed rich ®ttings, the ®nest of them a bishop's throne in memory of Samuel Wilberforce.58 Finally, in 1877 he began the restoration of New College chapel, which was completed after his death in the next year by his sons George Gilbert and John Oldrid. Against his better judgement, he was constrained to put in a hammerbeam roof, although there was no historical or architectural justi®cation for it.59 In the 1870s three new architects, all pupils of Scott, appeared on the Oxford scene, on which they were to make a decisive mark. One, Thomas Graham Jackson, had a strong local connection; the others, George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner, who had been working in partnership since 1869, were based in London. Jackson was lucky enough to win a fellowship at Wadham in 1864 (he held it until 1880) and his earliest work was for his own college. This led to his being invited to compete in 1874 for the completion of the bell-tower at Christ Church, un®nished since Wolsey's time, and needed now to house the bells which Scott had moved from the Cathedral tower. Six architects competed ( Jackson, T. N. Deane, J. W. Hugall, Bodley, Scott, and Basil Champneys). Scott proposed a comparatively modest solution, Deane an `Italian campanile', and Jackson a preposterous great tower which would (according to the Dean) have `challenged' the Cathedral spire, but it was Bodley and Garner's scheme that was accepted. Unfortunately the college's failure to execute the magni®cent great lead-covered lantern on top leaves the beautifully detailed tower looking somewhat gawky.60 56 These are now covered up, as the seventeenth-century reredos, which Scott removed (but preserved), has been put back in front of them. 57 H. M. Colvin and J. S. G. Simmons, All Souls: An Oxford College and its Buildings (1989). 58 Destroyed c.1960. 59 After Scott's death Alfred Robinson tried to put the blame on him for a mistake for which he himself was chie¯y responsible. He led the majority of the committee which chose the hammer beam roof ( Jackson-Stops [n. 53] 251), but when asked in 1880 whether Scott had been solely responsible, he replied that this was indeed the case; Proceedings of the Oxford Architectural Society, NS iii (24 Feb. 1880), 364. 60 The designs by Scott, Jackson, and Bodley are illustrated in Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 138±9. According to Jackson, Acland called his design `the ®nest thing ever rejected' (Recollections of Thomas Graham Jackson, ed. Basil H. Jackson (1950), 127). A design by James Fergusson was

748

`our buildings shape us'

Jackson's great opportunity came with the decision of the University to erect new Examination Schools. This proposal went back to 1859, when the Hebdomadal Council had agreed that the rooms then used for examinations on the ground ¯oor of the Schools Quadrangle should be handed over to the Bodleian Library. In 1866 it was decided to use the site of the Angel Hotel in High Street for the new schools. The business of choosing an architect was extraordinarily mismanaged. In 1869 G. E. Street and T. N. Deane were asked to make designs, and Deane's were chosen, but the estimated cost of nearly £100,000 precluded action. In 1872 a Delegacy was appointed, and invited ®ve architects to competeÐA. W. Blom®eld, T. N. Deane, J. O. Scott, G. E. Street, and A. Waterhouse.61 The latter two refused. In 1873 an elaborate Gothic design by J. O. Scott was chosen by the Delegates, but rejected by Convocation. The question then arose of whether it was not the Bodleian which should be moved instead, either to the Angel Hotel site, or to some other.62 Finally, in 1875 a new Delegacy decided to seek designs from Scott, Deane, Bodley, Jackson, and Champneys. A limit of £50,000 was set. In March 1876 Jackson's design was chosen, and, although its cost was estimated at £63,884, accepted by Convocation. How much the Delegates were in¯uenced by Jackson's Oxford connection is impossible to say: they certainly must have been impressed by his novel choice of style, for in recommending the design to Convocation they pointed out that it was `in harmony with that of the existing Schools'. The other designs were all Gothic, but Jackson thought that the `late eclectic form of Gothic, of which Oxford and Cambridge contain admirable examples' was most appropriate: `before my eyes seemed to come the haunting vision of Elizabethan and Jacobean work, and especially of those long mullioned and transomed windows at Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire.'63 These latter are recalled by the great windows of the huge entrance hall on the High Street. This was designed as a place for candidates to assemble, and also as a way of keeping the noise of the street from the examination rooms themselves, which are arranged around the west illustrated in the Builder, xxxiii (1875), 952. Bodley and Garner's work at Christ Church included the upper part of Killcanon Tower, the restoration of the Chapter House, the new reredos and font for the Cathedral, and the walls and gateway in Oriel Square. The latter greatly interested Pevsner, who took it to be seventeenth-century. 61 A. W. Blom®eld's most important Oxford works are the Radcliffe In®rmary chapel (1864), St Barnabas's church (1869±72), and Magdalen College School (1893±4). 62 It was even suggested that the Bodleian should move to the Parks, an idea satirized in a lea¯et published in 1875. This is printed as an appendix to R. T. GuÈnther's Oxford Gardens (1912), 194±6, sinceÐaccording to GuÈntherÐits absurd arguments for moving not only the Bodleian and the Botanic Garden, but also the Radcliffe In®rmary and the Cowley Incurable Hospital, to the Parks helped to ensure that the Garden stayed put. 63 Recollections, (n. 60) 134. See also R. Wilcock, The Building of the Oxford University Examination Schools (1983), 14±15; Pt 1, 396 and 438. On the competition, see also Architectural History, viii (1965), 60±1.

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

749

and south sides of a quadrangle open to the east. The west range has a grand centrepiece in its east face, which oddly does not frame a doorway. In fact the planning of the building, as often with Jackson, leaves a good deal to be desired, though visually it is full of delights.64 As signi®cant as his choice of style was Jackson's use of stone from Clipsham in Rutland, whose durability justi®ed its subsequent popularity. This was so great that in 1947 W. J. Arkell could remark that it was `now after seventy years more seen than any other', and he observed with some regret that it `bids fair to become almost the sole medium through which the eyes of future generations will behold the architectural conceptions of the old masters, carried out originally in such a charming variety of materials'.65 Clipsham is much yellower than the local stones such as Headington, which had previously been commonest. This is why the regular description of Oxford by William Morris and others as `grey' now seems puzzling. The Schools were built between 1876 and 1882, by which time expenditure had risen to £107,000. This was largely due to the elaborate decoration in carved stone and woodwork, moulded plaster, marble, and mosaic. Even so the decoration was never completed. With the cost of the site and interest payments included the total was nearer to £180,000 by the time it was paid off in the early years of this centuryÐa huge cost for the University to bear at a time when there were many other calls on its ®nances. One of the greatest of these was the concomitant work on restoring the Bodleian Library. This was begun in 1876 by Douglas Galton, but Jackson took over responsibility in the next year. By 1884 it had cost no less than £28,000. The ¯oor of Duke Humfrey had to be raised, for it was found to be resting on the vault of the Divinity School (as had been discovered to be the case in 1700, and was to be discovered again in 1958). Much of the external stonework was renewed (in Clipsham), including pinnacles, battlements, and the tower ornament. Since the removal of the scienti®c books from the Radcliffe Camera to the Museum in 1862, the Camera had been used as the main Reading Room, because it had been lit by gas since 1835, whereas the Bodleian could not be lit at all until electricity was introduced, owing to the founder's prohibition on ®re (it had, however, been heated since 1845). Space in the library became less and less adequate to cope with the everincreasing tide of incoming books, and during the second half of the nineteenth century many different projects were ¯oated, including the complete moving of the library (see above, p. 748), the glazing-over of the Schools Quadrangle, the erection of a new building across the Quadrangle, or 64 The Schools were savagely criticized by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel in his Slade Lectures in 1935. He denounced them as `the general public's idea of a work of architecture', an example of the `vicious picturesque so common in Oxford', in which `all traditional honesty and good sense have been ignored' (Architect and Building News, cxliv (1935), 348). 65 W. J. Arkell, Oxford Stone (1947), 110.

750

`our buildings shape us'

between the Clarendon Building and the Quadrangle, the conversion of the Proscholium into a ®reproof strongroom, and the linking of the Radcliffe Camera to the Quadrangle by a covered passage raised on arches.66 It is fortunate that the combination of academic indecision and lack of demand from readers (whose average daily number, present at any one time, in 1880 was sixteen) ensured that the original buildings remained virtually intact.67 In 1876 Bodley and Garner were commissioned to build a new master's lodging for University College. The Bursar responsible was Bodley's old friend, Charles Faulkner. He had been a partner in William Morris's original ®rm in 1861, and Bodley had given the ®rm its ®rst commission for glass. The result at University was one of the most attractive examples of domestic architecture in Oxford, in a late sixteenth-century style not dissimilar to that used by Jackson for the Schools, but handled with more re®nement and discipline. Bodley intended it to `harmonise with the College buildings'.68 Unfortunately its erection was a nightmare for Faulkner, who had decided to do it by direct labour. Bodley had estimated the cost at £7,800, but after long delays it was completed for £10,494.69 When Faulkner had to furnish the three staircases in the Radcliffe Quadrangle converted out of the former master's lodging, in 1879, he obtained wallpapers from Morris and Co., Jeffreys, and Baldwin; Sussex chairs from Cox of High Wycombe; `Chippendale' and `Sheraton' chairs from Stennett; and carpets from Shoolbred. Morris and Co. also provided wallpapers for the lecture-rooms at Brasenose in 1885, together with `Persian glazed tiles' for ®replaces: other tiles came from William De Morgan, F. Garrard, and Shuffrey and Co.70 Such artistic furnishings were a comparative novelty, and represented one of the happier side effects of the colleges' increased control over undergraduate life. In the 1860s the normal arrangement had still been for undergraduates to purchase their predecessor's furniture, which was usually ancient and battered.71 In 1894 C. W. Boase pointed out that the sofas and easy chairs now to be found in men's rooms had previously been 66 This proposal was made by Acland in his Report to the Radcliffe Trustees in 1861: he had obtained a design from Woodward, illustrated in Building Accounts of the Radcliffe Camera, ed. S. G. Gillam (OHS 1958), plate 48; in G. C. Barber, Arks for Learning (1995), 124±5, where it is dated to 1858; and in O'Dwyer, Deane and Woodward, 512, where it is dated to 1857. 67 The seventeenth-century bookcases of Duke Humfrey narrowly escaped destruction when the ¯oor was renewed in 1876 (S. Gillam, The Divinity School and Duke Humfrey's Library at Oxford (1988), 73). 68 It is amusing to note that Bodley had told Jackson, after the competitors for the Schools had received their instructions, that he had `half a mind . . . to do it in Renaissance', but Jackson dissuaded him on the ground that he would spoil his chance, only to decide later to do so himself (Recollections, 134). 69 Faulkner's correspondence with Bodley in the College Archives makes the heart bleed for him. 70 UCA; C. D. Turnbull, `The Buildings of Sir T. G. Jackson at Brasenose College' (Oxford Final Honours School thesis, Modern History, 1987). 71 Furniture was provided at Keble: see p. 178 above.

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

751

unknown. He recalled that even in Senior Common Rooms sanded ¯oors and spittoons had not given way to carpets until early in the century.72 It was Bodley and Garner who had been chie¯y responsible for the return to the use of English models by architects (the turning-point being the revised design for All Saints' church, Cambridge, of 1862). G. G. Scott's eldest son, also called George Gilbert, a sensitive and learned architect, was more in¯uenced by them than by his father. He did less work at Oxford than for his own University at Cambridge, but his block on St Giles for St John's College, of which the ®rst part was built in 1880±1, was a subtle reinterpretation of the traditional college front.73 Basil Champneys has already been mentioned as an unsuccessful competitor for the Christ Church belfry and the Examination Schools. He had been trained as a strict Goth by John Prichard of Llandaff. Some of his earliest works were in OxfordÐparish schools for St Ebbe's (1870±1), and the new church of St Peter le Bailey (1872), a quiet and restrained work.74 In 1874 he was commissioned to design the ®rst building for Newnham College, Cambridge (built 1874±5), for which he used the newly fashionable style misleadingly called `Queen Anne', in red brick with white-painted woodwork. As a result of this, he was asked in 1880 to design the ®rst new building for Lady Margaret Hall, an addition to an existing house completed in 1884. For it he used the same style, and the same arrangement of rooms opening off a corridor (single bed-sitting rooms rather than the double sets traditional in men's colleges). This was considered to be more suitable for women's colleges, since, as Champneys explained in 1912, `You cannot turn girls out into the air when they pass from room to room; and, as far as I know, they are not given to cricket and bear-®ghting in the house!'75 Somerville College was founded in 1879, a year after Lady Margaret Hall, and it too began in an existing house, to which T. G. Jackson made an addition in 1881, also in `Queen Anne'. 72 Even then there were protests: when it was proposed to put a carpet in the Exeter SCR the senior fellow declared, `Gentlemen, if you will introduce such a monstrous luxury, I will never enter this room again'. Nor did he. (C. W. Boase, Register of Exeter College, Oxford (1894), clv). In the 1930s a chandelier ordered for the New College SCR eighty years previously was found still packed in its maker's box (A. H. Smith, New College, Oxford, and its Buildings (1952), 148). 73 The front was completed in 1899±1900 by E. P. Warren, modifying Scott's design. Scott had designed a quadrangle, with a new hall in Jacobean style forming its eastern side (Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 180±2). On Scott Junior see G. M. Stamp, George Gilbert Scott Junior (D.Phil. thesis, Cambridge, 1979: is to be published). 74 The church is now the chapel of St Peter's College, but was built to replace an old parish church on a different site. On Champneys, see A. J. Coignard, `Basil Champneys, Architecte' (unpublished MeÂmoire de MaõÃtrise, Universite de Sorbonne, Paris, 1984). 75 Journal of the RIBA, xix (1912), 292Ðsee n. 51 above; also Journal of the RIBA, x (1903), 209. It is a pity that when the Lodge Building was erected in 1926 it obscured and partly obliterated the east elevation which was the most attractive part of Champneys's building, with its pairs of shaped gables and ®rst-¯oor oriels.

752

`our buildings shape us'

In 1879 another important limited competition was held, for new buildings for Magdalen on the site of Magdalen Hall, following a report made by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1875. The architects involved were Bodley and Garner, Champneys, Street (his last great chance at Oxford), and William Wilkinson, a local man. Bodley and Garner won. They emphasized that they had taken their Gothic from Magdalen itself. The L-shaped block which they erected in 1881±5 (the St Swithin's Quadrangle), with its noble tower facing the Founder's Tower, the rich bay-windows on the High Street front, and its exquisite detailing, was one of the few modern buildings admired by William Morris and, according to R. T. GuÈnther, was `generally stated to be the best new collegiate building at Oxford'. Goodhart-Rendel praised it highly in 1935, writing: `Looking at Garner's buildings, one might fancy that the Gothic style had never died, and to Garner I do not think that it ever had.'76 It is interesting to note that Jackson was not asked to compete at Magdalen. Other colleges went straight to him for their building projects. The `English Renaissance' style which he generally used for his work at the older colleges suited Oxford patrons in a generation bent on change without the appearance of change: it was essentially secular, and was ¯exible enough to encompass both plainness and decorative elaboration. His work included the Grove Building at Lincoln (sixteen sets and domestic of®ces), and the ®rst stages of several much grander schemes. Brasenose had been thinking of extending to the High Street since the early eighteenth century, and its need for more rooms for undergraduates, teaching rooms for tutors who lived out of college, lecture-rooms, and an undergraduate reading-room, made this seem a necessity by 1880. After much discussion (in which Walter Pater, a fellow, took a leading part) the ®rst section of the new quadrangleÐthe west block and return wing to the northÐwere built in 1881±6. The college insisted on four storeys against Jackson's preference for three (as had happened to Scott at New College).77 The style was late Gothic, to suit the date of the college. Jackson employed the mixture of coarse stone rubble walling and Clipsham dressings which he had ®rst used at the Oxford High School for Boys (1880±1). Presumably he liked the effect of texture (a kind of instant antiquity), as did the other architects who used variations on the technique well into the twentieth century. The second stage of the scheme, built in 1887±9, was at the south-east, and included a new principal's house and the gate-tower on the High Street front. 76 Architect and Building News, cxliv (1935), 325. Goodhart-Rendel attributes the design to Garner, presumably because it was generally said that he had taken chief responsibility for the partnership's domestic work. The Building Committee Minutes would seem to bear this out at Magdalen, though the correspondence about the master's lodging at University is almost entirely with Bodley (who may, however, have known Faulkner better than did Garner). 77 Champneys held that the use of four storeys was `subversive of collegiate effect', pointing out that King's College, Cambridge, had likewise forced Bodley to go against his better judgement: Journal of the RIBA, x (1903), 207.

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The ®nal stageÐthe rest of this front and the link to the west side of the quadrangleÐfollowed in 1909±11. These parts were of three storeys. It is hard to deny that Jackson's front on the High is somewhat overdone. The placing of an oriel in every bay can be compared with G. G. Scott Junior's front at St John's, but the effect of the lavish ornament at Brasenose (however pretty in itself the `exquisite close foliage decoration . . . Arts and Crafts at a very early moment,' as Pevsner calls it) is to produce a congestion scrupulously avoided by Scott. It is perhaps less fair to criticize Jackson for the inclusion of a grandiose gateway which is almost never used, as this is not uncommon. However, the front would have been even more overpowering had the gate-tower been surmounted by the openwork `crown' (like that on Newcastle Cathedral) which he designed for it.78 At Trinity, Jackson created an irregular `front quadrangle'. A scheme prepared in 1880 involved sweeping away the old cottages on Broad Street and setting a pretty stone gateway in the centre of an iron railing, but the cottages were spared.79 The great need was for more rooms for undergraduates: in 1882 only ®fty-seven were able to live in, the rest being in lodgings. It was thought desirable to bring in at least the majority of freshmen. In 1883±5 a block containing twenty-seven sets was built along the eastern side, and in 1885±8 a new president's lodging was built on the north. The Trinity buildings are arguably the most attractive which Jackson built at OxfordÐthe composition well-judged, the detailing restrained, and the materials sympathetic. It is much harder to feel affection for the Annexe for Corpus Christi, on the north side of Merton Street, or for most of his extensive work at Hertford College. This college had been refounded in 1874, and the buildings of Magdalen Hall (transferred to this site in 1822Ðsee p. 729 above) were inadequate. Jackson's ®rst work was to ®ll in the space between Garbett's detached wings with a hall raised up above the main entrance and other accommodation. His fussy and indigestible design contrasts unhappily with Garbett's elegant reticence. He also built new rooms on the north of the quadrangle, and a much more substantial residential block on the other side of New College Lane, in a more successful gabled and mullioned style. The proposal to link this to the older part of the college by a bridge was prevented by the City authorities until 1913±14: although popular with tourists, the bridge has never been much used. Jackson also designed a new chapel for the college: characteristically it is much more satisfying in its details, such as the exquisite wood-carving and the inlaid marble ¯oor, than in overall architectural effect. Two of Jackson's buildings had particularly interesting purposes. One was the Delegacy for Non-Collegiate Students, with which he ®lled in the High 78 79

Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 151±5. The cost of all this work was almost £43,000. The scheme is illustrated in ibid. 149.

754

`our buildings shape us'

Street±Merton Street corner of his own Examination Schools. The NonCollegiate Students had been in existence since 1868, but had no purposebuilt premises until this handsome gabled structure, in a style deliberately contrasting with the Schools, was erected for them, largely due to the efforts of Jowett.80 The other was a large tutor's house for Balliol, called the King's Mound, in what is now Mans®eld Road. Its size was due to the fact that the tutor for whom it was built, A. L. Smith, was to take in students needing special careÐnamely those from the highest social strata.81 Another unusual commission, this time given to the proli®c local architect Harry Wilkinson Moore (responsible for much of North Oxford) was Foxcombe, Boars Hill, built as a summer residence (as it were a Castelgandolfo) for the president of Trinity. The building of houses for tutors was a novelty, due to the relaxation of the requirement of celibacy. They were usually built in closer proximity to the college than the King's Mound, as, for example, Kybald House at University College (H. W. Moore, 1887±8), and Mansel House at St John's (also Moore, 1898). Scott's tutor's house at New College has been mentioned already (p. 746 above): this was an exceptionally early case, since New College tutors had been allowed to marry since 1869. Resident tutors were considered essential for discipline. The Scott house was very inconvenient, but the new range added along Holywell Street by Basil Champneys in 1885±6 had a much more satisfactory house at its eastern end. This range was one of the several works in Oxford with which Champneys challenged the domination of Jackson. For it he used an extremely pretty late Gothic style, distinguished by charming ornament. In 1896±8 he had to face the problem of linking this building to Scott's, which he solved successfully by means of a gate-tower which had to rise higher than Scott's range and yet not overpower his own lower one. Sometimes Champneys used a Renaissance style, a prominent example being the Indian Institute, which closes the view east down Broad Street, and which had to relate to the grandeur of the Clarendon Building on one side and the old houses on either side of Parks Road on the other. The Institute was ®rst proposed by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Professor of Sanskrit, in 1875, and was built by means of subscriptions to provide teaching for Indians at 80 R.R. Trotman and E. J. K. Garrett, The Non-Collegiate Students and St Catherine's Society 1868±1962 (1962). When the Non-Collegiate Students (who became St Catherine's Society in 1931) moved to their new building in St Aldate's in 1936, their High Street building housed the Delegacy of Local Examinations, and later the Ruskin School of Art. 81 Jackson's original scheme was for a `Balliol Hall . . . where men might live more cheaply': Recollections, 198; also Abbott and Campbell, ii. 134±5, 344±5. This incorporated a large collegiate block south of the King's Mound. On the purpose of the house, see [M. F. Smith], Arthur Lionel Smith (1928), 127.

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

755

Oxford and a museum. Champneys ingeniously worked Indian elements into the decoration of the corner turret. He also used a Renaissance style for the simple shrine built to house the Shelley Memorial with which University College made amends to the poet it had sent down (though the funds came from one of his descendants). The memorial itself, by Edward Onslow Ford, is an outstanding example of the `New Sculpture'. Another successful use of the Renaissance style was the library at Somerville, in brick and stone like most of that college's buildings. However, it is hard to feel much love for the new front on the High Street which he designed for Oriel College, and which was built with money provided by Cecil Rhodes. Presumably Champneys found the site, opposite St Mary the Virgin, and almost opposite Jackson's Brasenose front, a daunting one.82 Nor can much be said in favour of the massive new Lodging which he designed for the bachelor Warden of Merton on the north side of Merton Street in 1903.83 Much more appealing is his St Alban Quadrangle opposite, which incorporates a doorway of 1599 from St Alban Hall, and is designed in a Gothic style ¯avoured with Renaissance elements. Particularly attractive is the way Champneys left the south side (formerly closed) open to the garden, but divided off by an elegant iron screen. Champney's masterpiece in Oxford dates, however, from twenty years earlier. This is one of the two new denominational `colleges' (strictly Permanent Private Halls) built on what is now called after it, Mans®eld Road. This Congregational college decided to move from Birmingham to Oxford in 1885, and Champneys was asked to design its buildings.84 These were not to include residential accommodation, as the students would live out. A long range facing south has the gate-tower in the centre, with hall and senior common room on the east, and lecture-rooms on the west. At right angles to it at the eastern end is the chapel, and at the western end the library, raised up above lecture-rooms, and beyond that the principal's house. The whole group is a most sensitive and intelligent adaptation of traditional Oxford Gothic to the needs of an unusual institution. The ®nest interior is the library, reminiscent of a great medieval barn. Lofty timber uprights support 82 Champneys's ®rst design, illustrated in Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 156, is even less satisfactory. The Rhodes Building was defended by Goodhart-Rendel (Architect and Building News, clxv (1936), 14): `though crude, it smells slightly less stale to me than most of Oxford's disorderly mock-Renaissance.' 83 This `monument of inconcinnity' was a particular bugbear of E. W. B. Nicholson. In his wonderfully pungent pamphlet Can we not save Architecture in Oxford? (1910) he regretted the unlikelihood of its being destroyed by earthquake; `perhaps the bombs of a hostile yet discriminating aviator may someday ``bring relief''!' Jackson had prepared an even more grandiose scheme for the same site in 1878: around three sides of a quadrangle, it included fourteen sets, two lecture-rooms, and two houses for tutors (illustrated in Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford, 149). 84 The college also obtained a design from Alfred Waterhouse, in 1886.

756

`our buildings shape us'

the prettily painted roof, and divide off the carrels, each lit by an oriel window, and linked down either side by galleries at an upper level.85 Mans®eld makes an instructive contrast with its neighbour Manchester College, built a few years later for Unitarians. Appropriately they chose a Manchester architect, Thomas Worthington, but he seems to have been overawed by Oxford, and his buildings, although in the same basic style as Champneys's, entirely lack the latter's re®nement and originality.86 A new demand which had to be met in this period was for sports facilities. The University's own cricket pavilion in the Parks was designed by Jackson in 1880, and most of the colleges built pavilions, and sometimes groundsmen's houses, on their playing ®elds before the First World War. The opportunity to build a small-scale building on an open site often led to exceptionally charming results, such as the Queen's pavilion by the local architect Edward Allfrey (1901) and the University College one by Clough Williams-Ellis (1913). The University also built pavilions at its running ground in 1876 (enlarged in 1893), and at its football ground in 1900. The needs of rowing were met partly by the University Boathouse designed by John Oldrid Scott in 1880, and partly by the college barges. These were sometimes designed by architects associated with the collegesÐas, for example, J. O. Scott for University College; Alfred Waterhouse for Balliol; Edward Prioleau Warren for Magdalen; and Jackson for Oriel and Corpus. Within these decades the University had to respond to demands more serious and expensive than those of sport. New buildings for science were constantly required. Deane's Inorganic Chemistry and Physiology Laboratories have already been mentioned, as well as his Pitt Rivers Museum. In 1874±5 Charles Barry Junior had built a new Observatory out in the Parks north-east of the Museum. A Department of Human Anatomy was built west of the Pitt Rivers (1891±3, by H. W. Moore); the Morphological Laboratory north of it (a rather unsuccessful design by the normally excellent domestic architect J. J. Stevenson, with H. Redfern); and the Radcliffe Science Library, paid for by the Drapers' Company, to its south-west, at the same time (T. G. Jackson). All of these buildings, except the Observatory, were physically attached to the Museum, which was now engulfed on three sides by a remarkably heterogeneous assemblage of buildings. 85 Champneys's greatest work was the John Rylands Library at Manchester. In 1902 he built a delightful little lodge at Mans®eld, but it was demolished in 1962 to make way for the new residential range. For a penetrating analysis of the architecture of Mans®eld, see C. Bin®eld, ```We Claim our Part in the Great Inheritance'': the Message of Four Congregational Buildings', in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism (Studies in Church History 7, 1990), 201±23. 86 Goodhart-Rendel vented on them his bitterest scornÐ`coarse, illogical, vulgar, and unintelligent'. He compared them interestingly with the Broad Street front of Balliol (Architect and Building News, cxlv (1936), 188). The Arlosh Hall, added by Worthington's talented son Percy in 1913±19, is quite a different matter. On Worthington, see A. J. Pass, Thomas Worthington: Victorian Architecture and Social Purpose (Manchester, 1988).

oxford architecture, 1800±1914

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Other science buildings started to go up in the same area, but detached. These included the insigni®cant Pathological Laboratory (by J. A. Souttar, 1899±1901); the pompously classical Electrical Laboratory, also built at the expense of the Drapers' Company, to designs by Jackson (now the Clarendon Laboratory); and the ®rst part (1913±16) of the Chemical Laboratory paid for by Dyson Perrins. This was designed by Alfred Waterhouse's son Paul: his ®rst scheme had a giant order of attached columns, but the executed building, in brick and stone, is rather nondescript. Science buildings not on the Parks site included a new observatory tower at the Radcliffe Observatory, by Jackson (1900); the Manley Laboratory (1902, A. Mardon Mowbray) and the Vines Wing (1910±12) at the Botanic Garden; the School of Forestry and Rural Economy in Parks Road, by the St John's College architects N. W. and G. A. Harrison (1906±8, extended 1912); and the Engineering Laboratory, at the Parks Road and Banbury Road junction, by W. C. Marshall (1914). None of these is of much architectural interest. It will have become clear that the lion's share of architectural work went to a few `big' London architects whose work had become fashionable in the University (a situation which prevailed until at least the 1970s). Local men tended to be used for more mundane work, such as kitchens or domestic of®ces, though they were sometimes given bigger opportunities, such as the substantial West Buildings at Somerville by H. W. Moore (1886±94), in his usual brick and stone sub-Jacobean. He was also responsible for the very large additions made to the University Galleries in three stages (1886, 1889, and 1893±4) in order to house the collections moved there from the old Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library. These additions were done in a plain and utilitarian manner. Moore's happiest work for the University was the smallestÐthe Museum Lodge in Parks Road (1888). Some colleges were more adventurous in their choice of architects. For the rebuilding of Magdalen College School on the other side of Magdalen Bridge, the College held a limited competition: it was not surprising that Jackson and Bodley were invited to compete, but the choice fell on Sir Arthur Blom®eld. It is hard to feel enthusiastic about the result (built in 1893±4). New College had better luck with its school, in Savile Road, which is by (Sir Charles) Nicholson and Corlette (1905). Christ Church had used Moore for its Choir School in Brewer Street in 1892. Some colleges preferred architects who had some connection with the foundation. Two used their own `house architects': St John's had its Rawlinson Building designed in 1909 by N. W. Harrison, who also designed many houses on its North Oxford estate, and Jesus had a new front built on Ship Street (1906±8 and 1910±12) by R. England, who might as well have been asleep since 1840. Pembroke College had the interior of its eighteenthcentury chapel transformed into a riot of colour and symbolism in 1884±5 by its old member Charles Eamer Kempe, who used the Renaissance style to

758

`our buildings shape us'

give a Catholic effect.87 Edward Prioleau Warren, whose brother (Sir) Herbert was President of Magdalen from 1885 until 1928, did several minor works for that college, completed G. G. Scott Junior's St Giles front for St John's, and built two new buildings at Balliol (his brother's old college), one by the back gate in 1906, and another ®lling the gap between the Basevi and Salvin Buildings, in 1912±13.88 Balliol also employed Paul Waterhouse, an old member of the college, to spoil his father's hall in 1910 by blocking the lower parts of the windows and installing new panelling. For the Maitland Building (1910±1) and hall (1912±13) Somerville went to Edmund Fisher, who was brother of the President of the College Council, H. A. L. Fisher. (However, he did win the ®rst of these jobs in competition with Herbert Tudor Buckland.) Fisher is little known because he died in the First World War, but, though his buildings are quietly unassertive, his hall is particularly successful inside.89 The women's colleges tended to be more adventurous in their choice of architects, and to prefer ones who had a reputation for domestic work. Somerville had already used Walter Cave twice, and St Hugh's was designed and built at one go by the Birmingham architects H. T. Buckland and William Haywood. Lady Margaret Hall went to Sir Reginald Blom®eld, nephew of Sir Arthur, and unlike him a committed classicist: between 1896 and 1926 he built a series of handsome brick and stone buildings in an early eighteenth-century manner. In 1904 Blom®eld designed ®ne new chimneypieces for the hall of his old college, Exeter. Some other distinguished London architects did only very minor works in Oxford. For example, J. L. Pearson completed the restoration of the New College reredos; J. T. Micklethwaite and Somers Clarke altered Keble chapel, not for the better, by inserting the Liddon chapel in the transept; W. D. CaroÈe remodelled the warden's lodging at New College; and Smith and Brewer put in new staircases and made other alterations to the Sheldonian Theatre.90 At least these works were informed by the new spirit of sensitivity to older buildingsÐthe same spirit which inspired, for example, the exemplary repair in 1888 by J. J. Stevenson (a founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) of Canterbury Quadrangle at St John's; his 87 The architectural work was done by R. J. Johnson, who had collaborated with Kempe at the chapel of Castle Howard, but it was of a purely structural nature. 88 His ®rst work at Magdalen (some bookshelves for fellows' rooms in St Swithin's Quadrangle) dated from 1885. In 1911 he designed a block containing a bursary and rooms for the east side of the Garden Quadrangle at Balliol (not executed), and he later built three fellows' houses for the same college. 89 Fisher's major work was Wych Cross Place, Forest Row, Sussex, completed in 1902 for his father-in-law, Douglas Fresh®eld. Unfortunately its late owner, Lord Samuel of Wych Cross, much altered it. 90 On Pearson, see A. Quiney, John Loughborough Pearson (1979). CaroÈe's work at New College was largely destroyed in 1958: J. M. Freeman, W. D. CaroÈe (Manchester, 1990), 113±14. For Smith and Brewer's work at the Sheldonian, see the Minutes of the Curators (OUA), and their drawings in the RIBA Drawings Collection.

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restoration in 1900±1 of the lettered parapet on the hall porch at Oriel; and the delightful panelling and stained glass designed for the same hall in 1909± 13 by J. N. Comper.91 Stevenson held that `a large amount of the renewal of the stone surfaces of Oxford buildings which has been done lately has been unnecessary, so far as stability was concerned.' It is not often realized what the extent of this renewal was: for example, even the eighteenth-century Queen's College was largely refaced.92 Another interesting aspect of Stevenson's work at St John's and Oriel was that it showed a new respect for the work of the seventeenth century. Although this was the period to which most of Oxford's collegiate architecture dated, it seemed debased to the `correct' medievalists of the midnineteenth century. For example, a critic writing in 1856 had regretted that the `bungling' gate-tower of Oriel had been restored exactly as it was, and had argued that the Fellows' Quadrangle at Merton (which even he praised as `picturesque') should have had its details improved.93 This attitude helps to explain the demolition of Exeter College chapel, and the drastic remodellings of the sanctuaries of the chapels of Jesus and University. By comparison, Jackson's enlargement of the chapel at Oriel in 1884 is a model of discretion, as one might expect from the architect of the Examination Schools. Right at the end of this period the ®rst part was built of a building of truly remarkable distinctionÐPusey House. This had been founded in 1884 in memory of Dr E. B. Pusey. For its new building, a competition was held: designs were made by Harold Brakspear and by the young Giles Gilbert Scott, but the commission went to his master, and his father's former pupil, Temple Moore, who was one of the best church architects of his time. The chapel and northern part of the St Giles front were built in 1911±14, and reveal Moore's mastery of simple and solid Gothic. A charming touch is the way the recessed oriels on the front echo those on the front which Moore's master Scott built for St John's on the other side of St Giles. `I do not think there is in Oxford any better specimen of Gothic design, old or new, than Pusey House,' wrote Goodhart-Rendel.94 91

100.

For Stevenson's work at St John's, see H. Colvin, The Canterbury Quadrangle (1988), 98±

92 One reason for this is the even more wholesale renewal of stonework carried out under the auspices of the Oxford Historic Buildings Fund after 1957 (W. F. Oakeshott (ed.), Oxford Stone Restored (1975)). 93 `Vivian', in Building News, ii (1856), 963. 94 Architect and Building News, cxlv (1936), 110. The recessed oriels must go back to a medieval model. Mr D. M. Brock suggests that it may have been the oriel on the gatehouse at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, of c.1540. They were used on a house by H. L. Elmes at New Brighton, Cheshire (c.1845); on Street's Vicarage at Cuddesdon (1853±4); and in the attics of Barry's building on High Street (where they must be due to H. W. Moore, who put new rooms in the roof in 1894). On Temple Moore, see G. K. Brandwood, Temple Moore (Stamford, 1997).

760

`our buildings shape us'

The only college garden laid out on any substantial scale during the nineteenth century was that of Worcester, which owes its present form to work carried out between 1817 and 1827, the latter stages under the direction of the Bursar, the Revd Richard Greswell. At Magdalen, the Fellows' Walk, from Addison's Walk to the King's Mill, was begun in 1867, to plans by the Revd T. H. T. Hopkins, a fellow. The architect of Lady Margaret Hall, Sir Reginald Blom®eld, made a design for its garden in 1896, and modi®ed it later: it formed the basis for the existing garden.95 In 1853 the University bought the Parks, which were already much used for recreation, from Merton College, the ninety-one acres costing it £37,457. It did this primarily to provide a site for the Museum, but Delegates were appointed, and a scheme for laying out the Parks was made in 1863 by James Bateman, FRS, of Magdalen, celebrated for the layout of his garden at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire. Further land was bought in 1865, 1871, and 1886, including Mesopotamia and the land east of the Cherwell. The lodge at the Parks Road entrance was built in 1862 to the design of T. N. Deane, and that at the South Parks Road entrance in 1893 by H. G. W. Drinkwater. Reference has already been made to the new buildings at the Botanic Garden (p. 757 above), and to Acland's unsuccessful attempt to move it to the Parks (n. 62). In 1873 J. D. Hooker, of Kew Gardens, reported that the glasshouses, which had been built at various times over the previous forty years (and included one range, apparently of 1851, with an iron and glass ridge-andfurrow roof), needed complete rebuilding, but it was not until 1893±4 that new glasshouses were erected by Messrs J. Boyd and Sons of Paisley. In an article published in 1952 on recent buildings in Oxford and Cambridge, Sir James Richards attacked what he called (in words subsequently much quoted) `the artistic barrenness and timidity of academic taste'.96 Such an accusation could certainly not have been levelled at those responsible for the buildings erected at Oxford in the middle years of the nineteenth century. No history of British architecture in this period could fail to mention the Taylorian and Randolph Galleries building, the University Museum, Keble College, or the Examination Schools. The fact that the responsible authorities were willing to accept such bold designs, and see them through to completion, is a tribute to their architectural awareness and bravery of taste. It is equally remarkable that each of these buildings continues today to serve what is essentially its original purpose, and has suffered comparatively insigni®cant alteration.97 Credit for this must 95 Eileen Stamers-Smith, `Sir Reginald Blom®eld's Designs for the Garden of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford', Garden History, xxiv (Summer 1996), 114±21. 96 Architectural Review, cxii (1952), 74. 97 It is sad to have to record that the Ashmolean has now (1995) `suffered signi®cant alteration': the raised and planted terrace along Beaumont Street, which was an original feature, has been destroyed, and the steps have been moved back from the street, in addition to other drastic alterations.

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go partly to forceful and distinguished architects like Cockerell and Butter®eld, and partly to in¯uential men of taste like Acland and Ruskin, but their efforts would have been vain if the University and college committees had lacked the vision necessary to ensure that their projects were executed. Comparison with the earlier years of the century is perhaps unfair, since so little new construction was undertaken at that time, but the taste of the later years, and of the Edwardian period, was noticeably less bold than that of the mid-Victorians. By 1900 safety and sobriety were the watchwords. To some extent this can be explained as a reaction against the great works of the midcentury, not just because some of them (especially Keble) were excessively strong meat for the quieter tastes of the later period, but because they had been so enormously expensive. Until recently, churchmen have not generally been reckoned to be adventurous in their artistic preferences, and it may seem strange that while Oxford was dominated by clergymen its new architecture should have been so adventurous; but architectural decisions re¯ect not only social changes, but currents of thought and feeling: the strong theological passions aroused by the Oxford Movement and the various degrees of reaction to it had their counterpart in a widespread and informed interest in architecture. Architects were on their mettle to show that the Gothic style could be adapted to modern needs, or that classical buildings represented something nobler than a debased `paganism'. As has been mentioned, Oxford's patrons and clients were not con®ned to the University itself. The same spirit which inspired Oxford-educated parochial clergymen to commission vigorous architects to rebuild or restore their churches might have encouraged them, during their years as bachelor fellows, to vote con®dently for similar projects by their University or college. It is arguable that the secular dons who came to dominate the scene later in the century were less knowledgeable about, and less interested in, architecture, apart from some obvious exceptions like Walter Pater and R. T. GuÈnther.98 Where the University most conspicuously failed was in making adequately imaginative provision for future needs. The most striking example of this is the piecemeal and messy development of the `Science Area' around the MuseumÐa problem which the twentieth century has been equally unsuccessful in remedying. On the other hand, academic conservatism has at least ensured the survival, through periods when they were out of fashion, of buildings whose preservation is a blessing for us: of these the most notable is once again the Museum, although a comparable example in the nineteenth century might be the Bodleian Library. 98 William Morris certainly had no faith in contemporary dons: see his `Architecture and History' of 1884ÐCollected Works, xxiii (1915), 306.

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In general, the combination of economic buoyancy and the relative cheapness of building enabled both University and colleges to respond rapidly and effectively to new needs as they arose. It is remarkable that the agricultural depression of the 1880s, which had an adverse effect on the ®nances of institutions whose wealth was largely based on land-ownership, had no apparent effect on the pace of building, which was at its greatest in the 1880s and the 1900s, though there was a falling-off in the 1890s. A partial explanation is provided by the ability of both the colleges and the University to call upon private benefactions when needed. As far as the University was concerned, it was the pro®ts of the Press, ef®ciently managed to meet the insatiable demand for Bibles and Prayer Books, which provided funds for projects such as the Randolph Galleries, the University Museum, and the Examination Schools. In the course of the nineteenth century Oxford had been transformed from a small market town, remarkable only for its University, whose almost monastic character was re¯ected in its buildings, their antiquity heightened by the picturesque decay of their stonework and the ivy and creepers which covered them, into a thriving city, whose built form now consisted of a mixture of spruced-up old buildings and substantial new ones which had displaced in great measure the old domestic architecture celebrated in the watercolours of J. C. Buckler. There were those who regretted the change: already in 1883 William Morris used the past tense when he said that `there are many places in England where a young man may get as good a booklearning as in Oxford; not one where he can receive the education which the loveliness of the grey city used to give.'99 It was because of this that the buildings of Oxford seemed to provide the perfect model for new universities, whether in Britain or the USA. Ralph Adams Cram, the great American church and college architect, wrote that `the XVth, XVIth and early XVIIth century collegiate architecture of England is the most perfect style ever devised by man to this particular end' (that is, education).100 Much of the fascination of the study of Oxford's own architecture in the period reviewed here lies in the tension between this traditionalist approach and a bold willingness to experiment.

99 Quoted by T. W. Goodspeed, one of the founders of the University of Chicago: Dreams in Stone: The University of Chicago (Chicago, 1976), viii. As these words do not seem to appear in any of Morris's published works, Goodspeed was perhaps quoting from a lecture he had heard. 100 `Recent University Architecture in the United States', Journal of the RIBA, xix (1911±12), 498. See also R. A. Lowe and R. Knight, `Building the Ivory Tower: The Social Functions of Late Nineteenth-century Collegiate Architecture', Studies in Higher Education, vii (1982), 81±91; R. Lowe, `Anglo-Americanism and the Planning of Universities in the United States', History of Education, xv (1986), 247±59; P. V. Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (New York, 1984), 215±45.

APPENDIX P R I N C I PAL A R C H I T E C T U R A L W O R K S AT O X F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y 1 8 0 0 ±1 9 1 4 Date

Building

1800 1800±2 1801 1801±2 1801±4 1802

St Edmund HallÐPrincipal's lodgings enlarged Exeter CollegeÐRector's lodgings rebuilt (?) Wadham CollegeÐBrewhouse Sheldonian TheatreÐroof rebuilt Christ ChurchÐhall alterations Trinity CollegeÐattic storey added to N and W sides of Garden Quadrangle University CollegeÐS side of quadrangle remodelled, and new plaster vault in chapel Jesus CollegeÐwork at Principal's lodgings, etc. Corpus Christi CollegeÐroughcast on inside of quadrangle replaced with stone facing Wadham CollegeÐnew staircase from cloister to Library; attic windows towards quadrangle made uniform Wadham CollegeÐWarden's lodgings improved (new staircase, etc.) BNCÐcloister under library converted into rooms BNCÐStaircases 9 and 10 Radcliffe ObservatoryÐporter's lodge St John's CollegeÐstables

1802 1802±3 1806±8 1806 1806±12 1807 c.1809±10 1810±11 1811 1

Architect

Builder

Actual cost1

George Saunders James Wyatt William Wilkins

D. Harris

£3,000

Knowles

£1,264 £628

James Grif®th John Nash

D. Harris £1,500 Sir John Soane John Hudson T. Hardwick

John Hudson Hudson

The note on movements of general prices in Pt 1, 381, is reproduced for convenience:

763

Prices rose steeply during the Napoleonic Wars, then fell sharply; despite considerable subsequent ¯uctuation they were lower in 1850 than in 1820; thereafter the tendency was upwards, especially in the early 1870s. The later 1870s, and more especially the 1880s and early 1890s, saw a substantial drop. To a rise at the turn of the century there succeeded, ®rst a slight decline, then an increase, which accelerated in the years immediately before 1914.

Building

Architect

Builder

Actual cost

1815±16

Jesus CollegeÐalterations (new battlements, windows, etc.) Oriel CollegeÐProvost's lodgings remodelled Lincoln CollegeÐnew battlements, chimneys, and windows on W front BNCÐsash-windows in Tower replaced with Gothic windows Corpus Christi CollegeÐfounder's statue and arms set up Oriel CollegeÐeight sets of rooms at back of Robinson Building University CollegeÐnew rooms over library and kitchen Exeter CollegeÐhall remodelled Oriel CollegeÐseven sets of rooms between Robinson Building and main quadrangle Magdalen Hall (later Hertford College) Pembroke CollegeÐhall remodelled Worcester CollegeÐattic storey added to building abutting SCR block Magdalen CollegeÐN and E sides of quadrangle rebuilt, S side restored, etc.

Thomas Knowles

Knowles

£3,383

H. Hakewill Thomas Knowles

Knowles Knowles

£1,900 £276

H. Hakewill

Thomas Wyatt £92

1815±17 1815±19 1817 1817 1818 1818 1818±20 1819 1820±2 1821 1822 1822±8 1824 1824 1824 1826 1826 1826 1826±7

All Souls CollegeÐcoffee room Magdalen CollegeÐends of New Building ®nished off Worcester CollegeÐnew upper storey to Pump Quadrangle (six sets) BNCÐBrewhouse St Mary Hall (now Oriel College)ÐW side of quadrangle Wadham CollegeÐhall ®replace, and stables and outhouses for Warden All Souls CollegeÐHigh Street front remodelled

£1,803 J. Nash and G. S. Repton

£1,857

W. Garbett

D. Evans Harris

£10,450 £1,839

J. Parkinson

D. Evans

Samuel Benham Thomas Harrison

£10,179 (E side) £1,975 (S side) £3,889 (Library)

Daniel Evans

£2,595 £800 Over £750

D. Robertson D. Robertson D. Robertson

Jas Johnson

£4,425

764

Date

1826±7 1826±7 1826±7 1827 1827±8 1828 1828 1829±30 1829±30 1830±1 1830±5 1831 1831±2 1831±2 1832 c.1833 1833 1833±4 1834±5 1835 1837±8 1837±8 1838

Clarendon BuildingÐinterior remodelled University PressÐSuperintendents' Houses Wadham CollegeÐchapel reredos and roof; Warden's lodgings improved New Inn Hall (now St Peter's College)ÐS wing St Mary HallÐPrincipal's house rebuilt, and three sets on N side of quadrangle (Old) Ashmolean MuseumÐreconstruction Exeter CollegeÐBroad Street front (E part) Exeter CollegeÐTurl Street front remodelled Botanic GardenÐlibrary and lecture-room Merton CollegeÐrestoration work Sheldonian TheatreÐnew cupola All SoulsÐCodrington Library; new staircase etc. in Sub-Librarian's room Magdalen CollegeÐhall chimneypiece Pembroke CollegeÐE side of quadrangle remodelled

G. Basevi

Charles Smith

£3,946

D. Robertson D. Robertson

Johnson Charles Smith

£495 £29,085 £998

Thomas Plowman H. Hakewill James Gilbert

John Plowman £4,078 £1,310 £1,770

Daniel Evans E. Blore R. Smirke L. N. Cottingham

Daniel Evans Charles Smith

R. Smirke E. Blore E. Blore

£2,898 £11,312 £10,900 (or £18,000?)

Joseph Banting £4,578 Over £300

T. Greenshields H. J. Underwood H. J. Underwood H. J. Underwood H. J. Underwood E. Blore E. Blore John Buckler

Hudson D. Evans Plowman

£490 £2,945 £3,574

Wyatt

£300 £571

765

1838 1838

Balliol CollegeÐnew building, and refacing of Bristol Building to match St John's CollegeÐinner SCR University PressÐE and S wings Oriel CollegeÐalterations to hall, including Gothic panelling St Mary the VirginÐre®tting Radcliffe CameraÐrailings BNCÐ`one of Mr Sheard's houses' rebuilt (21/22 High Street) Pembroke CollegeÐfront and quadrangle remodelled University PressÐN wing (Learned Side) Bodleian LibraryÐrestoration Magdalen CollegeÐchapel re®tted

Building

Architect

Builder

Actual cost

1838±9 1838±43 c.1840 1840±2 1841 1841 1841±3 1841±5 1843±4

St John's CollegeÐLaudian library re®tted Merton CollegeÐchapel roofs restored St John's CollegeÐPresident's kitchen University CollegeÐNew Building Christ ChurchÐsteps etc. of Tom Quadrangle redesigned New CollegeÐantechapel paved in marble Martyrs' Memorial Taylorian and Randolph Building St John's CollegeÐchapel reconstructed

H. J. Underwood E. Blore

Hudson

£434

1843±5 1844 1844

Queen's CollegeÐlower library enclosed Magdalen CollegeÐgateway etc. Worcester CollegeÐkitchen and of®ces with undergraduates' rooms above BNCÐchapel and library exterior refaced Jesus CollegeÐkitchen etc.

C. R. Cockerell A. W. N. Pugin

Pembroke CollegeÐfellows' and undergraduates' rooms, SCR, and Bursary Pembroke CollegeÐMaster's lodgings enlarged Pembroke CollegeÐhall Botanic GardenÐTownesend Building heightened (Daubeny Laboratory) St Mary the VirginÐrestoration of spire begun Magdalen HallÐsecond storey added over old Principal's lodgings and hall Magdalen CollegeÐChoristers' Hall

J. Hayward

1844±5 1845 1845±6 1847 1847±8 1848 1848±9 1849 1849±51 2

C. Barry Sir F. Chantrey G. G. Scott C. R. Cockerell E. Blore

P. Hardwick J. Matthews

WalterandWyatt Plowman £7,162 Knowles Kirk Baker Locke and Nesham Myers

£5,0002 £49,373 £3,899 £8,000 £990

Fulljames and Waller J. Hayward

G. Wyatt £3,200 Hudson and Matthews DanielEvans £5,287 andJ.R.Symm £1,473 MatthewAwdreyOver £6,500

E. Blore

Gardiner

See 1850±1

John Chessell Buckler

According to a note in the `Subscribers' Book', Jan. 1843, the cost of the Memorial and Memorial Aisle was £9,370±17-7: J. P. Wells, OM 2 Feb. 1968, 161±4.

766

Date

1848±56 1850±51

Merton CollegeÐchapel restoration etc St Mary the VirginÐrestoration of spire continued

1852

Lincoln CollegeÐbattlements along interior of front quadrangle and on N side of inner quadrangle Balliol CollegeÐSalvin Building and tower ChristChurchÐCathedralÐnewEwindowandnaveseats Exeter CollegeÐBroad Street front Jesus CollegeÐTurl Street front remodelled Exeter CollegeÐlibrary University Museum

1852±3 1853 1854±6 1854±6 1855±6 1855±60 1856 1856 1856±7 1856±7 1856±7 1856±7 1856±7 1856±9 1857 1857±8 1858 1858 1858 1859±62 1860

Magdalen College SchoolÐchapel St Mary the VirginÐspire repaired Union SocietyÐDebating Hall Exeter CollegeÐRector's house and eight sets Exeter CollegeÐchapel Corpus Christi CollegeÐtracery in hall windows University MuseumÐcurator's house All Souls CollegeÐaddition to Warden's lodgings on W Exeter CollegeÐblock between chapel and Broad Street buildings Oriel CollegeÐchapel restored University CollegeÐLibrary Christ ChurchÐCathedralÐE window of Latin Chapel

See Pt 1, 655.

Knowles A. Salvin

John Kelk J. Hudson G. G. Scott Symm J. C. and C. A. Buckler James Long Jnr. G. G. Scott Symm Deane and Woodward Lucas Bros J. Billing G. G. Scott W. Butter®eld

Hudson

Total 1847±52 £3,904 £7,985 £4,587 £1,854 £3,321 £87,000 (to 1867)3

Ruddle and Thompson

£6,049

Gardiner

£1,289

G. G. Scott Deane and Woodward G. G. Scott G. G. Scott C. A. Buckler Deane and Woodward

Symm Symm

£5,000 c.£7,900

Lucas Bros

G. G. Scott

Symm

£1,300 £1,800 £550

C. A. Buckler G. G. Scott Deane and Woodward

Symm

£5,141

767

3

Christ ChurchÐCathedral restoration work and alterations to Deanery Magdalen CollegeÐFounder's Tower restored, etc. Balliol CollegeÐchapel

W. Butter®eld J. C. and C. A. Buckler Gardiner

Building

Architect

Builder

Actual cost

1860 1860±3 1861 1861 1862±3 1862±5 1863 1863 1863±4 1863±4 1863±4 1863±4 1863±6 1863±6

University CollegeÐButtery, etc. Merton CollegeÐGrove Building Christ ChurchÐCathedralÐrestoration work St Mary the VirginÐrestoration work University CollegeÐchapel enlarged, etc. New CollegeÐhall roof, etc. Lincoln CollegeÐcommunal lavatory Union SocietyÐReading Room, Writing Room, etc. (Old) Ashmolean MuseumÐrestoration, etc. Jesus CollegeÐchapel restored Radcliffe CameraÐsteps and lower Reading Room Worcester CollegeÐchapel remodelled BNCÐentrance tower restored Christ ChurchÐMeadow Buildings

G. G. Scott W. Butter®eld E. G. Bruton G. G. Scott G. G. Scott G. G. Scott

Symm J. Fisher

£500 c.£8,000

Gardiner Symm Franklin

£3,869 £2,754 £5,830

W. Wilkinson C. Buckeridge G. E. Street S. Smirke W. Burges J. C. Buckler T. N. Deane

Symm Symm Wyatt Wyatt Wyatt Symm

1863±6 1864 1865 1867 1867

John Gibbs

Selby

Clayton and Bell E. G. Bruton W. Wilkinson

Earp (sculptor) £440 Wyatt

1867 1867±71 1867±9 1867±9 1868

St Alban's HallÐchapel, etc. rebuilt Trinity CollegeÐ4 sets NW of Wren quadrangle Magdalen CollegeÐsculpture in reredos All Souls CollegeÐCodrington LibraryÐAnson Room New CollegeÐalterations to S side of main quadrangle, etc. St Edmund HallÐtwo sets over hall Balliol CollegeÐFront Quadrangle and Master's lodgings Sheldonian TheatreÐnew heads Clarendon Laboratory Keble CollegeÐN quadrangle

1868 1868 1868±9

New Inn HallÐchapel Queen's CollegeÐpediment at E end replaced Merton CollegeÐantechapel restored

W. Wilkinson A. Waterhouse

£1,533 £1,680 £2,771 Over £7,000 £30,000 (or £20,000?)

W. Brass

£26,615

T. N. Deane W. Butter®eld

Symm John Parnell and Son

£10,282

C. Buckeridge

J. Fisher

768

Date

1869 1869

C. Buckeridge Bodley and Garner G. G. Scott G. G. Scott

1873±8 1873±5 1873±6 1873±7

Balliol CollegeÐhall and ¯anking buildings Observatory Keble CollegeÐchapel All Souls CollegeÐchapel restoration completed

A. Waterhouse C. Barry Jnr W. Butter®eld G. G. Scott

1874 1874 1875±7 1875±8 1876 1876

Keble CollegeÐServants' Building Wadham CollegeÐimprovements in Back Quadrangle New CollegeÐHolywell Building (second part) Keble CollegeÐhall and library (Old) Ashmolean MuseumÐrepairs, including new heads Trinity CollegeÐorgan gallery in chapel; and new lecture room

W. Butter®eld T. G. Jackson G. G. Scott W. Butter®eld

1869 1869 1869 1870 1870±6 1871 1871 1871 1871±2 1871±3 1871±3

J. C. Buckler E. G. Bruton E. G. Bruton C. Buckeridge C. Buckeridge A. Waterhouse G. G. Scott C. Buckeridge G. G. Scott T. N. Deane H. Clutton J. C. Buckler T. G. Jackson

E. G. Bruton

Wyatt Fisher

£941

Wyatt Symm J. Castle

Kimberley Fisher

£24,000 c. £400

£1,300 £348

Booth Jackson and Shaw P. Horsman Symm Parnell Franklin

£6,000 £23,000 £36,490 £4,668 £40,000 £10,639 (whole work)

JacksonandShaw Parnell £40,000 Wyatt £201

769

1872 1872±3 1872±4 1872±4

BNCÐantechapel refaced Christ ChurchÐServants' Building (in lane from St Aldate's) Clarendon BuildingÐproctorial rooms, etc. Magdalen CollegeÐadditions to President's lodgings Pembroke CollegeÐnew kitchens and scullery Balliol CollegeÐFisher Building refaced Christ ChurchÐCathedral restoration Magdalen College SchoolÐclassrooms St Mary the VirginÐCongregation House restored as Unattached students' chapel University MuseumÐporter's lodge All Souls CollegeÐchapel restoration St Mary HallÐchapel restored, and new reredos Wadham CollegeÐwork in Warden's lodgings, hall, and chapel St John's CollegeÐnew ®ttings in chapel Christ ChurchÐnew W entrance to Cathedral Merton CollegeÐhall restored New CollegeÐHolywell Building

Building

1876

University Running Ground

1876±7 1876±8

W. Butter®eld Bodley and Garner

1876±82

Keble CollegeÐWarden's Lodgings Christ ChurchÐWolsey's almshouses converted into steward's house Christ ChurchÐBelfry; Killcanon Tower; Chapter House restoration; walls, etc. to Oriel Square Examination Schools

1876±84 1877

1876±9

Architect

Builder

Actual cost

Fisher and Hobdell Parnell

Nearly £2,000

Bodley and Garner

Symm

T. G. Jackson

A. Estcourt

Bodleian LibraryÐrestoration Botanic GardenÐlaboratory, etc.

T. G. Jackson

1877

Sheldonian TheatreÐorgan case

T. G. Jackson

1877 1877±8 1877±9 1877±80 1877±80 1878 1878±9 1879 1880 1880±1 1880±1 1880±1 1880±3 1880±4 1881

Worcester CollegeÐhall remodelled ObservatoryÐlecture room and library Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory University CollegeÐMaster's lodgings New College ChapelÐrestoration Radcliffe CameraÐheating Union SocietyÐDebating Hall Pembroke CollegeÐtower parapet renewed University CollegeÐbarge Cricket Pavilion St John's CollegeÐnew front to St Giles University Boathouse Lincoln CollegeÐGrove Building Lady Margaret HallÐnew block Christ ChurchÐwooden bridge over Cherwell

W. Burges C. Barry T. N. Deane Bodley and Garner G. G. Scott and sons A. Waterhouse A. Waterhouse Bodley and Garner J. O. Scott T. G. Jackson G. G. Scott Jnr J. O. Scott T. G. Jackson B. Champneys T. G. Jackson

Symm Fisher and Hobdell Farmer and Brindley Wyatt Symm Symm Direct labour G. Shaw Symm J. Parnell Sam Saunders Estcourt Symm Estcourt Bell and Son

£8,932

£107,000 (excl. site and loan costs) £28,000 £1,738 £400 c.£2,000 £2,145 £8,268 £10,494 £20,000 £700 £6,030 £2,215 £7,500 £3,230 £7,725

770

Date

1881 1881±2 1881±2

Corpus Christi CollegeÐchapelÐorgan case Balliol CollegeÐbarge Magdalen CollegeÐworks to kitchen, etc.

T. G. Jackson A. Waterhouse Wilkinson and Moore

1881±2 1881±3 1881±5 1881±6 1882 1882±4 1883±4 1883±5 1884±5

T. G. Jackson W. Butter®eld Bodley and Garner T. G. Jackson Wilkinson and Moore B. Champneys T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson

1884±5

Somerville CollegeÐnew block Keble CollegeÐBursary, lecture-room, and twenty sets Magdalen CollegeÐSt Swithin's Quadrangle BNCÐS quadrangleÐW block and return wing to N New CollegeÐkitchen alterations Indian Institute (N half) Oriel CollegeÐchapel remodelled Trinity CollegeÐnew buildings Corpus Christi CollegeÐannexe, and restoration of Beam Hall Jesus CollegeÐPrincipal's lodgings enlarged

1884±5

Pembroke CollegeÐchapel remodelled

1884±5 1885 1885 1885

Physiology Laboratory All Souls CollegeÐlibrary for Warden's house Magdalen CollegeÐgateway Trinity CollegeÐMillard Laboratory (Dolphin Yard)

1885±6 1885±6 1885±6 1885±6

Lincoln CollegeÐnew wing to Rector's lodgings New CollegeÐTutor's house and sets Pitt Rivers Museum Wadham CollegeÐorgan-loft, case etc in chapel (including repairs) Trinity CollegeÐPresident's house

1885±7

Salter George Castle and Knowles and Son Parnell Franklin Symm Holland Symm

£2,500 £6,842 £38,472 See 1892±6 See 1885±7

Bodley and Garner

Charles Curtis/ £3,613 Knowles R. J. Johnson and C. E. Knowles Over £4,000 Kempe (by 1893) T. N. Deane and Son Symm Over £6,000 W. C. Marshall Bodley and Garner C. Curtis/ £431 Knowles Wilkinson and Moore £2,500 B. Champneys Estcourt £8,698 T. N. Deane and Son Symm Over £10,000 T. G. Jackson Curtis £1,190 T. G. Jackson

771

£22,000 (with the other buildings)

Building

Architect

Builder

1886 1886 1886 1886 1886±7 1886±7 1886±8 1886±8 1886±9 1886±94 1887 1887±8

Wilkinson and Moore

Kingerlee Symm Symm

1887±9 1888 1888 1888 1888 1888±9 1888±92

Ashmolean MuseumÐextension to Picture Galleries Clarendon PressÐmachine room Kettle Hall (now Trinity College)Ðlecture-room Lincoln CollegeÐchapel restoration Balliol CollegeÐorgan gallery in chapel Magdalen CollegeÐbarge Delegacy of Non-Collegiate students Merton CollegeÐchapel exterior and sacristy restored Magdalen CollegeÐPresident's lodgings Somerville CollegeÐWest Buildings Pusey HouseÐextra storey on garden front Hertford CollegeÐCatte Street front; new block N of quadrangle, and restoration of E and N sides Foxcombe, Boar's Hill (summer residence of President of Trinity) St John's CollegeÐrestoration of Canterbury Quadrangle and library roof University CollegeÐKybald House BNCÐS quadrangleÐSE corner, including Principal's house Mans®eld College Christ ChurchÐCathedralÐnew organ-loft Magdalen CollegeÐHolywell Ford Radcliffe CameraÐalterations University MuseumÐMuseum Lodge Trinity CollegeÐbarge New CollegeÐchapel reredos statues

1889

Ashmolean MuseumÐlarge extensions

1887±8 1887±8 1887±8 1887±9

Wilkinson and Moore A. Waterhouse E. P. Warren T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson Bodley and Garner H. W. Moore H. W. Moore T. G. Jackson

Symm Salter Parnell Symm Franklin Symm

Actual cost

£110 £800 £6,412 £11,134

Symm

H. W. Moore J. J. Stevenson

Wyatt

c.£2,000

H. W. Moore T. G. Jackson

G. Dobson

c.£14,000

Parnell

c.£40,000

Symm

£1,725

N. Hitch (sculptor) Symm

£3,000

B. Champneys H. W. Moore C. C. Rolfe A. Waterhouse H. W. Moore H. W. Moore J. L. Pearson H. W. Moore

772

Date

1889

J. P. Harrison

1891 1891±3 1891±3

Lincoln CollegeÐhall ®replace, etc. Department of Human Anatomy Manchester College

1892 1892 1892 1892±3 1892±3 1892±3 1892±3 1892±6

New CollegeÐpavilion Balliol CollegeÐcricket pavilion Oriel CollegeÐbarge Balliol CollegeÐKing's Mound BNCÐchapelÐorgan-case and screen Clarendon Press Institute University CollegeÐShelley Memorial Indian Institute (second part)

H. W. Moore T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson H. W. Moore B. Champneys B. Champneys

1892±6 1892 1893 1893 1893 1893

St Mary the VirginÐrestoration Somerville CollegeÐporter's lodge Christ Church Choir School ParksÐHolywell lodge Pembroke CollegeÐchapelÐorgan-case Running Ground PavilionÐnew dressing room, etc.

T. G. Jackson W. F. Cave H. W. Moore H. G. W. Drinkwater C. E. Kempe A. Mardon Mowbray

1893±4 1893±4 1893±4

Ashmolean MuseumÐBeaumont street galleries Botanic GardenÐnew glasshouses Magdalen College School

H. W. Moore

T. G. Jackson J. Osborne Smith H. W. Moore Micklethwaite and Somers Clarke T. G. Jackson H. W. Moore T. Worthington and Elgood

A. Blom®eld and Sons

Symm

Symm Parnell

£2,000

£7,250 c.£45,000

T. H. Kingerlee

Parnell Parnell Symm

£5,000 ?£34,000 (whole building) £11,633

Symm Ben®eld and Loxley Symm £1,500 J. Boyd and Sons Ben®eld and ?£8,500 Loxley

773

1889 1890 1890 1891

Christ ChurchÐCathedralÐSt Frideswide's shrine restored Lincoln CollegeÐhall roof restored Bodleian LibraryÐHistory School ®tted with stacks Pembroke CollegeÐgallery in library Keble CollegeÐLiddon Chapel

Building

Architect

1894

H. W. Moore

1896±8

University CollegeÐsubway under Logic Lane; new rooms in roof of Barry Building University MuseumÐadditions to Hope Department BNCÐchapel restored, etc. Somerville CollegeÐextension Local Examinations Delegacy (12 Merton Street) University CollegeÐlecture-rooms and accommodation in Logic Lane All Souls CollegeÐCommon Room annexe BNCÐcricket pavilion Lady Margaret HallÐWordsworth Building St John's CollegeÐcricket pavilion University CollegeÐcottage, carriage house, etc. for the Master New CollegeÐRobinson Tower and sets to its E

1897±8 1898 1898 1898±9 1898±1900 1898±1901

St Hilda's CollegeÐS extension St John's CollegeÐMansel House Somerville CollegeÐThe Hostel St John's CollegeÐgroundsman's house Radcliffe Science Library Department of Zoology and Morphological Laboratory

1894 1894±5 1895 1895±7 1895±7 1896 1896 1896 1896 1896

1898±1904 New CollegeÐrestoration of exteriors 1899 Trinity CollegeÐKettle Hall converted into six sets 1899±1900 Oriel CollegeÐfront quadrangle and ornamental work on hall front restored 1899±1900 St John's CollegeÐW front to St Giles completed 1899±1901 Pathological Laboratory

T. G. Jackson W. F. Cave T. G. Jackson H. W. Moore

Builder

Actual cost

Wyatt Curtis Estcourt

H. W. Moore R. Blom®eld H. W. Moore H. W. Moore B. Champneys R. P. Day H. W. Moore W. F. Cave H. W. Moore T. G. Jackson J. J. Stevenson and H. Redfern B. Champneys

£6,500

Ben®eld and Loxley

£14,225

£8,200

J. J. Stevenson

Knowles

£1,793

E. P. Warren

Ben®eld and Loxley Symm

c.£6,000

J. A. Souttar

£10,000

774

Date

1900 1900 1900 1900 1901 1901

Queen's CollegeÐChemical Laboratory Radcliffe ObservatoryÐnew tower Trinity CollegeÐcricket pavilion University Football GroundÐpavilion Merton College: three Tutors' Houses in Merton Street Queen's CollegeÐpavilion

T. G. Jackson T. G. Jackson

1901±2 1901±3

University CollegeÐDurham Buildings Hertford CollegeÐN quadrangle (®rst phase)

H. W. Moore T. G. Jackson

1902 1902 1902±4 1903 1903±4 1903±4 1904 1904 1904 1904 1904±6 1904±10

Botanic GardenÐManley Laboratory Mans®eld CollegeÐlodge Magdalen CollegeÐhall restoration New CollegeÐWarden's lodgings remodelled Somerville CollegeÐlibrary University CollegeÐhall extended Corpus Christi CollegeÐPresident's lodgings rebuilt Exeter CollegeÐhall chimneypieces, etc. Jesus CollegeÐpavilion Magdalen CollegeÐpavilion Sheldonian TheatreÐnew staircases, etc. Merton CollegeÐSt Alban's Quadrangle; Warden's lodgings Corpus Christi CollegeÐcricket pavilion New College School

A. Mardon Mowbray B. Champneys G. F. Bodley W. D. CaroÈe B. Champneys H. W. Moore T. Case R. Blom®eld R. England Ronald P. Jones Smith and Brewer B. Champneys

1905 1905 1905 1905±6 1905±7

Charles Curtis/ £1,209 Knowles Ben®eld and Loxley Kett

£4,968

Wooldridge Hutchins

£4,950

J. A. Hunt Symm Simpson

T. Case C. Nicholson and Corlette H. W. Moore Read and Macdonald ?R. T. Blom®eld E. P. Warren

£889

£2,317

Over £5,000 Holloway Bros

775

1906

University CollegeÐbridge over Logic Lane Lincoln CollegeÐlibraries and lecture-room Exeter CollegeÐnew gables to Turl and Brasenose Lane, and attics enlarged Balliol CollegeÐBack Gate Building

E.P. Warren E. W. Allfrey

Knowles

Building

Architect

Builder

1906±8

Hertford CollegeÐchapel

T. G. Jackson

1906±8 1906±8

Jesus CollegeÐShip Street front (®rst part) School of Forestry and Rural Economy

1907 1907 1908

Hertford CollegeÐNE corner of N quadrangle Physiology LaboratoryÐnew wing New CollegeÐpavilion enlarged

R. England N. W. and G. A. Harrison A. Estcourt

Jacob Long and Sons

Walter E. Mills

1908±10 1909 1909 1909±10 1909±11 1909±11

Electrical Laboratory St John's CollegeÐRawlinson Building St Hilda's CollegeÐextension to S Lady Margaret HallÐTalbot Building BNCÐS quadrangleÐpart W of gateway Oriel CollegeÐRhodes Building

T. G. Jackson N. W. Harrison W. E. Mills R. T. Blom®eld T. G. Jackson B. Champneys

1909±11 1909±12

Oriel CollegeÐhall repanelled, etc. Radcliffe CameraÐunderground bookstore

1910 1910±11 1910±11

Corpus Christi CollegeÐtower refaced St John's CollegeÐrepair of garden front of Canterbury Quadrangle Somerville CollegeÐMaitland Building

J. N. Comper Edmund Woodthorpe W. Lucy and Co.£12,000‡ and Rutland Saunders (engineers) R. T. Blom®eld Symm H. Redfern

1910±11 1910±12 1910±12 1911±14 1912 1912

Union SocietyÐlibrary, etc. Botanic GardenÐVines Wing Jesus CollegeÐShip Street front (second part) Pusey HouseЮrst part New CollegeÐtwo-storey block S of JCR School of Forestry and Rural EconomyÐextension

Edmund Fisher Mills and Thorpe

Actual cost

Wooldridge £5,500 and Simpson £21,000 £8,400 Wooldridge and Simpson

Hutchins and Sons

R. England Temple Moore £6,000

776

Date

1912±13 1913 1913±14

Balliol CollegeÐStaircase XV University CollegeÐpavilion Hertford CollegeÐbridge

E. P. Warren Clough Williams-Ellis T. G. Jackson

1913±16 1913±19 1914 1914±16

Dyson Perrins LaboratoryЮrst part Manchester CollegeÐArlosh Hall Engineering Laboratory St Hugh's College

Paul Waterhouse Percy Worthington W. C. Marshall Buckland and Haywood

Knowles £6,858 Charles Elcock E. Bowman £1,370 and Sons

777

page

778

page

E D WA RDIAN O X FO R D

779

page

780

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31 The Oxford of Raymond Asquith and Willie Elmhirst m . g . b ro c k Raymond Asquith came up to Balliol as a scholar in 1897 and held an All Souls fellowship from 1903 to 1910. His father, who had also been a Balliol scholar, became Prime Minister in April 1908. Willie Elmhirst was a commoner at Worcester from 1911 to 1914. The diary which he kept during his freshman year came to light in 1967 and was published two years later.1 Both joined the colours in December 1914; and before the Battle of the Somme was over both had been killed in actionÐAsquith at Ginchy on 15 September 1916, as British tanks went into action for the ®rst time, Elmhirst a few miles north-west of that at Serre, on 13 November during the battle's last phase. Both men came from the professional class and had been publicschool boarders. While neither was an outstanding athlete, both performed willingly and competently at team games.2 Otherwise there were few resemblances between them. Asquith was brilliant, metropolitan, and psychologically complex;3 Elmhirst eager, provincial, and a little naõÈve. H. H. Asquith, Raymond's father, was the outstanding Liberal leader of his day. Elmhirst's father was an ex-curate who had retired from preaching on succeeding to a small Yorkshire estate. Asquith had started his University career in Oxford's most powerful college; Elmhirst was a commoner of Worcester, then one of its smallest and poorest.4 1 Asquith gained ®rsts in Classical Moderations, Greats, and Law, and four University scholarships, the one which eluded him (the Hertford Scholarship) being won a few years later by his brother, Cyril. Sir John Masterman wrote the introduction to A Freshman's Diary, 1911± 12: Willie Elmhirst (1969). On the width of the intellectual gap between the ablest scholars and some of the commoners see Athenaeum, 12 Dec. 1908, 761. 2 Oxford University Roll of War Service, ed. F. S. Craig and W. M. Gibson (1920), 34, 511; H. J. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (1989), 85. Raymond Asquith captained Balliol's soccer team and was in the rugger ®fteen: Willie Elmhirst's cricket performances ®gure largely in the diary for Trinity term 1912. 3 M. G. Brock, ```The Eternal Lack of Motive'': Raymond Asquith's Buried Talents', Winchester College: Sixth-Centenary Essays, ed. Roger Custance (1982), 479±88. 4 Elmhirst, Diary 110±11 (from Memoir by L. K. Elmhirst); Pt 1, 403±4; OM 22 Feb 1912, 226. Worcester then had 85 students in residence, Corpus, the smallest college, having 77.

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The two belonged to different undergraduate generations. Asquith came up in the Diamond Jubilee year, 1897. Within three years the early reverses of the Boer War had given the British upper classes a severe shock.5 By the time that Elmhirst arrived change and reform were in the air at Oxford as elsewhere. Six Worcester Rhodes scholars appear in his diary. A little over a tenth of those who matriculated with Asquith had been born overseas: by Elmhirst's year the corresponding proportion had risen to nearly a quarter.6 By 1911 the Of®cers' Training Corps had an important place in the University's life. Elmhirst received a call from one of its members within three days of his arrival. He joined it at once and was soon a keen member.7 By his time the impression that the sun `rose over Magdalen and set over Worcester' had begun to fade. At ®rst glance the Oxford of 1911, and even that of 1897, seem recognizably modern. Undergraduates wrote weekly essays for their tutors and attended lectures; and the range of subjects studied was fairly wide. Women students, though a small, unobtrusive band, denied University membership, already made a respectable showing in their own class-lists.8 By 1911 members of the University rode bicycles and used telephones and typewriters; Oxford contained cars and a cinema; undergraduate aviators were not unknown. After the building efforts of the 1880s and 1890s the facËades of central Oxford were much as they are today; and most colleges had electric light and a measure of modern plumbing. North Oxford had become, in estate agents' terms, an eligible residential area; and even in less fashionable parts of the city the undrained, fever-ridden Oxford of mid-Victorian times 5 G. C. Brodrick, `A Nation of Amateurs', Nineteenth Century, xlviii (Oct. 1900) 521±35; Rosebery, Address to Glasgow University Students, 16 Nov. 1900: Rosebery, Miscellanies, Literary and Historical (2 vols 1921), ii. 229±63; Arnold White, Ef®ciency and Empire, ed. G. R. Searle (1973; ®rst published Mar. 1901), 289; G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Ef®ciency (1971), 75±9; P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism (1978), 224; Stephen Tallents (Balliol, 1903±7), Man and Boy (1943), 125; Varsity, 14 Oct. 1913, `the sobering effect of the Boer War disasters'. Stephen McKenna's Sonia Between Two Worlds (1917) depicts Christ Church during the Boer War. McKenna was a Westminster Exhibitioner at the House, 1906±9. See also p. 480. 6 Matriculation Registers, OUA, and Stone, `Size and Composition', 35, 68, 101. The increase at Cambridge was not so great. For the opening of the BCL to overseas BAs see A. V. Dicey's Memo. for the Hebdomadal Council, 15 Feb. 1899: HCP 52 (1899), 51; Gazette, xxx (8 May 1900), 496. For the importance of the legal link with the United States see Richard A. Cosgrove, Our Lady the Common Law (1987). The proportions educated abroad are given in Ch. 25, n. 5. 7 Elmhirst, Diary, 8; Roll of War Service, ix, x. The replacement of the Volunteers by the OTC in 1908 was given publicity to great effect. See, for instance, OM xxvi. 288±9, xxvii. 74±5, 138±9. Compare Lawrence Jones (Balliol 1904±8) with Elmhirst: `No thought of military training ever crossed my mind at Oxford. But . . . soon after I came to London . . . I found myself under compulsion to join the Territorial Army': Edwardian Youth, 200. Haldane regarded the University OTCs as an important complement to his Territorial Army scheme. For their contribution to Britain's war effort see C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, The Great War, 1914±18 (1934), 278. 8 See the verse in the Contemporary Review, 93 (June 1908), 678. For these class lists see pp. 257±8 and 265 above.

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was no more than a memory.9 Cows from the Gloucester Green cattle market might still be encountered in Broad Street; but Blackwell's bookshop was a substantial concern with sales exceeding £27,000 a year and a pro®tsharing scheme for the staff.10 The New York branch of the Oxford University Press had been functioning since the mid-nineties. These resemblances can deceive. During the ®rst decade of this century more than a ®fth of Oxford's undergraduates left without qualifying for a degree: less than three-®fths quali®ed for honours. A University of more than 14,000 students, less than three-quarters of whom are undergraduates, while nearly two-®fths are women, would have been unrecognizable to Asquith and Elmhirst;11 and the differences in mental hinterland between their Oxford and ours, though less obtrusive than those of scale and composition, are still more considerable. They had not been subjected to those processes of introspection and social analysis which, by many indirect means, condition the responses of today's undergraduates. The psychologist and the sociologist had not had much effect on them. They had been brought up to despise practices on which a later generation would look with less disfavour. Writing to a friend and contemporary of his elder daughter, H. H. Asquith described introspection as a `dangerous and debilitating habit'.12 No two Oxford men of that time could have been chosen to illustrate or represent the full range of Oxford and its colleges. For instance, the secondary-school sector from which both Asquith and Elmhirst cameÐthat of boarding public schoolsÐdid not account by 1914 for much more than half even of the United Kingdom entry to Oxford.13 The colleges, though not as variegated as they had been earlier, were still notably diverse. Each had its rituals. `Divvers Prelim' had engendered several of these. In Magdalen it was bad form to pass at the ®rst attempt. In Christ Church one prepared for Divvers with the solace of a large bag of popcorn: to continue with the preparation after the popcorn had all been eaten was `not done'. The chaplain of Trinity, Ronald Knox, had devised a `snakes and ladders game' based 9 Josephine Butler, who had started her married life in Oxford, left a vivid account of its unhealthiness during the ®fties: Autobiographical Memoir, ed. G. W. and L. A. Johnson (Bristol, 1909), 36, 41. In some working-class areas conditions were still highly defective: C. V. Butler, Social Conditions in Oxford (1912). See also Anthony Howe, `Intellect and Civic Responsibility: Dons and Citizens in Nineteenth-century Oxford', in Oxford: Studies in the History of a University Town since 1800, ed. R. C. Whiting (Manchester, 1993), 23±7. For bicycles in Oxford see Isis, 11 May 1895, 270. 10 OM n s v. 393 (Clara Burdett Patterson); A. L. P. Norrington, Blackwells (1983), 36. 11 Pt 1, 360, Fig. 11.1. See Max Beerbohm's Note prefacing the 1947 edition of Zuleika Dobson (®rst published 1911). 12 H. H. Asquith to Venetia Stanley, `Whitsuntide 1914': H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. M. and E. Brock (1982), 80. The British branch of the International Association of Psychoanalysis was not formed until 1913. 13 See p. 552 Fig. 23.1 Of the 1911±14 United Kingdom entry 59.1% had attended a public school, boarding or day (other than a `fringe' one).

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on St Paul's journeys which, in Harold Macmillan's words, `played with reasonable assiduity could ensure success'.14 The levelling process set in motion by student grants from public authorities had not yet begun.15 According to one of Asquith's Oxford friends, John Buchan of Brasenose, a man who had gained a ®rst was said to have been ducked in Brasenose for `breaking the traditions of the college'.16 In Corpus, by contrast, scholars were expected to aim at ®rsts. The undergraduates of Keble did not think of themselves as being on a par with Christ Church or Magdalen men. `That one day Keble or St Edmund Hall would be head of the river,' Compton Mackenzie recorded of Magdalen many years later, `would have seemed to us in 1901 a far more fantastic vision of the future than anything in Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.'17 There were also great inequalities between one undergraduate and another, and these might operate within a single college: in Christ Church Peckwater room rents were much higher than those for the Meadow Buildings. The amount of ®nancial backing a man commanded could have a great effect not merely on his lifestyle at Oxford, but on his academic chances. Alan Lascelles was allowed a fourth year for Greats although he had not taken classical Mods.18 It was simply a matter of persuading his father to pay. W. G. C. Gladstone was in line for the presidencies of the Union and the Palmerston Club in his ®nals term. Warned by his tutors that this threatened him with a fourth in modern history, he had no dif®culty in securing permission from `Uncle Herbert', Viscount Gladstone, to stay up for a fourth year. As a result he obtained a second.19 C. B. Fry, the celebrated athlete, on the other hand, had to take tutorships in the vacations and sell the products of his pen to keep himself at the University. He attributed his fourth class in Greats, after he had gained a ®rst in Classical Mods, to the strain which these ®nancial troubles imposed.20 14

Compton Mackenzie, Octave Three, 1900±1907 (1964), 62, 107; information on Christ Church from R. W. Hodder-Williams (1890±1961), Westminster Exhibitioner, 1908±11; The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11b (Harold Macmillan). For the history of `Divvers' see Pt 1, 357±8; for the ribaldry and blasphemy involved by 1914, J. C. Masterman, On the Chariot Wheel (1975), 77. 15 Balliol's style of informality, as between fellows and undergraduates, was not always admired when William Temple brought it from Balliol to Queen's as a young fellow: F. A. Iremonger, William Temple (1948), 63±4. 16 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (1965), 49. See also John Buchan, Brasenose College (1898), 76. 17 Octave Three, 63. G. O. Smith (Charterhouse and Keble) was, however, the hero of the 1896 Varsity Cricket Match, and England's centre forward in soccer. 18 End of an Era: Letters and Journals of Sir Alan Lascelles, 1887±1920, ed. Duff Hart-Davis (1986), 38. 19 Visc. Gladstone, W. G. C. Gladstone: A Memoir (1918), 14. 20 C. B. Fry, Life Worth Living (1939), 89±90. J. W. C. Wand (St Edmund Hall, 1904±7) read Theology because his family could not afford the fourth year for Greats. He took a ®rst: William Wand, Changeful Page (1965), 31.

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Sifting the information about this varied scene is not easy. Some ®ctional accounts were never meant to be reliable. When the hero strokes the eight in Sandford of Merton (1903), we learn that `his blade struck the water a full second before any other. . . until . . . as the boats began to near the winning post, his own was dipping into the water twice as often as any other.'21 Desmond F. T. Coke wrote this, under the pseudonym of `Belinda Blinders', to stress that feminine comments on some Oxford activities were apt to be inaccurate. The characteristic falsi®cations of ®ction are a little harder to detect. In Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street the `bloods' who set out to break up Smithers's rooms relent and make off when the victim appears and snatches up a photograph of his mother: suddenly Smithers is revealed to be, not so much an egregious undesirable, as a pathetic ®gure who has strayed out of his class in search of honours in science, and who would have been far happier in a civic university near his home.22 That ®ctional incident may have been founded on fact, but there is no evidence of this in Compton Mackenzie's autobiographical volume on his Oxford years; and the suspicion lingers that it represents less an incident which had actually occurred than one which the writer and his readers would have liked to suppose had occurred. The reminiscences of the elderly have to be approached with reserve. Occasionally the retrospective view is too severe. W. M. Macmillan, the distinguished South African historian and one of the earliest Rhodes scholars, recorded seventy years later that only half of his year at Merton (1903) had managed to complete two years of their academic studies.23 In fact twenty-seven of the thirty-nine Merton freshmen of 1903 took their degrees within four years. More commonly evening gives the retrospect a rosy glow, as another Macmillan recognized. `In trying to give some picture of those years,' Harold Macmillan said in the 1970s, `I know well that I look back through somewhat rose-tinted spectacles. Yet the picture is vivid and real to me. Or is it, perhaps, after all, a dream?'24 This dif®culty is increased immensely in the case of Edwardian Oxford by the slaughter of the First World War, which reversed judgements and distorted the perspective. In 1912 Edward Horner was banned from entering Balliol after taking part in some particularly riotous proceedings there two years after he had gone down. On the outbreak of war he transferred from his yeomanry regiment as soon as he could; and he reached the front in February 1915. In the following May, when he had been dangerously wounded, the fellows of Balliol judged his war service to outweigh his 21

Pp. 88±9. `Ouida' (Marie Louise de la RameÂe) was Coke's particular target. Sinister Street (2 vols 1913±14), 595±600; see also 642. The vols are paginated continuously. 23 My South African Years (Cape Town, 1975), 67±8. 24 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 7, 11f. Corrected from History of the University seminar proceedings, 13 Mar. 1973. 22

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offence and rescinded their ban.25 He managed to return to the western front in March 1917 and died of wounds during the Battle of Cambrai. For many years after that, to have dwelt on his youthful indiscretions would have been thought a cruel impiety. Until the war came Raymond Asquith's elders were apt to criticize his cynicism and distrust his in¯uence on his friends: the group who took their tone from him were known as `the corrupt coterie'.26 When he had been killed in the Somme battle, after refusing safe staff jobs, no one except his intrepid stepmother, Margot, dared to repeat these censures publicly;27 and her raking of the ashes was strongly resented.28 Indignation was aroused as late as 1949 when A. D. Lindsay (by then Lord Lindsay of Birker), making his farewell Gaudy speech, compared the pre1914 Balliol undergraduates with their successors, to the detriment of the former. A more subtle effect of the war losses was to keep the spotlight on the small Balliol group among the fallen which had included Asquith and Horner. Inevitably this gifted and privileged band were given a posthumous prominence in which they were taken to epitomize what had been best in the Oxford of their time. In fact they had not been especially representative of pre-1914 Oxford, nor even of the Balliol talent of those days. William Beveridge, Harold Macmillan, Walter Monckton, Lewis Namier, Harold Nicolson, R. H. Tawney, William TempleÐthese survivors exempli®ed pre-war Balliol at least as well as Raymond Asquith and the others who had fallen. Despite all the variations between colleges, and within each, some general features may be discerned through the mists. Much idealism could be found among Oxford undergraduates during this period. The origins of this stance in T. H. Green's time have been outlined in Chapter 1. The tutors of the Edwardian colleges infected many undergraduates with their own attitudes. In that era, as in others, those under instruction were well able to reject particular views put to them by their mentors; but the attitudes and values of some older person who commanded respect were less easily resisted. A freshman coming from a public school experienced an intoxicating sense of freedom. He might not realize that he was now subject to a different conditioning, and one which, being unobtrusive, might prove highly effective. The differences between school and college, Stephen McKenna wrote, `were great enough to mask the resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new. . . standard.' The founding of the Oxford settlements in East London has been described in Chapter 27. Many Oxford men 25

The `informal resolution' of May was con®rmed, 22 June 1915. Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1958), 82. 27 Margot Asquith, Autobiography i. (1920), 174. M. J. Rendall, one of Raymond's masters at Winchester, told Margot that her stepson's in¯uence at Balliol had been `most unfortunate', see her diary, 20 Sept. (misdated Oct.) 1916; Bodl. MS. Eng. d. 3215 fo 77. 28 Cynthia Asquith, Remember and Be Glad (1952), 198±205. 26

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went to work in them when they had gone down; and such work helped to shape the outlook of some who later rose to prominence, such as C. R. Attlee and William Beveridge. Attlee seemed to Eustace Percy `the typical son of the Oxford I knew', where social reform was the dominant theme.29 Ben Tillett drew inspiration as a union leader from a settlement lecture by C. G. Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury.30 Oxford House spread its net widely, attracting, for instance, H. R. L. Sheppard when he came down from Cambridge.31 The Bishop of London appealed to Oxford men to `put in a bit of spare time with us in the slums. Better still, come and live with us. It's jollier to dine on a leg of mutton with a dozen Oxford men at Oxford House than to munch a solitary chop in lodgings at Hampstead.'32 `There was,' recorded Harold Macmillan, `much talk among us about religion and much debate.'33 Oxford's religious state at the turn of the century has been assessed in Chapter 3. By 1914 the doubts about the miraculous side of Christianity which T. H. Green had once voiced were being echoed, in various versions of `modernism', by in¯uential Oxford clerics, such as J. M. Thompson, Magdalen's Dean of Divinity, B. H. Streeter, the dean of Queen's, and William Sanday, Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church. William Temple, who was Raymond Asquith's junior by three years, was ordained Deacon in December 1908 by the Archbishop of Canterbury despite doctrinal doubts which had deterred the Bishop of Oxford from sanctioning his ordination.34 Mrs Humphry Ward, portraying an Oxford man, pronounced in 1912: `The noble symbolisms of religious ritual are as dear and necessary to men as they ever were; but knowledge is, and must be, in the long run, their master, not their slave.'35 Religious worship and phraseology were still deeply embedded in Britain's upper-class culture. Undergraduates were used to Biblical allusions and to churchgoing and took both for granted. The idea, Lawrence Jones wrote, that the college chaplain, `through being in Holy Orders, could have contributed anything to our knowledge of ultimate reality never entered our 29 Eustace Percy, Some Memories (1958), 12. Beveridge was in¯uenced personally by Caird, but in his reading by T. H. Huxley: Jose Harris, Beveridge (1977), 41±3. Attlee regarded Ruskin's Unto This Last (1862) as the `gate' through which he had `entered the Socialist fold'; but he entered it after he had gone down from Oxford: Kenneth Harris, Attlee (1982), 22. See also n. 36 below. Stephen McKenna's remark is made by the narrator in Sonia (n. 5 above), 62. 30 Ben Tillett, Memories and Re¯ections (1931), 112. 31 R. Ellis Roberts, H. R. L. Sheppard: Life and Letters (1942), 26. For Willie Elmhirst's help in entertaining `the Bethnal Green people' see Elmhirst, Diary, 85±6. 32 R. Pound, A. P. Herbert (1976), 36. 33 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11c. 34 Iremonger, William Temple (n.15), 108±23. Kenneth Kirk (St John's, 1904±8) found `the atmosphere' of Greats `very secular'. Newman's Grammar of Assent helped him to keep his faith: E. W. Kemp, K. E. Kirk (1959), 12±13, 15. 35 Introduction to The Case of Richard Meynell, ix, in Collected Works xvi, 1912. The novel had been published in the previous year. See Ch. 1, n. 318.

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heads . . . We went to chapel very willingly, but held ourselves free to ignore creeds where they clashed with conscience.' When Charles Lister was rusticated by Balliol for dancing after a bump supper with a stranger who turned out to be the dean of Trinity, the text inscribed by Ronald Knox at the entrance of his staircase proclaimed: `I wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest;'36 and H. W. B. Joseph's staircase in New College was ¯ooded with red paint `so that Joseph should have to pass through the Red Sea'.37 In his diary Willie Elmhirst shows no particular interest in religious questions; but on Whit Sunday he attended `early service' and then morning and evening chapel, with a choir practice between the two.38 Parents, as always, saw dangers on all sides. An undergraduate son might develop religious doubts: still more dangerously, he might be attracted to Rome. It was probably the fact that F. F. Urquhart of Balliol (`Sligger') was a Roman Catholic which led A. L. Smith's strong-minded wife to prevent her son from going on a reading party to Sligger's chalet.39 Ronald Knox's spiritual odyssey, which led him to Rome in 1917, caused notable havoc. This attractive man, then chaplain of Trinity, whose satires at the expense of modernism show Balliol wit at its best, was the son of an Evangelical bishop and became in 1910 the private tutor to the 17-year-old Harold Macmillan.40 He was removed from that post by the staunchly Protestant Mrs Macmillan; and, although her son, Harold, was very friendly with Knox in his short undergraduate career, he never, as the word then went, `poped'. By all accounts most undergraduates of this period greatly enjoyed their Oxford years. Elmhirst, who had been miserable at his public school, was happy at Oxford;41 but for many there was, at some stage of the course, a great sense of strain. Like all else in Edwardian Oxford, anxieties about academic performance and career were unevenly distributed. The process of squeezing out the idlers and passmen, much though it varied from college to college, continued throughout these pre-war years. By Elmhirst's time honours degrees constituted four-®fths of all those awarded; and the ®rst 36 Edwardian Youth, 29±30; Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox (1959), 102, 108; Acts of the Apostles 23: 5. The inscribed stone was removed and replaced with the inscription on the inner side. After a mock funeral which was long remembered, Lister spent his period of banishment working in the Trinity College Mission in West Ham: Charles Lister, ed. Lord Ribblesdale (1917), 248. 37 Joseph was one of the college's philosophy tutors, 1895±1932. William Hayter, Spooner (1977), 119; Carola Oman, An Oxford Childhood (1976), 107. 38 Elmhirst, Diary, 84. 39 Rowy Mitchison, `An Oxford Family', in Arthur Lionel Forster Smith, ed. E. C. Hodgkin (privately printed, 1979), 52. 40 A. Horne, Macmillan, 1894±1956 (1988), 17±33. Waugh, Knox, 106, 128, 142±3. Waugh refers to Macmillan as `C'; but M. Muggeridge revealed `C's' identity: New Statesman, 17 and 24 Oct. 1959, 499, 506. 41 After Willie had been killed in action his father went through his papers and read the Malvern diary. He said that if he had ever realized Willie's suffering at school he `would have taken him away immediately'. Unable to bear that anyone else should see the diary he destroyed it: Elmhirst, Diary, 117.

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and second classes almost matched the thirds and fourths in number.42 He was lucky (as all then thought) in that a berth awaited him in the of®ce of an uncle who was a York solicitor. He needed no more than a third, which he duly obtained in 1914. The intending schoolteacher who had already gained a ®rst in Classical Moderations was almost equally well placed: he had no imperative need of a ®rst in Greats as well. For many undergraduates, however, their performance in the week of ®nals was of great importance. The Cambridge system of Part 1 and Part 2 gave a man two chances. There was no such safety net in Oxford. Having failed to secure a ®rst in Greats, J. A. Spender did not dare to revisit Balliol for some years; yet he owed his second largely to having `fought through the six days of the examination with what was afterwards discovered to have been a mild attack of pleurisy'.43 Colleges set their own test papers (`collections') and tutors did their best to keep a watchful eye; but it was easy to succumb to various distractions and then suddenly to ®nd a few weeks from ®nals how much had to be done. Compton Mackenzie concluded at this stage that he would have to `sit up every night' during his History schools `to cram'. As a result, in his later papers he did not know what he was writing. He followed this ordeal by attending three balls and then suffered an alarming `pseudo-angina' attack.44 He gained a second. C. W. Mercer of University, better known as `Dornford Yates', engaged a crammer and so obtained a third in Jurisprudence.45 Lawrence Jones of Balliol did not take Classical Mods and had a second in Greats. He decided to stay up for a fourth year, take History ®nals, and try for All Souls. He needed the £250 per year for seven years which an All Souls fellowship would provide if he was to maintain himself while passing his Bar exams and waiting for briefs. He gained a ®rst but not an All Souls fellowship. Looking back at that frenetic year he wrote: `When I came up . . . for the viva, the examiners, as one of them afterwards told me, had not the heart to question a candidate with so green and worried a face. I was none the less congratulated on my papers . . . But . . . nobody ought to write feverish essays in his sleep for weeks and months on end.' At the turn of the century those who were sitting the civil service exam in the same year as Greats faced a punishing routine. Until 1904 there was no limit to the number of papers which a candidate might take for `the Civil'; but a mark of less than twenty-®ve out of a hundred did not count towards the total. Intending candidates allowed themselves a three-day break after ®nals and were then assessed by a London crammer, who advised on the most 42

Pt. 1, 360, 362. Elmhirst, Diary, 115±16; Oxford ii.3 (1936), 49±50. Spender took Greats in 1885. 44 Octave Three, 190±4. T. E. Lawrence (®rst class, Modern History, 1910) wrote that he had crammed for his special subject, the Crusades, `while the examination was actually in progress in three all-night sittings': Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. D. Garnett (1964 edn), 109. 45 A. J. Smithers, Dornford Yates (1982), 40. 43

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pro®table cramming possibilities for the intervening weeks.46 There was no University counselling service to provide professional advice in cases of overstrain. A tutor or the chaplain could be consulted; but there was some expectation that a young man would `consume his own smoke.' Those who are inclined to regard the modern mixed college as affording too much distraction from regular study should perhaps avert their eyes from the Oxford of Edwardian times. Colleges were then not merely sociable but liable to much disruption. Their undergraduates' physical energy was not expended entirely on team games. Drunken and rowdy incidents were at least as common in Edwardian Oxford as they had been earlier.47 Post-prandial activities involved constant damage to property. Several of the pranks showed ingenuity: the Balliol undergraduates contrived on one occasion to lay a complete lawn in the Trinity junior common room.48 Animals were sometimes releasedÐa pig, or rabbits, or ratsÐwhere they would cause a disturbance.49 Some club or society dinners ended at a reasonable hour, with the outside speaker (if any) curbing his loquacity to leave time for `Langers and Godders':50 others became scenes of riot and destruction. When Christ Church went head of the river in 1907 its members burned down the grandstand erected for the Oxford pageant, and engaged in running battles with police and ®remen.51 In May 1910 a New College group which included Alfred Duff Cooper found themselves short of material for their bon®re. Having ransacked the senior common room, they burned some furniture from the rooms of Francis de Zulueta, a young law tutor who was not then very popular. One of the items put on the blaze contained the materials for de Zulueta's forthcoming book.52 In Balliol the Annandale 46 Edwardian Youth, 98, 146. The writer's father (L. G. Brock) gained a ®rst in Greats and a place in the Home Civil Service in 1902. This routine cost him a nervous breakdown. In the search for extra marks in the civil-service examination he de®ed the crammer's warning that he would not obtain 25% in the French Unseen, and this de®ance gained him some valuable marks. The occasion of the change in 1904 was said to have been A. B. Keith's triumph three years earlier in securing 5382 marks when his nearest competitor had 4123: PP 1902 xxii. 127±8. The candidate who achieved this record score left the service in 1914, his great talents being better suited to academic life. 47 Pt 1, 41±2; Jacques Bardoux (trans. W. R. Barker), Memories of Oxford (1899), 81; Lascelles (n. 18), 20 (Bishop of London's sermon, 29 Oct. 1905); Pages From a Family Journal (privately printed, 1916), 150. This collection of letters was made by Lady Desborough after her sons, Julian and William Grenfell, had been killed in action. 48 Octave Three, 130; Mitchison, `An Oxford Family', 161. 49 Octave Three, 102±3; Lascelles (n. 18), 39; Elmhirst, Diary, 22; C. Petrie, Chapters of Life (1950), 88. 50 See the contrast between rowing and cricket dinners in Elmhirst, Diary, 93. For Oxford slang of the period see p. 549 and The Times, 17 Aug. 1990, 10a, b. Prudent undergraduate chairmen would warn the speaker that proceedings would end with `Auld Lang Syne' and the National Anthem. 51 Oxford Review, 30 May 1907, 3d. For a participant's account see S. P. B. Mais, All the Days of My Life (1937), 27±8. For the pageant see pp. 496, 828 52 Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (1953), 35. Duff Cooper incurred another decanal reprimand after he had gone down: J. Charmley, Duff Cooper (1986), 13. For an earlier incident when

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Society's dinners would be followed by `waterfalls' in which quantities of the college's crockery would be sent cascading down staircases or the hall steps.53 The society was suppressed in March 1908 after its members had uprooted a sapling and sent a boot through a Trinity man's window.54 Often, however, if those who had done the damage could be identi®ed, they were merely required to pay for it. On 1 June 1902 the Christ Church porter's morning report listed forty-eight broken panes in Peckwater Quad, with smashing of crockery, glasses and lamps.55 That was nothing exceptional in the Trinity term at Christ Church. `J. C. Jones went round with a hockey stick,' Willie Elmhirst noted on 4 November 1911, `and smashed all the windows in the Pump quad [of Worcester] on the ground ¯oor.'56 The destruction was not con®ned to colleges. As proctorial records show, teams relaxing after a match against Cambridge were apt to make the railway station their target. `Many of the upper class' have, in Hilaire Belloc's words, `liked the sound of broken glass'.57 There was a nastier side to these activities, however. It was often an unpopular undergraduate's furniture and possessions which were damaged or destroyed; and the damage sometimes extended to the property's owner. `Thomas's rooms hopelessly ragged,' Elmhirst recorded on that same November evening, `his jugs upset in his bed etc, and the wretched man had to spend the night in an armchair. Several bombs chucked into his rooms shook the men above like anything.' On another occasion Elmhirst lent a pair of sheets to a neighbour whose bed had been similarly treated.58 `This aspect of Oxford life is little talked about,' R. B. McCallum told the University History Seminar in 1973: The victims in later life are reticent; the assailants either bury it in their unconscious or accept it as part of the human predicament . . . I remember in America in 1941 being asked to meet a former Rhodes scholar who had been at Worcester about 1910±1912. He spoke with some appreciation of his time there; but there was much that he did not like. He spent many evenings sitting in the room of some unpopular undergraduate as a kind of bodyguard. The hearty brigade would not be likely to beat [the undergraduate] up if there was a burly American sitting with him.59 de Zulueta's window was broken see Joyce Popplewell (ed.), A Gloucester Diarist: Lt. Col. A. B. Lloyd-Baker. . . 1897±1919 (1993), 55. 53

Edwardian Youth, 15; Stephen Tallents (n. 5), 125. Lascelles (n. 18), 45. 55 OUA, MS Top. Oxon e. 385, fos 83±4. 56 Elmhirst, Diary, 19. 57 H. Belloc, New Cautionary Tales. 58 Elmhirst, Diary, 19, 59. 59 University History Seminar, 29 May 1973, ts. 8. Mrs Humphry Ward's Lady Connie (1916) shows how familiar contemporaries were with `ragging' incidents. In it a Polish undergraduate is ducked in `Neptune' (in an allusion to `Mercury', Tom Quad, Christ Church), and receives a serious injury to his hand from the jagged end of a submerged pipe. See also Stephen McKenna, Sonia (n. 5), 65, 67. 54

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Worcester may have been particularly prone to this since the college had dif®culty in ®lling all its places; but no college seems to have been quite free of it.60 The persecutors were not all public-school men, nor was the victim necessarily a member of the non-public-school minority. In one case detailed by Elmhirst neither was from a public school as the term was then understood. In another recorded by C. C. J. Webb the Magdalen man whose rooms were `ragged' was a Carthusian. A recurrent feature seems to have been the accusation of `not doing anything for the college'.61 Webb's Magdalen man had refused `out of mere slackness to play golf for college or University', though known to be a good golfer.62 Lack of prowess at team games did not in itself imply great vulnerability. Elmhirst's neighbour was ragged for not running with the college boat in Torpids. Failure to conform to the norms may have been more common among the minority than in the public-school element; and a public-school man probably had the best chance of escape if he failed to co-operate. Alan Lascelles, who was a Marlburian at Trinity, apparently went his own way without any feeling of alarm. In his diary for 1908 he noted: There's a marvellous lot of enjoyment in these nocturnal adventures, and it's damned good practice lying one's way out of them next morning . . . Whenever there is any trouble in Trinity, they send for me and Guy [Charteris] as a matter of course, there being no other man in our year who moves out of his room after 10.30 . . . The bulk of the college at present are smug, respectable, dim and unoriginal; they do nothing; they aren't clever, they aren't particularly good, and they're damned tedious to meet. Incidentally, I think they hate us. They believe we are `fast'; we go out hunting and we only dine in hall six times a term. We know men in other colleges, and we don't seriously support our own in athletic departments.63

When A. D. Lindsay became a Balliol tutor in 1906 he was astonished by the leniency shown to the college's `blood push'. `They seemed to me, coming from outside,' he recorded years later, `to be accorded a strange impunity.'64 In retrospect its cause is starkly clear. No college liked to imperil its entry by bearing down hard and steadily on offenders. Today's large surpluses of well quali®ed applicants were unknown in the pre-war years. In the less eligible colleges, to send down every offender might simply have entailed admitting applicants who would prove equally troublesome, or, still worse, being left with empty rooms. McCallum's comment on the `impunity' was explicit: Suppose that a college was to become known as one where the patriotic ebullience of healthy-minded young men was too rigidly and priggishly suppressed, or, to put it in 60 Sir Charles Petrie's reminiscences (n. 49 above) are of interest on this point. He entered Corpus, a small and scholarly college, in 1914. 61 Elmhirst, Diary, 60. 62 Diary, 1 June 1905: Bodl. MS Eng Misc. e 1151 fo. 138. 63 Lascelles (n. 18), 43. 64 Drusilla Scott, A. D. Lindsay (1971), 47.

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different terms, suppose that a college was to be known as a cads' college, the ®nancial consequences might have been very serious.65

The surge in secondary and higher education, and the student grants which helped in meeting it, did not come until after the First World War. The Board of Education reported for 1923±4: The great change . . . is the birth and growth of a demand for education . . . We have dealt mainly with schools on the Grant List, but the change does not affect them alone. The public schools have experienced it also. Twenty years ago most of them were crying out for pupils, many were in ®nancial dif®culties. Now, in spite of high fees, they are full to over¯owing and entry is not easy to secure. The same is true of private schools and of the universities . . . The change does not affect one class but many; the well-to-do manufacturer now gives his son a prolonged education, the artisan and the farm labourer gives [sic] his son, or will at least allow him to take, what education he can get.66

In pre-war times, by contrast, there were fears everywhere in Oxford about a possible shortage of eligible applicants for commoners' places. Jowett had once been able to impose a `discipline' on Balliol which made it, in J. A. Spender's words, `more like a school than an ordinary Oxford college'.67 He had achieved that effect because Balliol had been unique then in having no fears of having too few well-quali®ed applicants. Those days of Balliol's undisputed ascendancy were over. Strachan-Davidson's speeches show that he was as concerned as any other head about his college's hold on the leading public schools. If he and his colleagues had started imposing school discipline on their college they would soon have been in trouble. Julian Grenfell (later to be revered as a war hero) was often seen in Balliol with an Australian stock-whip.68 On one occasion he apparently used it on an Edinburgh man, A. B. Keith, who had been among the ®nest Balliol scholars of his year. When Keith told the college authorities that he intended to take legal action about this, he was warned by the Master that if he did so he 65 Seminar, 29 May 1973, ts. 9. In a private letter, May 1912, Sidney Ball pointed out that entrance standards were bound to be low `with colleges struggling to exist': O. Ball, Sidney Ball (1923), 107. See Twentieth-Century British Social Trends, eds. Halsey and Webb (2000), Table 5.9 (p. 194). 66 PP 1924±5 xii. 79. Echoed in Returns from Universities and University Colleges in Receipt of Treasury Grant, 1923±4 (University Grants Committee, 1925), 6. 67 Spender was writing of 1881±5: Oxford ii. 3 (1936), 49. Cf. Harold Nicolson's account of the contrast between school and Oxford: ibid. iii. 2 (1936), 49. Nicolson had been at Balliol from 1904 to 1907. 68 J. M. Mackail, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson (1925), 68±9, 112; `Family Journal' (n. 47), 180 (R. A. Knox's letter). For the mixture of riotous behaviour and scholarship in Balliol in these years see ibid. 320; Margot Asquith's diary, 4 May [1912], Bodl. MS Eng d. 3210, fo 31; Margaret Fitzherbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle (1983), 21±3, 29. Billy Grenfell was sent down in 1912 after being awarded a ®rst in Classical Mods and winning a Craven Scholarship. He was working for the All Souls fellowship exam when the war broke out. Aubrey Herbert was rusticated for misconduct and suffered from serious eye trouble; yet with the Balliol tutors' help he took a ®rst in Modern History (1902).

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would have to leave the college the next day.69 If bullying and disorder became too bad there was apt to be a reaction among the undergraduates themselves. It seems that at Balliol a band of Rhodes scholars eventually took the offensive and curbed the activities of the `blood push'.70 In 1908 the college acquired, in R. W. Poulton, a science exhibitioner who was a more impressive athlete than any of the `bloods'; and shortly afterwards Neville Talbot, a man of splendid physique, became the junior dean. Under the in¯uence of these two Balliol's tone was completely changed. By 1914 the second- and third-year men had, in Gervas Huxley's words, effectively `discouraged any manifestation of noisy insobriety'.71 The same happened in New College, where, in or just after 1911, the junior common room `engineered some kind of internal revolution and managed to elect a very strong and responsible steward'.72 No Oxford incident of these pre-war years was as bad as the cases of bullying in the Guards which were aired in the Commons in 1903 and 1906;73 and Oxford undergraduates were thought to be better disciplined than the students of some continental universities.74 Enough was known about Oxford ragging and `debagging', however, to arouse the interest of the London press; and the Senior Common Rooms were delighted when Compton Mackenzie and his Magdalen friends succeeded in hoaxing a Daily Mail reporter with a bogus ragging incident.75 The hoax established the credulousness of the paper, but left the good conduct of Oxford's undergraduates in some doubt. Before it was exposed the Daily Mail printed a number of letters detailing incidents of ragging, the worst of which had been fuelled by anti-Semitism.76 Commenting on the Daily Mail's report, an undergraduate told the Daily Express: 69 Seminar, 29 May 1973, ts. 9. McCallum did not give the exact date or the identity of the assailant, but put the incident in Strachan-Davidson's mastership, which began in 1907. Julian Grenfell had entered Balliol in 1906. Keith, who had gone down in 1901, was deputy to the Boden Professor of Sanskrit, 1907±8. The whip seems to have been used against Philip Sassoon: Edwardian Youth, 39. To Grenfell both Scots and Jews were `outsiders'. 70 Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. A. O. Bell (5 vols 1977±84), i. 109; Observer (Philip Toynbee), 18 Apr. 1976. 71 Gervas Huxley, Both Hands (1970), 68; Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley (1973), i. 44. Poulton, a son of Oxford's Zoology Professor, played Rugby for England, 1909±14, and was killed in action, May 1915. On the death of his uncle, G. W. Palmer, Oct. 1913, he had changed his name to Palmer: see also pp. 870±1 below. A college's disciplinary of®cer needed either a strong physique or a ready phrase. For Haver®eld's fame in Christ Church see p. 141 above. 72 Hayter, Spooner, 120. Magdalen also seems to have quietened down by 1914, according to Richard Gunstone (`Gunner') who retired then after 34 years as JCR steward: C. Day Lewis and C. Fenby, Anatomy of Oxford (1938), 216. 73 Parl. Deb. 5±16 Mar. 1903, 4S cxviii. 1552±4, cxix. 243±51, 475±515, 858±9; 26 Mar. 1906, cliv. 853±4; Egremont, Balfour (1980), 155. James Lees-Milne, Esher (1986), 163±4. 74 R. W. Livingstone, `The Heidelberg Carcer', Pelican Record, viii (1907), 144±7. 75 Octave Three, 179±85. 76 4 May 1904, 3a.

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`Lack of hospitality' . . . is not a thing for which we rag a chap. We simply cut him, which is much worse for him . . . As to the `provincial accent'Ðwell, a chap does get that jeered and jibed out of him in time, much to his bene®t for the rest of his life.77

Some undergraduates adopted a lordly attitude towards Oxford's citizens. `We have this . . . town for our private estate,' Alan Lascelles wrote, `and the burghers thereof for our serfs.'78 The Vice-Chancellor and Proctors were particularly concerned about incidents such as Socialist meetings in which members of the public or the police were ill-treated.79 The Guy Fawkes night riot of 1907, during which F. W. Leith-Ross broke a policeman's arm, was especially embarrassing, as the University Re-endowment Appeal had been launched earlier that year, and Curzon was in Oxford preparing his report on University reform. `The good name of the University,' the ViceChancellor told the undergraduates, was dragged in the dirt; and every. . . hostile critic . . . was given a handle. They were told that Oxford was the garden of the idle rich; they would be told that it was the bear garden of the rowdy rich if these things went on.80

Apart from noise and disturbance, the reading man who strove for a ®rst had to cope with dif®cult conditions in regulating his relations with the other sex. A high standard of public propriety was required. In 1906 when the Oxford University Dramatic Society advertised Measure for Measure, the prospect of Angelo's attempt on Isabella's virtue being depicted by an undergraduate and an actress elicited protests in not only the local, but the London press.81 Clandestine episodes seem to have been fairly numerous. Oxford had harboured a large number of prostitutes throughout the nineteenth century, though French observers from Taine onwards remarked on its comparative freedom from street vice by continental standards.82 By 1914, as a proctor noted, the trouble was `far more with young and ¯ighty girls of lodging house keeper status than with prostitutes'. Comparatively few undergraduates were convicted by the proctors of `vicious acts' or `immoral intentions'. The insistence that college autonomy should not be infringed, the fact that the University police did not become active until 77

4 May 1904, 5e. Lascelles (n. 18), 44. 79 Oxford Times, 28 Oct. 1907; OUA WP 7(5), 117v ( Junior Proctor's Manual, 1914 note). 80 Lascelles (n. 18), 39; Oxford Review, 9 Nov. 1907, 3d. In 1908 the Vice-Chancellor decided not to claim jurisdiction when the Police arrested an undergraduate: Pt 1, 473; The Times, 7 Nov. 1908, 8d, 12 Nov., 8c (The Revd Lord William Cecil's protest). Leith-Ross became a KCMG in 1930, a GCMG in 1937. 81 Humphrey Carpenter, O.U.D.S. (1985), 65±6. 82 Arthur J. Engel, ```Immoral Intentions'': the University of Oxford and the Problem of Prostitution, 1827±1914', Victorian Studies, 23 (1979), 79±107; Taine's Notes on England, ed. E. Hyams (1957), 115±16; Jacques Bardoux (n. 47), 67; Margaret L. Woods, `French Views of an English University', Nineteenth Century, xliv (1898), 995; Seminar, 29 May 1973, ts. 4. 78

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fairly late in the evening, and the ease with which the offences concerned could be committed, not in Oxford, but in one of the surrounding towns, impeded the proctors' efforts in suppressing vice. `Motor cars,' the 1913±14 proctor added, `have made it easy to range farther a®eld.'83 In 1857 an anonymous pamphleteer had poured scorn on the view that allowing fellows to marry might expose undergraduates to temptation. `It is said,' `Megathym Splene' wrote, `that mammas would be entrapping, and unmarried sisters fascinating, the unfortunate young commoners . . . Poor dears! What a hard fate for them to marry their tutors' sisters or daughters! . . . The chances of a few love affairs of a pure description would be a great blessing to Oxford; . . . it [sic] would not interfere with study more than hunting or cricket do; and . . . it might seduce many a spoony swain from the side of his jeweller's daughter, his scout's sister or some woman of yet lower class. Everyone knows that young Oxonians are always in danger of being caught up by designing tradesmen's wives, to whose society ladies' men resort for want of any better; and we have one or two instances, even among our aristocracy, of foolish unequal matches formed . . . at college. The tutors' daughters would put a stop to this mixture of caste.'84

It was by no means as simple as `Megathym Splene' made out. By 1900 comparatively few undergraduates were young men of means: most had their careers to make. Jacques Bardoux was no doubt right in 1895, when observing the ®anceÂes during eights week, to conclude that they were `a surer guardian of the undergraduates' morality than the University police'.85 But an undergraduate looking towards a professional career could not expect to be able to support a wife and family for some years. Even in circles where birth-control methods were accepted as admissible, it was thought harmful to a wife's health and nerves for her ®rst child to be delayed.86 Parents, other than the few who could provide lavishly for their sons, were therefore inclined to hope that those sons would not form deep attachments at the university. As was shown in Chapter 10, this helps to explain why people of liberal mind, who favoured women's higher education where most students lived at home, had doubts about expanding the Oxford women's colleges. To bring large numbers of young men and women together, when they were away from home, was seen as tempting the men into injuring their careers by imprudently early marriages. Mary Stocks's surprise, on arrival at Oxford, at the contrast between the London School of Economics and Somerville has been mentioned in Chapter 10. She was about to marry a fellow and tutor of 83

Engel (n. 82), 102, where the Proctor is called `Stokes'. He was J. L. Stocks. [ J. C. Thompson], Almae Matres [1857], 157. For an instance of attempted entrapment see Pt 1, 471. 85 Jacques Bardoux (n. 47), 51. 86 A group of undergraduates, including Lawrence Jones, were told by an Oxford doctor `that nine out of ten women were indifferent to, or actively disliked', sexual intercourse: Edwardian Youth, 162±3. The doctor added: `the tenth, who enjoys it, will always be a harlot'. 84

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St Johns who was nine years her senior, and would be well placed to start a family with little delay. Looking back she wrote `of the fear that young males and females could not be trusted to mix freely without emotional entanglements . . . At the time I found this fear wholly baseless. I ®nd it less so today.'87 The `apartheid' policy, as Baroness Stocks called it, applied to undergraduates only where college girls were concerned; but there were many other young women of the professional class in Oxford, and only a proportion of these latter were the daughters of heads or fellows. The development for which `Megathym Splene' had asked was thus only part of the story. As the Warden of Merton pointed out, Oxford had `attracted from all parts of the country the same class of residents which had long frequented Bath, Cheltenham, and Leamington'. It contained, for instance, an excellent Girls' High School.88 Single-sex schooling and the chaperonage to which girls were then subjected did not make Oxford undergraduates wise in love. Compton Mackenzie became engaged to the daughter of the Bursar (later the Provost) of Worcester. After two years the engagement was broken off: his ®anceÂe could not be expected to wait while he made his name as an author.89 Lawrence Jones embarked on his punishing fourth year in the hope of a `happy issue for a preposterous but devastating love affair'. In the 1950s Sir Lawrence Jones, as he had by then become, looked back at this feature of Edwardian Oxford. `Today', he wrote, when . . . young men and girls mix on easy and companionable terms, the girls are known to be fellow creatures after all. What is lost in day dreaming is made up for by warmth and intimacy and the sharing of interests. There is still mystery enough for provocation . . . but the days of formal and chaperoned reconnaissances are over, arm's-length has become arm-in-arm, and intelligence and charm and dearness come on the ®rst encounter. . . into their own. It is a great improvement.90

Heads and fellows were much concerned about the possibility of undergraduates forming homosexual attachments. There were strict rules on where choirboys might go: the proctors insisted that the boys' clubs which some colleges had established in Oxford's poorer parishes should be supervised by a senior member of the college; and work in Oxford with the new Boy Scout movement needed the permission of the Vice-Chancellor and 87 Mary Stocks, My Commonplace Book (1970), 114: Baroness Stocks had been married in Dec. 1913. Her ®rst child was born in July 1915. See pp. 271, 276 above. 88 George C. Brodrick, `The University of Oxford in 1898', Nineteenth Century, xliv (Aug. 1898), 213. See V. E. Stack (ed.), Oxford High School (1963). It opened in 1875, and occupied its new building at 21 Banbury Road (designed by T. G. Jackson) in 1880. 89 Octave Three (1964), 201±7. 90 Edwardian Youth, 98, 166. Jones had been at a single-sex boarding school (Eton) and during University terms he was away from home. The proportion of male undergraduates to whom both of these statements applied would have been far smaller in a Scottish university, or a recently founded English university or university college, than it was in Oxford.

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proctors.91 There were certainly grounds for this concern in a university of some 3,000 young men educated in single-sex establishments, many of them in boarding schools. Some undergraduate friendships showed a degree of emotional intensity which suggests homosexual inclinations; but, as in the earlier period discussed in Chapter 1, homosexual inclination was almost certainly much commoner than homosexual practice. Letters from one young man to another couched in terms of endearment, such as some of those written by R. A. Knox to Harold Macmillan, are far from being evidence of homosexual acts.92 It seems doubtful whether homosexual practices were very widespread among undergraduates in Edwardian Oxford. Curzon's speech when Wilde was invited to the Crabbet Club in July 1891 does not suggest that Wilde's gospel was sympathetically regarded among his Oxford contemporaries even when he was at the height of his fame. The skit produced anonymously for Eights Week in 1894ÐAristophanes at Oxford: O. W.Ðcomposed largely by L. S. Amery and F. W. Hirst, was even more hostile.93 Pater died in that year, and for some time he had not been taken seriously by young Oxford. His lectures had been inaudible. `Giving lectures for him,' Beerbohm remarked, `was a form of self-communion. He whispered them.'94 Pater's brand of `Hellenism' was yesterday's fashion, and therefore of little account thirty years later. The story was different in Cambridge; but even there the more `medical' view of homosexuality prevalent from the mid-nineties was making an impression. An English translation of Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in 1895, ran quickly through several editions: it was cited by Wilde in the following year when he petitioned for his release from prison.95 In a chapter of his Autobiography begun in 1910, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson of King's, Cambridge, wrote of his homosexuality: `I am like a man born crippled.'96 By then an undergraduate could meet girls of his own class in Oxford, however restrictive the conditions for such meetings. In Sinister Street Compton Mackenzie's hero tells his mother: `The great point of Oxford . . . is that there are no girls'; 91

OUA, WP y 7(6), Senior Proctor's Manual, 1902±3 (with later additions), ff. 140, 143. Jose Harris, Beveridge (1977), 24±6; Horne Macmillan (n. 40), 25±6. In Letters of T. E. Lawrence (1988) the editor, Malcolm Brown, comments (p. xxvii) that the atmosphere of Lawrence's association with the Arab, Dahoum, on a dig when L. was a Magdalen Demy, amounted simply to the `standard badinage of a scholarly all-male world.' 93 R. Ellmann, Wilde (1987), 302 (giving references to other accounts of this episode); H. A. Morrah, The Oxford Union, 1823±1923 (1923), 302. 94 David Cecil, Max (1964), 48. When Pater asked after a lecture whether he had been heard, Wilde replied: `We overheard you': Robert Ross, Masques and Phases (1909), 131. Pater's defects in classical scholarship were well known to undergraduates: Thomas Wright, Walter Pater (2 vols 1907), i. 236±9. See also pp. 329±30 above. 95 Ellmann, Wilde, 471±2; Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895), 259, 317±22. 96 Autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson, ed. Dennis Proctor (1973), 11. In The Greek View of Life (1896) Dickinson wrote sensitively about Greek homosexuality, but his tone was not that of Pater. 92

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but, as has been recorded, this did not re¯ect Compton Mackenzie's own experience.97 A romantic friendship with someone of the same sex might represent for an undergraduate one of the public-school experiences which he had left behind on reaching the University. The Dean of Christ Church, T. B. Strong, who was among the wisest of the Oxford heads, did not invariably refuse to accept those who had been convicted of homosexual offences at school.98 The admission of commoners lay largely with college heads, whose overriding aim was to create a united college. As Chapter 22 shows, encouraging rowing and team games had long been seen as the chief means of achieving this; but by the Edwardian period there were suggestions, both inside and outside the University, that the encouragement might have been overdone. The reverses of the Boer War had changed opinion on this as on so much else. Those battles, Isis pronounced in 1910, `were most certainly lost on the playing-®elds of Lords'.99 The heads and fellows who had never liked the attention paid to games and the river, such as T. B. Strong, Lewis Farnell, and Hastings Rashdall, gained support;100 and the champions of Kipling's `muddied oafs at the goals' were thrown onto the defensive.101 In 1898 the Brasenose rowdies had demonstrated against their Principal, C. B. Heberden, because of his alleged bias against sport.102 In February 1914 Heberden was defending Oxford against the charge of `allowing games and athletics to take a place of too great importance'.103 Among Edwardian undergraduates there were some small signs of revolt against the athletes' dominance, but the 97 For the restrictions on women students see pp. 252±3, 270, 274±8 above. For the friend's sisters who came to `Eights Week balls' see Harold Macmillan, The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 7h. In Sinister Street (n. 22), 812, the hero's mother replies: `I thought undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I'm sure they are too.' 98 Harold Anson, T. B. Strong (1949), 35. See also `Father Viner's' view in Sinister Street, 292. For the concerns of the Home Of®ce during the 1890s with `obscene materials', imported from Spain, and allegedly promoting homosexuality in the public schools, see Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State (1987), 99. H. A. Vachell, The Hill (1905), concerns a `pure', romantic friendship between two public-school boys. Vachell was a Harrovian. 99 OM xx (5 Feb. 1902), 188±9; Parl. Deb. 24 July 1907, clxxviii 1550 (Bishop of Oxford); pp. 534±5 above (Isis editorials, Feb.±May 1910). R. B. Haldane advised the Edinburgh students to attend less to games, and to take inspiration from the disciplined excellence of the Japanese army at Mukden: Rectorial Address, 10 Jan. 1907, Universities and National Life (2nd edn 1911), 87±8. Cf. Haldane's speech to Oxford OTC, June 1909, OM xxvii (10 June), 359. 100 Ch. 22, n. 52; Oxford Times, 27 Mar. 1897, 5g (Farnell, Proctor's speech); John Buxton and Penry Williams (eds), New College (1979), 99. For the German rectors' efforts to build gymnasia and acquire sports ®elds see K. H. Jarausch, `Students, Sex, and Politics in Imperial Germany', Journal of Contemporary History, 17 (1982), 294. See also An Oxford Correspondence of 1903, ed. W. Warde Fowler (1904), 39. 101 Oxford and Cambridge Review, no. 15 (July 1911), 128 (F. W. Bussell, for whose eccentricities see Octave Three, 167). `The Islanders' by Kipling had been published in The Times, New York Herald, and New York Tribune, 4 Jan. 1902. 102 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan, 58. 103 Meeting of Duty and Discipline Movement: Oxford Times, 14 Feb 1914, 10e. Heberden had been Vice-Chancellor until 1913, and so had some obligation to defend Oxford's practices.

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long struggle between `aesthetes' and `hearties' had not yet begun.104 There was, however, a widespread wish to show that an Oxford college did not resemble a house in a public school. That applied as much to the public schools' products as to the others. Demonstrating the distinction between the two institutions constituted an assertion of maturity.105 In April 1914 the headmaster of Dulwich wrote to The Times to complain about the excessive attention paid to games at Oxford and Cambridge. This elicited an indignant rebuttal from Isis. The undergraduate editor admitted that the accusation might be `very largely true of public school boys' who had been subjected at school to a `curriculum calculated to discourage the most ardent would-be worker'. He was con®dent that it was not true more generally. `Oxford,' he added, `is the most tolerant place in the world, and the non-athletic man has quite as good a chance of popularity as the ``Blue''.'106 The undergraduate sought most by the heads, and admired most by his contemporaries, was the `scholar-athlete'.107 Isis carried an article about an admired member of the University, usually an undergraduate, in each issue. In 1913±14 a bare majority of these `Isis Idols'Ðthirteen of the twenty-fourÐowed the distinction solely to athletic prowess. The remainder were included for activities of many kinds, some being acclaimed for a combination of athletic and non-athletic achievement. The heading to the article on the Union president for the 1914 summer term made an oblique reference to his membership of two winning Boat Race crews, but devoted at least equal space to his work for the `New Tory Club'.108 A few heads feared that their colleges' cohesion would be destroyed if they allowed an increased entry from overseas or enlarged the range of British schools from which their undergraduates were drawn. After the war L. R. Phelps, Provost of Oriel from 1914, expressed this view in evidence to the Asquith Commission. His college's undergraduates, he said, were drawn from a small group of middle-class schools, an occasional arrival from a different class being welcome. `It is to this fact,' he added, `that the college owes its charm. A body of men brought up under similar conditions and the same ideas, educated at schools of the same type, develops a corporate life, intimate, wholesome and moderately industrious.'109 During the Edwardian 104

The Twentieth Century, 98±9. Lascelles (n. 18), 43±4. For Macmillan's Union speech condemning the public schools see Isis, 1 Mar. 1913, 247, OM xxxi (6 Mar. 1913), 272. In May 1914 the Union voted (64 to 63) for a `drastic change' in these schools: OM xxxii. 343±4. Cf. 18 Feb. 1875 when the vote had gone in favour of the public school system by more than two to one. 106 The Times, 18 Apr. 1914, 4c (A. H. Gilkes), 21 Apr., 9e (A. C. Benson); Isis, 2 May 1914, 1±2. See also Ch. 22, n. 87 (the Feb.±May 1910 Isis editorials) and Stephen Tallents (n. 5), 138. Isis had been published as an undergraduate weekly during term since 1892: it was supported by the Alden Press. 107 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 7g. 108 Isis, 25 Apr. 1914, 9 (on A. H. M. Wedderburn for whom see also p. 860). 109 Memorandum, 8 Apr. 1920: Bodl. MS Top. Oxon b. 104 fo. 149. 105

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years the Presidents of Magdalen, Corpus, and Trinity acted on lines more restrictive than those which Phelps was later to describe; they avoided even the occasional arrival of any non-white applicant.110 In retrospect there seems to have been little justi®cation for such a policy of exclusion. Contemporaries identi®ed one or two colleges where the undergraduates showed little solidarity during the pre-war years. One of them was Balliol, which had been known since Jowett's day for its overseas, and indeed its Indian intake: Magdalen men called it `Basutoland'; but there seems little reason to attribute its internal rifts to this particular cause. Between 1911 and 1914 the percentage of Balliol's freshmen educated overseas was lower than that of Lincoln, Merton, Queen's, or Worcester.111 A disparaging remark made by Raymond Asquith to his stepmother when he arrived at Balliol in 1897 was not directed exclusively against its overseas contingent. `The college,' he reported, `is for the most part composed of niggers and Scotchmen.'112 Several reasons for Balliol's disunity are quickly discerned. It was a large college where the atmosphere could be intensely competitive; and during the Edwardian decade it contained substantial contingents from a single school. In 1906 nineteen of its ®fty-three freshmen were Etonians.113 Looking back, Sir Lawrence Jones concluded that to induce such elements to mix well with each other had represented an impossible task.114 If Alan Lascelles's remarks are a guide, Trinity, where the overseas intake was not high, a racially exclusive admissions policy being enforced, was no less disunited than its eminent neighbour. As Willie Elmhirst had hated his time at Malvern, it would have been odd if he had arrived at Worcester anxious to consort only with public-school men. He seems to have enjoyed the enlarged area of contacts which Oxford gave him. He described a rabbi whom he met in a friend's room as `a very decent man'; and the next day he recorded, after tea with another friend: `A black man from Keble [was] there . . . a prince of the blood royal of Demerara in Brit. Guiana. He has evidently been to an English public school, because if you hadn't seen his face you wouldn't have known you weren't speaking to an English chap. Not the least trace of any accent.'115 There was a bizarre 110 H. E. D. Blakiston to the Marquess of Crewe, 7 Dec. 1910, 15 Feb. 1911: TCA; PP 1914 lxii. 981, 1914±16 xlviii. 10±11; C. Hopkins and B. Ward-Perkins, `The Trinity±Balliol Feud', Trinity College, Oxford, Report, 1989±90, esp. 55±6. 111 Worcester 23%, Queen's, Lincoln 21%, Merton 18%, Balliol 17%; Non-Collegiates 52%. Magdalen's attitude was matched by that of other colleges: Edwardian Youth, 80; Trinity College Report, 58±9. 112 Raymond to `Margot' Asquith, Oct. 1897: John Jolliffe, Raymond Asquith (1980), 33. 113 Balliol College Register, 1833±1933, ed. I. Elliott (1934), 291±7. 114 Edwardian Youth, 14. The Etonians called the non-public school element `the plebs': Charles Lister to Alan Lascelles, 27 Mar. 1910, Lord Ribblesdale, Charles Lister (1917), 242. 115 Elmhirst, Diary, 61±2. Willie had far less colour prejudice than at least one of the early American Rhodes scholars: Edwardian Youth, 66±7; and his attitude to a Jewish acquaintance

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touch about the `colour bar' operated by the three exclusionist presidents, for to Elmhirst, as to most of his Oxford contemporaries, differences of class counted for more than those of colour. The view which prevailed among most of the other heads was summarized in the Hebdomadal Council's evidence to the MacDonnell Commission on the Civil Service (December 1912): University and college life, in which men from all parts of the world and from the most various surroundings are brought into close contact in associations of every kind, affords an experience and a discipline which, it is believed, cannot be supplied to the same extent in any other way. Men are thus insensibly trained in co-operating with other men, and their outlook is widened while they learn to hold their own.116

How did these admirable sentiments apply in the Edwardian University for those who did not come from its central tradition? There seems to have been no more anti-Semitism in Oxford than there was elsewhere in upperclass England. In the Union the greatest debating star, Philip Guedalla, and the outside speaker who secured the most striking success in an Eights-Week Union debate, Israel Zangwill, were both Jewish.117 There is, however, at least one recorded example of ¯agrant anti-Jewish prejudice from this period. When L. B. Namier tried for an All Souls fellowship in 1911 the traditions of an exclusive club were invoked to defeat him. Patrick ShawStewart, who had become a fellow in the previous year, wrote to a friend in November 1911: We elected three miserable specimens, but no one jolly was in; and anyhow, by the strenuous efforts of me and one or two others, the election of a Polish Jew from Balliol, much the strongest candidate really, was prevented.118

Lionel Curtis's `Moot' did something to redeem Oxford's reputation by arranging the ®nance in 1913 which gave Namier the time needed for producing The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution.119 compares well with that of Raymond Asquith at the same age according to John Buchan: These for Remembrance (privately printed, 1919), 72. 116

PP 1914 xvi, Appendix liii, 934. The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11b; OM xxix (1 June 1911), 363; B. P. Moore, who was of Jewish descent (Balliol 1896±1900) had an even better record as a classic than Raymond Asquith: Conrad Russell to Katharine Asquith, 15 Nov. 1929: Letters of Conrad Russell, ed. G. Blakiston (1987), 110. For Zangwill see also p. 306. 118 Viola Tree, Castles in the Air (1926), 147. See also Julia Namier, L. B. Namier (1971), 101; R. S. Rait, Memorials of A. V. Dicey (1925), 220, 226. Only two candidates were elected: C. R. M. F. Cruttwell and A. T. P. Williams. Compare the election of a Jewish candidate (D. F. Schloss, 1850±1912) to a Corpus scholarship before the Act abolishing University Tests had been passed (see Ch. 1, n. 111). Namier was an unsuccessful All Souls candidate again in 1912. 119 Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth, ed. Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (1982), 105. 117

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It is impossible to judge how much racial prejudice non-white undergraduates faced in these years. `We would be wise,' John Darwin has written, `to assume that for Africans, and West Indians particularly, it was perhaps even harder than for Indians to feel that vital combination of acceptance and respect by their peers which made the inevitable strains of life in a demanding foreign institution bearable.'120 There was a wide gap among white undergraduates between private talk and public conduct. As president of the Union in 1900 Raymond Asquith proposed E. T. Nelson successfully for of®ce. Nelson, he told his father, `is a West African nigger. . . black as pitch and a staunch patriot; I think his voice and teeth pulled him through: the former is a most magni®cent organ, like the sound of heavy guns at sea.'121 Anyone from outside the charmed circles needed talent, resolution, and some willingness to conform, to reach prominence in undergraduate activities.122 That was particularly true for non-white undergraduates; but the charmed circles were not de®ned wholly on ethnic lines. One of Christ Church's Indian princes was inside them, whereas a Free-Church Scot might not be. The mixture of ethnic and non-ethnic prejudice was not peculiar to Raymond Asquith in his freshman year. In the ®rst issue of the Michaelmas term 1905 of the weekly undergraduate periodical, the Varsity, a college's `rugger captain' is depicted in a cartoon failing to elicit a co-operative response from a freshman he is trying to recruit. The freshman is not an Asian or African, but a Scot.123 (This was thought wholly compatible with complaints that the University ®fteen's selectors relied too much on `the red stockings of Loretto'.)124 The `outsiders' of pre-1914 Oxford were of several different kinds and colours. Frank Lenwood of Corpus was Union president in 1897. Being a Nonconformist and a strict teetotaller, he explained to his guests at the president's dinner that his principles forbade him to serve wine. F. E. Smith, who was the guest of honour, received this announcement with atrocious discourtesy.125 Lenwood, who was a Rugbeian, could be expected 120

Illustrated History of Oxford University, ed. John Prest (1993), 365. 4 March 1900: Raymond Asquith (n. 112), 64. Nelson, who became a barrister, had been elected Treasurer. In 1905 R. C. Bonnerjee (1883±1940), a native of Calcutta, was elected to the same Union of®ce. A Rugbeian who coxed the Balliol eight, he went on to practise in the Calcutta High Court. 122 Cyril Garbett, Union President, Easter term 1898, was a clergy orphan who held a closed scholarship at Keble. Hensley Henson, a Non-Collegiate, won an All Souls fellowship, 1884. There seems some reason to suppose that Hilaire Belloc's failure at All Souls may have been connected with his Roman Catholicism: A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (1984), 61±2. Two very capable Manchester boys who reached Balliol in the 1890s formed a striking contrast. Neither came from a privileged home; but whereas Ernest Barker, self-con®dent and physically vigorous, enjoyed his undergraduate years, F. M. Powicke did not: R. W. Southern, Proceedings of the British Academy, 50 (1964), 277. 123 The Varsity, 19 Oct. 1905, 3. The cartoonist was Graham Hoggarth (1882±1964), a Keble man from Kendal Grammar School, Westmorland. 124 Information from H. Walker, CCC, 1896±1900. 125 E. C. Bentley, Those Days (1940), 75. 121

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to cope with this. A non-white president would have found it harder to do so; but in that case even F. E. might not have been quite so rude. Some Black and Asian students were soon assimilated. Kuruvila Zachariah, an Indian of a Christian family, came to Merton in 1912 and took a ®rst in Modern History. He was greatly attracted from the start by `the extreme cordiality and bonhomie of the dons'. His letter recording his doings at the end of his ®nals might have been written about one of his English friends: The thing was over on Wednesday at 12.30 . . . I rushed back to college and yelled for a minute or two at the top of my voice; then I went into Lowson's rooms and made an awful row with a walking stick; then I met Buckland on the staircase, aimed a cushion at his head and we had a good ®ght. After some more of these vagaries I changed and played tennis for four hours on New College grounds with Ron and two other New College men . . . Then hall. Then Watson and I went on the river till after ten. I went to bed feeling as limp as a rag.126

Pixley Seme, who came to Jesus in 1906, and Alain Leroy Locke, the ®rst African-American Rhodes scholar, who arrived in the following year, were more political in outlook. Seme became the founder of the African National Congress soon after he had returned from England. Locke, who was slightly built, made himself a successful cox. He knew what participation in Oxford life could do for him. `Oxford,' he wrote to his mother, `is a training-school for the governing classes, and has taught your son its lesson.'127 The presence of Indian students impinged on imperial politics and entailed problems which concerned the India Of®ce. By 1909 that Of®ce faced a delicate task: the Morley-Minto proposals had to be sold in India as a substantial reform package, while the British electorate were assured that they did not represent a step towards Indian independence. It was thought crucially important that Indians who had studied in Britain should return home imbued with pro-British attitudes. In the of®cial view (enunciated in 1907 by the Lee-Warner Committee) they would be better disposed towards Britain if they had met plenty of British students. Oxford, where they were spread widely, was thought to have done better in this than Cambridge, where they were concentrated in three colleges.128 In January 1909 the Vice-Chancellor was asked by the India Of®ce to secure an even `more regular distribution of Indian students among colleges'. The Vice-Chancellorship was then held by T. H. Warren, the President of Magdalen, and one of the three college heads who declined to accept Black or Asian applicants.129 Apart from this dif®culty the moment was not propitious. Within a few weeks there were renewed outrages in India;130 and on 13 February the attention of Times readers was 126 127 128 129 130

`An Indian at Merton', Postmaster and the Merton Record (Oct. 1991), 88±9. Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians (1998), 154. Report of the Committee on Indian Students, 1921±2 (1922), 77±8 (App. iv). Colin Campbell (India Of®ce) to Vice-Chancellor, 21 Jan. 1909: HCP 82 (1909, H. T.), 55±6. The Times, 12 Feb. 1909, 7c.

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drawn to an advertisement in the Indian Sociologist about a memorial to the `martyrs' of Indian independence. This memorial to terrorists, as the British regarded it, was to be erected at India House in London, which an Indian convicted of assaulting Sir William Lee-Warner had given as his address.131 The Indian Sociologist was edited from Paris by Pandit Shyamaji Krishnavarma, who also controlled India House, where Indian students could stay. He had been an undergraduate at Balliol from 1878 to 1882 and held an Oxford MA. His University record was good. He had even taken `Rudders' (Rudiments of Religion) seriously. He had been a lecturer at Balliol and assistant to the Boden Professor of Sanskrit. In 1904 the University had accepted a gift from him to establish an annual Herbert Spencer Lecture. Shortly after making this gift he had turned to Indian Home Rule.132 By 1909 he was advocating terrorism to secure independence, and warning his English `friends' of the risks which they would run by going to India, where every English person was `regarded as a potential enemy by the Indian Nationalist Party'. Herbert Spencer, as he argued, like Oliver Cromwell and George Washington, had recognized the necessity of using violent methods against a despotic government.133 In March 1909 the Vice-Chancellor received a memorial from 109 members of Congregation, including ®ve college heads, urging that the Herbert Spencer Lectures should be abolished, and the gift for them returned to the donor.134 In May the Hebdomadal Council were told that to break a trust in this way would be exceedingly dif®cult; and it was soon clear that while the Inner Temple had been able to disbar Krishnavarma, the University could not deprive him of the MA which was mentioned as being his in the trust deed. It seemed possible, however, that no one of the appropriate standing would now be willing to give one of the lectures.135 On 1 July 1909 Sir Curzon Wyllie, the India Of®ce's student adviser, was stabbed to death at the Imperial Institute in London by an Indian student.136 In the resulting wave of revulsion several colleges stopped admitting Indians. However, the damage done by Krishnavarma was limited. As soon as his advocacy of terrorism had become widely known in February 1909, his claim to speak for Indian Nationalists had been denied by a Nationalist who lived in Britain: he clearly had no hold on those Indians who were within the reach of British law.137 It proved possible to appoint a Herbert Spencer Lecturer for 1909.138 The prospect of raising a new endowment for the lectures, in the 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

Ibid. 13 Feb., 10c. Ibid. 15 Mar. 1909, 6c; Gazette, xxxiv. (15 Mar. 1904), 433±4. The Times, 20 Feb., 6b; HCP 84, 263±4. The Times, 9 Mar., 12d. Ibid. 4 May, 4d, 19 May, 8f. Ibid. 3 July, 8a±e, 11d, e. Ibid. 19 Mar. 1909, 6b. HCP 84, 209, 247.

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hope that this would enable the University to return his money to Krishnavarma, was not inviting; and on 31 January 1910 Council decided to take no further action.139 By the time that C. E. Mallet had taken post in 1912 as head of a small Indian students' department, the crisis had passed. In June 1913 there were 66 Indian undergraduates at Oxford and 117 at Cambridge; and Magdalen, Corpus, and Trinity were still the only colleges not to accept them.140 Some of the students for whom such concern was shown during this decade ful®lled expectation by attaining leading roles; but they did so in a partitioned India of two independent countries. The Muslim students from Aligarh, for instance, who were sent to Oxford by Cambridge men, included the ®rst Prime Minister of Pakistan.141 In the last months of 1911 Lord Derby was consulted by George V on the standing of the leading Oxford colleges: the Prince of Wales and Lord Stanley were contemporaries and it was planned that they should go to college together. Derby reported: There appear to be three in the running: Christ Church, New, and Magdalen. New College I should not like, as according to the Archbishop of York there is much trouble there; and his is a judgement I would implicitly rely on. Christ Church is a large college apparently, where all the nouveaux riches go and where the sole object seems to be to spend money and prove themselves men instead of being what they areÐboys. Magdalen would appear to have none of these disadvantages.142

London club opinion was then, as always, a poor guide to Oxford. The Archbishop was a year or two out of date about New College.143 He could hardly be blamed for that; but the three grand colleges made up a very short list, and his veto on it kept the `Pragger Wagger' away from the only one in the trio which was intellectually up to scratch at the undergraduate level.144 The preference for Warren's Magdalen over Strong's Christ Church now seems perverse; and when Warren persisted in refusing to admit Indian students it caused public embarrassment.145 By academic criteria both colleges were weak. The proportion of Christ Church graduates taking pass degrees was nearly twice the University average, while at Balliol it had fallen to a mere 3 per cent.146 When A. L. Smith's son, Lionel, came to Magdalen as 139

Ibid. 84. 399±402; 85. l(27). PP 1914 lxii. 980±1. Relations between Indian and English students were particularly good in the women's colleges: Symonds (Ch. 28 n. 1), 260. 141 Ibid. 264±5. 142 Randolph S. Churchill, Lord Derby (1959), 157. 143 See n. 72 above. 144 Raymond Asquith to his father, 30 March 1898: Raymond Asquith (n. 112), 37. New College was already threatening to challenge Balliol's intellectual hegemony. See also p. 216 above. 145 PP 1914±16 xlviii. 10. 146 The ®gures are for entrants, 1905±9. The proportion at Christ Church was 32.3%, the University average 17.2%. Non-Collegiates and private halls are excluded: RCOC (1919), Appendix 3, Table c14. 140

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a modern history tutor he was appalled by what he found. In 1912 seven of the college's twenty candidates for history honours were ploughed, only two being placed above the third class. In the following year the failures exceeded those obtaining honours. One of the nineteen Magdalen candidates was placed in the ®rst class, ®ve in the third, and two in the fourth: eleven were ploughed.147 The superiority of Christ Church to modern eyes lay in the range of its intake. This was probably the very feature which scared Derby. In 1906 the right-wing National Review had referred to `the Greeks and Hebrews' who now gained admission to the House: Kurt Hahn, for instance, had recently been numbered among the latter.148 Paul of Serbia and Sergius Obolensky, who were both princes, and the heir to the Maharaja of Kapurthala, are unlikely to have been short of money; and the sons of senior German and Russian ambassadors may have seemed nouveaux riches to the seventeenth Earl of Derby; but mixing with such as these would surely have widened the Prince of Wales's horizons.149 There were plenty of less exotic Christ Church men to provide ballast. T. B. Strong aimed to make the House `the home of average Englishmen, both intellectual and sub-intellectual'.150 The holders of local-authority awards who could face Oxford's compulsory Greek and gain admission were scarce in any college. When Derby gave his advice there were only 118 of them in the whole University.151 If someone low in the social scale found himself at Christ Church the grandees seem to have done their best to treat him well:152 the House was large enough to allow them to treat the occasional social upstart with distant kindness. Magdalen, though smaller than Christ Church as Derby noted, was no less aristocratic. In 1901 almost half of its undergraduates were Etonians, and 147 `An Oxford Family' (n. 39), 60±75. The 1913 history examiners were thought to be raising the standard in an unauthorized fashion. They failed 41 candidates out of 213. There were only two failures in Greats that year. 148 National Review, xlviii (Oct. 1906), 285: anon. by `A Recent Graduate (not of Balliol)'. Halifax, who had been at Christ Church, 1899±1903, thought that it owed `an almost inde®nite measure of diversity' to its size, and judged this advantage to outweigh `a certain weakness in its solidarity': Earl of Halifax, Fulness of Days (1957), 51. 149 In May 1912, after nearly 15 years as German ambassador at Constantinople, Marschall von Bieberstein was posted to London, but died in the following September. Iswolsky was Russian foreign minister, 1906±10, and ambassador in Paris, 1910±17. See also Serge Obolensky, One Man in His Time (1960). Stephen McKenna depicted the variegated population of Christ Church in Sonia (n. 5), 65±6 on `the reserved and aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch graduates'. For the masterly way in which Christ Church had dealt with the problems of the Crown Prince of Siam see J. C. Masterman (n. 14), 116. 150 H. Anson, T. B. Strong (n. 98), 26. For the improvement in Christ Church's reputation while Strong was Dean see Michael Kennedy, Adrian Boult (1987), 38. In his retiring address to the House in 1920 (see Ch. 9 n. 4) Strong described it as `large and representative of very various interests'. 151 See p. 553. 152 Information from R. W. Hodder-Williams (see n. 14 above); S. P. B. Mais, All the Days (n. 51), 23±4.

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Warren's practice of composing a threnody if one of his young noblemen should die elicited one of Raymond Asquith's best lampoons.153 Ernst Stadler, the German expressionist poet, who came to Magdalen as a Rhodes scholar in 1906, did not have a happy experience at the hands of the President and fellows. Faced with someone who already held a German Ph.D. they failed to show any great sensitivity.154 Magdalen's most striking social feature was its self-suf®ciency. When one of its members mentioned that he had been elected to the presidency of the Union, his college friends affected to believe that he had become involved with the Poor Law Union (the `workhouse'). `What,' they said, `that frightful place up the Headington Road?'155 If Balliol had been added to Derby's three colleges the quartet would have included more than a quarter of Oxford's undergraduates; but it should not be given all the historical limelight. In a `poor man's college' most of the undergraduates would be likely to take their work seriously. The headmaster of Bradford Grammar School told his pupil Umberto Wolff (later Humbert Wolfe) that Wadham would suit him: `plenty of work, no nonsense, good tutors, and decent young men with not too much money to spend'. It was shrewd advice. When Wolfe matriculated there in 1903 he had a brief period of disillusionment; but, like Willie Elmhirst, he soon found his niche. In his case this was the college's Debating Society and Literary Club, where his literary pretensions were acceptable and he made friends with one of the early Rhodes scholars.156 In most colleges undergraduates could meet interesting and agreeable survivals from another day. Two life fellows survived in Corpus at the turn of the century. Charles Plummer, the chaplain, had his eccentricities. He had steadfastly declined to take priest's orders, and it had become necessary to remove him from his modern history lecturership many years earlier. He was, however, not merely the mainstay of a boys' club, but the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar of his time, and, as a medievalist, the coiner of the term `bastard feudalism'.157 Cuthbert Shields, the Garden Master, has appeared in Chapter 1 as Robert Laing. South Shields was his birthplace, so that he had a territorial link with St Cuthbert; but why he had chosen so striking a commemoration of this was not clear. As has already been indicated, he had to retire periodically to the Warneford Mental Hospital. When in college, however, he was a mine of out-of-the-way information, much of it derived from his travels in the Near East: he claimed, for instance, to be a 153 `On a Viscount who Died on the Morrow of a Bump Supper': Raymond Asquith (n. 112), 105±6. For a sympathetic view of Warren see the unpublished memoirs of Joseph Addison (Magdalen 1897±1901), extracts in Magdalen College Record, 1991, 68±77. 154 Richard Sheppard, Ernst Stadler (1883±1914): A German Expressionist Poet at Oxford (1994), 13±14. 155 Octave Three, 116. 156 Ed. C. S. L. Davies and Jane Garnett, Wadham College (1994), 56±7. 157 G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 103; Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (1885), 15.

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White Druse. To talk with such people widened horizons.158 It was the boast at Corpus, as elsewhere, that this was a `friendly college' where the second year made the freshmen welcome.159 A description of the pre-war undergraduate's experience which dealt solely with college life would be misleading. University societies contributed largely to the informal curriculum, and the Union at least, which any undergraduate could join by paying a moderate subscription, exercised a democratic in¯uence. It had achieved a resurgence in the 1890s and was `free of all debt' by the end of 1905.160 The Union provided a link with the London world, and, more speci®cally, with that of Westminster. Guest speakers were ®rst invited in 1888; and most presidents issued one such invitation during their term of of®ce. It was not the practice to have more than one guest speaker in a debate. The guest spoke last, and usually won on the vote: it was almost a matter of courtesy for him to do so. Mrs Fawcett's visit in November 1908 proved an exception: the cause of women's suffrage was defeated by 31 in a vote of 689, but the margin against her was thought to have been produced by the senior members who voted.161 When Lloyd George came in November 1913 the Society expressed con®dence in the Liberal government's land policy by 654 votes to 586.162 In the following summer Austen Chamberlain secured the rejection of Home Rule by 317 to 234. His speech, which was reported in the national press, gave him the chance he needed of reassuring the Carsonites that Birmingham was not going to rat on Belfast.163 The dominant `Union style' was epigrammatic and a little ¯ippant. Here the undergraduates showed some af®nity with the University's senior members. Oxford senior common rooms had been scarred by the religious turmoil of the 1840s. The ¯ippancy was a defence against any renewal of rending controversies. Religious topics were not allowed in Union debates until the Second World War. In the hands of a wit such as Philip Guedalla the style was effective; but his imitators, as Harold Macmillan came to think, `could be very feeble and tedious'.164 The Liberals were almost certainly stronger in the Union than elsewhere in Oxford. Among the dons, and the undergraduates taken as a whole, they were outnumbered. Even in the 158

OM xxvii (1908), 8±9; Pelican Record, ix (1909), 157, 169; Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, 115±16. H. Walker, `After Sixty Years', Pelican Record, xxxi (1957), 168±9. 160 OM xxiv (29 Nov. 1905), 118. 161 C. Hollis, The Oxford Union (1965), 126±7, 140±4; OM xxvii (26 Nov. 1908), 108±9; M. S. Fawcett, What I Remember (1924), 196±8. R. A. Knox proposed women's suffrage. 162 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11b, c. 163 Chamberlain was known to favour the federal schemes proposed by Milner and the `Round Tablers'. See D. Dutton, Austen Chamberlain (1985), 106 and the criticism of Carson in Birmingham Post, 11 July 1914, 8d. 164 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11b. For a Second World War debate on a religious theme see The Twentieth Century, 180. 159

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Union the Conservatives prevailed in the party motions which followed each general election until January 1911, when the Liberals secured a narrow majority (132±120).165 Even a prominent member might not pretend to any great political consistency when an eloquent guest speaker was involved. `I voted,' R. A. Knox recorded years later, `no con®dence in the government with Mr Wyndham, Home Rule with Mr Redmond, socialism . . . carried off my feet by the eloquence of Mr Philip Snowden.'166 Harold Macmillan spoke in support of Home Rule and of the main principles of socialism.167 The Union's records and the pages of the undergraduate press dispel any doubts about the effects of the Boer War reverses and the arrival of the Rhodes scholars in reducing insular complacency. When the Rhodes scholarships were ®rst announced the Union condemned them by 133 votes to 30. The opening speaker said that `all the world would send its worst specimens.'168 The sequel to this disdain has been described in Chapter 29. The ®rst small batch of Rhodes scholars not only showed sporting prowess, but secured seven ®rsts in ®nals, one in the BCL, two Economics Diplomas with distinction, the Ireland and Vinerian Scholarships, and the Gladstone Memorial Prize. In 1913 the Union elected its ®rst American president. In December 1898 the Isis opposed the plans for `Ruskin Hall', asking: `Would not Birmingham be a better venue than Oxford for this experiment?'169 The contrast with the Union's two debates in 1907 on reforming the University is striking. In the second of these R. W. Livingstone called it disgraceful that the foundation of Ruskin should have been left to an American. The motion which he seconded, regretting that Oxford was not suf®ciently in touch with the nation and calling for some measure of reform, was carried by 129 to 76.170 On 7 December 1899, just before `Black Week', the Union rejected conscription by three to one in a thin house. After 1900 there were repeated Union majorities for `some system of compulsory military service'; and in 1907 the society rejected the view that Haldane's Territorial Army made compulsion unnecessary.171 Even a motion for compulsory OTC training, such as R. R. Marett had advocated in the Athenaeum, was lost in November 165 OM xxix (2 Feb. 1911), 173. See Granta, xxiii (12 Feb. 1910), 216: `the advocate of aristocratic government . . . stays in his rooms or goes to the theatre while the Union proclaims the democratic ideal'. 166 R. A. Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), 56. 167 Horne (n. 40), 22. In the Home Rule debate Macmillan spoke immediately before Austen Chamberlain. 168 OM xx (14 May 1902), 337±8. See also A. G.'s verses, ibid., 299. The anonymity was thin: A. D. Godley, Fifty Poems, ed. C. L. Graves and C. R. L. Fletcher (1927), 32±4. For some inferior verse by G. W. A., ibid., 314. 169 Isis, 3 Dec. 1898, 108. 170 Oxford Review, 16 Nov. 1907, 3d: OM xxvi (21 Nov.), 96±7. The `reformers' won by 129 to 76. For Livingstone's part in the Oxford reform group see Ch. 32: he was President of Corpus, 1933±50. The Oxford Review was printed by the Oxford Times and published daily during term from Oct. 1888 to the end of Trinity term 1914. 171 Oxford Review, 4 May 1907, 3d; OM xxvi (27 Feb. 1908), 233±4; xxix (15 June 1911), 398.

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1910 by no more than 117 to 130.172 By 1914 the OTC had a strength of 1,200. In the preceding year it had even been proposed that a degree should be made conditional on the attainment of a certain standard of military ef®ciency. But this proposal came from Cambridge and attracted practically no support in Oxford.173 Advocates of military training stressed the need for national ®tness and ef®ciency rather than any immediate dangers. `Some of us,' said Walter Monckton in his maiden Union speech, `will vote tonight for a compulsory OTC, not with a view to the maintenance of an Empire which we do not believe to be imperilled, but to restore a vanished spirit.'174 More realistic perceptions could not have been expected. Oxford was no more blinkered than much of Westminster and Fleet Street: and there were limits, however wise the tutor, to what could be learned about contemporary Europe in a Greats or Modern History course. As the opening speaker had said in the University reform debate of May 1907, one of the gravest charges against Oxford syllabuses was that they included so little study of the contemporary world.175 The democratic effect of the Union was reinforced by that of the political clubs on which it depended. Each had a limited membership, if only because they met in their members' rooms; but the subscriptions were low and they contrasted sharply with the socially select Bullingdon Club. Membership of the Strafford and the Russell cost ®ve shillings per term, while the Palmerston, like the Russell, charged a ®ve-shilling entrance fee. In the Union it was the of®ce-holders who met the guest speakers: in the political clubs all the members could do this.176 The clubs also brought undergraduates into contact with some of the more in¯uential senior members of the University. The leading colleges exercised a certain dominance in the political clubs; but during the Edwardian decade ®fteen colleges were represented in the Canning, which was one of the Conservative mainstays. Trinity had as many members as Balliol, and University only one fewer than New College. The clubs' fortunes were apt to rise and fall with the political tides. In the ®rst years of the century the Russell and the Palmerston were more optimistic than the Canning, the Chatham, and the Strafford.177 Some clubs did not ask 172

Athenaeum, 16 Dec. 1905, 837; Isis, 5 Nov. 1910. For the background see pp. 639±40 above. Oxford Review, 5 Mar. 1913. In 1939 the government announced conscription on 26 Apr. For the Union's pro-conscription majority, 27 Apr., see The Twentieth Century, 168. 174 Birkenhead, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (1969), 34; OM, xxix (10 Nov. 1910), 68. 175 Oxford Review, 18 May 1907 3e, reporting W. M. Ogilvy's speech. The need for `a reformed curriculum in which modern literature, the practical and ornamental arts, and the principles of statesmanship will predominate' is the theme of an `Oxford novel' of 1907, The Massacre of the Innocents: Mortimer Proctor, The English University Novel (1957), 116±17. 176 See, for example, Ch. 33, n. 24. 177 The Hon. Edward Cadogan, an of®cer of the Chatham, complained that the party leaders gave the Conservative clubs no help. His remarks were aimed particularly at the Cambridge premier, A. J. Balfour: National Review, xli (Mar. 1903), 121±3. See History of the Oxford Canning Club, 1861±1911, ed. Harold Steinhart (privately printed for the Club, 1911). 173

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for an exclusive allegiance. Harold Macmillan was a member of the Canning, the Russell, and the Fabian Society.178 The bill of fare would be reasonably varied even within one club. The Russell's ®ve meetings in Trinity term 1903 were devoted to `current politics', problems of imperial defence, modern protectionism, old-age pensions, and licensing reform.179 The most important of the subject-based societies was the Junior Scienti®c Club. Natural Science was the third largest honour school by 1914, being exceeded only by Modern History and Greats.180 The preponderance of classical scholarships, and the fact that Greats and Modern History were regarded as the courses for intending statesmen, make it easy to regard those two schools as having dominated the University; and the fact that the tutorial system ®tted exactly with their subject-matter can enhance this impression. But Mathematics and Natural Science secured a share of high ability. Harold Hartley, who had a Balliol science scholarship in Raymond Asquith's year, became the college's science tutor, specializing in chemistry, and achieved a remarkable war career. By the age of 26 Harry Moseley of Trinity was in the forefront of atomic physics. His death in the Dardanelles ®ghting in August 1915 was reported in both British and German papers. Julian Huxley, who took a ®rst in 1909, specializing in zoology, was a professor three years later at the newly formed Rice Institute in Texas. These science scholars were not detached from the Oxford mainstream. Moseley rowed each year in one of his college's eights. Julian Huxley won the Newdigate Prize with a poem on Holyrood.181 Each college would have several societies, most of them of a literary ¯avour and subject to many vicissitudes. There was often a debating society loosely associated with the junior common room. The tone of these college debates was fairly conservative. Salisbury's success in the khaki election of 1900 was welcomed by substantial majorities and the attempts to condemn Joseph Chamberlain's electoral conduct all failed. In the thirty years from 1882 the Lincoln JCR rejected women's higher education and equal rights on eight occasions. However, although Lincoln's undergraduates judged the Labour Party a threat to nation and empire in 1903, their successors sympathized with the striking miners in 1912.182 178

Horne, Macmillan, 22. Russell Club term card in Bodl. G. A. Oxon 4 600. Pt. 1, 361, Fig. 11.2; P. J. Rowlinson, `Student Participation in Science Teaching: the Early Years of the Oxford University Junior Scienti®c Club', Oxford Review of Education, 9 (1983), 133±6. By 1914 the `separate discipline clubs'Ðthe Chemical, Biological, Morphology, and Junior PhysiologicalÐwere gaining ground. For the Alembic Club see p. 465 above and The Twentieth Century, 268. 181 Julian Huxley, Memories, i (1970), 67. For Huxley's good fortune in encountering an able science master at Eton see J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe (1977), 137. 182 OM xix (24, 31 Oct. 1900), 33±5, 50±2; Green, Lincoln, 564±8. For the society founded in May 1886 for Welsh-speaking undergraduates, Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym, see K. O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880±1980 (1981), 100±1. `Oxford for Wales,' writes 179 180

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Most pre-war undergraduates regarded heads of colleges as Olympian ®gures prone to eccentricities, usually of an amiable kind. Elmhirst was lucky in that his `Provvy' had married a hospitable lady much younger than himself who had become one of Oxford's best known hostesses. In February 1912 Elmhirst recorded: To the Provvy's . . . at 8.15. About a dozen young ladies there . . . Mrs Daniel in great form . . . We started off with charades which were really awfully good . . . About 10.15 they started dancing in which I was unable to join, so spent some of the time . . . talking to a lady who also was not dancing. We, most of us, left at 11.30.183

At Balliol, by a custom derived from Jowett's time, undergraduates read essays to the Master. `The subject,' Harold Macmillan recalled, was pinned up in the college lodge and there was a graceful repetition of the themes which proved valuable to some of us. On one such occasion, so the story ran, a young man, more endowed with athletic than intellectual prowess, had borrowed for this purpose an essay which had already done yeoman service but was getting a little worn and dog-eared . . . He began con®dently `As Bophocles once said . . .'. `Are you sure that's right?' said the Master. `Well, it's written down here as Bophocles, so I suppose it's all right.' The Master let it pass.184

That incident has a certain symbolic importance. Now that the old Oxford of the religious tests was no more than a memory, few heads or fellows were willing to impose their views. An early Rhodes Scholar was surprised to ®nd that an Oxford don liked it when undergraduates controverted his opinions and stood up for their own.185 In 1944 William Temple apologized to a friend for `my habitual tendency to discover that everybody is quite rightÐbut I was brought up by Caird, and I can never get out of the habit.'186 Whatever the parental fears, none of Balliol's undergraduate historians supposed that, because F. F. Urquhart was a Roman Catholic, he would press the doctrines of his Church on them.187 A tutor thought it his duty to help in bringing out Professor K. O. Morgan, `was a cultural, perhaps spiritual inspiration, not a political one.' In Magdalen all the `clubs and societies' are reported to have been open by 1912 `to the whole college without election': Oxford, ii. 3 (1936), 33. 183

Elmhirst, Diary, 45±6. See The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 7g. This legendary incident has been variously dated. Herbert (`Beb') Asquith says that the essay was being read to the senior dean, i.e. to StrachanDavidson before he succeeded to the mastership: Herbert Asquith, Moments of Memory (1937), 125±6. The Master was not the only one to hear the essays: E. Barker, Age and Youth (1953), 307. 185 W. D. Wallis, American Oxonian, ii (1915), 8. For the doctrine of `obedience' in Tractarian Oxford see Pt 1, 50, 54, 60, 221±2. G. D. H. Cole equated the political propaganda of the Central Labour College in extension teaching with Tractarian methods: Blue Book, i (Mar 1913), 393. For disquiet among Oxford's senior ®gures at the prospect of Trinity College, Dublin, losing freedom of enquiry in a federal university dominated by Roman Catholic colleges, see Oxford Review, 11 Mar. 1907 4a±c. 186 Iremonger, William Temple, 37. 187 See Harold Nicolson's review of Cyril Bailey, F. F. Urquhart in Daily Telegraph, 6 Nov. 1936. 184

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by any means available whatever ability an undergraduate might have. The range of abilities and achievements among the undergraduates of Edwardian Oxford was even greater than appears at ®rst sight. There was a difference in standards, not merely as between honours men and passmen, but as between Greats and the other schools on the arts side. The 1913 Student's Handbook explained: The School of Literae Humaniores . . . is admitted on all hands to be the premier School in dignity and importance. It includes the greatest proportion of the ablest students, it covers the widest area of study, it makes probably the severest demands, both on examiner and candidates, it carries the most coveted distinction.188

Few undergraduates would have disputed that. Michael Fane, the hero of Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, reads Modern History like his creator; yet he says: `It does not seem to me that one gains the quintessence of the University unless one reads Greats.'189 When the MacDonnell Commissioners began their investigations in 1912 they feared that the civil-service examination might be too favourable to Greats. They were assured, however, by an experienced witness that a good performance in Greats represented Oxford's most reliable indicator of industry and capacity, and that those who had been reading Modern History for three years were sometimes outperformed in ®nals by Greats men who had taken History as a second school in a year.190 The author of the 1913 Handbook seems to have been embarrassed by the suggestion that the standards for honours varied from school to school. It was therefore explained how a Greats man might be able to secure a History ®rst in a year: He has already acquired an acquaintance with Political Science and possibly with Political Economy, as well as with the general methods of historical study, which will prove invaluable to him; and the only real dif®culties which he will encounter are the technicalities of English Constitutional History.191 188

Oxford University Handbook (20th edn, revised to Sept. 1913), 135. Sinister Street (n. 22), 800. Oscar Wilde had thought the same in 1880: Oscar Wilde, More Letters, ed. R. Hart-Davis (1985), 33. The standing of Modern History, and of tutors and lecturers in the subject, varied from college to college: E. L. Woodward, Short Journey (1942), 40; J. C. Masterman (n. 14), 46; Ernest Barker, who moved from a lecturership at Wadham to a fellowship of St John's, recorded that modern history `counted more' in the second of these colleges than in the ®rst: Age and Youth (1953), 62±3, 65. 190 Evidence of Stanley Leathes, Secretary of the Civil Service Commission: PP 1912±13 xv. 138. He had been a Cambridge tutor and had examined for Oxford Modern History ®nals. In 1912 forty of the forty-seven successful Oxford candidates for the Home and Indian Services, and the Eastern Cadetships, had read Greats. Six had read Modern History, two of these after Classical, and two after Mathematical, Moderations; one had read Mathematics: PP 1913 xviii. 155±62. In giving his evidence in March 1912 Leathes referred to Greats as `the ®nal school at Oxford': Q 579. For a criticism of the relatively low place given to modern history in the examination see Sir Hiram Wilkinson, Q 28, 490 (21 Feb. 1913): PP 1914 xvi. See also Pt 1, 496±7, 501±2. 191 Handbook (n. 188), 157±8. For the comparison with the 1932 Handbook see The Twentieth Century, 115±16. 189

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Those remarks certainly gave the links between Greats and Modern History their full weight. This discrepancy in standard did not mean that the Modern History school lacked undergraduates of ability. The days when that might have been true were far past. Edwardian civil servants (`Home' and `Indian') belonged to an undiluted meritocracy, but the country which they served did not.192 Pre-war Oxford included men destined for high political positions who had avoided some of the stiff classical grind at school and did not need to spend all their Oxford years at their books. Viscount Samuel and the Earl of Halifax (as they were to become) were free to take plenty of time over the History school, not from lack of ability, but because they could expect the privileges of inherited wealth or noble birth.193 T. E. Lawrence's letter to a younger brother, who had moved to History after Classical Moderations, gives the ¯avour of the school: 8 June 1911. You are going to too many lectures. The English Constitution did not develop out of domesday book. If you imbibe all of Mr Barker's lectures thereon, you will not be able to see that it didn't . . . Give him up after the ®rst term . . . A. L. Smith is an institution: he delivered those lectures on Aristotle the year before his eldest daughter was born . . . He is an excellent joke, but you will get more out of Mr Barker's book in ten minutes . . . Don't make the mistake of over-much political science . . . There is only one paper on [it], though the classical dons forget that in their joy at ®nding a common ground between Greats and History. . . Oman is a monument: and one doesn't need to look at such things over long.194

In Greats professors and tutors seem to have varied in their views about the relevance of the course to the modern world. In Harold Macmillan's account J. A. Smith, the Professor of Moral Philosophy and lately a Balliol tutor, stood at one extreme. He listed for those embarking on Greats the various callings at which they might be aiming, and ended: A fewÐI hope a very fewÐwill become teachers or dons . . . Except for the last category, nothing that you learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after lifeÐsave only thisÐthat if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot; and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.195

When William Temple was a young fellow of Queen's his approach diverged a little from this. He used H. G. Wells's New Utopia for his lectures on 192

For the resulting contrasts see Pt 1, 496±7, 501±2. See Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel (1992), 12±25; Halifax, Fulness of Days, 49±53. On the `classical grind' see Raymond Asquith to Katherine Asquith, 2 Aug. 1910: Raymond Asquith (n. 112), 178±9. 194 To W. G. Lawrence: Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. D. Garnett (1964 edn), 109±10. 195 The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11e. W. D. Ross, then a young tutor in Oriel, said the same to F. R. Barry, who took a ®rst in Greats in 1912: F. R. Barry, Period of My Life (1970), 45. For a somewhat similar remark in a mathematics lecture see p. 451 above. 193

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Plato's Republic.196 Although the ancient history tutors, unlike the philosophers, were con®ned to the ancient world, some of them at least wanted to show how much those who were to serve India could learn from studying the Roman Empire.197 The Modern History tutors had few doubts about the relevance of their syllabus for members of the ruling class. It was the importance of this advantage in their eyes which made them resist Firth's attempts to turn the honours course towards method and technique.198 They did not forget that their `recent options' were much the most popular.199 They were too con®dent to have great fears about investigations into their own society. Until 1915 the most recent period of English history ended with Queen Victoria's accession in 1837. In April 1906 H. E. Egerton, giving his inaugural lecture as the ®rst Beit Professor of Colonial History, announced that his teaching would not be restricted to this ending date.200 Ernest Barker's Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906) shows the in¯uence of A. L. rather than J. A. Smith. `Where there are representative institutions,' Barker wrote, `one can unite the democratic principle of rule by the people with the Socratic and Platonic principle of rule by the Wisest and Best.'201 The examiners in Modern History, and even in Greats, interpreted their subjects broadly, and kept an eye on the problems with which the candidates would one day have to cope. `In what chief respects,' asked the History examiners in 1897, `does modern democracy differ from ancient?' In 1900 they asked whether the party system was breaking down and whether the results would be good or bad if it did so, and in 1901: `Is the commercial prosperity of the United Kingdom threatened either by excess of imports over exports, or by the recent growth of German and American trade?' `Are representative institutions,' the Greats candidates were asked in 1901, `in danger of being superseded by some other form of government?'202 Apart from this no syllabus restrictions can prevent capable and lively undergraduates from enquiring about their own world; and in a collegiate university the `hidden curriculum' can be very important. `I have acquired suf®cient 196

Iremonger, William Temple, 50. See pp. 346±9 above. 198 See pp. 370±2 above. 199 See Ch. 14, n. 22. 200 H. E. Egerton, The Claims of the Study of Colonial History upon the Attention of the University of Oxford (1906), 9±14. T. F. Tout, the medievalist, Professor at Manchester, 1890± 1925, wanted `a great increase' in the study of `the most modern periods': Collected Papers (Manchester, 3 vols 1932±4), ed. F. M. Powicke, i. 103. 201 Ernest Barker, Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, 89n. 202 From the Political Science paper (1897); a Constitutional History paper (1900); and Political Economy (1901). The Greats question is from a Moral and Political Philosophy paper. Charles Lister, Balliol, who took a ®rst in Greats in 1909, ran, while an undergraduate, a `Committee for Lectures on Social Subjects in Oxford': Lord Ribblesdale, Charles Lister (1917), 241. 197

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knowledge of how scientists interpret the world', Temple told the British Association in 1916. `This I owe almost entirely to being a member of a college which contained people who studied natural science while I was studying classical languages, ancient history, and philosophy.' During his ®rst Greats year Arthur Salter read widely and `voraciously. . . dabbling in economics, learning something of the working of the English legal mind, and drinking deep of English literature'. After this `glorious year' the approach of ®nals `narrowed the range of reading.'203 In these amateurish ways Oxford's pre-war undergraduates learned something about their country and the wider world. Many pre-war Oxford men proved deeply grateful for their tutors' guidance and support.204 The tutor `read with' the undergraduates in the oldfashioned phrase: he was not there merely to instruct. Having no wish to impose his views he did not hesitate to state them, even if this meant trenching on modern controversies. It has always been impossible for a history tutor never to disclose unconscious bias or indicate his political stance: this impossibility is indeed equalled only by that of judging what effect such bias may have. The shaping of the Modern History school to show the fundamental soundness of `England's institutions and the directions of her development' has been described in Chapter 14. The caveat in that Chapter about the impossibility of discovering the undergraduate historians' Oxford experiences which `most affected their subsequent judgement' applies with full force to the Edwardian era.205 Allowance has to be made for the natural tendency of undergraduates to assert their independence by rejecting the tone of the authoritative works which they are required to read, and for the fact that people provide even better targets than books when independence is to be asserted. Some undergraduates may have been made complacent by reading Stubbs, only to be plunged into pessimism by a Conservative tutor who regarded Lloyd George's ascendancy as the symbol of a country in irretrievable decline. Others will have reacted against either Stubbs or the tutor, or, more probably, against both. Some may have absorbed the doctrines despite this reaction. Some of the ablest, who were reading Modern History as a `second school' in one year, can have had little time either to enter into the spirit of a past age or to relate what they read about it to their own times.206 Compton Mackenzie does not seem to have been impressed either by the optimism of Stubbs or by the Conservative pessimism of C. R. L. Fletcher of Magdalen. He found Stubbs's Constitutional History `ineffably boring', and refused to choose 1714 to 1815 as his General History period in order to 203 204 205 206

Iremonger, William Temple, 37; Lord Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (1961), 31±2. Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University (1949), 23. P. 382 above. Edwardian Youth, 98, 145±7.

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avoid Fletcher's lectures on those years. According to Mackenzie, the attendance on these occasions consisted entirely of Fletcher's `Magdalen pupils', and the lecturer was accustomed to ascribe all the evils of the day `to the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832'. Mackenzie congratulated himself on having chosen General Period 2 (a d 919±1273), thereby securing Urquhart as one of his tutors.207 Even the clash of philosophical doctrines in Greats seems to have been regarded without anguish by many honours men. F. C. S. Schiller, the Corpus tutor, was the leading `pragmatist' when `Idealism' provided the dominant philosophical doctrine elsewhere. In the 1902 Greats examination three Corpus ®nalists happened to be sitting in a row. As he passed the third of these Corpus desks during a philosophy paper, an examiner who was invigilating, noting the college's name on the desk labels, groaned audibly: `Oh God, nine more hours of pragmatism.' The Corpus men concerned thought this a great joke.208 It is hard to detect any particular stamp imprinted by H. A. L. Fisher on those who read History at New College. As tutor to both Samuel Hoare and Duff Cooper, he does not seem to have imbued them with a common doctrine. Nearly thirty years later the ®rst became one of the principal appeasers, the second a leading opponent of appeasement. What could have been claimed for Fisher was that he helped men to acquire the habit of re¯ection and the ability to see `the other side of the hill'.209 Philip Kerr, who took a History ®rst at New College in 1904, produced nine years later in the Round Table one of the most perceptive predictions about what would happen if Belgium were to be invaded.210 The charge of bias cannot be brought against J. A. Smith, but from that of complacency he is not perhaps invulnerable. Greats men of academic talent certainly found little dif®culty in turning their minds to later eras. Some of the best young modern historians of these yearsÐH. A. L. Fisher, J. L. Hammond, R. H. Tawney, and Arnold ToynbeeÐhad read Greats at Oxford. But, as J. A. Smith himself stressed, such people constituted a small minority. For those who were going into public life the seven terms for Greats represented the only considerable period for systematic study which their careers were likely to allow. Surely some study, not merely of the languages of modern Europe, but of the culture underlying them, could 207

Octave Three, 125±6. Information from L. G. Brock. Pragmatism does not seem to have put Corpus candidates at a disadvantage. Two of them (Brock being one) secured ®rsts, and their ®rsts and seconds outnumbered thirds and fourths by ®ve to three, although their ancient history tutor was ill and out of action. `Impartiality' in examining had become an unbreakable rule, for dislike of pragmatism among Oxford philosophers was strong. J. A. Smith (n. 195 above) `regarded pragmatists with the horror felt by a Newman for a Colenso': Edwardian Youth, 27. See also OM lxxvii (4 June 1959), 444; The Times, 18 Oct. 1975, 11c. 209 Wellington's phrase: Croker Papers (1884), iii. 275. 210 Round Table, iii ( June 1913), 418±24. 208

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have helped to sharpen their perception of `rot', while also being `of use in after life'.211 The mystique of Oxford was powerful throughout these years. In the 1890s Arthur Quiller-Couch asked: Know you her secret none can utter? ÐHers of the Book, the tripled Crown?212

`Oxford!' wrote Max Beerbohm in 1911; `the very sight of the word printed, or sound of it spoken, is fraught for me with most actual magic.'213 Very few Oxford men thought their University years had been wasted. The yearnings of those who had not been to one of the older universities are eloquent. They found plenty to criticize in Oxford and Cambridge. `Do you know the University smile?' Kipling asked his Anglo-Indian friends, `it expresses tempered . . . sorrow at your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the universities, and a chastened contempt.'214 Yet Kipling knew what he had missed. He envied his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, the son of a prosperous ironmaster. `I'd give something,' he wrote, `to be in the sixth at Harrow. . . with a university education to follow.'215 `The important thing,' Northcliffe told a friend shortly before he died, `is poise . . . in all things and at all times . . . I have suffered . . . throughout my career. . . from the fact that I was not at Oxford.'216 211 `Our political studies were maintained on too abstract a plane . . . We could have been turned loose . . . with a little more knowledge of the world, or at least of our own countrymen': Edwardian Youth, 155. 212 OM xv (11 Nov. 1896), 60. 213 Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson (1911), 191. 214 Pioneer, 27 Sept., Pioneer Mail, 2 Oct., Week's News, 18 Oct. 1890 (Allahabad newspapers); Abaft the Funnel (New York, 1909), 203. That volume was issued in response to an unauthorized one of the same title. No English publication until the Sussex Edition of Kipling's works (Uncollected Prose, i, 1938). See also, Green, Works, III, 460; `Vernon Fork' [ R. B. McCallum], `The Oxford Manner', Oxford, xix. 3 (Dec. 1964), 79±81. 215 To Edith Macdonald, 21 Nov. 1884: Kipling Letters, 1872±1899, ed. Thomas Pinney (2 vols 1990), i. 80. 216 Tom Clarke, My Northcliffe Diary (1931), 259: entry of 6 Apr. 1922. Three years at Oxford, Northcliffe added, was `too much'.

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32 The Edwardian Reform Movement j a n e t h owa r t h `In November 1919 another Royal Commission was appointed, by a Minister who had not long since been a distinguished Tutor at an Oxford College, and who was ere long to return to that College as its Head', wrote the interwar historian of the University.1 The Asquith Commission on Oxford and Cambridge was set up by H. A. L. Fisher in the aftermath of the First World War but the issues it dealt with had a longer history. Sir John Myres saw it as a product of `the ®t of national self-examination which was begun by the African War, and is still in progress'.2 Oxford had little reason for dissatisfaction with the outcome. `Of the value and interest of the Commission's Report, its width of outlook, its liberality of temper, there could be only one opinion. It preserved the independence of the Colleges. It introduced into the University no external control . . . and its most important recommendation was that the University should receive a large annual grant from the State.'3 The price for state funding was a programme of reforms, embodied in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1923 and statutes of 1926, that included muchÐabove all, the drastic reduction of Convocation's legislative vetoÐthat Oxford welcomed. A more radical and alarming reform programme had been canvassed in the Edwardian era when internal and external critics of the University once again formed an alliance. Their purpose was to modernize and democratize Oxford and their strategy threatened its survival as a self-governing collegiate University. Memories of that movement had faded by the 1920s and its implications had never been fully grasped by the rank and ®le of Oxford dons. As Sir Herbert Warren, Vice-Chancellor 1906±10, wrote to Percy Matheson on his retirement, `Only ourselves and a few friends have any idea of what was resisted.'4 The stage was set for a third phase of reform agitation at the turn of the century. For some years the University's annual accounts had shown 1

Mallet, iii. 486. J. L. Myres, `Oxford in the Making', University of California Chronicle, July 1927, 303. For the start of this process during `the African War' see Ch. 31, n. 5. 3 Mallet, iii. 489. 4 L. Magnus, Herbert Warren of Magdalen, President and Friend, 1853±1930 (1932), 118. 2

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a de®cit; by 1902, after a sharp increase in the city rates, it amounted to £5,721. Oxford was under attack for its failure to divert more resources to science. Even Cecil Rhodes noted in his will the inadequacies of the medical school. A crisis in university funding brought on by the growing demands of science had already led to the formation of a Cambridge University Association to appeal for benefactions in 1898 and publication the following year of a Statement of the Needs of the University. In 1902 the Hebdomadal Council issued a similar catalogue of urgently needed appointments and building projects, later costed at over half a million pounds in capital outlay and an additional £93,880 in revenue.5 Together with the publicity occasioned by the Bodleian's tercentenary, this marked Oxford's ®rst tentative moves into fund-raising. In December 1906 T. A. Brassey launched an appeal to old members for £250,000 that was subsequently to be relaunched by Curzon. Financial anxieties tended to enhance the `inspection effect' associated with the Boer War. They were accompanied by the revival of a number of controversies that the ancient Universities seemed unable to resolve. In 1898 the Headmasters' Conference, after years of fruitless negotiation for rationalization of college scholarship examinations, had sent a memorial to Salisbury asking him to intervene as Chancellor.6 A renewal of efforts to abolish compulsory Greek shortly afterwards resulted in deadlock: at Oxford in 1904 Congregation voted to exempt mathematicians and scientists (162 votes to 164), then reversed the decision (200 votes to 164), while at Cambridge in 1904±5 a majority of residents favoured making Greek optional, only to be overruled by the clerical out-voters.7 Convocation's veto on the secularization of Theology degrees in 1904 made constitutional reform a live issue at both places. The undergraduate curriculum also came under renewed attack from various quarters. The publication in 1903 of Percy Gardner's Oxford at the Crossroads opened up a wide-ranging debate on provision for research and on who Oxford should be educating and how. Gardner's `indictment of Greats', restated in more genial terms by William Warde Fowler, was echoed by Charles Firth's denunciation of OxfordÐand the Modern History school in particularÐfor their failure to `train men capable of adding to knowledge'.8 Dons who did not share the view that undergraduates should be trained in research acknowledged nevertheless that existing Arts courses were open to criticism. As one put it, `It is a common idea that the business 5 Statements of the Needs of the University (1902); `The Needs of our Oldest University', Nature, 72 (6 July 1905), 231±2. 6 Journal of Education, Jan. 1898, 67; HCP 51 (1898), 87±9. 7 Gazette xxxiv (9 Feb. 1904), 334; xxxv (29 Nov. 1904), 190; Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons (1968), 253±4. 8 P. Gardner, Oxford at the Crossroads (1903); W. Warde Fowler, An Oxford Correspondance of 1903 (1904); The Times, 28 Sep. 1903, 9; C. H. Firth, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History: An Inaugural Lecture delivered on Nov. 9 1904 (1904).

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of Oxford is not to train specialists but statesmen, and we pride ourselves on performing the latter function admirablyÐquite forgetful that business men regard Oxford-trained statesmen with the reverse of admiration.'9 Greats tutors were particularly dissatis®ed, according to a recently elected fellow of New College, Alfred Zimmern: All the younger dons, many of the older ones, and most of the thinking undergraduates, have a vague feeling that something is wrong. Percy Gardner's and Warde Fowler's recent little books are only symptoms of what most Senior Common Rooms are feeling; they feel that, somehow or other, our teaching and learning is not done in the right spirit; and every attempt to localize and diagnose the disease always leads in the end to the same answerÐExaminations.10

Here was another area of deadlock. Zimmern wanted to revive interest in study for its own sake by transforming Moderations into a purely literary examination and allowing the ablest ®nalists to study independently for Greats and graduate after viva voce alone, adopting the device of oral examination that was common in continental universities. But he found no support, while a number of less radical schemes for reforming the classical syllabus made little progress.11 Oxford appeared once again incapable of moving with the times. Frustration with obstacles to change was now no monopoly of the ageing research party represented in the `Club'Ðthe vanguard of academic reformers since the 1880sÐand it was not they but an alliance between a group of young tutors and London-based Oxford graduates who launched the Edwardian movement for university reform. The ®rst phase of the agitation, coordinated by Samuel Barnett of Toynbee Hall (and from 1906 a Canon of Westminster), culminated in the question asked by Charles Gore, now Bishop of Birmingham, in the House of Lords on 24 July 1907: Whether, in view of the changes that have taken place in English higher education since the Report of the Universities Commission of 1877, and the dif®culties experienced by the older Universities as at present constituted in adapting themselves to modern conditions, the Government will advise His Majesty to appoint a Royal Commission to enquire into the endowment, government, administration and teaching of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and their constituent colleges in order to secure the best use of their resources for the bene®t of all classes of the community.12

The question, suggesting the need for an enquiry that was more open-ended than its predecessors, extending even to the curriculum, was drafted by a committeeÐwhose existence was not known to the publicÐbrought to9 10 11 12

Guardian, 7 Oct. 1903, 1467. Zimmern to Murray, 15 Aug. 1905, MS Murray 11, fo 94, Bodl. Journal of Education, Nov. 1905, 758; June 1905, 49; Mar. 1906, 196; July 1906, 47. Parl. Deb., 24 July 1907, 4S, 178, 1526. See pp. 628±31, 642±3, 682.

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gether in 1907 by Barnett, following an intensive press campaign that focused largely on Oxford. The elder statesman of the committee was Arthur Acland, a veteran of Oxford extension, now out of Parliament but Chairman of the Board of Education's Consultative Committee and recently active in the Education Committee of the West Riding of Yorkshire.13 Other members were Graham Wallas, Lecturer in Politics at the LSE, and J. A. Spender, editor of a highbrow Liberal evening paper, the Westminster Gazette. All shared a conviction that the ancient Universities were failing to meet the needs of the new democracy. Acland was especially concerned that they educated so few of the local government of®cials upon whom the Balfour Act of 1902 had placed increased responsibilities for education. `But when the ``young barbarian'' theory prevails almost as much as ever, can Oxford and Cambridge be prevented from slipping more and more out of the most important currents of national life?' he asked.14 Some years earlier Barnett, on one of his regular visits to Oxford, had con®ded to his brother anxieties about the ways things were going there. The universities needed, in Rosebery's phrase, to be put on a business footing . . . At present they are expensive schools and more and more tend to become like schools with a schoolboy's ideals. This football is ridiculous . . . The public schoolboy rules colleges and dons. He is the `®nest product of the times' and because he is strong and rich, looks down on other boys, pities or patronises the `clever smug' from the elementary school. There is no one to check this spirit. Jowett who was in with the great could do so but no one has succeeded him.15

In 1905 the Westminster Gazette took up the theme in a series of articles signed `Kappa', attacking the in¯uence of the modern public school, with its clerical headmasters, anti-intellectualism, and preoccupation with Latin verse. Wallas reviewed the articles, arguing that the unsatisfactory state of upper-class education weakened Liberalism and cleared the way for a ®ght between capital and labour. `To Liberals, therefore, the future of those universities and public schools by whose endowments the ``dead hand'' controls the education of the leisured classes in England is of real importance, and Kappa's suggestion of a strong Commission which should deal with schools and universities as part of one system ought to be seriously considered by a Liberal Cabinet'.16 Barnett, meanwhile, urged the need to 13 L. Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (1995), 37±48; P. H. J. H. Gosden and P. R. Sharp, The Development of an Education Service: the West Riding 1889±1974 (1978), 78±81. 14 Acland to Spender, 11 Mar 1906, Spender MSS, BL Add MS 46391, fo 181. 15 S. A. Barnett to F. Barnett, 24 and 28 Nov. 1900, Barnett MSS, F/BAR/ fos 227, 230, London Metropolitan Archives. 16 `Let Youth But Know', Speaker, 20 Jan. 1906, reprinted in G. Wallas, Men and Ideas (1940), 151±5. `Kappa' was the theatre critic William Archer.

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widen access to the ancient Universities. His long-standing belief, strengthened by his association with the WEA, was that `the chief thing necessary is to touch the coming power of labour with ``University'' knowledge.'17 `Oxford and Cambridge need what workmen can give and workmen have no less need of the Universities,' he wrote in the University Review.18 The Tribune, a Liberal penny paper edited by L. T. Hobhouse, was the vehicle for an article in which he argued in January 1906 that there was a demand for university education among trade unionists.19 The following month the Labour party conference adopted a resolution, echoed by the TUC in September, for the expansion of free state education and `that provision be made to continue the education of capable students through the university'.20 The younger generation of Oxford graduates associated with Barnett's committee were a more heterogeneous bunch, linked together as much by public-school and college friendships as by shared political objectives. William Beveridge and R. H. Tawney, Balliol contemporaries and recent Toynbee Hall residents, were not based in Oxford. As leader writer for the Morning Post Beveridge furnished another means of access to the press. Tawney began his academic career in 1906 at Glasgow: he was from 1908 employed full-time as lecturer by the Oxford Extension Delegacy, but remained on the fringe of the University's academic life. Among the Oxford residents, the two who were closest to Barnett's London group were William TempleÐpresent with Tawney at the meeting that founded the WEA, chaired by their old headmaster from Rugby days, John PercivalÐand Alfred Zimmern, a pupil and friend of Graham Wallas. Neither remained an Oxford tutor for long. Temple moved to Repton as headmaster in 1910 and Zimmern became in 1912 an HMI with responsibility for tutorial classes. The idea of a `conspiracy' to promote reform originated in a conversation between Tawney, Temple, and Zimmern one night in 1905 after the Extension Summer Meeting, and it was Temple who persuaded Gore to become the spokesman for reform in 1907.21 Other tutors recruited to the conspiracy had interests that were primarily academic. J. M. Thompson, Zimmern's old school friend from Winchester, was dean of Magdalen and a regular attender at Temple's `Holy Lunches', discussions that led to the publication of Foundations (1912) (although Thompson's heterodoxy on miracles in the New Testament prevented him from contributing to the 17

Barnett to Asquith, 16 Jan. 1907, MS Asquith 19, fo 135, Bodl. S. A. Barnett, `University Settlements', University Review, 1 (1905), quoted in S. Harrop (ed.), Oxford and Working-Class Education (Nottingham, 1987), 13. In this republication of the 1908 Report (Ch. 27, n. 73) it is preceded by ®ve introductory essays. 19 `Labour and Culture', Tribune, 18 Jan. 1906, 4. 20 Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party (1906), 58; Morning Post, 15 Sept. 1906; C. Griggs, The Trades Union Congress and the Struggle for Education, 1868±1925 (Lewes, 1983), 121. 21 F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury. His Life and Letters (1948), 89. 18

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volume).22 W. H. Fyfe, Mods tutor at Merton, and R. W. Livingstone, fellow (and later President) of Corpus and another Winchester friend of Zimmern's, were both, like Zimmern himself, enthusiastic Hellenists. Livingstone's politics were, however, to the right of his fellow conspirators: they were all radicals or socialists while he voted Unionist in 1910.23 The other early member of what came to be known as the `Catiline Club' was an older man with more experience of University business. John Myres, an ancient historian and a formidably able polymath, then in his mid-thirties and a Student of Christ Church, had been a Proctor in 1904±5. A colleague of Francis Haver®eld and a former collaborator with Arthur Evans, he was at that stage the only member of the group who also belonged to the `Club'. In autumn 1907 Myres left Oxford brie¯y for the chair of Greek at Liverpool University, but he returned in 1910, as Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, to a prominent role in University politics. Later members of the Catiline group who replaced Temple and Zimmern were the historian Reginald Coupland and the lecturer in English, R. J. E. Tiddy. Liaison continued for some years between residents and the London committee that met at Barnett's house at Westminster Abbey. But it was chie¯y in the press campaign of 1906±7 that the group made its mark. The agitation was conducted through a combination of anonymous and signed articles in the national press. Its purpose was to create a demandÐor the impression that there was a demandÐfor a public enquiry. Coming in the wake of the Liberal landslide of 1906, it created more alarm than enthusiasm within Oxford. Barnett's onslaught in Tribune on the use of Oxford's endowments to ®nance scholarships for those who did not need them was followed by a series of anonymous articles by Tawney (`Lambda') in the Westminster Gazette, which criticized colleges for excessive spending on `purposes which are not directly educational'.24 Tawney recalled Jowett's complaint that the revenues of the richer colleges were `deplorably wasted' and claimed that in 1904 college contributions to University purposes amounted to only 8.5 per cent of their income, `rather less than half the sum which [Jowett] suggested they should contribute in 1874'.25 Goschen's ®rst reaction, as Chancellor, was to urge that these charges should be countered in the national press: `in view of the present currents of democratic opinion, I take a serious view as to the probability of a Commission, & Oxford ®nancial experts should not let matters drift, & inaccurate statements invade public opinion.'26 In April he warned: 22

Thompson was among those who fell foul of Gore when he became Bishop of Oxford. Livingstone to Zimmern, n.d. [1904, 1909], Bodl. MS Zimmern 75, fos 1, 15. 24 Westminster Gazette, 15 Feb 1906, 22; later articles appeared on 16±17, 23±24 Feb. and 2±3, 10 Mar. 25 Ibid. 17 Feb. 1906. 26 Goschen to Matheson, 26 Feb. 1906, Bodl. Dep. c. 183. 23

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The new House of Commons has shown immense activity during its ®rst weeks. If they keep up the pace, depend upon it, they will have a ¯ing at the Universities before the present Parliament expires. The Labour men are anxious to secure room for `Labour' in all educational establishments. If they should make a determined attack the Oxford men in the Cabinet would not be able to hold them.27

But Barnett and Tawney had chosen a line of attack that was singularly hard to drive home. College tutors believed that few scholars were wealthy: Percy Matheson estimated that `not more than 10 per cent at the outside' could afford to come up without their scholarships.28 University and college accounts were opaque; it was easily shown that Barnett had overestimated college income and also that `Lambda' had made mistakes in calculating their contributions to University purposes.29 The result, according to one Oxford observer, was to set back the progressive cause and encourage the `moderately-pleased-with-themselves'.30 More effective within the University was an article solicited by Edward Jenks for the Independent Review and written by Zimmern, posing as `an independent and discontented classical don', concerned about the widening gulf between Oxford and its critics.31 Zimmern focused on the issue of access to Oxford: on its costliness and the classical tradition as barriers to the poor student bent on professional workÐin which he included businessÐand on the idle rich undergraduate presence, as well as defects of the examination system. He also revived the alarming suggestion, ®rst made by Pattison and his friends and now backed by Acland, a former college bursar, that economy would be served if college estates were managed centrally by a body modelled on the Ecclesiastical Commission.32 A second series of anonymous Westminster Gazette articles early in 1907 by Zimmern, Tawney, Temple, and Livingstone attempted to take the argument further, demanding new initiatives to widen recruitment and promote science and `the scienti®c spirit' in the humanities.33 Yet they seemed to Barnett's old Oxford friend William Markby, formerly Reader in Indian Law and a veteran of Extension, to be symptomatic of the reluctance of the reform party to face up to the real issues. The articles suggested `bringing the University, as distinguished from the Colleges, more into prominence', but this was impracticable because of 27

Ibid. 18 Apr. 1906. Tribune, 29 Jan. 1906, 4. 29 Letters from Spooner and Matheson, Westminster Gazette, 23 Feb. 1906; Journal of Education, Apr. 1906, 268. 30 Athenaeum, 24 Mar. 1906, 361. 31 Jenks to Barnett, 19 May 1906, MS Zimmern 11, fo 160; A. E. Zimmern, `Oxford in the New Century', Independent Review, xi (1906), 95±104. The article was discussed by `the Club' at its meeting in Oct. 1906; Bodl. MS Myres 76, fo 21. 32 Acland to Spender, 11 Mar. 1906, Spender MSS, BL Add MS 46391, fo 180. 33 `Some Principles of University Reform', Westminster Gazette, 22±3 Feb., 1±2, 8±9 Mar. 1907. 28

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the strength of the colleges and the unsatisfactory situation of the professoriate. `In short I am coming to the belief that the College system whatever merits it may have, and undoubtedly it has some, cannot be worked side by side with a vigorous and well-directed University system,' wrote Markby. `Of course if I said this in public I should be laughed at. I should not mind that if it would do any good, but of this there is no hope.'34 Partly through force of circumstance, more impact was achieved by a third series of articles, `Oxford and the Nation', published in The Times in April and May 1907 and reprinted as a pamphlet in June. They appeared between the election of Lord Curzon as Chancellor and the of®cial launch of his Reendowment Fund, which was followed by a series of events, re¯ecting his belief in the `value of ritual and ceremonial' and designed to attract favourable publicity.35 The Chancellor's installation on 11 May was the ®rst to take place in the Sheldonian since 1834. The University congratulated itself on the success of this picturesque spectacle, witnessed by a packed audience and punctuated by applause from an orderly contingent of undergraduates in the gallery. The ceremony was widely believed to be traditional but had in fact been concocted for the occasion by the Vice-Chancellor, Herbert Warren.36 Curzon ensured that Encaenia on 26 June would receive wide press coverage by nominating as honorands a long list of celebrities, ranging from the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and Prince Arthur of Connaught to General Booth of the Salvation Army, Auguste Rodin, Camille Saint-SaeÈns, Rudyard Kipling, and `Mark Twain'. The following week was taken up by a grand historical pageant in which town and gown combined to enact scenes from Oxford's past since the days of St Frideswide, colourfully staged on the banks of the Cherwell. The impresario was Frank Lascelles, Beerbohm Tree was among the theatrical advisers, and episodes were devised by Charles Oman, A. D. Godley, Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth Wordsworth, and a number of non-residents, among them such literary ®gures as Laurence Housman and Laurence Binyon. Robert Bridges wrote the introductory ode and Quiller-Couch an epilogue on the `Secret of Oxford'Ðan elusive image of perennial youth in a setting `more medieval than the Middle Age itself', evoked in the pageant `by dragging Antiquity to the meadows, to dance an hour for its juniors'.37 The Times articles offered, by contrast, a pungent critique of modern Oxford. The tone was loyalist and much that was wrong with the University 34 Markby to Barnett, 14 Mar. 1907, Tawney correspondence on early tutorial classes, WEA archive, Temple House, Bethnal Green, London. 35 J. A. R. Marriott, `Lord Curzon of Kedleston', Fortnightly Review, 98 (1925), 583, quoted in D. Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (1994), 78. 36 Magnus, Warren, 127±8; OM 15 May 1907, 331±2. 37 The Oxford Historical Pageant. Book of Words (1907), 123, 127. For enthusiastic press coverage see Oxford Historical Pageant, 1907. A Selection of Opinions of Competent Critics (1907).

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was attributed to circumstances beyond its controlÐto social pressures from parents and schools, the obstructiveness of Convocation and the Victorian Commissions that had `saddled Oxford with institutions which do not work, and a programme which is becoming obsolete'.38 Speci®c charges were, however, calculated to cause discomfort. `The typical pass-man . . . is as un®t to-day to be a member of Oxford University as he was in 1830': the remedy lay in exclusion of `non-reading men'Ðeven at the cost of a fall in fee incomeÐby a University entrance examination.39 `In its relation to professional training Oxford is in a state of administrative chaos.'40 A rationalization of the BA course was proposed on lines that betrayed the Arts background of the authors. For the passman the remedy was to increase the vocational content of Oxford courses, but honours students should be required to pursue a three-year compulsory general course analogous to Greats, followed by a year of advanced or professional study. Reform of the scholarship system to release endowments for the poor was blocked by college competition; the solution was to make the University rather than the colleges responsible for allocating scholarships and to make them purely honorary, diverting endowments to exhibitions for the needy.41 Meanwhile `the amateur housekeeping of the majority of colleges contributes, of course, to raise the cost of necessaries in Oxford.'42 Colleges were also blamed for impeding the development of an ef®cient teaching system: they had `failed most of all to realize that their function is to be a United States, not a Concert of Europe; to be the instruments, not the masters of Oxford'. A third University Commission was needed not only to remove constitutional blocks to change but to review academic policy and give colleges notice of a last chance to `revert to their founders' intentions', with the prospect, for those that failed to respond, of disestablishment and disendowment.43 The possibility of a Royal Commission with more limited scope had been discussed within both ancient Universities. Many dons felt that non-residents should lose their veto on academic legislation. At Oxford there was talk at the Museum of demanding a Commission if space in the Parks for new laboratories was denied, while the `Club', led by Charles Firth, considered petitioning for an enquiry into relations between the University and colleges.44 But neither the prospect of an open-ended Royal Commission nor the programme outlined in `Oxford and the Nation' had much support. 38

Oxford and the Nation, by some Oxford Tutors (1907), 12. Ibid. 17±19. There was no University entrance examination until 1926, except for NonCollegiate students: Pt 1, 356±8. 40 Ibid. 31. 41 Ibid. 53, 60. 42 Ibid. 59. 43 Ibid. 101±2. 44 Turner to Anson, 13 Mar. 1907, MS Top. Oxon d. 310, fo 35; proof of draft petition, 13 June 1907, Bodl. Firth b.36 fo 183; letter from S. Ball and 15 others, The Times, 24 July 1907, 10. 39

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Gentlemanly convention prevented critics from identifying the authors, but the public was informed that they were young dons with `Radical and Progressive opinions of a special type in which not all Progressives would concur', and that `even amongst the friends of progress in Oxford there is a profound dread of an unsympathetic Commission.'45 The Professor of Astronomy, H. H. Turner, a New College Liberal and friend of Zimmern's, lamented the failure of The Times authors to consult with scientists and described the proposed extension of compulsory general education to the age of 22 or 23 as `perfectly appalling'.46 Barnett's private attempts to recruit Cambridge support for a third University Commission were anticipated by the message that the Oxford initiative was `non representative . . . of the serious ``Reform party'' of Oxford as a whole'.47 And as Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge, pointed out, academic reformers had practical reasons for disliking the prospect of a Commission. Above all, it would not aid fund-raising. The fact is our. . . need here is moneyÐmoneyÐmoney! . . . There is no formidable obscurantist spirit here; and all studies are progressing as fast as things without food and service can grow. If 2 or 3,000£ a year could possibly be saved by this concentration or that economy on the other hand we have (a) no pension fund, and (b) many invaluable teachers are wholly without stipend, and many others on nominal stipends. So that this saving would be lost at once (so to speak) in making time up to date. While there is no money, teachers having some private means work in loyal silence and in frugality; but if money be disposable then they ®rst must be considered. I guess from 1/4 to 1/3 of our work here is unpaid.48

Oxford and Cambridge were well represented in Campbell-Bannerman's Cabinet and it was unlikely that the government would impose a Commission on them without strong support from residents. Yet a Liberal government was subject to in¯uences, well appreciated in the Universities, from the Labour movement and the press. When Murray Macdonald, a Liberal MP with Toynbee Hall connections, raised the matter in the Commons in May 1907 the Prime Minister's response was noncommittal.49 Barnett's committee decided to force a debate in the House of Lords that would at least step up the pressure for reform from within Oxford. As Zimmern put it, `the truth of the matter is that there are crowds of people in Oxford who want some sort of a change, but one might wait till Doomsday for them to be unanimous. Gore's debate and a big newspaper row will do it if anything can.'50 It had the desired effect. Pointedly refraining from consultation with 45 46 47 48 49 50

Guardian, 17 Apr 1907; Athenaeum, 6 July 1907, 15. The Times, 28 May 1907, 10. Allbutt to Barnett, 19 July 1907, Tawney MSS 21/2, BLPES. Ibid. Parl. Deb., 6 May 1907, 4S, 173, 1357±8. Zimmern to Wallas, 7 July [1907], Wallas MSS 1/36, fo 7, BLPES.

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his old Balliol friend Herbert Warren, now Vice-Chancellor, Gore lent his authority to the charge that `at present our ancient Universities are allowed to become to an extent altogether beyond what ought to be tolerated a playground for the sons of the wealthier classes.' The agenda he proposed for a Commission was broadly that of `the younger Oxford': the expulsion of the idle, the use of resources for `those who are hungering and thirsting for that sort of knowledge and training which a University is able to supply', the abolition of prize fellowships, further transfer of endowments from colleges to University, and constitutional reform. Gore added a plea for the study of `political, or social, or economic science . . . to train young Englishman in the idea of citizenship'.51 Percival, now Bishop of Hereford, hoped that a Royal Commission would introduce a Greekless entrance examination.52 Energetic lobbying by Anson, Warren, and Curzon (the last excluded from the debate by the refusal of both Unionists and Liberals to accede to the King's wish that he should be given a seat in the Lords) had, however, briefed the front benches on the narrow basis of support for a Commission. There was a hint of rebuke in Lord Crewe's statement that `it is important for us, before arriving at a ®nal conclusion, to know what the most thoughtful and the most competent opinion at both Universities really demands.'53 But there was nothing in this debate to encourage complacency. Other contributions included a con®dent claim from the former secretary of the Cambridge Commission, now Bishop of Bristol, that `we in Cambridge at least have adapted ourselves, even under our supposed restrictions and limitations, to modern conditions'; a ferocious attack from Lord Ellenborough on the teaching of dead languages; and from the Bishop of Oxford and Lord Lansdowne, a quali®ed defence of Oxford that rested ultimately on the University's willingness to promote reform from within.54 Lansdowne had hinted that Oxford might look for a lead to its Chancellor, `a courageous administrator if ever there was one'.55 The challenge was at once accepted by Curzon and his hand was strengthened in the autumn by petitions that reached him both from the `Club' and from a larger body of tutors mobilized by A. L. Smith.56 The next three years saw the preparation and digestion of the Chancellor's scheme for reform. Curzon's many commitments and his injuries in a road accident in 1908 caused delay. His `Scarlet Letter' to the University, Principles and Methods of University Reform, was published on 28 April 1909. A further sixteen months went by while Council 51

Parl. Deb., 24 July 1907, 4S, 178, 1527, 1531±2. Ibid. 1545. 53 Ibid. 1555; Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon (3 vols 1928), iii. 97±8; Warren to Campbell-Bannerman, 21 July 1907, Campbell-Bannerman MSS, BL Add MS 41240, fo 12. 54 Parl. Deb., 24 July 1907 4S, 178, 1533±43, 1549±51, 1555±61. 55 Ibid. 1558. 56 Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 100; Bodl. Firth b. 36, fo 183. 52

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prepared a report framing proposals based on his suggestions. Meanwhile events moved on. At Cambridge Liberal voices were now raised in favour of a Commission of enquiry and an unof®cial cross-party committee, dubbed by sceptics the `New Jerusalem Caucus', persuaded the Council of the Senate to propose constitutional reforms.57 The strengthening of Oxford's connections with the Labour movement through the tutorial class system encouraged agitation to divert endowments to working-class educationÐas Barnett had hoped it would. The 1908 Report on Oxford and Working Class Education, which was welcomed by Curzon, was one sign of the University's will to modernize itself. Others were the creation of a school of Forestry in a handsome new building provided by St John's, a chair and school of Engineering, and a Delegacy for Women Students that at last gave of®cial recognition to the presence of women in the University. But there were also familiar demonstrations of obstruction, which won converts for the `party of youth and impatience'.58 In 1908 Council agreed to the longstanding demand for the right of legislative initiative to be extended to members of Congregation and opened the way for an attempt to reform its constitution. Yet proposals to exclude non-academic residents from Congregation or, alternatively, to con®ne the MA with its concomitant voting rights to honours graduates, were both defeated the following year. Support for a Commission gained force in these years. The main objective of Curzon, mistrustful of the State and more alive than reformers of the purely academic sort to the political forces that would in¯uence a public enquiry into Edwardian Oxford, was to avoid one. Curzon, a Conservative ex-Viceroy, elected in a campaign managed by the Non-Placets Charles Oman and W. H. Hutton, was not on the face of things a likely choice as a facilitator of reform within a democratic academic community. Although a proli®c man of letters, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1908 for his services in India to history, archaeology, and art, he was not, like Goschen, Rosebery, or Haldane, involved in wider issues of educational politics.59 He was mistrusted by Barnett and Acland, whose London committee remained a secret from him.60 The Westminster Gazette continued to take a sceptical view of `reform from within'.61 Curzon was, on the other hand, determined to leave his mark on the University and increase its ef®ciency. Shortly after his election he wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, `I am very glad that we agree about doing things. It is the secret of all success.'62 57 A. I. Tillyard, `University Reform, II. From a Liberal Point of View', Cambridge Review, 7 Nov. 1907; Athenaeum, 19 Dec 1908, 789. 58 Ibid. 20 Mar. 1909, 345. 59 D. G. Hogarth, `G. N. Curzon, 1859±1925', PBA, 1924±5, 521. 60 Acland to Crewe, 24 June 1909, Crewe MSS C/1, CUL. 61 `Oxford and the Nation', reprinted in Wallas, Men and Ideas, 156±62; `Oxford in TransitionÐLord Curzon's Memorandum on University Reform', Westminster Gazette, 28 Apr. 1909. 62 Curzon to Warren, 17 Apr. 1907, Warren MSS.

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Matheson recalled to Warren that `his view of the University and its work was not exactly yours or mine, but he had a great pride in it and was very anxious to save it from injurious handling.'63 This he was uniquely wellplaced to do. When pressure for a University Commission was renewed in the Commons in 1908 he extracted a private assurance from the Prime Minister, who was an old friend.64 My dear George, Your letter admits of a very short answer. I should never consider the idea of a Commission unless at the desire and even demand, of the universities themselves. From what I saw and heard at Cambridge today, I gather that there is no such disposition there. And from what you say, the same appears to be the case at Oxford. So you may safely assume that, so far as I am concerned, the Commission is postponed to the Greek Kalends. We had a delightful Sunday at Hackwood. Every yours, HHA

The task of `reform from within' was, however, one that Curzon approached seriously and not without a touch of humility. `Hard and anxious work as you say lies before usÐand I rather tremble at the prospect.'65 Principles and Methods of University Reform was based on a thorough investigation of opinion within the University and its fringe institutions, including the women's colleges and Ruskin College, supplemented by the views of Oxford graduates with whom Curzon had contact as Chairman of the Re-endowment Fund. It was drafted on a voyage of convalescence to South Africa while Curzon recovered from his car accident but vetted by the University's elder statesmen before publication.66 Curzon launched his investigations by keeping open house at the Judge's Lodgings in St Giles in November 1907, as `Receiver-General of Con®dences', and won much goodwill by his charm and hospitality.67 He interviewed and asked for written statements from existing reform groups and encouraged A. L. Smith to organize the series of meetings in the Examination Schools at which the more inchoate opinions of tutors outside these groups were canvassed in 1907±8. His open-mindedness caused disquiet among conservatives and `moderates'; Strachan-Davidson found him `inclined to listen to reason; but too much of the ``something must be done'''.68 For the Catiline group, 63 64 65 66 67 68

Matheson to Warren, 1 Jan. 1926, Warren MSS. Asquith to Curzon, 17 June 1908 (copy), Warren MSS. Curzon to Warren, 6 Aug. 1907, Warren MSS. Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 102±3. Athenaeum, 14 Dec. 1907, 767. Strachan-Davidson diary, 4 Nov. 1907, Strachan-Davidson Papers II. 6, BCLP.

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however, it was an exciting time. `He means business,' reported Temple after he and Zimmern had each spent an hour with Curzon. `He is very keen on ``rooting Oxford in the democracy'' . . . He won't do all we want but he will do a good deal; and the Tories are on the run.'69 Zimmern thought him a man of a very Radical turn of mind; he doesn't care a snap for sentimental associations and all the other brakes on Oxford wheels. I think he will control, and possibly centralize College ®nance. But he has been laying himself out to be sympathetic, and the `moderate reformers', who have sprung up like mushrooms in the last 6 months, think he is with them. It is really touch and go whether he will try to do just enough to avert a Commission (in which case we are agin him), or will make a real effort to be a sort of Second Founder and carry his own policies through a Commission. The latter would of course appeal to his vanity. When he suggested in our talk that I was casting a lot of duties (scholarships etc.) on a University which in a sense hardly existed, I said `Don't you think you might create one?'70

But Curzon did not in fact see himself in a Laudian role: the Chancellor should be `the ®rst servant of the University' and his task was chie¯y to `present . . . in succinct form the views that were found to be entertained by large and important sections of its members, past and present.'71 Principles and Methods, despite its title, dealt exclusively with Oxford; it was at once a review of the progress made since 1882 in adapting it to `the altered conditions of the time' and a programme for reform. Many of Curzon's recommendations echoed the views of Oxford reform groupsÐ reform of Council and Congregation, the abolition of compulsory Greek and secularization of Theology degrees, a University entrance examination and the development of professional courses, including a diploma in business education. His recommendation that women should be admitted to BA degrees was a personal initiative, however: there had been little agitation for it since the degree controversy of 1895±6. `It will be in a compartment by itself,' he told Warren. `The University can take it or reject it, but I shall certainly put it forward.'72 Other proposals were less clear-cut. Various means of opening the University to poor students were considered, including endowment of the Non-Collegiates and a new college for working men. A conference of domestic bursars was recommended with a view to reducing the cost of living. But such measures could yield only marginal reductions in the cost of an Oxford education, and Curzon was not convinced by those who argued for the use of scholarships for purely eleemosynary purposes. Academic and ®nancial relations between colleges and the University were also discussed at length. Curzon denied that there was `any inherent or 69 Temple to Tawney, n.d. [Nov. 1907], RHT correspondence on early tutorial classes, WEA archive, London. 70 Zimmern to Wallas, 17 Nov. [1907], Wallas MSS 1/36, fos 25±6, BLPES. 71 Principles and Methods, 12. 72 Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 102.

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intentional antagonism' between them.73 But he proposed a strengthened Faculty structure co-ordinated by a General Board, and a Finance Board including non-resident members and with advisory and supervisory powers extending to college as well as University ®nance. Everything, clearly, would turn on the powers given to these new University bodies, at this stage sketched only in general terms. In other areas, such as rationalization of the scholarship examinations and the allocation of more college funds to research fellowships and studentships, progress would depend on the willingness of colleges to work together under Council's leadership. Finally, there were two issues on which Curzon stood out against prevailing opinion among Oxford reform groups. Prize fellowships, in practice con®ned now to All Souls (of which he was a member) but widely denounced as a scandal were, he argued, important in maintaining links between the University and the outside world.74 So was the in¯uence of MAs in Convocation, though Curzon admitted the case for widening its membership by reducing MA fees and dues and toyed with the notion of restricting it to a suspensory veto.75 National press coverage of the report was limited because its publication was overshadowed by Lloyd George's People's Budget. But the tone was favourable, though doubts were expressed `whether any great advance can be made without the aid of Parliament'. The Times suggested that legislation for the reform of Congregation and Convocation might be promoted if there were evidence that the University would then be willing to reform itself.76 Tawney, writing anonymously in G. D. H. Cole's undergraduate newspaper, the Oxford Socialist, greeted Curzon's proposals as `a step in the right direction, and if they are not stulti®ed in Committees, a considerable step'. He criticized Curzon's suggestion of a working-men's college, made with `an unfortunate manner of patronage', and his failure to advocate state funding for Oxford. But on the whole the programme of the book was `so advanced as to make one rub one's eyes'.77 Among University Liberals and moderates ®rst reactions to Curzon's scheme were on the whole equally euphoric. `Our Chancellor has certainly come wonderfully near to satisfying both sides.'78 `The political situation at Oxford can be summed up in a sentence: we are all going to support the Chancellor.'79 More ominously, a number of heads of houses, whose opinions were canvassed anonymously by the Oxford Journal, were in no doubt that resistance would mobilize. One described the Chancellor's scheme as `able and systematic' but added that 73

Principles and Methods, 123. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 36±41. 76 Westminster Gazette, 28 Apr. 1909; The Times, 28 Apr. 1909, 11. 77 `Lord Curzon's Message to Socialists', Oxford Socialist, 3 (summer 1909), 4±5, Nuf®eld Coll. Library. 78 Guardian, 5 May 1909. 79 Athenaeum, 26 June 1909, 755. 74 75

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`whether it was desirable or practicable was, in his opinion, another matter. The scheme would certainly provoke strong opposition, for the most active opponents regarded it as an undisguised attempt to completely modernise the University.'80 Anxious to build up momentum, Curzon at once summoned extraordinary meetings of Hebdomadal Council at which resolutions were passed in favour of his proposals and committees set up to prepare plans to translate them into practice, after consulting colleges and considering comments sent in by individual members of the University. These committees held 105 meetings and Council itself 23 special sittings, at many of which Curzon himself presided. But he stressed in his preface to Council's Report that `the great majority of the decisions arrived at have been carried by large majorities of Council: on many important subjects we have been unanimous or all but unanimous.'81 This mode of proceeding was not uncontroversialÐStrachan-Davidson and A. L. Smith, not normally allies in University politics, joined forces in an unsuccessful bid to set up a consultative committee elected by Congregation, asserting the democratic spirit of the University.82 There were other warning signals. A broadly based Oxford Reform Association founded in 1909 to support the Chancellor, on Sidney Ball's initiative and with Firth as chairman, had on its committee L. R. Phelps, a staunch supporter of compulsory Greek.83 Could such men, drawn in in the hope that they might be converted, be induced to follow Curzon's lead? Hastings Rashdall was one of those who doubted it.84 Among University Liberals he was the harshest critic of the Chancellor's Report. It was the work of a `®rstrate administrator taking stock of the University machine from without' but showed `little appreciation of the problems which concern what may perhaps be called the highest aspects of University lifeÐthe functions of a University as a seat of learning, of advanced study, of research. About these things he writes as about something of which he has vaguely heard.' Curzon's imperviousness to the priorities of researchers may have re¯ected his Balliol background. Events were to show that he had underestimated the commitment of Edwardian dons to the ideals and interests of their profession. The ®rst measures brought forward for legislation by Council in the autumn of 1910 included a Faculties Statute, the abolition of compulsory Greek in Responsions, and the creation of a Finance Board. All ran into dif®culties. The Faculties Statute became a battleground between the `Club' and the professors, keen to shift the balance of power towards the Univer80

Oxford Journal, 1 May 1909, 12. Principles and Methods of University Reform. Report of the Hebdomadal Council (1910), vi. 82 Strachan-Davidson diary, Summer Term 1909, SD 12, BCLP. 83 Zimmern to Wallas, 21 May 1909, Wallas MSS 1/42 fo 50; Papers relating to University Reform, Bodl. G. A. Oxon 4 296, fos 275, 296. 84 H. Rashdall, `An Academic View of Lord Curzon's Manifesto', The Nation, 15 May 1909. 81

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sity, and tutors and `college-men', alarmed at the powers that Council proposed to assign to Faculty Boards. Proposals that Boards should `appoint ®t persons to hold the title and post of University Lecturer', giving or withholding such recognition for existing inter-collegiate lecturers, were defeated by a coalition that included Anson, Strachan-Davidson, Oman, and Rashdall. The statute as ®nally passed in 1911 amounted to little more than an administrative reorganization. Modern History and Modern Languages (including English) were recognized as separate faculties and a General Board took over management of the CUF and some of Council's academic businessÐin itself a useful measure but one that did nothing to enhance the authority of the faculties.85 The proposal to do away with compulsory Greek was at once defeated in Congregation, where those willing only to exempt mathematicians and scientists, and others, led by Gilbert Murray, who wanted Latin rather than Greek made optional, joined forces with the Greek Defence Committee. With some sense of urgency Murray tried to engineer a compromise.86 In May 1911 Congregation agreed (156 votes to 79) that Greek should become optional for mathematicians and scientists, a solution that a majority of the Greek committee was now willing to accept. But the `stalwart six', led by Thomas Case, took the ®ght to Convocation and in November won it (595 votes to 360).87 The Finance Statute met protracted opposition (including a challenge to its legality) from defenders of college autonomy, again led by Case. Anson and StrachanDavidson were shrewd enough to see that Oxford's reputation would suffer if it were defeated and with their backing it eventually passed in March 1912Ðbut only after assurances that the powers of the new Finance Board would be advisory only. The Chancellor's frustration with the University recalled that of his predecessor, the Duke of Wellington, in 1837.88 `Think of what all the bright prospects of four years ago have dwindled down to,' wrote Curzon gloomily in the spring of 1912.89 Worse was to come. Wrangling between professors and `college men' broke out again in autumn 1912 over the statute embodying the plan, over85 Principles and Methods. Report of Hebdomadal Council, 22±3. There was much support for an open letter by Rashdall advocating freedom of teaching and improvement in the status of tutors: see letters from Oman, Madan, Wright-Henderson, Pickard-Cambridge, Hutton, Grundy, Jenkinson, and others, June 1909, Rashdall MSS, Bodl. MS Eng. Lett. d. 361, fos 126± 38; P. E. Matheson, The Life of Hastings Rashdall (1928), 122±3. A separate Faculty of English was established in 1926: The Twentieth Century, 121. 86 MS Murray 416, fo 51, Bodl. 87 Gazette xlii (29 Nov. 1911), 213. Case's allies were F. A. Dixey of Wadham, F. Madan of Brasenose, and three Fellows of St. John's, G. Dickins, T. C. Snow, and W. H. Stevenson; Preservation of Greek; the Case Dinner, 24 Jan 1912, MSS CCC DXV, Corpus Christi College Archives. Mallet implied wrongly (iii. 471) that the mathematicians and scientists were released from Greek in 1911. 88 E. Longford, Wellington (1992), 470±1. See also Pt 1, 143, 215, 232, 309. 89 Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 106.

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whelmingly popular three years earlier, to abolish the three-class constitution of Hebdomadal Council. Deprived of the in¯uence they had hoped to exercise through Faculty Boards, the professors now insisted on retaining their reserved seats on Council and found enough support to defeat the statute. Proposals to make Convocation more representative of MAs fared little better, attracting no positive supportÐfor such matters did not interest the `Club'Ðand opposition from the extremes of left and right. The reduction of degree fees, with an increase in undergraduate dues, was rejected in May 1912 by 32 votes to 31, and a measure enabling MAs to demand a three-day poll was passed by a majority of one in an even thinner House, only to be defeated later.90 Approached by Warren, worried about mounting public criticism, Curzon responded, `You ask me what Oxford can do. I answer Refrain from these unfortunate displays in Congregation . . . I think it is these exhibitions that do us so much harm and shut up the purses of the wealthy.'91 What had gone wrong? Curzon blamed Oxford's constitutional machineryÐ`fatally devised for procrastination and impotence'Ðfor delays that had allowed the reforming impetus generated by his Red Book to ebb away.92 He also felt personally rebuffed, writing after Heberden succeeded Warren as Vice-Chancellor, of `a growing sense that Council disapproves of my intervention and wishes to be left alone'.93 A similar ®asco had taken place at Cambridge, even though the initiative for constitutional reform there had come from within the academic community. Measures to reduce the in¯uence of non-resident voters in the Senate met with rebellion in 1910±11 when brought forward by Council.94 At both universities there was impatience with of®cial leadership and a democratic assertiveness that reform agitation tended to enhance. Symptomatic of the mood was a threatened parliamentary candidature in 1909, averted only after Lansdowne's intervention. The Keeper of the Ashmolean, Arthur Evans, announced his intention to divide the Unionist vote at Oxford in the coming general election by standing as `a candidate of protest' on a platform of University and tariff reform.95 Evans, with the support of Farnell, Firth, Wright, and a number of scientists, claimed that one of the of®cial Unionist candidates, Lord Hugh Cecil, would aid `reactionaries and obstructives' within the University in blocking reform, and that his Free Trade views had been exploited to win Liberal backing.96 90 The Club's refusal to back such constitutional reforms and the poor record of attendance of its members in Congregation led Myres to stop attending its meetings in 1912: Myres to Haver®eld, 16 Oct. 1912, MS Myres 76, fo 166, Bodl. Gazette, xlii. 680, xliii. 256, 472. 91 Curzon to Warren, 8 Dec. 1912, Warren MSS. 92 Ibid. 10 Dec. 1911, Warren MSS. 93 Ibid. 94 Athenaeum, 24 Dec. 1910, 793±5. 95 J. L. Myres, `Sir Arthur Evans 1851±1941', PBA (1941), 323±57. 96 Oxford Journal, 21 Aug. 1909. On 15 Jan. 1910 Anson and Lord Hugh Cecil were returned unopposed.

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A similar dispute over the representation of Cambridge University in a byelection early in 1911 resulted in the selection of the eminent physicist Sir Joseph Larmor, a surprise candidate ®elded by the anthropologist Professor Ridgeway, against the preferred nominee of the Cambridge Conservative caucus.97 There was mounting irritation at external pressures that were directed to non-academic ends and criticisms that were believed to be ill-founded.98 Curzon's frank preoccupation with the University's image in the eyes of benefactors and politicians did not add to his in¯uence. Nor was the Chancellor sensitive to the professional priorities of academic reformers. He took little interest in Council's efforts to strengthen the science departments. News that it was courting the distinguished chemist, W. H. Perkin Junior, for an Oxford chair met a snubbing response in a private letter to Warren: if the colleges would endow scholarships for the Non-Collegiates `they would do more to satisfy critics and to answer slanders than by building a dozen laboratories or creating twenty Professors.'99 Academic residents, for their part, tended to close ranks in face of continued sniping in the press from Barnett's committee, which failed to acknowledge the efforts of internal reformers. Protesting to Wallas against `the incessant abuse of dons', Hastings Rashdall commented, `Many people who were once undergraduates at Oxford did not know everything about the University even in their own day. . . nor do they know the enormous changes in the method or ef®ciency of teaching in several ways in 25 years.'100 Even Sidney Ball felt bound to remonstrate to John Carter, secretary to the Christian Social Union, at renewed criticisms from Gore: Frankly, I think it is a pity, and an impediment rather than a help, to those of us who are working on the Bishop's side, that he should appear to ignore the very real progress that has been made in the direction he desiderates . . . Within, say, the last twenty-®ve years I have seen my own College raised from a Pass to an Honours College, and it is, of course, not alone in this respect. Moreover, there is none of the more popular Pass Colleges which does not enforce strict rules as to failure in examinations. With Colleges struggling to exist, there is, no doubt, a pressure in the other direction, but the students they take are, at any rate, for the most part quite poor men, and anxious to qualify for Holy Orders or a profession . . . In fact, it has become increasingly dif®cult for a rich man to come up, or at any rate to reside for any length of time, simply in order to `have a good time'. Nothing is so striking in the recent history of Oxford as the virtual disappearance of this class and 97

Athenaeum, 8 Apr. 1911, 389. Larmor held the seat until 1922. Cf. Rothblatt, Revolution of the Dons, 256±8, on resistance at Cambridge to utilitarian arguments for reform. 99 Curzon to Warren, 8 Dec. 1912, Warren MSS. 100 Rashdall to Wallas, 27 Dec. 1908, Wallas MSS 1/38 fos 54±5, BLPES. 98

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their replacement by rich (if not so rich) men who mean business and have a profession in view.101

Curzon's ability to put pressure on Oxford was weakened, moreover, by the growth of feelingÐin his view, profoundly misguidedÐthat a Royal Commission would, after all, be welcome. Rashdall had argued from an early stage for a Commission restricted to reform of Convocation, prize fellowships, and scholarships.102 A limited or statutory Commission to promote speci®c measures was a very different prospect from the wideranging enquiry proposed by Gore. Setbacks to `reform from within' fed the hope that Parliament would agree to grant one. Delenda est Convocatio was the mood among moderates as well as University liberals after the vote on Greek in 1911.103 A. L. Smith organized a petition to the Chancellor asking him to promote a Commission in December 1911 and a further memorial on the same lines reached Curzon six months later. Even Sir William Anson was now ready to propose a Commission limited to curbing Convocation's powers.104 Cambridge reformers felt, equally, by the spring of 1912 that it was important for the good name of the University that the initiative for a Commission to free them from the dead hand of the Senate should come from within Cambridge.105 In Curzon's eyes, however, it was politically naõÈve to suppose that Parliament would let the universities off lightly if these requests came before it. I am ®rmly convinced that an ad hoc Commission i.e. a body which will merely overhaul the administrative machineryÐis out of the question. If you get a Commission it will insist on dealing both with administration and curriculum and most of all with property and ®nance. Many good Oxford men seem to think that it will do what they individually happen to want, and nothing else, and that it will leave an Oxford relieved of certain blemishes and even more specialised than before. In my judgment it cannot and will not be so instructed but will insist on turning Oxford upside down.106

Curzon was clearly right in thinking that the political situation made a limited Commission unlikely. Outside Oxford and Cambridge, the agitation for university reform derived its leverage from the support of the labour movement and at its peak in 1911±12 it commanded some in¯uence in 101 Ball to Carter, 14 May 1912, in Oona H. Ball, Sidney Ball: Memories and Impressions of an `Ideal Don' (1923), 106±7. Of St John's men admitted in 1875±9, 36% took honours and 43% pass degrees; of those admitted in 1905±9, 57% took honours. 102 Matheson, Rashdall, 122. 103 Athenaeum, 16 Dec 1911, 769. 104 Petition 8 Dec. 1911, Bodl. G. A. Oxon b. 141 fo. 43; Letter to the Chancellor, 24 May 1912, Bodl. G. A. Oxon b.141, fo 29; H. Hensley Henson (ed.), Memoir of Sir William Anson (1920), 118; Anson to Turner, 12 Dec. 1911 (copy), Bodl. MS Myres 76, fos 86±7. 105 R. St John Parry to Crewe, 16 Feb., 9 Mar., 3 June 1912, Crewe MSS C/41, CUL. 106 Curzon to Warren, 10 Dec. 1911, Warren MSS.

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Whitehall. The WEA, ®nding neither organized labour nor the universities willing to provide adequate funds for adult education, masterminded a campaign through the co-operative and trade-union movements. Mansbridge began to press for a Commission on `University Education' in 1909.107 He and Tawney lobbied the Co-operative Union and TUC and briefed deputations sent by those bodies to the President of the Board of Education in 1910±14 to ask for a Royal Commission.108 The demand was sometimes for a general enquiry into universities or educational endowments, sometimes an enquiry restricted to Oxford and Cambridge, but the main focus of interest was the resources of the ancient Universities. By 1912 efforts were in progress to place a Commission of Enquiry on university endowments on the Labour party's agenda.109 The agitation gained support from a more broadly-based campaign led by Will Thorne of the Gasworkers' Union for the restitution of educational endowments originally given for the poor. The latter attracted little sympathy in Whitehall, where it was considered to be based on a vastly exaggerated notion of the endowments held by universities and public schools and an unhistorical interpretation of the intentions of benefactors. But there were features of Oxford and Cambridge that did seem to justify enquiry. Their confused accounts did nothing to dispel the belief that resources were not put to the best use. Internal controversies could be construed as healthy self-criticism but they encouraged an impression that something was wrong. Pease admitted to a TUC deputation in February 1912 that the Universities themselves seemed to be `in some doubt as to whether their funds are always applied to the best educational purpose'.110 Nor was it easy to dismiss Mansbridge's claim that labour organizations would not use their own funds to support adult education while they believed that `hoards of wealth' were being used to subsidize the education of the rich.111 Public attention was focused on the exclusiveness of the ancient Universities in the spring of 1911 by the affair of the Holmes±Morant circular. This con®dential document, written by the chief inspector of elementary schools, Edmond Holmes, and issued to HMIsÐan error of judgement, as he soon recognizedÐby Robert Morant, was leaked and denounced in Parliament and the press.112 Although motivated by an Arnoldian concern 107

Mansbridge to Runciman, 12 Feb. 1909, Runciman MSS 33, Newcastle University Library. Mansbridge to Zimmern, 17 Nov. 1909, Bodl. MS Zimmern 12, fo 83; `Notes for the Deputation to the President of the Board of Education on Mar 17 1910', Mansbridge MSS, BL Add. MS 65215; Griggs, The TUC and the Struggle for Education, 184. 109 Report of the 12th Annual Conference of the Labour Party (1912), 104±5. 110 Quoted in HCP 92 (1912, TT), 152. 111 Memorandum by H. F. Heath, 28 Nov. 1912, PRO ED 24/1940. 112 The circular was subsequently withdrawn: only one copy survives, in the Runciman MSS, Newcastle University Library. It is reprinted in P. Gordon, `The Holmes±Morant Circular of 1911: A Note', Journal of Educational Administration and History, 10 (1978), 36±40. 108

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to broaden and improve elementary education, it used language that suggested `reaction and caste prejudice'.113 Local authorities were criticized for employing as school inspectors ex-elementary-school teachersÐ`as a rule, uncultured and imperfectly educated and . . . many. . . if not most . . . creatures of tradition and routine' rather than men of the `Public School and ``Varsity'' type'. The circular lent point to the demand made by a Co-operative Union deputation that `the Scholarship Funds of the ``Varsity'' should be used to make it easy for the workers' children to pass to the university if they so desire and are capable.'114 It was in the months after the Holmes±Morant circular became public that Walter Runciman, harried by the NUT, decided that `the agitation was now reaching such dimensions that it could not advisedly be ignored any longer.'115 The Board of Education began to give serious consideration to the form a Royal Commission might take in the summer of 1911, although, having only just (and against the wishes of Haldane and Lloyd George) taken over reponsibility for administering the Treasury grant to universities, it had no great desire to throw open the issue of university reform. Runciman and Morant suggested the possibility of two separate Commissions on Oxford and Cambridge with a fact-®nding brief restricted (like that of the Cleveland Commission) to ®nance. Canon Barnett was willing to be persuaded that this was the `best next step'.116 But it was not clear what would be achieved. Curzon's Finance Board was already designed to bring Oxford ®nances under public scrutiny. A limited enquiry would hardly satisfy the co-operative and trade-union movements. Morant's successor as permanent secretary did, moreover, see attractions in moving towards a system of education coordinated from Whitehall, in which the Board would have greater control over universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.117 When pressure on Asquith was renewed in the House of Commons late in 1912, L. A. SelbyBigge advised that it is quite impossible to restrict the reference to a Royal Commission to ®nancial questions only. . . The only fruitful line of inquiry is whether in respect of the ideals at which they aim, the standards which they maintain and the organization and methods which they adopt, the old Universities are ®lling the place in the life of the nation which they ought to ®ll. Are they doing the best work of which they are capable in the best way and under the conditions which make the advantages of their wealth, prestige and tradition accessible to all who are really able to pro®t by them?

Reform from within at Oxford was, added Selby-Bigge, destined to be 113 114 115 116 117

Sir James Yoxall, in Manchester Guardian, 1 Apr. 1911. Resolution of the Co-operative Congress in 1910, in PRO ED 24/525. Morant to Heath, 24 Aug. 1911, PRO ED 24/528. Ibid. G. Sherington, English Education, Social Change and War, 1911±20 (Manchester, 1981), 27.

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at best a very slow and gradual process and impracticable without a substantial diminution of the autonomy of the Colleges. It is hardly in the nature of things that the Colleges should consent to surrender or diminish their autonomy except under pressure from outside, and personally I feel that any useful reference to a Commission must give it power to deal very freely with the educational as well as the ®nancial relations of the University to the Colleges.118

Any Commission set up at this stage to represent opinion on University reform would have been constituted very differently from its Victorian predecessors, almost all of whose members were Oxford or Cambridge graduates.119 H. F. Heath of the Board's Universities branch suggested that it should include representatives of the trade unions and co-operative societies, the WEA or Ruskin College, a Labour MP and possibly MPs from other parties, as well as `other persons interested such as the Bishop of Oxford'; also representatives of secondary schools and the modern universities, a businessman as a ®nancial expert and a secretary chosen, if possible, from among the Board's civil servants. Oxford and Cambridge should be represented by `at least 2 resident members of the University. . . if possible moderate men and not men who are de®nitely committed to an advanced line on one side or the other'. There was a note of unease in his gloss, `the important thing to secure is that there are on the Commission persons quali®ed to inform it of the University spirit and ideals.'120 The prospect of investigation by a body composed on these lines would not have appealed to most University men. Whether it was ever a serious prospect must remain an open question. Despite Asquith's assurances of 1908, the slow pace of reform from within caused him to reconsider the position four years later. He and Crewe were by then tolerably certain that `both Universities ought to be . . . and must be overhauled by a Commission.'121 The agitation of 1911±12 was inconveniently timed, coinciding with serious industrial unrest and a crowded legislative timetable, and Lloyd George was determined to give priority to his Land Campaign.122 But the responsibility for shelving the university issue was not one that Asquith relished. In May 1912 he consulted Curzon about the desirability of a Commission. `I have merely to lift a little ®nger to get it,' 118 Minute on `Question to the Prime Minister from Mr. King MP, Tuesday 3 December', L. A. Selby-Bigge, 29 Nov. 1912, PRO ED 24/1940. It is tempting to suggest that Oxford reformers had a hand in framing this minute: (Arthur) Hugh Sidgwick, son of the veteran Corpus Liberal Arthur Sidgwick and a recent Balliol graduate, became Selby-Bigge's private secretary in 1912; I. Elliott (ed.), Balliol College Register, 1833±1933 (1934), 265. 119 The one exception was a member of the Cleveland Commission, Kirkman Hodgson MP, described by W. R. Ward as a representative of `the great unacademical British public'; Victorian Oxford, 293. 120 Memorandum C, H. F. Heath, 28 Nov. 1912, PRO ED 24/1940. 121 Crewe to Parry, 25 Feb., 6 Mar. 1912, Crewe MSS C/41, CUL. 122 Sherington, English Education, 23, 37.

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Curzon told Matheson. `Every consideration but one tempts me to say ``Yes'', and that is the conviction that a Commission would destroy the Oxford that we know, and that curriculum, ®nance, government and colleges would go in one sweep.' Asquith's own preference was still against imposing a Commission at a time when opinion in the universities was deeply divided, if only because the likely result would be to delay rather than expedite reform. Yet he did not like to repudiate the `Commissionites' in his own partyÐ`they include some excellent men.'123 There was also a possibility that his hand might be forced in Parliament, in which after the election of January 1910 the Liberals no longer had an overall majority. Curzon let it be known in Oxford that the Prime Minister had given him two years for the Finance Board to `do something'Ðthough what remained vagueÐand also that it was politically important to improve access to the University for the poor.124 In the last resort, however, the situation was resolved chie¯y as a result of Oxford's unique relationship with the Labour movement. The `utopian' view of class relationships that lay behind the settlement movement and its sequel, agitation to open Oxford to the workers, has always been controversial.125 George Lansbury recalled that the settlements were at ®rst seen by Londoners as a `dodge . . . to keep the unruly people in their places'.126 Later Marxist historians tended to revive this interpretation of Oxford's in¯uence on working-class education.127 Harmony between classes was indeed the goalÐyet there were many in the Labour movement who came to see, as Lansbury pointed out, that workers stood to gain from association with well-wishers in the universities and access to `knowledge'. This was the vision that inspired the WEA. Others regarded contemporary Oxford as irredeemably a class University. When Bernard Shaw refused an invitation to speak at Ruskin College in 1899 he wrote: A workman ought to have a vulgar prejudice against Oxford . . . The business of Oxford is to make a few scholars and a great many gentlemen; and that will remain its business until the latter half of the process loses its social importance suf®ciently to make a sweeping measure of University reform possible.128 123 Curzon to Matheson, 11 May 1912, Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 106±7; Asquith to Curzon, 8 Dec. 1912 (copy), Curzon to Warren, 9 Dec. 1912, Warren MSS. `Commissionites' in the House of Commons included Joseph King, Athelstan Rendall, Richard Denman, and H. B. Lees-Smith (all of whom joined the Labour Party after the war), Alfred Hutton, a Nonconformist Cambridge graduate, and Sir John Barran, spokesman of the reform party at Cambridge. 124 Strachan-Davidson diary, [July] 1912, BCLP II. 7. 125 For a full and persuasive review of this debate see Goldman, Dons and Workers, 163±90. 126 Oxford Review, 13 May 1907, 3. 127 See, for example, R. Fieldhouse, `The 1908 Report: Antidote to Class Struggle?', in Harrop (ed.), Oxford and Working-Class Education, 30±47. 128 Shaw to Charles A. Beard, 1 May 1899, Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898±1910 ed. Dan H. Laurence (1972), 87.

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Whether Oxford could ever hope to educate leaders for the Labour movement seemed doubtful. The Cooperative Union found that those who went up to Oriel with Hughes and Neale Scholarships `were taken from the families of working people and taught on a syllabus which dragged them out of their class and ®lled them with a desire to earn their living with their pens or by preaching'.129 The Ruskin strike of 1909, leading to the formation of the rival Central Labour College which competed for support within the Trade Union movement, encouraged suspicion that Oxford would merely `incorporate' working-class education under University control. Much as Dissenters had feared that their sons would be seduced into Anglicanism by the University, some Labour leaders mistrusted its in¯uence on the workers. Ramsay MacDonald, though a friend and frequent visitor of Sidney Ball's, believed that Oxford was `a poison' that could kill the con®dence of working men exposed to it in their own values and worth (or, as in H. A. L. Fisher's account of a later exchange, `an engine devised by the Devil for the corruption of Ruskin Hall').130 The hope of Barnett and his friends was that such critics could be converted, and on that hope was pinned their strategy for University reform. The Universities must lose their `®nishing school' image and learn from working people in order to gain their trust. The philosophy of the WEA, as expressed by Temple and Mansbridge, was that `Labour co-operates with [the universities] not because they are perfect, but because such co-operation will increase their rate of progress towards the desired perfection. The mental and spiritual in¯uence which comes from Labour must be absorbed by all educational institutions if they are to do the work which their existence in the community demands.'131 Central to this philosophy was an idealistic faith in the integrative power of education. `If Democracy had but the knowledge, if universities had but the powerÐthey could make a new England.'132 In such an England, Tawney believed, the University would become a `centre of moral authority', upholding not only the highest intellectual standards but also the ideal of `knowledge, like religion, as transcending all differences of class and wealth', equally accessible to all.133 And in this transformation Oxford should lead the way. It has always been the privilege of the older Universities . . . to train men for all departments of life and public administration . . . It seems to us that it would involve a grave loss both to Oxford and to English political life were the close association 129

Cooperative Union, 43rd Annual Cooperative Congress Report (1911), 175. MacDonald to Mansbridge, 4 Dec. 1908, TCC Early Papers, OUA, quoted in Goldman, Dons and Workers, 163; Fisher to Murray, 31 Mar. 1913, MS Fisher 54, 207, Bodl. 131 WEA, Annual Report, 1909, 13, WEA archive, London. 132 A. E. Zimmern, `What is the Use of University Study to Working Men?', Highway, 2 (Nov. 1908). 133 J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin (eds), R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book (1972), 42±3. 130

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which has existed between the University and the world of affairs to be broken or impaired on the accession of new classes to power.134

The language of the 1908 Report on Oxford and Working-Class Education did little to disarm suspicion that defence of privilege was the chief motive behind its call for opening the University to working people. The Report was addressed, however, to an audience that included sceptics within the universities. Arthur Evans spoke up for those who were `strongly opposed to any scheme ``popularising'' the University by lowering the standard of our curriculum, or for diverting funds from the higher studies represented here to the purposes of secondary education'.135 The Athenaeum's Cambridge correspondent claimed to be `perplexed why it is that Oxford wants the Working-Man'; it suggested either `a strong, if not very rational sentiment of Socialism' orÐmore plausiblyÐa desire to improve the University's sporting record. `If Michigan, Drake University, Kansas, Princeton, etc, contribute Rhodes Scholars to enable Oxford to beat Cambridge in athletics . . . why should not Aston Villa or Bromwich Albion supply footballers?'136 The invocation of Oxford's role in educating the country's eÂlites was a way of countering academic and frivolous objections to an enterprise that many dons thought genuinely important in the interests of social harmony. As Lawrence Goldman has shown, since the early days of Extension a distinctive feature of Oxford's work, associated originally with Acland and Arnold Toynbee, was the sense of `a particular mission to working-class groups and communities'.137 An optimistic Liberal tradition, represented also by T. H. Green, A. V. Dicey, and James Bryce, maintained that given the right guidance, `the working class could be safely accommodated within the national community'.138 Even Sidney Ball, who considered himself a socialist, found the doctrine of class con¯ict espoused by the Ruskin strikers `rather sterile' and identi®ed with Green's belief that `common education is the true social leveller.'139 The tutorial class system, launched by the 1908 Report, had a positive appeal to dons who shared Barnett's ideal of the University as a source of culture for the massesÐalthough there were certainly others, like H. H. Turner, who viewed it chie¯y as a means of 134 Oxford and Working Class Education (1908), para 78. For republication of this report see n. 18 above. 135 Oxford Journal, 21 Aug. 1909, 5. 136 Athenaeum, 27 Mar. 1909, 375. 137 Goldman, Dons and Workers, 40. 138 P. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (1978), 5±6; Goldman, Dons and Workers, 37±54. 139 Ball to MacDonald, 6 Apr. 1909, MacDonald MSS, PRO 30/69/1153, fo 14, quoted in Goldman, Dons and Workers, 172±3; Ball, `What Oxford can do for Workpeople', papers submitted to the National Conference of working-class and educational organizations held in the Examination Schools, 10 Aug. 1907, Tawney correspondence on early tutorial classes, WEA archive, London.

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de¯ecting criticism of Oxford's exclusiveness or, in Tawney's phrase, as `simply a sort of ``®re-insurance'''.140 The question of how to open Oxford to the working classes was far from straightforward. Barnett's circle and socialists within Oxford opposed schemes that relegated working people to second-class status within the University, whether as Non-Collegiates or in a new college for working men, as suggested by Curzon.141 The experience of Extension and Ruskin College showed that workers would reject projects under the University's sole control. Working-class participation in the Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee (TCC) and the reconstitution of Ruskin under the control of labour organizations, with academics playing a purely advisory role, emerged as a practical compromise. A further successful experiment was the WEA Summer Meeting, organized by A. L. Smith from 1910, separately from the Extension Summer Meeting and at a lower cost, since lecturers gave their services free.142 Yet these arrangements fell far short of Tawney's ideal, shared in the early years by the TCC, which was that working men, including mature students, should be admitted to colleges as undergraduates. This was a suggestion calculated to raise alarm. T. B. Strong, one of the authors of the 1908 Report, wrote frankly of the dif®culty of integrating manual workers into college social life.143 Others suggested that poverty alone would become a quali®cation for admission to Oxford. The Balliol historian H. W. C. Davis thought that `we should, if our funds for eleemosynary purposes increase very greatly, use the increment to subsidise intellectual or moral cripples.'144 Another of Smith's Balliol colleagues, though admitting that it was consistent with Oxford's tradition of educating the `politically in¯uential' to open colleges to the workers, took it for granted that the intellectual standard of such men would be lower than that of all other freshmen.145 These charges were strenuously denied by Smith and the WEA, but there remained an ambiguity in the demand of the Co-operative Union that it should be made `easy' for the workers to win scholarships. The philosopher F. C. S. Schiller feared the outcome would be pressure `to rearrange our teaching and our standards so that such men can do well in our examinations'.146 140 Turner to Anson, 13 Dec. 1911, MS. Top. Oxon. d. 310, fo 58; Tawney to Mansbridge, 10 Oct. 1912, Mansbridge MSS, BL Add. MS 65216, fo 79. 141 `The Admission of Poor Students', draft by Zimmern, n.d., TCC papers 09/11, Bodl. Western MSS; Henry Allsopp, `A College for Poor Men', The Oxford Reformer, Nov. 1909, 5±7, Nuf®eld Coll. 142 Goldman, Dons and Workers, 142±6. 143 T. B. Strong, `University Problems in relation to Labour', Highway, 1 (Oct. 1908). 144 Davis to Smith, 31 Jan. 1908, A. L. Smith MSS, Balliol. 145 F. F. Urquhart, `Lord Curzon and Oxford Reform', Dublin Review, 145 (1909), 138±41. 146 Schiller, `Oxford and the Working Man', Fortnightly Review, 99 (1913), 772±3.

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At all events it was evident to Tawney that little progress could be made without a Royal Commission that would reform the scholarship system and greatly reduce the cost of college life. In 1912, when the WEA held its annual meeting in Oxford, he attempted to force the issue, bringing pressure to bear on Mansbridge to place on the agenda a strongly worded resolution, repudiating `reform from within' and demanding a Royal Commission. Oxford would thus be prevented from using its connection with the WEA as an alibi when charged with neglecting its duty to the working classes. `We have tried conciliation for 5 years. What have we got? The tutorial classes and nothing else.' Was the WEA, he asked Mansbridge, prepared to acquiesce in Oxford and Cambridge throwing crumbs to Labour in the shape of Tutorial Classes, without attempting to change the system? I am not; and I always thought you were not . . . You need not be in the least nervous lest the Universities should withhold support from Tutorial Classes, if you press for a Commission. They won't. They will give more support. Don't you yet understand that Oxford started Tutorial Classes because it was afraid?147

Tawney's assessment of the politics of the situation was much mistaken. The WEA, though effective as a pressure group within the labour movement, could not be made a platform for public agitation without alienating support that depended on its non-political character. Mansbridge found University friends worried that the resolution gave `colour to the statement freely made in Oxford, that we are out for politics'.148 Angry protests from A. N. Badger, the representative of the Association of Directors of Education on the WEA's Executive Committee, and milder warnings from Strong and others in Oxford that `our path here may be made very dif®cult if we are not careful' led to the decision not to debate the motion at the 1912 conference but defer it for further consideration.149 Secondly, while fear had indeed been among the motives for starting tutorial classes, it did not imply an open-ended commitment. Raising money for them was an uphill task and depended largely on college goodwill. An application to Council in 1912 for a £500 grant from the university to supplement the TCC's income from the Board of Education grant and fees survived a challenge to its legality from Thomas Case only to fail because the University faced an overall de®cit. In 1911 only ten colleges had responded to the TCC's appeal for funds and only threeÐAll Souls, New College, and MagdalenÐgave over £100.150 147

Tawney to Mansbridge, 21 Sept. 1912, Mansbridge MSS, BL Add. MSS 65216, fos 89±92. Mansbridge to Temple, 16 Oct. 1912, Mansbridge MSS, fo 109. Badger to Temple, 8 Oct. 1912; Strong to Mansbridge, 9 Oct. 1912; Badger to Mansbridge, 16 Oct. 1912, Mansbridge MSS, fos 62±5, 72, 80. A resolution supporting a Royal Commission, from which Badger dissociated himself, was sent to the Prime Minister by the WEA executive committee in December; WEA Executive Committee and Council Minutes 1908±12, fos 310±14, WEA archive, London. 150 Heberden to Marriott, 18 June 1912, TCC 10/13, OUA; HCP, 92 (1912), 162±3. 148 149

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But the greatest weakness in Tawney's position was that, despite the agitation currently proceeding in the labour movement, there was little real evidence of a popular demand to bring working men into residence in Oxford. This emerged when H. H. Turner visited Tawney's own highly successful classes at Longton and Rochdale to discover their views on the matter. Reporting back to the Oxford TCC, Turner was clear that `there is at the present not the least wish to see the particular scheme in the minds of this Committee (of drafting one or two from each class to Oxford) carried into practice.'151 The Summer Meeting satis®ed the desire to experience a period of residence in Oxford and was valued especially because it bene®ted the whole class, rather than just one or two.152 Tawney resisted this conclusion because it was fundamental to his creed that working people could and should bene®t from a full university education and because the political case for a Commission, as presented through the trade-union and co-operative movements, depended on that assumption. The issue was to confront him squarely two years later, when an application from three members of the Longton class for admission to Oxford met vigorous opposition within the WEA. Mansbridge himself disliked the spirit of `intellectualism' at Longton; others urged that the WEA aimed at `a feeling of fellowship in the pursuit of knowledge and not of rivalry in the classes for the opportunity of going to the university'.153 Douglas Cole, representing a younger generation of Oxford socialists, endorsed the view that an expensive, examinationridden undergraduate education was not what the workers wanted.154 All Temple's diplomacy as President was needed to prevent the WEA setting its face ®rmly against members of tutorial classes going on to the University.155 Hebdomadal Council took stock of the situation in 1912 when considering the TCC's application for funds. Heeding Turner's advice, it reached the reassuring conclusion that `the extension of University teaching among working people can be better promoted by giving assistance to the Tutorial Class system, and to the Summer Meeting, than by attempting to bring working people into residence at Oxford as undergraduates, however desirable the latter course may be in a few exceptional cases.'156 Evidence that workers `now seem to prefer that the University should go out to them 151 Report of Visit to Longton and Rochdale, Jan 1911, TCC Early Papers, OUA. For the start of these classes see p. 684 above. 152 WEA Executive Committee and Council Minutes, 22 Sept. 1913, fos 26±8. 153 Letters from Mansbridge to Temple and Zimmern, 16 Oct. 1913, Mansbridge MSS, BL Add. MS 65219. 154 `An Oxford Summer School', Blue Book, 1 (Mar. 1913), 389±93. 155 On the two Longton students admitted to Balliol and St Hilda's (respectively) in 1913, see Goldman, Dons and Workers, 139±40. 156 Report of Committee on Applications by Extension Delegacy [May 1912], HCP, 92 (1912), 125.

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rather than that they should come in numbers as undergraduates to Oxford' was used by Curzon in dissuading Asquith from a Commission.157 Whether he would succeed remained far from clear. Many Oxford residents now favoured a Commission and Joseph King, MP for North Somerset (1910± 18) and the chief parliamentary spokesman for Barnett's committee, received temporizing answers when he raised the question in the Commons.158 `We'll let it simmer, we'll let it simmer,' was Asquith's comment in June 1912 when tackled by Warren after a Foreign Of®ce dinner.159 Far from reassuring in that context was the report produced by Mansbridge and the two Labour representatives on the TCC, C. W. Bowerman and J. M. Mactavish, in response to Council's request for clari®cation about `what workpeople think of the university'.160 Contradictory impressions had been created on this point: enthusiastic accounts of the Summer Meeting and its value in dispelling prejudice against Oxford contrasted with the hostile tone of the TUC and the co-operative movement. Mansbridge and his colleagues took the opportunity to dispel some illusions. The organized Labour movement, they claimed, did truly represent the more active workpeople who had no contact with Oxford and its opinions should therefore be taken seriously. Such men believed that university endowments were used to bene®t `a comparatively small and privileged class'; that `much of the teaching of Oxford is biased in the interests of property'; that it did nothing to advance knowledge on `subjects which directly concern the life of the nation' nor to help elementary education; and that `its wasteful use of buildings, its long vacations, and its bad economy of monies' amounted to `bad business'. This hostile feeling was, the report predicted, likely to increase with the workers' growing demand for equality of opportunity in education; `any barrier, especially any ®nancial barrier, which excludes them from the University will be regarded with ever-growing bitterness.' On the other hand, there was more goodwill among workpeople who had contact with the University through the WEA, Extension or Tutorial Classes. Oxford and Working Class Education was still circulating and had `helped to enhance the reputation of Oxford throughout the civilised world'.161 But even the most well-disposed working people were critical of the University's failure to recognize its duty to accept only `genuine students' and exclude those who were not. 157

Curzon to Warren, 19 May 1912, Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 107. Parl. Deb., 4 Dec. 1911, 5S, 32, 1013; 18 June 1912, 39, 1484; 3 Dec. 1912, 44, 2081. 159 Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 108. 160 Report of Committee on Applications by Extension Delegacy, Appendix to question 12, HCP 92 (1912), 150±60. 161 Cf. S. Rowbotham, `Travellers in a Strange Country: Responses of Working-class Students to the University Extension Movement, 1878±1910', History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), 62±95. 158

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Workpeople cannot understand that men whose chief interest seems to be ``play'', who have to be taught the very elements of Latin and Greek, should be allowed to remain at a University. They regret that while many graduates holding a Pass Degree possess an extremely meagre portion of knowledge, many capable students are prevented from obtaining a University education through lack of ®nancial means.

If Oxford was unable to remedy this situation herself, the State should intervene. Finally, workers thought it `essential if the claims of all classes are to receive due consideration' that there should be lay representation, including non-graduates, on Oxford governing bodies. `The revelation you give me of the Working Men's attitude in their own Report is very frank and very ominous,' wrote Curzon. `How any man after reading it can desire a Commission in which such views would probably to some extent prevail, I cannot understand.'162 But the Report was not circulated to colleges until August, and would not have been known, given Hebdomadal Council's notorious secretiveness, to the dons who petitioned Curzon to procure a Commission in May 1912.163 To Strachan-Davidson, who had warmed to the company of `very intelligent and pleasant' working men at the Summer Meeting in Balliol, the views brought to light by Mansbridge and his colleagues were `such hopeless nonsense as made me almost despair', prompting anxious scrutiny of by-elections and re¯ection on the need to re-establish an effective Second Chamber.164 In his case, at least, this seems to have been the point at which fear of the labour movement began to take effect. When the proposal for a £400 grant to the TCC came eventually before Convocation in 1913, Case as always opposing, and Strong warning of the danger of a Commission, Strachan-Davidson spoke warmly in favour.165 There are other indications too of a new mood of realism in the University after the summer of 1912. The demand for a Commission was not renewed from within Oxford. Instead efforts were made to publicize the `substantial progress made in the University on Reform', starting with Heberden's decision to make the Vice-Chancellor's oration for the ®rst time in English rather than Latin.166 To the conservative or `moderate' voices raised in defence of the University since 1907 were now added eulogies from of®cial and Liberal Oxford. `The universities had become part of the national life as they never had been since the Middle Ages,' claimed Matheson. H. A. L. Fisher doubted `whether everyone knew how democratic and cosmopolitan Oxford had become. Whereas at one time all his students 162

Curzon to Warren, 21 May 1912, Ronaldshay, Curzon, iii. 107. It may be signi®cant that A. L. Smith, promoter of the petition of Dec. 1911, was not among those who signed the May petition. Other senior University liberals who refused to sign included Warren and Principal Rhys of Jesus College; Webb diary, 14 June 1912, Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e. 1158, fo. 122. 164 Strachan-Davidson diary, 20 July 1911, 7 Aug. 1912, S-D. Papers II.7, BCLP. 165 Manchester Guardian, 12 June 1913. In Convocation 88 voted for the grant, 18 against it. 166 The Times, 15 Oct. 1912, 9. 163

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were public school men, latterly he had lectured to a class comprising an abbess, two nuns, ®fty students from Ruskin College, one from the Euphrates Valley, a Philippino [sic], and several Rhodes scholars.'167 It would, perhaps, be too much to say that the progress of reform from within was greatly stimulated by this frank and credible account of what workpeople thought of the University. Congregation passed in November 1912 the statute eliminating non-academic members (though protecting vested interests) which it had rejected three years earlier. It also reiterated its approval for the secularization of Theology degrees and examinerships, only to be rebuffed by Convocation. Two defeats in 1912±13 for constitutional reform proposals have already been mentioned: the introduction of a poll, taken after the debate and on the two following days, in Convocation voting was successfully resisted by the combined efforts of Case and Ball; and reform of Hebdomadal Council elections was also defeated.168 Two widely advocated syllabus reforms, the Diploma in Commerce and Economics and rationalization of Responsions, were defeated. On the other hand, J. L. Stocks set in motion discussions on the admission of women to degrees that were to bear fruit after the war, as were the discussions promoted by A. D. Lindsay, A. J. Carlyle, and others on the subject of a modern Greats that would combine the study of philosophy with economics and political science.169 In 1912 the Gladstone Chair of Political Theory and Institutions was created with a grant of £6,000 from the Committee for the National Memorial to Oxford's Grand Old Man, and two years later Bryce visited the University to open a new centre for social studies, Barnett House. And Curzon's Finance Board, on which the most active external member was Sir George Murray, former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, had the desired effect of calming public disquiet about University and college ®nances, although its only discernible in¯uence on policy before 1914 seems to have been to bring pressure on the Press, stoutly resisted by Charles Cannan, to step up its contributions to the Chest.170 The Asquith Commission was to be deemed a necessary condition of the post-war extension of the UGC grant to Oxford and Cambridge. But the Finance Board was cited by Asquith in May 1913 when he ®nally let Oxford off the hook. While deploring the vote of Convocation on Theology degrees, the occasion for Joseph King's latest 167

The Queen, 20 Sept. 1913. Athenaeum, 1 Mar. 1913, 253. Case's amendment to allow voting by `properly attested voting papers' was narrowly defeated by 69 to 64: Gazette, xliii. 256, 418. For the small alteration in Council elections enacted in Nov. 1914 see Ch. 33, Appendix A. 1. The large scheme, reintroduced in Jan. 1914, had been frustratedÐby the Case±Ball combination: Gazette xliv. 417±18, 463, 525: OM xxxii (5 Feb. 1914), 176. 169 N. Chester, Economics, Politics and Social Studies at Oxford (1986), 16, 130±1. 170 Cannan to Gamlen, 6 Mar., 10 June 1913, Finance Board papers, bundle 1, OUA; for the Board's unsuccessful efforts to appropriate funds from Delegacies in 1915, see Dunbabin, `Finance since 1914', The Twentieth Century, 639±40. 168

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question urging a Royal Commission, Asquith announced his reluctant `conclusion that in the existing circumstances the setting up of such an enquiry might lead to delay in the prosecution of necessary reforms and is not likely to be productive of fruitful consequences'.171 From this point the steam went out of the agitation, despite the adoption in January 1914 by the Labour party of an education programme re¯ecting the views of Tawney rather than MacDonald, and including demands for popularly elected representatives on the governing bodies of the ancient Universities and measures to facilitate access for the poor.172 Barnett's death in 1913 deprived the London-based reform group of its main driving force. Percival took the opportunity at the opening of new buildings at the women's teacher training college, Cherwell Hall, to praise `the new work . . . undertaken . . . for the working men of England and . . . for the women of England,' adding that `Oxford was prepared to receive into her generous bosom every kind of valuable experiment for the higher life of the people.'173 The Fabian New Statesman published an account of `The Place of Oxford in a Democracy' which suggested that it was responding to its critics.174 Mansbridge's health broke down in 1913 and he was given a year's leave of absence from his post as secretary to the WEA. His University Tutorial Classes (1913), a largely celebratory account of the movement, prompted a reviewer in the Toynbee Record to suggest that `every don, like every lawyer, is a good syndicalist at heart' and that Oxford might be left to work out its own salvation `without any clumsy intervention of a Royal Commission'.175 The reform agitation did at least clarify the terms on which Oxford would adjust to the twentieth century. The spectre of an unsympathetic Commission, though it had loomed large in 1912, was laid not simply because Oxford, even more than Cambridge, had forged powerful links with what would later be termed the `Establishment'. For all their loyalties, Asquith refused to take his MA and Rosebery to `contribute a word or a mite' to Curzon's Re-endowment Appeal while Convocation retained its power to block reform.176 The Board of Education, though packed with Oxford graduates, was not wholly averse to extending its in¯uence over the universities. Even the headmasters of Wellington and Rugby proposed to the 171

Parl. Deb., 5 May 1913, 5S, 53, cols 1666±7. Report of the 14th Annual Conference of the Labour Party (1914), 40±2. The programme was drafted by a committee set up on the motion of J. M. Mactavish of the WEA at the Labour Party Conference in 1912. 173 Oxford Chronicle, 13 June 1913. Built 1877±8 as Cowley Grange, at the south end of Cowley Place, Cherwell Hall was acquired by St Hilda's College in 1921 and is now known as `St Hilda's South'. 174 New Statesman, 6 Sept. 1913, 682. 175 Toynbee Record, 26 (1914), 82. 176 Rosebery to Curzon, 5 Apr. 1907, Rosebery MSS, National Library of Scotland. Asquith was a candidate for the Chancellorship in 1925 as a BA. 172

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HMC in 1912 that it should support a Royal Commission on the relations between universities and secondary schools.177 It was, moreover, a group of Oxford graduates whose conspiratorial tactics had brought them in¯uence disproportionate to their numbers in a campaign for reform that had elicited some expressions of real animus against their University. The campaign foundered partly because it was ill-timed, overshadowed by more urgent claims on Parliament's attention, but chie¯y because the `Commissionites' were much more divided among themselves than the Victorian reformers. The professional interests of dons, in so far as they did point to reform, con¯icted with the objectives of those who placed the democratization of Oxford above the claims of learning and research. The Labour movement, at this stage more sectarian than nineteenth-century Nonconformity, though readily aroused against the class privilege of eÂlite universities, was too intent on class solidarity to give serious backing to Barnett's demand for increased access for the workers. More appealing was the `compensatory' higher education provided by tutorial classes and Labour-controlled colleges like Ruskin, compared by Marett to seminaries rather than universities and speci®cally designed to train leaders for the movement.178 Reform from within, accommodating to some degree pressures from both directions, seemed after all to be the only answer. Root and branch reform, overturning Oxford's traditions, was unlikely while its critics remained so divided. It was to become still less likely when the ancient Universities were raised in public esteem by their contribution to the war effort.179 By December 1914 two-thirds of all members of the University, including more than ®fty college fellows, were in khaki.180 177

Athenaeum, 23 Mar. 1912, 336. Ibid. 12 Dec. 1914, 625. Cf. G. D. H. Cole's view, Ch. 31 n.185. Unlike Marett he distinguished sharply between Ruskin and the Central Labour College. 179 The Twentieth Century, 8±9. 180 Research for this chapter was carried out in collaboration with Mark Curthoys, whose patience in reading and commenting on a series of drafts was much appreciated. Early versions were also read by Brian Harrison and Sandra Den Otter and a later draft by Lawrence Goldman. I am grateful to Mr C. A. Brodie QC for permission to make use of the papers of T. H. Warren, which contain the only surviving correspondence of Curzon as Chancellor. 178

page

33 Epilogue m . g . b ro c k

`p ro b le ms . . . r em ot e fro m u s' None of the University's preoccupations during the last academic year before the First World War will surprise a reader of the preceding pages. In November 1913 Convocation killed the proposed Diploma in Commerce and Economics mentioned in the last chapter.1 This unhappy saga, initiated by Curzon, illustrates a recurrent theme of the volume. Those who had received the University's stamp during Queen Victoria's later years held the transmission of the cultural heritage to be their overriding concern. As Chapter 25 shows, they were disinclined to extract money from a `plutocrat' who would provide it only if the University dropped compulsory Greek.2 They did not think it their role to help in keeping Britain ahead of its competitors. Their country was one of the world's richest; but even for the British there was no general diffusion of af¯uence. In that world two assumptions were easily made, ®rst, that Britain would retain its leading industrial and ®nancial position, and secondly, that, when an undergraduate chose his career, he might well put the likely material reward above all other considerations: his chief temptation would be towards materialism and avarice. In the Congregation debate on the proposed diploma the Warden of New College pleaded against `too much of the brains and vigour of the country' being drawn towards the `wealth-amassing career of commerce or business' to the neglect of `the more ennobling careers of the clergyman, the student, the man of science, the teacher, the lawyer, the doctor, and even the public servant'.3 Dr Spooner's remarks were not representative of Oxford opinions. Indeed they hardly did justice to his own, for he was a member of the Political Economy Club and lectured on that subject.4 Their connection with the 1 Gazette xliv. 189. Birmingham University, by contrast, had a faculty of commerce in 1914. See Joseph Chamberlain's speech to the Court of Governors: The Times, 15 May 1905, 12d, e. 2 See p. 631 above. 3 OM xxxii (29 Jan. 1914), 163. The article from which this quotation is taken was by H. E. Morgan, an executive with W. H. Smith, for whom see Pt 1, 499. See also Eustace Percy's attack on `the superstition of the ``liberal professions''': Education at the Crossroads (1930), 53. 4 William Hayter, Spooner (1977), 90.

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salient facts was tenuous. The Oxford men then in industry included Lionel Hichens from the Warden's own college, who had just rescued Cammell Laird. He wanted a recognition that industry was `primarily a national service', the object of those engaged in it being `®rst and foremost the good of the community as a whole'.5 Some at least among the lawyers of the time seem to have been less high-minded than this. F. E. Smith was not thought to be indifferent to the size of his fee. In less eccentric and extreme guises, however, opposition to materialism applied far beyond the clergy and characterized universities other than Oxford.6 Curzon's proposed diploma was wrecked by Congregation's insistence that it should be con®ned to graduates. What was `dangerous', in the view of a correspondent of the Oxford Magazine, was `to bring young men to Oxford merely to follow a technical preparation for business'. A principle being at stake, it could not be helped that very few would be willing either to combine the diploma with a pass degree, or to lengthen their residence by working for it after taking honours. The proposal went down, not under the attacks of opponents, but because in its postgraduate form its friends deserted it.7 The mission to the undergraduates which the Bishop of Oxford conducted in February 1914 drew large crowds: the Union was denuded of most of its best speakers that week.8 Interest in the social side of the Church's work was as strong as ever. Oxford House held its annual meeting in the Union's debating hall on 10 May, when a thousand attended to hear about Bethnal Green.9 Meanwhile, unlike the undergraduates, the Bishop had to be concerned about heresy, and he therefore warned the diocesan clergy against such deviations as the latest swerve into `Modernism' by the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. Professor Sanday's defence was published in The Times on 13 May.10 T. H. Green's heirs were naturally less worried than the Bishop 5 Lionel Hichens, Some Problems of Modern Industry (1918), 22. Hichens had become chairman of Cammell Laird in 1910. For a general survey of Oxford men going into industry during the Edwardian period see Pt 1, 499±500. Of 155 men admitted to Wadham, 1903±8, twelve were reckoned to have gone into business: Wadham College, ed. C. S. L. Davies and Jane Garnett (1994), 60. 6 See Rothblatt, Revolution of the Dons (ch. 32 n. 98), 257; Rudyard Kipling, Rectorial Address, St Andrews University, 10 Oct. 1923: Independence (1923), 31. Cambridge, according to Rothblatt, was most reluctant to accept the pleas of Karl Breul, its Professor of German from 1910, that it should treat modern language studies with proper respect. 7 OM xxxii. 176. For a similar emphasis on `culture and enlightenment', as opposed to vocational skills, see pp. 471±7, and 701±2 above; G. Sutherland (ed.), Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government (1972), 283 (the `Holmes Circular', 6 Jan. 1910); Jose Harris, `Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870±1940', Past and Present, no. 135 (May 1992), 137±8. The Circular is discussed on pp. 841±2 above. 8 OM xxxii. 201. 9 Isis, 16 May 1914, 10. See Elmhirst, Diary 85±6 (entertaining `the Bethnal Green people', May 1912). 10 The Times, 7 Apr., 6d, 20 Apr., 9e; 13 May, 6c. The Hulsean Professor at Cambridge (W. E. Barnes) had been embroiled with the bishops over the Athanasian Creed a few weeks earlier: The Times, 4 Mar., 7e.

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about the spread of `Modernism'. After visiting von HuÈgel in 1910 C. C. J. Webb wrote in his diary: `He spoke of the fanatical anti-religion current at Cambridge, from which I think our Greats School has preserved Oxford';11 and in 1917 R. W. Macan, the Master of University College, reviewing ®fty years of religious change in Oxford, called Green `a master-mind in our spiritual building . . . a missionary of the spirit'. By 1914 the views which had once persuaded Pusey to have Macan expelled from Christ Church had become Oxford's academic orthodoxy.12 Those items might suggest that attitudes had not changed greatly in Oxford since the 1890s; but any such conclusion would be mistaken. The undergraduate protests round the turn of the century, when Ruskin College and the Rhodes scholarships were founded, had by now faded into history. In February 1912 the Union had voted nem. con. to congratulate Ruskin on the laying of the foundation stone for its new buildings.13 In 1913 Ruskin students had taken six of the thirteen distinctions in the Diploma in Economics and Political Science and seven of the ®fteen passes. The Professor of Political Economy was by now supported by one in Political Theory, and by a Reader in Economic History and an All Souls fellow in Political Economy.14 The fears about allowing the study of contemporary topics were lessening all the time. In 1915, the compulsory ®nals paper on modern English history would include questions about the Victorian age to 1885: the second-year historians who were studying this modern era naturally did not know that conditions would have changed a good deal by the date for their ®nals.15 Among the B.Litt. subjects approved by the Modern History Board in 1914 may be found: `The incidence of local rates and of taxes upon the unearned income of the land'.16 During Lloyd George's time at the Exchequer there were few topics more controversial than that. These incremental changes caught the eye less than the defeat in Congregation of the new Responsions statute in the summer of 1914 by 110 votes to 73.17 Persuading the colleges to turn Responsions into a modern-style entrance examination on School Certi®cate lines had been a foredoomed operation. The Bursar of Worcester had no dif®culty in showing that a multi-subject entrance exam which included compulsory Latin and Greek amounted to a formula for emptying his college.18 The vote simply empha11

Webb diary, 31 Dec. 1910: Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e 1157 fo. 17. R. W. Macan, Religious Changes in Oxford During the Last Fifty Years (1917), 13: paper read to Oxford Society for Historical Theology, 14 June 1917. 13 OM xxx (22 Feb. 1912), 228. For the earlier expressions of disdain see p. 810. 14 Norman Chester, Economics, Politics and Social Studies in Oxford, 1900±1985 (1986), 15± 16, 21. One of the `passes' in the Diploma was secured by Jean Paul Getty (see Ch. 7, n. 28). 15 Gazette xlii (19 June 1912), 958. 16 `State insurance, with special reference to England and Germany' and `The British tax system' had been approved in 1913: OUA, FA 4/11/2/2, pp. 13±14, 33±4. 17 Gazette xliv (17 June 1914), 881. 18 OM xxxii (11 June 1914), 389±92, F. J. Lys. 12

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sized that no effective reform of Responsions was possible as long as Convocation insisted on compulsory Greek. The Hebdomadal Council was none the less expected to make another attempt at the apparently impossible. `It is,' the Athenaeum's Oxford correspondent commented bleakly, `what they are there for.'19 There was something unreal about the vote in June. As the end of Chapter 23 shows, the members of Council had known since early May that `compulsory Greek' was almost certainly doomed. Some at least of the Greekless Etonians about whom Lyttelton had sent his warning would not apply to Oxford if this entailed being crammed for Responsions; and, even assuming some to be willing to face the prospect, such cramming would hardly be feasible. It was one thing to defend the classics in the last ditch when the number of potential applicants being deterred thereby was quite uncertain: to bar the door deliberately to the country's most famous school would be quite another. Where the pleas of the many had failed this threat from the privileged would be devastatingly effective.20 Public ®gures were much seen in Oxford during this academic year. On 30 October 1913 the Union debated the motion `That military power is economically and socially futile'. With the help of the visiting speaker, Norman Angell, this was carried by 284 votes to 244. Angell returned to Oxford on 14 November and explained in New College hall, with the Warden in the chair, that military conquest brought no pro®t to the conqueror; and in February a meeting was held to form an `Angellite' Peace and War Society in the University. Gilbert Murray presided, and the organizer of the Garton Foundation, which had been formed to spread Angell's views, made the principal speech.21 A few days later the Navy League provided a counterblast with the support of the Warden of Wadham and the Master of University. The League's chief secretary explained that, while the British Navy was `unchallengeable' for the present, its future strength was a cause for concern.22 In the Trinity term the threat of civil war in Ireland brought heavyweights to Oxford. In May 1914 Milner spoke for Ulster at a mass meeting in the Town Hall: six Oxford heads and many fellows had already signed the Ulster Covenant.23 A few weeks later Haldane addressed a joint 19

Athenaeum, no. 4522 (27 June 1914), 890. See pp. 564; E. Lyttelton to the Vice-Chancellor, 28 Apr. 1914: HCP98 (1914), 81±2. The Master of University (Macan) was soon warning about the danger for Oxford if it continued to demand `antiquated accomplishment' of all its candidates: Oxford Times, 8 Aug. 1914. 21 Isis, 1 Nov. 1913, 5; OM xxxii. 88; Oxford Chronicle, 21 Nov. 1913, 5d; Oxford Times, 7 Feb. 1914, 10a, b. See also J. D. B. Miller, Norman Angell and the Futility of War (1986), 8±9. `We did not know until the war revealed it,' Murray wrote, 7 Sept. 1914, `what this German system meant': Duncan Wilson, Gilbert Murray, OM (1987), 218. 22 Oxford Times, 14 Feb. 1914, 16e. The president of the Navy League had given the same warning earlier in the Union: OM xxx (15 Feb. 1912), 213. 23 Oxford Times, 14 Mar. 1914, 16; 30 May, 11 a±e. See also ibid., 20 June, 6, for the joint University±City meeting chaired by the Mayor. Strachan-Davidson, though a Conservative, thought signing the Covenant incompatible with his position as Master of Balliol. 20

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meeting of the Russell, Palmerston, and Eighty Clubs on the Ulster question and the rise of the Labour Party.24 Britain's continental neighbours aroused far less controversy than the Irish. In January the University French Club had entertained the French Ambassador, who told them that the Entente Cordiale was perfect and complete. In two years the Club's numbers had risen from 54 to 271.25 But Oxford's German students outnumbered the French by far, and as the Encaenia was to show, German scholarship commanded immense respect among the University's senior members.26 When the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, visited Oxford on 3 June to receive his DCL he was greeted everywhere with enormous enthusiasm. It was the centenary of the King of Prussia's visit after Napoleon had been despatched to Elba; and an `English Studies Course for Foreigners', recently instituted, had proved particularly popular with young Germans. At the dinner in the Masonic Hall the Master of University College recounted how a seedling ®r brought home from the Black Forest was now deeply rooted in his garden and growing well. This parable was received with much thumping of champagne bottles upon the tables. No one who was present, the Oxford Magazine commented, `could doubt the waÈhlverwandtschaft between German geist and Oxonian kultur'.27 Four evenings earlier the Union, when entertaining visiting speakers from the Cambridge Union, had agreed, by 96 votes to 60, to `Condemn the Triple Entente as embodying both an unnecessary and an unnatural policy'. This debate reveals a good deal about the Oxford of 1914 and merits a word of explanation. It was not a mere anticipation of the reception which awaited Lichnowsky. Oxford's undergraduates were less likely than their seniors to be impressed by Germany's academic achievements. The speakers for the minority stressed that Britain had been bound to choose between Germany and France, and had made the right choice: if the Triple Entente were to be weakened war would be inevitable. For the majority it was argued that a rapprochement with Germany would be possible for Britain if only the link with France and Russia could be severed. The opening speaker combined this with a little isolationism: we `should not', he said, `dabble promiscuously in problems that were remote from us'.28 These were the standard arguments to be found then in the press and periodicals: the evening carried no hint of undergraduate radicalism and revolt; anything less like the 24

Ibid. 13 June 13 c,d . Ibid. 31 Jan. 1914, 16d. Four Frenchmen matriculated in 1913±14, thirty-four Germans. The University's AngloGerman club had a `new extension': Isis, 9 May 1914, 6. For the German Honorands in summer 1914 see The Twentieth Century, 3. 27 The Times, 4 June, 10c; OM xxxii. 393, 11 June; E. M. Wright, `My Life at Oxford, Pt 2', Oxford, xiv. 3 (Dec. 1956), 88±92. Macan had studied at Jena as a young man. 28 OM xxxii. 375: Cambridge speaker. 25 26

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`King and Country' debate of 1933 could hardly be imagined. The Oxford President, who condemned the Entente for `dividing the European powers into two armed camps, and so encouraging rivalry in armaments and strained relations', bore no resemblance to the `angry young men' of a later day. He was a Conservative who had reorganized the ®nances of Oxford's New Tory Club. He had rowed in two winning Boat-Race crews, held a commission in a Territorial battalion of the Black Watch, and was active in a scheme for helping working-class youngsters to ®nd a better future through emigration.29 Distrust of Russia and sharply opposed views about German intentions were well-worn themes in the Oxford Union as elsewhere.30 Doubts about the Entente were not con®ned to `Little Englander' Liberals. The History of `The Times' records of these years that while its military correspondent . . . continued trying to win support for the turning of a vague Entente into a precise military and naval alliance, his appeal was listened to in the country generally with great reluctance. To admit openly that Britain was no longer free to act independently was unpalatable to Englishmen.31

If a new feature can be discerned in the debate, it lay in the strength of Norman Angell's appeal among paci®c British people who had long relied on the supremacy of their Navy. Talk of a war between the European powers had been repeated too often to sound convincing either to undergraduates or to their seniors. `Perhaps,' the Oxford Magazine commented after Angell's visit in November 1913, `the armies of 2913 will still be preparing for the ``inevitable war''.'32 Neither these views nor the sporting calendar led to any slackening of interest in matters of defence. On 23 May 1914 the barges were crowded to see University, which had made seven bumps in Torpids and won the rugger cup, `go head' in Eights;33 but ®ve days later a demonstration arranged by 29 Isis, 25 Apr. 1914, 9, A. H. M. Wedderburn (Balliol) as the week's `Isis Idol'; G. C. Drinkwater and T. R. B. Sanders, The Boat Race: Centenary History (1929), 127±31. 30 See, for instance, OM xxix (16 Feb. 1911) 208 (L. N. G. Monte®ore, S. H. Wall), xxx (14 Mar. 1912) 277 (L. F. Urwick), xxxi (15 May 1913) 342 (Viscount Sandon). The persecutions in Russian universities were well known in Oxford. Paul Vinogradoff (Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, 1903±25) and Alexander Glazunov (Hon. D.Mus., 1907) had both resigned from Russian academic positions in protest at them; and the fame among mathematicians of Sofya Kovalevskaia (1850±91) had done little for Russia's academic reputation. After studying at Heidelberg and GoÈttingen she had been appointed to a chair at Stockholm. See P. Vinogradoff, `Russian Universities', Pelican Record, vii (Mar. 1905), 147±50. 31 The Twentieth Century Test, 1884±1912 (History of The Times, vol. 3, 1947), 704. The passage refers to the aftermath of the Agadir crisis of 1911. 32 OM xxxii (20 Nov. 1913), 88, in a comment on Norman Angell's visit: see n. 21 above. For the ®ctional output about `the coming war' see I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War (1966), 131± 61. For a skit on these stories see P. G. Wodehouse, The Swoop, or How Clarence Saved England (1909). 33 University bumped Christ Church, Magdalen, and New College to go head on the third day. It was `many years' since any except the three latter colleges had held either headship or second place. New College had been head since 1911. The Times, 25 May, 38e, 28 May, 13d.

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the Imperial Air Fleet Committee was followed by a mass meeting in the Town Hall, where Lord Desborough spoke on the `imperative need for aerial defence'.34 On the day of the Union debate Sir William Robertson inspected more than a thousand of the University contingent of the Of®cers' Training Corps. He arrived late after confusion about his rendezvous with his horse, but pronounced the `turnout and performance of all arms to be excellent', the parade being watched by `a large and, for Oxford, fashionable crowd'. The OTC's military tournament and gymkhana was held in Headington Hill Park on 30 May.35 The contingent's second-in-command was a son of C. R. L. Fletcher, who rowed bow in Oxford's eight and its Henley four. He was to be killed in action ®ve months later.36 Warlike precautions were not con®ned to Oxford's young men. In 1913 a daughter of the Secretary to the Press Delegates was given the task by the University's Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment of obtaining promises of help `in the event of mobilization for war'. One of those from whom she sought a promise was the headmaster of Magdalen College School. He asked her when she expected war to come. `I answered,' May Cannan recorded, ```After the harvest in 1914. The Kiel Canal will be ®nished by then.'''37 By 1914 some parts of Oxford at least were showing an intention of emulating German scholarship. A week or so before the Encaenia the Rector of Exeter brought out an impressive bibliography of `the literary and scienti®c work produced by his college's fellows and tutors in recent times'.38 On 6 July The Times's correspondent noted: `Research students still throng the Three of the University College crew were Etonians. Five of them were members of the OTC. All nine were commissioned and served overseas in the war. Two were killed in action. Five received war decorations or `mentions'. No. 6, the stroke-side `heavy man', J. J. Llewellin, attained Cabinet rank in 1942, was made a peer in 1945, and became Governor-General of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953. The Trinity College eight, which went head in 1938 (Twentieth Century Oxford, xii±xiii and Plate 7.1) were to suffer still worse: six of those nine (four of the six being RAF pilots) did not survive the Second World War. 34

Isis, 23 May 1914, 12, 30 May, 9. Ibid. 23 May, 9, 30 May, 4: Oxford Times, 6 June, 7c. The Oxford and Cambridge OTCs had also been represented at the Olympia Military Tournament, 15 May. 36 Being a University candidate for a regular commission, R. W. Fletcher had been in action as an of®cer of a Howitzer Brigade since the Marne Battle: Balliol College Register, 1833±1933, ed. I. Elliott (1934), 318. An elder brother (Balliol, 1907±10) was killed on 20 March 1915. 37 May Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Kineton, 1976), 68. For predictions that 1914 would be the year of greatest danger see Coming of the First World War, ed. R. J. W. Evans and H. Pogge von Strandmann (1988), 165 (M. Brock). Once the Kiel Canal had been widened to take `Dreadnoughts', the German leaders preferred the prospect of an immediate war to one of `war later', because Russian military strength, which already seemed formidable, was due for a further large increase. 38 L. R. Farnell, Bibliography of the Fellows and Tutors of Exeter College in Recent Times (1914); Athenaeum, 28 Mar. 1914, 450; p. 339 above. Membership ®gures for the Royal Society and the British Academy indicate the position of Oxford and Cambridge in British research and scholarship. In 1910 they had 37.6% of the Royal Society fellowships (science) held by British university members, and 74% of the British Academy fellowships (arts): A. H. Halsey and M. A. Trow, The British Academics (1971), 217±18. Oxford's improved position in the world of 35

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Bodleian.'39 The mixture of military precaution, preoccupation with Ireland, and unre¯ecting con®dence persisted through the ®rst six weeks of the long vacation. At the end of June the OTC camps at Frimley and Aldershot were in full swing. Keble supplied Frimley with two complete platoons, while at Aldershot Oxford's scouting detachment under the Prince of Wales operated with marked success. Primed with their reports, the Oxford commander, J. F. Stenning, an Aramaic scholar who was dean of Wadham, drove `a wedge', as The Times recorded, `into the Cambridge force and split it into two detachments'.40 A number of undergraduates had made plans to join in further military operations across the Irish Channel. Carson's army seems to have been the most powerful magnet; but the Nationalist volunteers also had their partisans.41 A newly elected Christ Church lecturer, J. C. Masterman, was completing a year's study at Freiburg. After the assassinations at Sarajevo he was advised by Wolfgang Michael to go home. He had, however, as he later recorded, `a more than average share of that supposed moral and intellectual superiority which is . . . the curse of British Liberals'. Having read Norman Angell's Great Illusion on the futility of aggressive war, and being con®dent that the statesmen would draw back from the brink, he disregarded this advice and was interned.42 On Friday 31 July some 300 foreign students assembled in Oxford for the Extension Delegacy's summer school.43 Forebodings grew during the weekend, especially among the middle-aged. Vera Brittain, who had won a Somerville exhibition (and whose ®ance and brother were to be killed in the war), recorded in her diary on 3 August: `The great fear now is that our bungling government will declare England's neutrality.'44 By contrast, C. C. J. Webb had thought two days earlier: `Things could scarcely look blacker.' On the Sunday evening (2 August), however, Magdalen's high table had some reassuring news. `Bryce told Hogarth today,' Webb noted in his diary, `that our Govt was determined not to go to war and would declare our neutrality tomorrow. But . . . they make some conditionsÐe.g. that German ships should not pass the straits of Dover.'45 learning had been stressed earlier in Brodrick 344±5, 359, and W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (1900), 6±7. 39 The Times, 6 July, 4d. The Bodleian's holdings had risen since 1888 from 440,000 books to more than a million. 40 Ibid. 24 June, 6e, 27 June, 8e. 41 Information given by the sixth Earl of Harrowby (d. 1987) and S. P. B. Mais (d. 1975). The ®rst (then Viscount Sandon) was in residence. Mais, who had taken his MA in 1913, was then a master at Sherborne School. 42 J. C. Masterman, On the Chariot Wheel (1975), 96±7. 43 Oxford Times, 8 Aug. 44 Vera Brittain, War Diary, 1913±1917, ed. A. Bishop and T. Smart (1981), 84. 45 Bodl. MS Eng. Misc. e 1159. Hogarth, like Webb, was a fellow of Magdalen. At the ®rst Cabinet meeting of 2 Aug. it had been decided to reassure the French about the Channel. For similar fears and hopes in Cambridge on that Sunday see Walter Layton, Dorothy (1961), 56±7.

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Webb did not know that a German ultimatum had just been delivered in Brussels, and that even Bryce had admitted `violation of Belgium' to be a casus belli.46 On 3 August Bryce's world, in which the German armies might be hoped to respect Belgian neutrality, at least to the extent of con®ning their advance to the Ardennes, faded away; and H. H. Asquith and Edward Grey, the Balliol pair who ran British foreign policy and dominated the Commons, moved quickly.47 `War declared on Germany before midnight yesterday,' Webb recorded on 5 August, `the Schools converted into a hospital . . . Greats list out: Edward Bridges and Hauer Firsts: wrote to both. It was odd writing to Hauer, who is a German subject.'48 Thomas Case, who was at Weymouth, told various Corpus undergraduates that, if they volunteered and served with the colours beyond the end of the long vacation, they would no longer be regarded as members of the college. When this became known in Oxford, an informal meeting of Corpus fellows drew up a countermanding circular which was despatched urgently to reassure the college's actual and prospective volunteers.49

` m r rae b urn' l ook s bac k We didn't listen to Matthew Arnold. We've never thoroughly turned out and cleaned up our higher schools. We've resisted instruction. We've preferred to maintain our national luxuries of a bench of bishops and party politics. And compulsory Greek and the university sneer. . . Well . . . we've got to plough through with itÐwith what we haveÐas what we are.

In his novel about the home front in the war's early years H. G. Wells has `Mr. Raeburn' saying this towards the end of 1915.50 `Raeburn' was a portrait of C. F. G. Masterman, with whom Wells was friendly. Masterman had lost his parliamentary seat on promotion to the Cabinet early in 1914 and had failed to ®nd another. Obliged because of this to resign a year later, he had become director of wartime propaganda in Wellington House.51 The 46

Wilson Harris, J. A. Spender (1946), 38. On the expectation of the German advance not crossing the Sambre±Meuse river line see Coming of the First World War (n. 37), 149±51. 48 J. W. Hauer was allowed after some delay to register for an Oxford postgraduate degree: Webb diary, 2 Dec. 1914. 49 G. B. Grundy, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 110. Con®rmed by W. Phelps (1882± 1963), Vice-President of Corpus in 1914. According to Grundy, Case had to be removed from a Weymouth street where he was blocking the movement of a company of recruits. 50 H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916), 348. On the `Oxford manner' see p. 819 above and Donald Hankey, A Student in Arms (17th edn 1917), 160±1. This collection of pieces about the war had been published ®rst in book form in Apr. 1916. Hankey (Corpus Christi, 1907±10) was killed in action, Oct. 1916. 51 Lucy Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman (1939), 372. Masterman had been at Christ's, Cambridge, and had taken a ®rst in the Natural Sciences tripos (1895) and another in Moral Sciences, Pt 2 (1896). He had been president of the Cambridge Union and had been elected to a fellowship of Christ's in 1900. 47

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aftermath of the Battle of Loos was hardly the time for producing a balanced appraisal of English secondary and higher education during the ®fty years since the Taunton Report; but Masterman was a person of greater capacity than some of Oxford's pre-war critics. His strictures on British education, as it was seen under the harsh test of war, are not to be dismissed lightly, although any judgements advanced eighty years later are likely to be less sweeping than his. Oxford's progress was dogged during the nineteenth century by two disadvantages peculiar to itself. First, creating a proper system of teaching and examining had entailed giving classical learning something close to a monopoly: the ordained fellows of the Oxford colleges had not been capable in 1800 of teaching anything else. Secondly, the University had a strong High-Church tradition and the only professional group seeking its accreditation consisted of those aiming at the Anglican priesthood. Britain did not have an administrative cadre whose members needed university quali®cations. Consequently the disappearance of the `confessional state' involved Oxford in a period of intense controversy. The college fellows emerged from this disliking not merely controversial theology, but any undergraduate studies which seemed novel, speculative, or potentially divisive; and their tradition biased them against university subjects, such as modern languages and engineering, which could be thought materialistic or commercial. There were no `forced marches' for the British during the century: unlike their continental neighbours they escaped revolution, invasion, and civil war. The removal of the twin initial drawbacks was therefore bound to be slow. It was made still slower by the fact that the University, like its rival, was sited in a fairly small town, and consisted of colleges which commanded large endowments and strong allegiance from their old members. Oxford was thus dif®cult to reform, but, as newer, more centralized, and less well-resourced institutions found, almost equally dif®cult to challenge.52 These basic constraints are quickly summarized: the dif®culty lies in evaluating their effects. In any university the arrangements may tend to correspond to yesterday's climate rather than today's; and the service provided may re¯ect not so much society's current needs, however interpreted, as the professional interests and inclinations of the academic staff. The natural bias of academics tends to be anti-vocational, since an instrumental view of higher education can hardly be welcome to them. Universities may thus give a distorted and out-of-date image of social attitudes and intensify mental habits which have lost some of their value. Did Oxford's particular dif®culties, combined with the more general ones in higher education, mean that the University was responsible for a large share in the British (and still more the English) defects to which `Raeburn' referred? 52

See pp. 64±5 above.

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It is tempting to give a largely negative answer. As `Raeburn's' remarks implied, the crucial defects lay in secondary education: Oxford's heads and fellows had to do what they could with those sent to them by the schools. If `towns and parishes' had been authorized in the 1860s to levy rates in order to establish secondary schools, as the Taunton Commission recommended, only the merest handful might have used the authority.53 It would have been beyond any university's power to eliminate the social snobbery which underlay the least desirable features of classical schooling in Victorian England. The central control over secondary and higher education which Matthew Arnold admired in Germany made without doubt for a certain kind of ef®ciency; but the price was high. By the end of 1915 C. F. G. Masterman was as eager as anyone to spread the news of Treitschke's baleful in¯uence, and to point out how badly the few rebels had been treated in a university system staffed by state servants.54 The Greats course, which resulted from Oxford's preponderant classical tradition, was the admiration of the university world; and in philosophy it provided a remarkable combination of classical and modern. Britain had probably received some damage by 1914, whether for peace or war, from Oxford's inclination to disparage entrepreneurship. The extent of this damage, especially where the country's industrial leadership was concerned, remains a disputed question.55 It may have been a misfortune that England lacked Technische Hochschulen. That resulted, however, not from Oxford's defects, but from the fact that in English cities the need for higher technical education had become apparent just as the university colleges were being founded.56 Some English employers were immovable in the belief that lads should start in the works when in their teens: if they needed college training they ought to have it near to the factories and the forges.57 Workingclass educational opportunities did not depend greatly on the University. Even after the 1902 Education Act the number of poor boys who stayed in 53

SIC (1864), pt 1, 656. M. E. Sadler, `Government and the Universities', McGill University Magazine, xiv. 4 (Dec. 1915), 484±90, republished, Selections from Michael Sadler, Studies in World Citizenship, ed. J. H. Higginson (Liverpool, 1979), 105±7. C. E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700±1914 (1980) gives an account of restrictions which applied to German universities before 1914: see especially pp. 268±9, 315 (Max Weber's articles, Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 June, 20 Sept. 1908). Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities, trans. F. Thilly and W. E. Elwang (1906) had made similar criticisms. Sadler had alluded delicately to these in the preface to the English edition, p. xii. 55 For a survey of recent discussion see R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (1992), 37±46. 56 Eric Ashby, Technology and the Academics (1958), 64±5. See, however, p. 638 above. 57 PP 1910 xxii. 630 (Board of Education Report, 1908±9); H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (2nd edn 1911), 168±9, 173; C. Erickson, British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery (1959), 35. For views on where higher technology training should be located see p. 12. In 1870 1% of British 17-year-olds had been in full-time education: in 1902 the ®gure was still only 2%: British Social Trends since 1900, ed. A. H. Halsey (1988), 269. 54

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secondary education to 18 was too small to produce many applicants for Oxford despite any alteration which might have been made in Responsions to attract them. The MacDonnell report on the civil service, published in April 1914, drew attention to the insuf®ciency of the facilities for progress up the educational ladder from the primary school to the university. Finally, Oxford was not the only English university to leave its graduates ignorant of the modern world. In 1901 a fellow of a Cambridge college received the Archbishop of Canterbury's invitation to become Bishop of Rangoon. He found that his brother, also a Cambridge fellow, was as ignorant as himself of Rangoon's whereabouts. They decided to start the search for it in the map of Africa.58 These are the elements of a partial, but not of a total defence. Oxford had been accused, with justice, since the 1870s of distorting the school work of many boys who would never reach any university.59 By 1914 the arguments for `compulsory Greek' were far outweighed by those against it:60 by impeding the creation of a multi-subject entrance examination to Oxford it encouraged a generation of schoolmasters to allow the premature and onesided specialization which has long been the scourge of English secondary schooling.61 A country in which some of the most capable boys and girls can still remain almost ignorant of science may not have seen the last of `compulsory Greek's' ill effects.62 At the other end of the scale, an honours course attracting most of the ablest undergraduates which impinged on the modern world only through some eminent philosophers had long been recognized as one-sided. The 1850 Royal Commission may have underrated the dif®culty 58 PP 1914 xvi. 36. For local education authority award-holders at Oxford and Cambridge, 1911±12, see p. 553. The `ladder' created by the Education Act, 1902, had not been put in place until 1907 when grants to secondary schools were made dependent on the provision of 25% of free places for pupils from public elementary schools: British Social Trends, 232. A. R. Whitham (1863±1930), a scholar of Magdalen College, 1881, and Herbert Ward (1866±1938), a scholar of Corpus Christi College, 1885, had both reached Bradford Grammar School from public elementary schools. Both took ®rsts in Greats and achieved careers of some distinction: PP 1914 xvi. 277. H. J. C. Knight, the brother consulted, told the Rangoon story to a meeting years later: D. H. S. Cranage, Not Only a Dean (1952), 34. 59 P. 11. 60 Curzon, Principles and Methods of University Reform (1909), 101±7; C. M. Bowra, Memories (1966), 331. Council schools apart, in 1912 154 of 503 secondary schools `on the grant list' in England and Wales taught Greek: it was taught in only 29 of the 382 council schools: Educational Statistics, 1911±12, table 38: PP 1913 xlix. 544. 61 Michael Sanderson, The Missing Stratum: Technical School Education in England, 1900± 1990s (1994), 163±5; Letters to `The Times', 1884±1922, Written by Thomas Case, ed. R. B. Mowat (1927), 58±95. In Case's view the classics were central, all the other subjects which schoolmasters tried to introduce being `specialisms'. He wanted `those who proceed to Oxford and Cambridge' to learn, when at school, `Greek and Latin classics, modern languages, mathematics, and mechanics, the mother of natural sciences': ibid. 71. 62 See Advancing A Levels (1988), `the Higginson Report', 11. While the harm done by general ignorance of science and technology is undoubted, whether this educational defect has contributed to shortages of scientists and technologists remains doubtful.

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of combining ancient and modern history in an undergraduate syllabus;63 but a lament by Raymond Asquith about his education remains eloquent. He had just capped his ®rst in Greats and University prizes with an All Souls fellowship; yet he was `®lled', he wrote, `with a kind of intellectual despair. . . the feeling of being behind hand with one's foundationsÐa blank ignorance of history and economy'.64 To put a high value on classical education was anything but a mistake. Pre-war Oxford's faults were, ®rst, to adhere to a classical entrance requirement which not merely did widespread damage to secondary schools, but, according to some of the best judges, actually harmed classical studies themselves, and, secondly, to leave most of the University's ablest undergraduates ignorant of the modern world's history, languages, cultures, institutions, and scienti®c achievement. In his evidence to the MacDonnell Commission in 1912 Stanley Leathes (for whom see p. 814) referred to Greats as `the widest and completest School that exists in any university'. Professor Christopher Brooke's judgement that the attitude of some `proponents' of Greats approached the `mystical' hardly seems unfair. Some of Oxford's classical tutors were still following the path which Jowett had worked out. To them the study of Plato seemed to offer what Professor Turner has called `a humanistic path toward the secular'. In a work published in 1912 R. W. Livingstone wrote: `If anyone comes to these pages looking for a portrait of the ordinary Greek he will be disappointed . . . To understand [the Greek] genius, we must look . . . at the men . . . in whom it was most fully realized, at its ``saints''.'65 This enormous prestige of Greats, allied to a reluctance to see the possibilities in the study of modern languages, had helped to mask the peculiarities of a system in which neither of the two largest honours schools provided a well-balanced syllabus. For centuries such a syllabus had been seen as involving two elements, ®rst, useful knowledge, and, secondly, a training in techniques for handling and organizing it. Modern history was strong in the ®rst component, Greats in the second: neither combined both in substantial amounts. The Greats tutors either maintained that useful information was not needed in an honours course, or exaggerated the extent to which an acquaintance with short periods of Greek and Roman history could be relevant to current problems.66 Their opposite 63

P. 42. To H. T. Baker, 28 Dec. 1902: John Jolliffe, Raymond Asquith, Life and Letters (1980), 101. As a candidate for University scholarships Raymond had maintained his skill in Greek and Latin composition, and the minutiae of classical scholarship, after completing Classical Moderations. 65 PP 1912±13 xv. 139 (cf. n. 60 above); C. N. L. Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge, 1870±1990 (1993), 243; F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), 35; R. W. Livingstone, The Greek Genius and its Meaning for Us (1912), 18, 19. 66 To some effect: Curzon based his (deeply mistaken) argument against the evacuation from the Dardanelles on the disasters of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse: M. Bowra, Memories (1966), 141. R. M. Ogilvie pointed out in Latin and Greek (1964), 121, that the study of the 64

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numbers in Modern History saw Firth's proposal to increase the element of technique, not as improving the mental training which the course provided, but as making it a narrow vocational affair for intending teachers.67 The pamphlet of 1909 headed `Wanted! A New School at Oxford' had been well named.68 Important projects and proposals were afoot in Oxford in 1914. The Engineering Laboratory was being completed: Oxford degrees for women and a Modern Greats course were under discussion; but it would be years before Britain's leaders would bene®t from these changes.69 A great deal had been left to the terrible accelerator of war. A. L. Smith, who had tried as hard as anyone to relate Oxford's studies to the modern world, saw the war, on its outbreak, as providing `a splendid educational opportunity'. He was not wrong, although the ®rst of his adjectives could hardly have been less felicitous.70 In March 1915, for instance, `Representative Government' was added to Oxford's Modern History special subjects, evidence given in 1914 to the select committee on parliamentary procedure being included in the texts set for it.71 Two months later the Hebdomadal Council agreed to appoint a committee `to report on the advisability of instituting a course of study and examination in political economy, political science, and public law leading to a degree, and, if thought desirable, to prepare a scheme for the consideration of Council'.72 By creating a pause in the battles between parties, and evoking both a demand for ef®cient national organization and great social changes, the war removed many of the obstacles to modernization which have been described in Chapter 25. The story of their removal has been told in the concluding volume of this History; but some of the reforms enacted in Oxford during and soon after the war have been named for convenience in the appendix to this chapter. Even in the aggregate they did not amount to root and branch reform; but, by the end of 1920 when the radical post-war mood had begun to ebb, Oxford, like the world in which it operated, had been much changed. The criticisms of Oxford, overt and implied, which the war stimulated, all pointed one way. In June 1916 the Board of Education's Consultative Committee on Scholarships reported: Roman Empire provided little guidance on the problems of race, religion, and colour which the British faced in India. See pp. 347±9 above. 67

Pp. 370±2. Bodl. G. A. Oxon 88 761 (12). The pamphlet called (p. 4) `for, as it were, a modern-side Greats'. See Sir William Osler, The Old Humanities and the New Science (1919) and The Twentieth Century, 112. 69 By 1914 the term `Modern Greats' was familiar to Oxford undergraduates: see Isis, 13 June 1914, 2±3 (quotation from Sidney Ball's article in The American Oxonian). 70 Rowy Mitchison, `An Oxford Family', Arthur Lionel Forster Smith, ed. E. C. Hodgkin (privately printed, 1979), 76. 71 Faculty Board notice, 13 Mar. 1915: Gazette, xlv (22 Apr. 1915), 533. 72 Chester (n. 14), 24. 68

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869

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge should remodel their ®rst examinations (Responsions and Previous) and make them a satisfactory test of the general education necessary for useful study at a University. No minor reform would be more useful.73

A year later the committee under Stanley Leathes, appointed to revise the Civil Service examination, produced a scheme which they hoped would be A corrective at once to the narrowness of interests and knowledge and the lack of useful accomplishment which may be the defects of the specialist, and to the ignorance of modern conditions which may be the defect of students too exclusively devoted to ancient learning . . . The effects of the war in suspending university studies, breaking up traditions, and shaking preconceived ideas, render possible changes more fundamental than any committee would have proposed in ordinary times and than the various vested interests would have tolerated before the war.74

In August 1916 the Prime Minister had appointed committees to investigate the position of modern languages and science in schools and universities. Both reported early in 1918. The ®rst, noting that a national scheme of university scholarships had just been recommended, stressed the importance of awarding some of these in modern languages.75 The science committee reported: All the witnesses we examined who have expressed any opinion on the subject have been unanimous in condemning the retention of Greek as a necessary subject for a degree at Oxford and Cambridge, and with this condemnation we are fully in accord.76

A Swansea steel-master, giving evidence before the Royal Commission on University Education in Wales in 1917, said: I took the chemistry school at Oxford . . . and have been engaged in the production of special steels ever since I left college; and I can see very well now what was lacking in the Oxford chemistry school in my time, and the enormous advantage which might have accrued if we had been in touch with the practical industries . . . The opportunity is there now. It was not there before the war.77

These statements and recommendations were important in themselves; but their real signi®cance lies in the glimpse which they give of the climate change brought by the war in every institution, and in Oxford not least. `Mr Raeburn' had too close a concern with the war's progress to look at its effects. He was dominated by the thought that defects in the school and 73

PP. 1916 viii. 388. The Committee had been appointed in March 1913. PP. 1917±18 viii. 131. See also p. 497 above (Strong, Oct. 1916). 75 PP. 1918 ix. 433. 76 Ibid. 529. See also resolutions of conference chaired by Lord Rayleigh, 3 May 1916. 77 PP. 1917±18 xii. 619. The last two remarks quoted refer to the Welsh university colleges rather than to Oxford. 74

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university systems were preventing the British from ®ghting the war with the ef®ciency needed. `Three times this year,' he said, `we have missed victories because of the badness of our staff work . . . It's because the sort of man we turn out from our public schools has never learned how to . . . do anything smartly and quickly.'78 That there was evidence to back this view can hardly be doubted, although at Loos the commander-in-chief had been far more at fault than his junior of®cers, and in war the search for scapegoats seldom ceases.79 Possibly Oxford had failed some of its young men as badly as had their public schools; but `Raeburn' may have been overlooking the change, much stressed already in this volume, between the `muddied oafs' about whom Kipling had written in 1901 and their successors ten years later.80 Ronald Poulton, whose doings in Balliol were mentioned in Chapter 31, exempli®ed this change. He captained the University's rugby ®fteen in 1911, and the England team three years later. During this captaincy England won the `triple crown' for the second year running; and in the ®nal match in 1914 against France he set a record by scoring four tries.81 By then he had been capped seventeen times for England; but, though constantly muddied, he was no oaf. Poulton's Oxford record, which included a second in the new Engineering school, reveals a thoughtful man whose capacity to work hard was not limited to rugby. By going to be trained in a large Manchester engineering ®rm, and taking an evening course in the city's college of technology, he learned a good deal about the working class. He regarded trade unionism as `the workman's only redress against exploitation', but was concerned that some trades should have so much more political muscle than others. He supported the Workers' Educational Association strongly, and pleaded in the Sportsman for putting rugby `on an immovable basis among all classes of the community'. After England had defeated Ireland at Twickenham in February 1914 he was found deep in theological argument with a member of the Pusey House staff. He had been the secretary of the Balliol Boys' Club and much of his time after he had gone down was given to boys' clubs and to studying the problems of running them. Holding a Territorial commission (after service in the Oxford OTC), he joined his battalion on 2 August 1914, volunteered at once for overseas service, and was killed by a sniper at the age of 25 on 5 May 1915. The tributes to him give a glimpse of the qualities which contemporaries then hoped to ®nd in an Oxford man. `He . . . played,' in the words of the Irish rugby captain, `for his side and never for himself . . . It was as much a pleasure to play against him as with him.' A sergeant in 78

Mr Britling (n. 50), 349. John Terraine, The First World War (1984 edn), 92±3. 80 For Kipling's phrase see Ch. 31, n. 101. 81 E. B. Poulton, Life of Ronald Poulton (1919), 222±7. For convenience the name of Poulton is used here. For the change of name in the spring of 1914 see Ch. 31, n. 71. 79

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a neighbouring battalion of a different regiment wrote that in his unit Captain Poulton had been `looked on as a personal friend, and I think he was known by every man in the British army'.82 The complaints of late 1915 concerned Oxford's latest products. Even if their education had not brought them to the highest competence, it had certainly done nothing to impair their courage and tenacity. A rather different question concerns the education of those Oxford men of earlier generations, including Asquith and Grey, who exercised a controlling in¯uence on British policy in the immediately pre-war years. Why was the threat from Germany, which seems (as always) so clear in retrospect,83 not seen clearly at the time? Its nature may be brie¯y summarized. In Germany an unstable and discredited Kaiser, and a Chancellor who commanded little political or constitutional authority, were confronted by army leaders used to military supremacy and convinced that it was slipping from them. This regime, lacking both effective parliamentary control and a guiding hand, was drawn always towards demagogic militarism, and eventually to the wild gamble of war.84 The various German leaders had the rickety Austro-Hungarian empire as their one reliable ally. By 1914 they dared not restrain Vienna from seeking prestige by crushing the Serbs; and, once they judged the best time for the `inevitable war' to have come, they had little inducement to exercise this restraint. In May 1914 it took no more than a few days in Berlin for Colonel House from Texas to realize how things stood.85 The question posed is not one about the war crisis itself. Asquith's conduct of that is hard to fault. He held his Cabinet together with great skill until the German government left him and his colleagues with only one possible course of action. `A House of Commons,' Harold Begbie wrote, `that had hesitated an hour after the invasion of Belgium would have been swept out of existence by the wrath and indignation of the people.'86 No British policy devised to deter Germany from making war could have overcome isolationist attitudes at home, or had the slightest effect in Berlin, without informed and determined leadership over a span of years from both Liberals and Conservatives. Oxford does not seem to have contributed much to supplying such leadership. Four men who stood high in British 82 Ibid. 214, 219±20, 258±60, 298±306, 366; P. Guedalla, Supers and Supermen (1920), 248±53. Engineering honours had become available in 1910. Poulton was one of four to gain them in 1911. 83 Coming of the First World War (n. 37), 164±5; R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870±1914 (1936), 469±71, 481±3; Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958), 99. 84 On the `gamble' see Avner Offer, `Going to War in 1914: a Matter of Honour?', Politics and Society, 23 (1995), 222; P. M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers (1979), 213 (L. C. F. Turner). 85 Burton J. Hendrick, Walter H. Page (2 vols, New York, 1923), i. 295±6, 299; Charles Seymour, Intimate Papers of Colonel House (4 vols 1926±8), i. 267±70. 86 [Harold Begbie], The Mirrors of Downing Street (1920), 51.

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politics during the pre-war periodÐLeo Amery, Herbert Samuel, J. A. Simon, and F. E. SmithÐhad all gained Oxford ®rsts in the 1890s. Amery and Simon had won ®rsts in Greats and All Souls fellowships. Both of the Liberals had become cabinet ministers by 1914: both of the Conservatives were prominent spokesmen on defence problems.87 None of the four helped colleagues with fewer educational advantages to go beyond party slogans and to think seriously about the dangers by which the country was faced. Simon and Samuel spoke during the war crisis with a notable disregard for what had long been known everywhere, namely the German commanders' war plan to attack France by way of Belgium.88 At Manchester on 25 July Simon adjured his hearers to resolve that, during the crisis, `the part which this country plays shall from beginning to end be the part of a mediator.'89 He did not explain how the British could remain mediators if summoned either to help the Belgians under the terms of the 1839 treaty, or to stop the German navy from using the Channel to bombard the French coast. On the evening of 2 August Samuel told his wife of his continuing hope that the German army would not `invade Belgium'.90 Amery, having been in Berlin during the Boer War, had no illusions on that score; but his view of British policy now seems remarkable. `We are not a part of Europe,' he told Milner in May 1915, even if the most important unit of the British community lies off the European coast. The war against a German domination of Europe was only necessary because we had failed to make ourselves suf®ciently strong and united as an Empire to be able to afford to disregard the European balance.91

F. E. Smith wrote to his wife from France in October 1914 to express his remorse for the extravagance which had left her short of money; `but the one thing,' he added, `I never anticipated was what has happened.' Unfortunately he had not been confronted by Miss Cannan's remark about the Kiel Canal.92 On this issue the Prime Minister was a better advertisement for high achievement at Oxford than any of these four. As early as November 1908 he told Balfour that the Germans' `internal conditions . . . were so unsatisfactory that they might be driven to the wildest adventures'.93 But his later 87 See, for example Parl. Deb. 4 July 1912, 5S xxxx. 1340±52 (Amery); F. E. Smith, Unionist Policy and Other Essays (1913), 77±8. 88 Amery referred to this plan openly, 4 July 1912 (n. 87 above). 89 The Times, 27 July, 7e. See also Manchester Guardian, 27 July, 8c. 90 Samuel Papers, House of Lords Record Of®ce, A 157/697, fos 54±5. 91 To Milner, 26 May 1915: Leo Amery Diaries, 1896±1929, ed. John Barnes and David Nicholson (1980), 116. 92 P. 861. 15 Oct.: John Campbell, Birkenhead (1983), 384. In Sept. 1914 F. E. Smith told a London meeting that Germany's aggressive intentions had been known for years, but that, until 4 Aug., they had been spoken of only `with a delicacy and reticence which were proper in times of peace': The Times, 12 Sept., 10c, d. 93 Balfour to Lansdowne, 6 Nov. 1908: K. Young, A. J. Balfour (1963), 271.

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remarks did not show much understanding of the countries with which he was dealing. He compared Bethmann Hollweg to Abraham Lincoln, and attributed the harshness of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (23 July 1914) to `the Austrians [being] quite the stupidest people in Europe'.94 He did not ask whether these impossibly harsh terms might imply Berlin's sanction for the Austrian leaders to shore up their crumbling in¯uence by smashing Serbia.95 The `tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority' which he had identi®ed humorously as Balliol's hallmark was no longer enough for a statesman.96 These eminent Oxonians had never been taught to apply their trained minds to the institutions and the problems of the world in which they operated.97 The need for syllabuses which might throw light on the present day had scarcely been appreciated in Oxford until the last years before the war; and it would be some time before the dif®culties in teaching and examining which applied to honours courses stretching to the contemporary world could be fully mastered. Only then would the validity of such courses be unquestioned everywhere.98 An absence of insight about the European situation certainly did not betoken frivolity or lack of concern in the Premier or his colleagues. `War,' Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley on 3 August, `or anything that seems likely to lead to war is always popular with the London mob . . . How one loathes such levity.'99 Like his juniors he knew his University's defects: like him they bore its stamp and held it in affection. During the First World War C. R. Attlee would take an imaginary walk through Oxford when under shell-®re or as zero hour neared;100 and as an ex-Prime Minister of 70 he testi®ed to the `abiding love of the city and the University, and especially for his own college' which his undergraduate years had given him.101 Lawrence Jones took much the same view. Looking back after thirty-six years, he wrote: 94 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1954), 460 n.1; Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 26 July 1914: H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia, ed. M. and E. Brock (1982) 125±6. 95 For Berlin's knowledge of, and sanction for, the unacceptable terms of the Austrian ultimatum see S. E. Miller, S. M. Lynn-Jones, and S. Van Evera, Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (1991), 266, 273. 96 Asquith was speaking at the dinner of Balliol MPs to celebrate his premiership: The Times, 23 July 1908, 12c. 97 For Philip Kerr's forecast about a German attack on France through Belgium see Ch. 31, n. 210. 98 See Chester (n. 14), chs. 3, 4, and 5. 99 Letters to Venetia, 148. Asquith's third son, Arthur (New College), who was to have a distinguished war career, spoke in the same way: Champion Redoubtable: Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914±45, ed. Mark Pottle (1998), 205. 100 Earl Attlee mentioned this when receiving the Freedom of Oxford City, 28 Feb. 1956. I am grateful to Professor M. R. D. Foot, who was present, for this information. 101 C. R. Attlee, As It Happened (1954), 16. Clearly Attlee was not worried by having gone through life `looking at things through Oxford spectacles' (John Perry, 1903, Pt 1, 502). He might have been equally unimpressed by the theory (advanced in Walter Ellis's book, 1994) about an `Oxbridge Conspiracy'.

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Towards the end of the ®rst Great War, when I was ill, severely wounded, halfstarved, sleepless, and a prisoner of war among the sands of Pomerania, it was Balliol Chapel that rendered me ®rst-aid . . . When my attention had wandered during . . . sermons, I had been used to read the memorial tablets on the Chapel walls . . . One of these . . . was inscribed in Greek, a passage, not from the Gospels, but from . . . Aristotle. I knew just enough Greek to construe it after a fashion, and it was . . . in Greek that I repeated it to myself for comfort in my troubles.102 102

Edwardian Youth, 31±2. The tablet commemorates Evelyn Abbott and Sir John Conroy. Translated the inscription reads: `Yet even in these [chance events] nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility and greatness of soul': Nichomachean Ethics, I. 11, 1100 b 30. Aristotle is discussing whether chance can affect virtue and happiness. For Abbott's misfortunes see pp. 337±8 above. For Cecil Rhodes and an Aristotelian doctrine see the commentary to Plate 9.

Appendix A

Changes in the University's Statutes

The list below gives a number of changes in the University's statutes which relate closely to its doings before the First World War, but were enacted after its outbreak. The date given is that of acceptance by Convocation, except for changes initiated by the statutory Commission appointed under the 1923 Act, where it is the assent of the Privy Council. The Gazette reference for the Convocation meeting concerned is given in brackets. 1 24 November 1914. Hebdomadal Council: members elected by heads of houses reduced from six to three, those elected by Congregation increased from six to nine (Gazette, xlv. 203±5. This needed Privy Council approval, which was given, 3 February 1915: xlv. 419). 2 15 May 1917. Oxford D.Phil. instituted (xlvii. 448±50). 3 5 June 1917. Women admitted to medical studies and First Examination for BM (xlvii. 504). 4 5 February 1919. Italian professorship established (xlix. 238). 5 12 March 1919. French professorship established (xlix. 328±9). 6 24 February 1920. BD and DD opened to non-Anglicans (l. 434±5). 7 3 March 1920. Compulsory Greek in Responsions abolished (l. 471±3). Cambridge was slower in making this move: The Twentieth Century, 37. 8 11 May 1920. Full membership of the University opened to women: this included eligibility for all degrees except (until 1935) BD and DD (l. 608±13). 9 30 November 1920. Honour school of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Modern Greats) established (li. 233±4). 10 16 May 1922. Final Honour school of Theology examiners no longer need be in priest's orders, Church of England (lii. 562). 11 18 March 1924. Retirement age for professors, etc, established in connection with superannuation provisions (liv. 446±53. Privy Council approval given 6 February 1925). 12 17 June 1924. Hebdomadal Council members to be elected by Congregation, and no longer partly by heads and professors (liv. 713. Privy Council approval given 6 February 1925). 13 1 February 1926. Responsions converted into a University entrance examination (Commissioners' Statute approved by Privy Council). 14 30 April 1926. Convocation's approval to be required only when Statute has been accepted in Congregation by less than two-thirds of those voting (Commissioners' Statute approved by Privy Council). 15 26 January 1932. `Examination in Holy Scripture' (`Divvers Prelim') abolished. This was accepted nem. con. by Congregation and was not therefore put to Convocation (lxii. 288±4). Convocation's approval was given nem. con. in all cases except no. 7, which was adopted by 434 votes to 359. No. 8 was accepted nem. con. by Congregation and Convocation after amendments to restrict Faculty Board memberships and

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University examinerships to men had been defeated in Congregation by 108 votes to 43 and 104 votes to 33.

B

Institutions affecting British universities established after 1914

Founded Founded Founded Founded Founded Founded

1915 1917 1919 1919 1919 1921±2

Department of Scienti®c and Industrial Research Secondary School Examinations Council (see p. 562) University Grants Committee Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals Association of University Teachers National Union of Students

The scheme `of State Scholarships tenable at university institutions and open to pupils in grant-aided secondary schools' was initiated in 1920: PP 1921 xi. 90±1. The University Grants Committee's tables showing `universities and university colleges in receipt of Treasury grant' included Oxford and Cambridge for the ®rst time in 1922±3: University Grants Committee, Report for 1922±3 (1924), 3.

Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1 Introduction A reforming era 1 The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800±1833 Note. The Oriel Noetics 2 The European university in the age of revolution, 1789±1850 3 Oxford and its critics, 1800±1835 4 The `unreformed' colleges 5 Balliol: From obscurity to pre-eminence 6 The ascendancy of Oriel `An age of young men' 7 `Lost causes and . . . impossible loyalties': the Oxford Movement and the University 8 The Oxford of Mr Verdant Green 9 An Oxonian `Idea' of a University: J. H. Newman and `Well-Being' 10 From the Tractarians to the Executive Commission, 1845±1854 Four surveys, 1800±1914 11 The examination system 12 Finance and property Note. The University Chest, 1868±1914 13 The University and the city 14 The careers of Oxford men Subjects of study 15 The beginnings of Greats, 1800±1872 II Classical studies II Ancient history 16 Oxford's scienti®c awakening and the role of geology 17 Medical education

M. G. Brock

M. G. Brock Richard Brent L. W. B. Brockliss Asa Briggs M. C. Curthoys John H. Jones K. C. Turpin

P. B. Nockles M. C. Curthoys and C. J. Day Sheldon Rothblatt W. R. Ward

M. C. Curthoys J. P. D. Dunbabin Roland Wilcock C. J. Day M. C. Curthoys

Richard Jenkyns Oswyn Murray N. A. Rupke A. H. T. Robb-Smith

878 18 19 20 21 22

nineteenth-century oxford, part 1

Central institutions, old and new The Bodleian Library The Ashmolean Museum The University Galleries The Taylor Institution The University Museum and Oxford science, 1850±1880 Note. The Radcliffe Science Library

A nationalized university? 23 Reform and expansion, 1854±1871

I. G. Philip A. G. MacGregor J. J. L. Whiteley Giles Barber Robert Fox H. C. Harley

Christopher Harvie

INDEX Reference is frequently made in this volume to the colleges to which undergraduates or fellows belong (as,ÐÐÐof Corpus). Where the references are merely to membership of the college, mentions are not included in the Index. Where a person's date of birth is not known it has been calculated approximately from the date of, and age at, matriculation. `Conservative' and `Liberal' were used with various connotations in nineteenth-century Oxford. They are given an initial capital only where party af®liation is indicated. Page numbers in bold indicate the principal references to entries. Pages xiii±xxxviii of the volume (List and Commentary on the Plates) are indexed as `PC' with the relevant Plate number added.

Abbreviations Bt BNC C. CCC cent. Ch.Ch. Cons. cr. Cttee ed. ICS JCR

Baronet Brasenose College Cambridge Corpus Christi College century Christ Church Conservative created Committee edited Indian Civil Service Junior Common Room

Abbot's Kitchen 741 Abbott, Evelyn (1843±1901): `Abbott and Mans®eld' 338 Pericles as disastrous statesman 338 a typical Jowett tutor 337 works mentioned: History of Greece (1888±1900) 338; Pericles (1891) 338; (with Lewis Campbell) Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (1897) 338 quoted 338 mentioned 61 Abelard, Peter (1079±1142) 39 Aberdare, 1st Lord, cr. 1873 (1815±95) 244 Aberdeen, 4th Earl of (1784±1860) 160 Aberdeen, University of 10, 29, 581, 587, 591 Abiturienten 636 abolition of tests, see Religious Tests Abyssinia 697 academic profession 593, 594, 601, 608 AcadeÂmie des Sciences 454 The Academy 421 accounting and actuarial professions 613 Acland family 663

Kt LMH Lit. Hum. O. Pres. Prof. Princ. SCR succ. V.-C. Visc.

Knight Lady Margaret Hall Literae Humaniores Oxford President Professor Principal Senior Common Room succeeded Vice-Chancellor Viscount

Acland, (Sir) Arthur Herbert Dyke, 13th Bt 1919 (1847±1926): education: B. of Education Consultative Cttee on Examinations 562, 637±8, 824; programme of `citizen-education' 664 O. Univ.: in¯uenced by T. H. Green 662; mistrusts Curzon 832; Somerville's ®rst Treasurer 247; Univ. Extension 663±6; Univ. reform 681 politics: Liberal MP for Rotherham (1885) 666; member of Cabinet (1892) 668 Toynbee Hall 671 Trade Unionism, O. Conference on 674 work mentioned: Studies in Secondary Education (with Llewellyn Smith, 1892) 668 quoted 663, 664±5, 669, 824 mentioned 643, 672, 673, 827, 846 Acland, (Sir) Francis Dyke, succ. as 14th Bt 1926 (1874±1939) 374 Acland, (Sir) Henry Wentworth, cr. Bt 1890 (1815±1900) Plate 40, PC 40 Regius Prof. of Medicine 508, 663, PC 40

880

index

Acland, (Sir) Henry Wentworth, cr. Bt (contd ) BM examinations, initiative to open to women 257 gentry background 493 Lankester's criticisms of 489 lecture audiences 94 Natural Science School: specialized syllabus 490 Ruskin Drawing School trustee 508±9 share of credit for distinguished buildings 761 Univ. Museum, building of 739 quoted 472, 486, 488 mentioned 74, 75, 136, 230, 466, 472, 491, 506, 511, 631, 760 Acland, (Sir) Thomas Dyke, 11th Bt 1871 (1809±98): examinations: local examination scheme 661±2; organizer of school examination 560 Fellow of All Souls 663 quoted 26±7, 240 mentioned 562 Acton, John Emerich, cr. Lord Acton 1869 (1834±1902) 211 Acts of Parliament, see Parliamentary proceedings Adam, James (1732±94) 731 Adam, Robert (1728±92) 731 Adam, William (c.1738±1822) 731 Adderley, James Granville (1861±1942) 672 quoted 189 Addison, Joseph (1672±1719) 37 Adelaide University, see Australia Adkins, (Sir) (William) Ryland, Kt 1911 (1862±1925) 380±1 Admiralty 359 adult education, 593, 634, 637, 661±88 An Adventure, see Jourdain advertising 299 aesthetes, aestheticism, 40, 59±60, 65, 90, 154, 155, 243, 532, Plate 29, PC 29 AEW, see Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Oxford Afghanistan 85, 697 Africa: administrators' con®dence, and later doubt 707 African students at O. 714±15, 803 Africanist 499 Central Africa 689, 710±11 missionaries 710±11 mentioned 690, 692, 707 agnosticism 22, 39, 108 Agricola, see Tacitus agricultural depression, effect of (late 19th cent.):

`a time of arrestation' 600 change in Univ.'s relations with clergy and county families 578 on clerical incomes 578 on coll. contributions 87 on coll. ®nance 116, 165, 215 creation of new chairs after recovery 611 on CUF income 487, 608 ®nancial and psychological 52, 85 no apparent effect on pace of building 762 on resources for science 480 value of Press contributions 654 mentioned 473, 580 agriculture: repairs, rents, leases 71, 81, 215 agriculture (as academic subject): degree and diploma proposals 474±5, 606 as degree subject 472 Diploma in Rural Economy (1909) 474±5, 611 Honour School 613 Institute for Research into Agricultural Economics 704 Pass School 476 Ainley-Walker, Ernest William (1871±1955) 507 Alcibiades (c.450±404 b c ) 37 Aldrich, Henry (1647±1710), Dean of Ch.Ch. (1689±1710): work mentioned: Logic (1691) 316 The Alembic Club 465, 467 Alexandria 101 Alexandria Museum 355 The Algebra of Quantics, see Elliott Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, see Dodgson, Charles: works mentioned All Saints Church (C.) 751 All Saints Church, (Oxford) 676 All Saints School, Bloxham 189 All Souls College 209±20 passim anomalous position preserved (1882) 117 Anson Reading Room 212 Bible clerks 209, 213±14 buildings: Chapel 747; High St front 731 Chancellorship election (1907) 633 Cleveland and Selborne Commissions 72, 213 Codrington Library 212, 391 fellowships: 10 fellowships abolished (1857) 210; 1852 proposals for suppression 210; A. Grant's fellowship 583; analysis of fellowship (1914) 216±19; annual examination 215; appeal to Executive Commissioners over elections (1857±64) 212; Balliol and Ch.Ch. men 210, 216; changes under 1882 Statutes 214±15; election without examination 211; fellows taking

index holy orders 219; ®rst Non-collegiate graduate elected 547; Namier not elected (1911, 1912) 802; ordeal of examinations, Lawrence Jones 789; research fellows 211, 218; schools and colls supplying fellows (1850±1914) 209, 210, 212, 216; social composition 209, 216; see also 217±18 Table 8.1 ®nancial contributions to: Bodleian 214±15, 218; Tutorial Classes Cttee 848; Unattached students 199; Univ. 213±15 foreign affairs, area of special interest 220 founder's kin 209±10; last fellow survivor (till 1915) 216; privilege abolished (1857) 210 high academic standard established (1857) 210±14 honorary fellowships 211 imperial connections 219±20 in¯uence of Round Table (from 1910) 695, 715 low academic standing in 1850 209 political tradition, MPs 219, 633 prize fellowships 835 property development 215 quali®cation for Wardenship 130 recruits to Milner's Kindergarten 694 Statutes (1882) 211, 214±15 subjects: active tutors and researchers in history 219; economics 857; Greats men dominate entry 216; importance in development of law school 391; law and history connection 117, 216, 611; Lectureship in Private International Law 391; legal tradition 210; Readership in Indian Law (1878) 214±15, 705; Readerships in English Law and Roman Law 391 Visitor (Archbishop of Canterbury) 212 mentioned 129, 201, 714 Allahabad University, Oxford and Cambridge Hostel 711±12 Allbutt, (Sir) Thomas Clifford, KCB 1907 (1836±1925): on disadvantage of a Commission 830 Regius Prof. of Medicine, C. 830 quoted 830 Allen, (Sir) Carleton Kemp, Kt 1952 (1887±1966) 216 Allen, (Sir) Hugh Percy, KCVO 1928 (1869±1946): Heather Prof. of Music 440 conductor of Bach Choir 440 Allen, Percy Stafford (1869±1933), Pres. of CCC (1924±33): work mentioned: edition of Letters of Erasmus 618 mentioned 629

881

Allen, Thomas William (1862±1950) 330 Allfrey, Edward 756, 775 Alpinists 138 Alternative Prospectus 99 Alumni Oxonienses, see Foster, Joseph: work mentioned Amalgamated Society of Engineers 679 America, see United States of America The American Commonwealth, see Bryce, James: work mentioned American Universities, see United States of America American War of Independence 645 Amery, Leopold (Charles Maurice) Stennett (1873±1955): Aristophanes at Oxford (1894) 798, PC 29 Beit Professorship, in¯uence on founding 692 colonial editor of The Times 694 Co-Ef®cients and Compatriots Clubs, membership of 695 Colonial Secretary 692, 694 Fellow of All Souls 220, 695 MP 696 quoted 872 Amos, Andrew (1791±1860) 385 Analogy of Religion, see Butler, Joseph: work mentioned Anatolia 354 anatomy 505 lecture theatre Plate 44, PC 44 Moore building 756 See also Human Anatomy ancient history 333±60 passim development of scienti®c methods and professional study 357 increase of interest in (1880s) 324 Modern History School, question of united course with 42 professorship in (1910) 611 relevance to modern problems exaggerated 867 Sub-Faculty 344 textbooks produced (1880±1912) 342 use of modern authorities 312 weaknesses of publishing tradition 342 mentioned 222 Ancient Law, see Maine, (Sir) Henry James: work mentioned The Ancient Mariners 528 Anderson, John George Clark (1870±1952) 342 Andrewes, Antony (1910±1990): Wykeham Prof. of Ancient History 342 Anecdota Oxoniensia 615 Angel Hotel 748

882

index

Angell, (Sir) (Ralph) Norman, Kt 1931 (1873±1967): Union debate, New Coll. meeting (Oct., Nov. 1913) 858, 860 work mentioned: The Great Illusion (1910) 862 Anglican, Anglicanism 97±112 passim Anglican univ. in NZ, attempt to establish 708 `catholic' and `liberal' 97 DD reserved to Anglicans 635 in¯uenced to place Church above party 625 Non-Conformist fear of conversions 103±4, 845 theology school after breaking of link with 617 undergraduate religious societies 108 women's education, concern over 245±6, 250±1 mentioned 366, 368, 580, 601 Anglo-Catholic, see High Church Anglo-Saxon 284, 808 Annals, see Tacitus Anson, Miss 220 Anson, (Sir) William Reynell, 3rd Bt 1873 (1843±1914), Warden of All Souls (1881±1914), V.-C. (1898±9) 391, Plates 36, 75, PC 36, PC 75 admission of women, to degrees (chairs cttee against), PC 36; to examinations 257 All Souls as producer of both politicians and academics 215±16 backing for Finance Statute (1912) 837 building leases in London estates 215 Commission, lobbying against (1907) 831; ready to propose limited Commission (1911) 840 death, 4 June 1914 220, 633 election as Warden 214, PC 36 engineering laboratory site 479 Faculty Boards proposal defeated 837 Law Quarterly Review (1884) 394 law school, importance in development of 391, 617 Liberal con®dence forfeited 625 `of®cial pluralism' claim against 607 Parliamentary Secretary, Board of Education, 571, 632, PC 36 science, `tepid and dutiful' interest in 478 support for WEA 684 Unattached students 199 Univ. MP (1899), 632, 682, PC 36 Vinerian Readership 391 work mentioned: Principles of the English Law of Contract (1879) 393, PC 36 quoted 129, 571, 609

mentioned 135, 218, PC 39 anthropology: anthropological study of religion 103 Cttee for Anthropology formed (1905) 356 degree course proposal defeated 469, 482, 502, 606; opposition from classicists, theologians and natural scientists 703 mentioned 702 Dept (later Institute) of Social Anthropology (1914) 503 dept's debt to classical scholars 356 Diploma group photograph (1908) Plate 42, PC 42 Diploma instituted (1905) 357, 502, 611, 619, 703±5 importance to Empire 703±4, 715 inter-disciplinary memorial to Council (1904) 502 Pitt-Rivers collection 499±503 Readership (1884) 640, 703 teaching provision and lectures 502 mentioned 331, 465, 614, 617 Anthropometric Laboratory 574 anti-Christian tone 39 anti-Semitism 794, 802 anti-suffrage 244±5 Anti-Suffrage League 304 anti-vivisection movement 482±3, PC 40 The Apple of Discord 273 Appleton, Charles Edward (1841±79): quoted 28±9, 31, 41 mentioned 31, 57 Arab bureau 358 Arabic, Arabist 118, 354, 617, 714 Aramaic 862 archaeology: collection 499±501 passim Diploma in Classical Archaeology 294, 350, 611, 619 Homeric archaeology as special subject 350 Jowett's hostility to 336±7 new discoveries 614 Professorship proposed (1883) 336 resignation of ®rst prof. 349±350 mentioned 103, 341, 342, 344, 345, 622 archbishops: Canterbury: Benson 261; Davidson 135, 787; Lang 219, 380±1, 787; Longley 17, 176, 177, 186; Sumner 212; Tait 3, 17, 187; Temple, F. 60, 450±1, 634; Temple, W. 634, 787 York: Lang 806 architecture 729±77 passim Clipsham stone 749 Corinthian columns of Press 731 Early English 732

index Elizabethan 748 Georgian 729, 742 Gothic: furor Gothicus 730; Geometrical Decorated 738; Gothicization 742; late, `late eclectic' 732, 748, 752, 754; Northern 739; revival 730, PC 17; Rhenish 739; ultra-, re-Gothicization 730; Veronese 740 High Victorianism 733, 737, 744 Ionic columns rejected for Balliol 730 Jacobean, sub-Jacobean 743, 748, 757 London architects 732, 742, 757 Palladian style 731 polychromy 737, 740 `Queen Anne' at Newnham, LMH, and Somerville 259, 751 Renaissance 739, 752, 755, 757±8, PC 22 Tudor 730 window replacement 731 mentioned 510 archivist 372 Arctic 499 Areopagitica, see Milton Argles, Edith Margaret (d. 1935), Plate 49, PC 49 aristocracy and gentry: Christ Church: sons of gentry at 225±6 country sports 525, 533, 536 cricket a fashionable sport 519±20 elder and younger sons 591±2 fewer undergraduates from gentry families 622 gold tassels 535 graded admission fees for 573 landed gentry 474 model for fellows 4 O. not so attractive to daughters of 581 O. regarded as their preserve 8 public schools 545 School of Law and Modern History: for better education of 387 traditional views on O. course 7 Aristophanes at Oxford, see Amery, Leopold Aristophanes (c.448±380 b c ) 34 Aristoteles und Athen 352 Aristotle (384±322 b c ): Bywater's achievement 325, 330, 618 change in manner of study by 1853 313 Clarendon Aristotle 657 and imperial administration 693±4 Jowett puts Plato on level with 31 lectures (A. L. Smith) 815; (Pater) 329 strong interest in, late 19th cent. 325 works mentioned: Ethics 25, 134, 311, 316, 366, 640, 693; Logic 316, 720; On the Constitution of Athens 338, 352;

883

Poetics 315, 655; Politics 329, 352; Posterior Analytics 324 mentioned 31, 874, PC 9, PC 35 Aristotle Society 620 Arkell, William J. 749 Armenia 621 Armstrong, Edward (1846±1928): as historian 621 quoted 266, 402 mentioned 283, 376 army, armed forces 160, 165, 382, 579, 622±3 Arnold family 288 Arnold, Julia Frances (Mrs Leonard Huxley) (1862±1908) 295 Arnold, Mary, see Ward, Mrs Humphry Arnold, Matthew (1822±88): central control in German education 865 O. as continuation of public school education 518 O. as `haut lyceÂe' 27 works mentioned: Culture and Anarchy (1869) 38; Schools and Universities on the Continent 10±11 quoted 7, 19, 95 mentioned 244, 604, 863 Arnold, Thomas (1795±1842): Regius Prof. of Modern History 42 aims for pupils 61 Arnold Historical Essay 349 Broad Church (`Arnoldian') 90, 634 education for citizenship 571 popular lecturer 238 public school system which grew out of Rugby 545 pupil at Winchester 548 on study of former empires 692 quoted 13, 44 mentioned 33, 95, 128, 244 see also Rugby School Arnold, Thomas (the younger) (1823±1900): quoted 13±14 Arnold, William Thomas (1852±1904): Arnold Historical Essay Prize (1879) 349 work mentioned: Studies of Roman Imperialism (posthumous publication, 1906) 349 Arnold Historical Essay Prize, see University Prizes and Scholarships Arrhenius, Svante August 496 Arts: 86.4 per cent of all honours awarded in 1880 93 Faculty of 93 `arts and crafts' movement 532, 753 Arundel marbles 734 Ashley, see Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of

884

index

Ashley, (Sir) William James, Kt 1917 (1860±1927): evidence to MacDonnell Commission 589 pupil of Stubbs 367 on teaching of constitutional history 367 University extension 666 quoted 133 mentioned 363, 381 Ashmole, Elias (1617±92) 500 Ashmolean Club 495 Ashmolean Museum Cook collection 501 Keeper (Evans) 622, 838 mentioned 337, 340, 341, 350 Ashmolean Natural History Society 480, 492 Ashmolean (Old) Museum 451, 757, 765, PC 41 Asia 203, 690, 707, 803±4 Asia Minor 67, 339, 354, 614 Exploration Fund 354 Aspects of Modern Oxford, see Godley, Alfred Denis Asquith, Cyril, Lord Asquith 1951 (1890±1954) 389 Asquith Herbert Henry, cr. Earl of Oxford and Asquith 1925 (1852±1928): in¯uence on national policy (1908±14) 871 on Jowett PC2 and outbreak of war 863, 871±3 premiership 66, 167, 673, 699, 781, 833 pres. of the Union (1874), 63, PC 12 proposed Commission, A's views (1908±13) 833, 842±4, 852±3 refusal to take MA 853 speech at opening of Balliol House (1891) 673 quoted 673, 833, 850, 853, 873, PC 36 mentioned 168, 458, 640, 694±5, 720, 850, 869, PC 2 Asquith, Margaret Emma (Margot), later Countess of Oxford and Asquith (1864±1945) 786, 801 Asquith, Raymond (1878±1916) 781±819 passim Balliol scholar (1897) 781 character 781 the `corrupt coterie' 786 death in Battle of the Somme 781 Fellow of All Souls 781, 867 lampoon 807±8 quoted 801, 803, 867 Asquith Commission (1919), see Commissions Assistant Masters' Association 630 Associated Prigs 278 Association of Directors of Education 848 Association of Headmistresses 280

Association for the Organization of Academical Study 53 Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Oxford (AEW) 247±307 passim `BA diplomas' (from 1896) 280 con¯ict over tutors 259±60 lectures 247±8, 405 modest premises 251±2 report codifying rules 275 supports opening of degrees 265 Association of University Teachers (1919) 876 Assyrian 354 Assyriology: professorship in 355, 417, 610±11 Readership in 611 mentioned, PC 25 Aston Villa 846 Astrographic Catalogue 468 astronomy 465, 468, 470 Atchison, Mary I. (1881±1955) 298 The Athenaeum: C. correspondent 846 O. correspondent 604, 858 quoted 270, 846 mentioned 810±11 Athenaeum Club 721 Athenian empire 694 Athens 38, 39, 352, 364, 374, 697, 716 see also British School Atkins, (Sir) Ivor Algernon, Kt 1921 (1869±1953) 440 Atlay, James Beresford (1860±1912) 215 atomic numbers 461±2 atomic physics, atomic theory 465 Attic drama 327, 330 Attic Theatre, see Haigh, Arthur Elam Attic vases 353 Attlee, Clement Richard, cr. Earl Attlee 1955 (1883±1967) Plate 69, PC 69 in First World War 873 outlook in¯uenced by: East End work 787; Ruskin PC 7 pipe-smoking PC 69 quoted 873 mentioned 92, 640 Augustan age 327 Augustus, Emperor 339 Austin, John (1790±1859) 385, 394 Australia: Australian kinship systems 501 cricket team 542 in¯uence of O. men in 709 OUP branch set up 656 Spencer's study of aborigines 704 states to provide Rhodes Scholars 718 Universities: Adelaide 713; Sydney 709

index mentioned 389, 422, 697, 701, 703, 712, 720, 793 Austrian Empire 357, 871±3 Autobiography, see Dickinson The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army, see Cheesman Aydelotte, Francis (1880±1956): comments on tutors' letter to Firth 371 Rhodes scholar 371 Babbage, Charles (1791±1871) 445±6, 480 baccalaureat 636 Bacchae (Euripides) 329 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685±1750) 440 Bach Choir 278, 440 bachelor of arts (BA): admission of women: all remaining examinations open by 1894 257; moves to open degree 256, 264±8, 630, 834 elementary teachers reading for 558 Examination Statute of 1850 313 inadequacies of course as preparation for research 614, 619 minimum quali®cation for (1864) 6 Non-Collegiate students 207 as preliminary to B.Mus. 432 quali®cation for Eldon Scholarship 389 reform, suggestions 829 Selborne Commissioners suggest law the easiest route to 390 title of Literae Humaniores in 1800 Examination Statute 311 mentioned 94, 444, 488 bachelor of civil law (BCL) 298, 385, 388, 389, 395, 396, 705, 724, 810 bachelor of literature (B.Litt.): institution (1895) 422, 619 no incentive for colleges to recruit for 619±20 Special Students attracted by 203 taken by graduates of other universities 423, 459 mentioned 269±70, 371, 410, 723, 857 bachelor of music (B.Mus.) 429±42 passim opened to women 257 Bacon, Francis (1561±1626): work mentioned Novum Organum (1620) 316 Bacon, Roger (1214?-1294) 496±7 bacteriology 507 Bagehot, Walter (1826±77): work mentioned: Physics and Politics (1872) 29±30 quoted 30 mentioned 334 Bagley Wood 94, 475 Bailey, (Sir) Abe, Bt 1919 (1864±1940) 698, 703

885

Bailey, Cyril (1871±1957) 167, 723±4 Baillie-Skene, William (1838±1911), Estates Bursar of All Souls 72 Baker, Herbert Brereton (1862±1935) 464, 477 Baldwin, Stanley, cr. Earl Baldwin of Bewdley 1937 (1867±1947) 819 Balfour, Arthur James, cr. Earl Balfour 1922 (1848±1930), 79, 261, 370, 872, PC 36, PC 55 Balfour, Henry (1863±1939), 501±2, 704, PC 42 Balfour Act, see Parliamentary proceedings Baliol, John de (1249±1315) 743 Balkans 357 Ball, Oona 270±1, 305 Ball, Sidney (1857±1918) Plate 75, PC 75 Barnett House 634 Convocation: assists rejection of postal voting in 852 critic of empire 698 Fabian Society 634, 642 on joint cttee of inquiry with WEA 684 Manchester Guardian correspondent 605 O. Reform Association (1909) 836 on out-of-date criticisms by Gore 839±40 Ruskin Hall 676 St John's: creates JCR 151; rejected for Presidency 624 secretary of The Club 628, 629 Toynbee Hall 634, 671 Univ. reform and women's suffrage 270±1, 305 quoted 839±40, 846 mentioned 672, 682±4, 845 Balleine, Cuthbert Francis (1883±1915) 341 Balliol College 159±69, 781±819 passim Balliol Boys' Club 870 Balliol Hall 22 Balliol House 673 Balliol men in All Souls 210, 212 Balliol-Trinity laboratory Plate 45, PC 45 Brackenbury Scholars 366±7 buildings: additional buildings 758; Basevi and Salvin Buildings 730, 758; Broad St front 162, 735, 743, Plate 18, PC 18; Chapel 611, 672, 738, 741, 743, 874, Plate 14, PC 14; college barge by Waterhouse 756; extra accommodation (1824) 730; Fisher building 742; gatetower 736; King's Mound 754; Master's Lodging, 735, PC 18; medieval buildings 735; new dining hall and sets (1875) 163, 743, 758; Pugin's Chapel designs, controversy 735; Warren buildings (1906, 1912±13) 167 Balliol College (contd )

886

index

careers: change in choices (1874±83) 165; clerical ambitions discouraged by Jowett 583; in Empire 706; of graduates: 1854±63 160, 1874±83 165, Modern History School (1873±1914) 382±3; Home Civil Service: graduates in (1863±87) 168±9; of Natural Science graduates, see 494 Table 20.3 Chancellorship election (1907) 633 character and composition Plate 28, PC 28; `Basutoland' 801; composition of college; clergy, sons of 159, 164; 1854±63 159±60, 1874±83 164; ethos of public service 164; fellows of All Souls 216; foreign element 163; Keble to `counteract Rugby and Balliol' (1869) 177; schools attended 159±60, 164, 550, 551; Scottish element, 159±60, 801, PC 28; Smith, A. L., as representative of ethos 374±5; `That Do-The-Boys Hall across the way' 628; tone changed (1893±1914) 793±4 criticisms of catering (1864) 146 dif®culty of access to library 148±9 fellows: clerical fellows, statutory number reduced (1871) 17; fellowship for extension lecturer (1890) 669; Toynbee on restrictions of his `fellow and tutor' post 359±60; `tutorial list' fellows (1871) 17 few scholars of ®rst rank among former students (c.1900) 157 ®nance: effect of agricultural depression 165; Endowment Fund (1904±5) 166; ®nancial comparisons revealed by Cleveland inquiry 161; grants to Univ. Coll., Bristol 68, 241, 662; income from coal-mines (1850s, 1860s) 162; internal income 71±2 Green, T. H.: supposed defect as tutor 58; Jowett's view of 109 ICS 163±4, 165±6, 346, 639, 691 in¯uence in the London world 15 intercollegiate lectures 46 members of the Canning Club 811 music: Balliol Concerts, founded 1885 435, 437±8; Musical Society 437±8 New Inn Hall annexed by (1887) 119 obstacle to agreement over scholarship examining 126 primacy: Asquith and Grey 863 `colonization' of other colleges 131, 210 days of undisputed ascendancy ended (1900s) 793 might `absorb the university' (1869) 22 nine Balliol Heads in other colls (1900) 168

Strachan-Davidson's network 699 ten history graduates at Paris Conference (1919) 383 two great proconsuls 694±5 rapprochement between coll. and the Univ. (1882±6) 166 reading essays to the Master 813 reforms PC 2 religion: chapel 874; compulsory chapel abolished 17; reputation for `in®delity' 17, 26, 30, 31±2, 56, 61; undergraduate scepticism (1870s) 690±1 Rhodes Scholars (1906) 722 scholarships, none in mathematics (c.1870) 444 science: Balliol±Trinity laboratory (from 1879) 136, Plate 45, PC 45; laboratory 451; patronage of 485, 491 Snell exhibitioners see separate entry societies: Annandale Society, `waterfalls' 791; Arnold Society 150, 303±4; Brackenbury Society 150, 381; Dervorguilla Society 150; History Club 376, 381; Musical Society 437±8 sport: amalgamated clubs' rules 529; initiative in organization of 524; Jowett a keen follower 527 statutes: change of (1871) 75, PC 2; Selborne Commission revision 82, 84±5 subjects studied, classes obtained: 1854±63 160; 1874±83 164 tutors: improvements to old system 314; `religious lay tutors' 105; weekly meetings 133±4 undergraduates: the `blood push' (1906±10) 794; degrees: 3 per cent of graduates passmen (c.1911) 806, honours, all to read for (by 1873) 137; few require outside tuition (1866) 135; internal rifts (1900±10) 801 Union speakers 63 Visitor, 1871 (Bp of London) 17, 161 WEA Summer School (1910) 687 mentioned 37, 48, 63, 87, 93, 98, 196, 788, 808, 851 Bampton Lectures 60 1859 (Rawlinson) 100 1884 (Temple) 97 1886 (Bigg) 101 1907 (Peile) 642 Banbury Road 94, 242, 263, 421, 676, 757 Bank of England 299 banking, ®nance 382, 594 Banks, Olive 300 Baptists 711 Bardoux, Jacques (1874±1959): quoted 796

index mentioned 106±7, 110 Baring, Thomas Charles (1831±91) 117±19, 131 Barker, (Sir) Ernest, Kt 1944 (1874±1960): on Australian students (1890s) 712 education 583, 589 problems of chaperonage 274 work mentioned: Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906) 815 quoted 712, 816 mentioned 558±9, 815, PC 35 Barnett, (Dame) Henrietta Octavia, DBE 1924 (1851±1936) 672 Barnett House 299, 634, PC 73 Barnett, Samuel (1844±1913): Canon of Westminster (1907) 681, 823, 826 Commission: attempt to recruit C. support 830 Curzon, B.'s mistrust of 832 East End of London 670 London extension classes 673 reform, cttee on (1907) 681, 823±4, 830, 839, 845, 850 teachers: summer school 558; training of elementary teachers 637 Toynbee Hall: ®rst discussions 671±2; usefulness to trade union leaders 673±4; value of connection with O. and C. 672; Warden 670, 673 Tribune article (1906) 681, 825, 826 urges need to widen access 824±5, 854 quoted 639, 671±2, 673, 674, 824, 825 mentioned 91, 634, 827, 832, 842, 846, 853 barristers 132, 592, 714, 789 Barrow, John (1810±80), Princ. of St Edmund Hall 1854±61 35, 36 Barry, (Sir) Charles, Kt 1852 (1795±1860) 736, 739, 766 Barry, Charles (Junior) (1823±1900) 756, 770 Barry, Edward Middleton (1830±80) 739 Bartlet, James Vernon (1863±1940) 635 Bartlett, William Lehman Ashmead (1851±1921) 181 Barton, Alfred Thomas (c.1840±1912) 85 Basevi, George (1794±1845) 730, 735±6, 765 Baskett, Thomas (1701±61) 645 Bateman, James (1811±97) 760 Bateson, William Henry (1812±81) 70 Bath 560, 797 battels 146, 147, 151 Battenberg, Prince Leopold of 553 Battersea Grammar School 584 Baur, Ferdinand Christian (1792±1860) 101 Bayne, Thomas Vere (1829±1908): Censor of Ch.Ch. 224 diaries of 230

887

leisurely routine of surviving life fellows 143±4 Selborne Commission, secretary to 76 Beale, Dorothea (1831±1906) 244, 250, 252, 263, 264±5, 280, 288, 295, 572±3, 581 Beard, Charles Austin (1874±1928) 675±6, 678 Beauchamp, 6th Earl (1830±91) 176, 177, 180±2, 188 Beauchamp, 7th Earl, succ. 1891 (1872±1938) PC 31 Beaufort, Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1443±1509) 246 Beaumont Street 508 Beazley, (Sir) Charles Raymond, Kt 1931 (1868±1955) 363 Beazley, (Sir) John Davidson, Kt 1949 (1885±1970) 353 Bedford, 9th Duke of, succ. 1872 (1819±91) 162 Bedford 560 Bedford College, London 238, 287, 296 Beerbohm, (Sir) (Henry) Maximilian, Kt 1939 (1872±1956): on Pater 798 work mentioned: Zuleika Dobson (1911) 725 quoted 819 Beesly, Edward Spencer (1831±1915) 697 Begbie, Harold (1871±1929) 871 Behan, (Sir) John Clifford, Kt 1949 (1881±1957) 389 Behistun inscription 354 Beit, Alfred (1853±1906) 640, 692, 698, 719, 721 Belcher, (Sir) Edward, Kt 1843 (1799±1877) 499 Belfast 809 Belgium 418, 818, 863, 871±3 Belgravia 38 `Belinda Blinders' 785 Bell, Gertrude Lowthian (1868±1926) 294, 594 Bell, Kenneth Norman (1884±1951) 219 Bellamy, Ethel F. (d. 1960) 470 Bellamy, Frank Arthur (1863±1936) 470 Bellamy, James (1819±1909), President of St John's Coll. (1871±1909), V.-C. (1886±90): a conservative V.-C. 600 on extension 636, 666±7 Non Placet Society 626 Selborne Commission member 78±9 quoted 636, 666±7 mentioned 122 Belloc, ( Joseph) Hilaire (1870±1953) 791 Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (c.1819±1886) 538, 539

888

index

Benecke, Paul Victor (1868±1944) 341 Benedictines 104, 120 benefactions, benefactors 584, 839 Bengal 714 Bengali 415, 710 Bensley, Thomas (d. 1833) 646 Benson, Edward White (1829±96) 261, 294 Benson, Margaret (1865±1916) 294 Benson, (Mary) Eleanor (1863±90) 294 Bentham, Jeremy (1748±1832) 394 Berkeley, 8th Earl of, succ. 1888 (1865±1942) 493 Berkeley, George (1685±1753) 317 Berlin 85, 450, 723, 871, 872 Academy of Sciences 450, 454 Univ. of 398 Bermuda 718 Bernard, Edward Russell (1842±1921) 100 Bernard, Mountague (1820±82): Chichele Prof. of International Law 391 Keble Memorial Fund 176 O.U. Press: memorandum on 649; Finance Committee 649 prof. of International Law 211 Selborne Commission: chairman 87, 213; membership of 76, 79 quoted 90 mentioned 174, 180±1 Berry, W. H. 684 Berthon, Henri Edouard (1862±1948) 426 Bethell, Richard, see Westbury, Lord Bethnal Green 152, 189, 501, 856 Betjeman, (Sir) John, Kt 1969 (1906±84): quoted 736 Bevan, Edwyn Robert (1870±1943) 345 Beveridge, William Henry (1879±1963), cr. Lord Beveridge 1946, Master of University Coll. (1937±44): leader writer for the Morning Post 825 reform `conspiracy' 681 settlements: interest in 642; outlook in¯uenced by East End work 786±7 quoted 681 mentioned 92, 640 Bible: The Bible: Acts 98, 101; Apocalypse 100; Epistles 98, 100±1; Gospels 98, 101, 874; New Testament 102, 103, 111, 329, 635, 699, 825±6; Old Testament 98, 100, 102, 617±18; Revised Version of New Testament (1881) 91, 652; translations 651, PC 13 biblical criticism 102, 150; critical biblical scholarship 102; `higher' critical issues in examination papers 99±100, 110; opposition to critical study 97±8 challenges to Biblical orthodoxy 18

Darwin's works cause questioning of 690±1 literal interpretation of 32, 100 O. Univ. Press: Bible mainstay until late 19th cent. 658; O.'s right to print 645; Press pro®ts 615, 649, 762; printing control transferred to London (1906) 656; printing and sales 645±6 mentioned 24, 33, 701 bible clerks 209, 213, 584±5 bibliography 372 bicycles 782 Bigg, Charles (1840±1908): Bampton Lecturer (1886) 101 as examiner in Schools 101 Billing, John (1816±1863) 747, 767 Bills, see Parliamentary proceedings Binyon, (Robert) Laurence (1869±1943) 828, Plate 34, PC 34 Biochemical Journal 505 biochemistry 507 biological sciences: effect of single-subject schools 488±9 professorial control of teaching 466 vigorous research tradition 617 Birmingham 560, 579, 677, 809, 810 Univ. of 363; Chancellor (Lodge) 472; mentioned 603, 662. See also Mason College. Bishop Hat®eld's Hall (Durham) 172 Bishop, (Sir) Henry Rowley, Kt 1842 (1786±1855), Heather Prof. of Music 440 bishoprics: suffragans, colonial, American, Scottish, Welsh 99 bishops: Barbados: Mitchinson 437 Birmingham: Gore 552±3, 823 Brechin: Forbes 175 Bristol: Browne 831 Calcutta: Milman 246 Chester: Cleaver 646; Stubbs 61 Durham: Hensley Henson 201, 380±1 Exeter: Temple 450 Gibraltar: Sandford 224 Gloucester: Headlam 111 Hereford: Percival 268, 680, 681, 831 Lich®eld: Selwyn 172 Lincoln: Hicks 19; King 223; Swayne 99; Wordsworth, C. 57, 250±1 London: Jackson 17, 161; Temple, F. 60; Winnington-Ingram 787 Manchester: Knox 19 Oxford: Fell 710; Gore 305, 635, 843, 856; Mackarness 34, 182, 187, 246; Paget 227, 682, 787, 831; Strong 228; Wilberforce 176, 211 Peterborough: Blagden 547 Rochester: Talbot 19

index Salisbury: Hamilton 176; Moberly 581; Wordsworth, J. 33±4 Stepney: Winnington-Ingram 189 a visiting Bush Bishop 709±10 mentioned 7±8, 26, 99, 219, 604 see also archbishops; clergy; Deans The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) 670 Black, M. H. 651 Black Watch 860 `Black Week' 810 Blackburn High School 296 Blackburn Olympic 540 Blackstone, (Sir) William (1723±80): lectures, basis for arguments of American revolutionaries 690 work mentioned: Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765±9) 386±7 Blackwell's bookshop 783 Blagden, Claude Martin (1874±1952) 228, 547 Blagg, Mary Adela (1858±1944) 470 Blakeway, Alan Albert Antisdel (1898±1936) 35±43, 357 Blakiston, Henry Edward (1862±1942), Pres. of Trinity Coll. (1907±38) Plate 34, PC 34 and non-white applicants 800±1, 804 Blegen, Carl (1887±1971) 350±1 Blenheim Palace 226±7, PC 31 Bliss, Philip (1787±1857), Princ. of St Mary Hall (1848±57): evidence to Select Cttee on legal education 385 Blom®eld, (Sir) Arthur William, Kt 1889 (1829±99) 748, 757, 758, 773 Blom®eld, (Sir) Reginald, Kt 1919 (1856±1942): CCC, tower refaced 776 Exeter Coll., work on hall 758, 775 LMH buildings (1896±1926) 758, 774, 776, PC 54, Plate 56, PC 56 Blore, Edward (1787±1879) 731, 765, 766 Bloxam, John Rouse (1807±91) 736 The Blue, see sport The Blue Book 713 Board of Education: civil servants 843 Consultative Cttee 561, 638, 824 and extension movement (1907) 682, 848 grants: to schools 554; to tutorial classes 623 inspectorships 557 Parliamentary Secretary (Anson) 632, PC 36 Permanent Secretary (Morant) 682 Pres. (Pease) 841, (Runciman) 842 Report (1923±4) 793 Royal Commission, prospect of 842, 853 scholarships: cttee report (1916) 868±9 Universities Branch (1912) 843

889

mentioned 562 Board Schools 547 Board of Trade 299 Boards of Studies: conversion into Faculties 93 de®ciencies, system enjoined in statutes of 1882 608±9 for Final Classical Examination (1872) 315 inquiry into staf®ng requirements 73 Boars Hill 493, 681, 754 Boase, Charles William (1828±95): Reader in Modern History 374 lecture material unchanged over many years 373 work mentioned: (with Kitchin) translation of Ranke's History of England Principally in the 17th Century 374 quoted 46 mentioned 373, 750 Boase, Frederic (1843±1916) 575 work mentioned: Modern English Biography (1892±1921) 575 Boat Race, see sport (rowing) Boden, Joseph (d. 1811) 699±700 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith (1827±91) 237 Bodington, (Sir) Nathan, Kt 1908 (1848±1911): quoted 75, 142±3 Bodleian Library: All Souls payments to 215 average of 16 readers daily (1880) 750 Bodley's Librarian 482, 496, 508 The Club, supportive of 627 Curators 144 Duke Humfrey's Library 749 heating and lighting 749 history of science, ®rst provisions for study 497 proscholium 633, 750 research students (July 1914) 861±2 restoration (from 1876) 749 Schools Quadrangle 748 Schools Tower 140 `Science Room' 497 storage problems 749 Tercentenary (1902) 822 transatlantic readers in 624 women librarians 297 women scholars admitted 238 mentioned 100, 600, 610, 732, 748, 757, 761 Bodley, George Frederick (1827±1907): Cathedral, West entrance 769 Ch.Ch.: bell-tower 747, 770; conversion of almshouses 770; Killcanon Tower, etc. 770 Examination Schools, competitor for 748

890

index

Bodley, George Frederick (contd ) Magdalen Coll.: Hall restoration 775; Pres.'s Lodgings 772; St Swithin's Quadrangle 752, 771, Plate 19, PC 19 Pembroke Coll.: Tower restored 770 return to use of English models 751 Univ. Coll.: Master's Lodgings, (with Garner) 750, 770 mentioned 757 Boehm, (Sir) Joseph Edgar, Bt 1889 (1834±1890) PC 38 Boer War: `Black Week' 810 Caird speaks out against 166 demands for `national ef®ciency' following 157 effects of shock at early reverses 782, 799, 810, 821 `inspection effect' 822 Oxford Magazine used in appeal for volunteers 690 Positivist opposition 697 science: Boers quicker to exploit 702; demand for increased spending 480 seen as Britain's Sicilian expedition 694 mentioned 872, PC 30 Bolton 583 Bombay 712, 714 Univ. of 714 bon®res, see undergraduate life Book of Common Prayer 98, 645, 656, 731, 762 book trade 645 Boole, George (1815±64) 451 boomerangs 499 boot makers 674 Booth, Charles (1840±1916) 673 Booth, William (`General') (1829±1912) 828 Bosanquet, Bernard (1848±1923): Shakespeare Society 152 work mentioned: Logic (1888) 315 mentioned 315, 323 Bosanquet, Bernard James Tindal (1877±1936) PC 62 Bosworth, Joseph (1789±1876) 416±17 Botanic Gardens 470±1 library and lecture room 732, 765 Vines wing 757, 760 botany: decline of School, and revival (1905) 471 inadequate accommodation 470 separate branch of Natural Science School 488, 490 women not encouraged in research 470 mentioned 491, 510, 704 Boulter, Benjamin Consitt (1876±1960) PC 30

Bourne, Gilbert Charles (1861±1933), Linacre Prof. of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy 467±8, 484, 534 rowing blue and coach 534 undergraduate measurements 574 quoted 462, 534 mentioned 491, 502 Bowen, (Sir) George Ferguson, KCMG 1856 (1821±99): career as colonial governor 706 Bowerman, Charles William (1851±1947) 684, 687, 850, PC 72 Bowman, Herbert Lister (1874±1942), Wayn¯ete Prof. of Mineralogy and Crystallography 468 Bowman, Thomas (d. 1945), Warden of Merton Coll. (1903±36) 496 Boy Scout Movement 797±8 Boyd, Charles Walter (1869±1919) 719, 725 Boyd, Henry (1831±1922), Princ. of Hertford Coll. (1877±92), V.-C. (1890±4): admirer of T. G. Jackson's work PC 20 low-church causes supported by 118 sporting successes of college 527 as V.-C. 197, 198, 600 Boyd and Sons 760 Boys' Central School 559 Boys, (Sir) Charles Vernon, Kt 1935 (1855±1944) 461 Brabant, Frederick Gaspard (b. 1855): quoted 327±8 mentioned 330, 331 Brackenbury, Hannah (1795±1873) 162, 743, PC 18 Brad®eld College 126 Bradford 39 Bradford Grammar School 549, 554, 808 Bradley, Andrew Cecil (1851±1935): Jowett's lack of support 322±3 lectures for AEW 248 Nettleship's tutorials described 135 quoted 135 mentioned 400 Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846±1924) 314, 318, 323, 324, 609, 620 work mentioned: Principles of Logic (1883) 324 Bradley, George Granville (1821±1903), Master of Univ. Coll. (1870±81) 18, 128 an interventionist coll. head 128±9 on Cleveland Report 73 Dean of Westminster (1881) 128 dogs, removal of 138 Marlborough, achievements as headmaster 128 Pres. of AEW 247 rusticates whole coll. (1880) 140

index Selborne Commission member 86 use of sarcasm 130 mentioned 129 Bradley, Henry (1845±1923) 653 Bradmore Road 686 Brahmin PC 28 Brakspear, (Sir) Harold, KCVO 1931 (1870±1934) 759 Brand, Robert Henry, Lord Brand 1946 (1878±1963) 695 Brantwood 511 Brasenose College: buildings: 12 sets of rooms in Fellows' Garden 730; gate-tower 752±3; large extensions, to High St 752±3, 755, PC 67; Morris wallpapers in Lecture Rooms 750; Princ.'s House 752 chapel services 105 closed awards 552 fellows: distinction between senior and junior removed 116 John Buchan's choice of 329 Madan's ambitions for libraries 149 Pater's Renaissance 33 Pelham's library presented to 340 proposal for amalgamation with Lincoln 124 resignation of Princ. 130 scholarships, joint examination with Queen's (1870) 126 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; celebrated for sport 528; exploits of George Osbaldeston 525; percentage of rowing men 521; rowing trophies PC 67 undergraduates: demonstration against Princ., etc. (1898) 799, PC 30; grammar school undergraduate's experience 547; JCR Plate 67, PC 67; man with ®rst class ducked 784 members of Vincent's Club 536 mentioned 118, 721 Brassey, Thomas Allnutt, succ. as 2 nd Earl Brassey 1918 (1863±1919) 166, 476, 822 Braye, Lord (1849±1928) 61 Brearley, Samuel (1859±1887) 380 `Brearley Improvement Society' 380 Brewer, J. S. 648 Brewer Street 757 Bridges, Edward Ettingdene, cr. Lord Bridges, 1957 (1892±1969) 863 Bridges, John Henry (1832±1906) 697 Bridges, Robert Seymour (1844±1930) 828 Bright, James Franck (1832±1920), Master of Univ. Coll. (1881±1906): academic standards raised 128 lectures opened to women 248

891

quoted 51 mentioned 374, 379 Bristol 68, 185, 548, 552 Univ. Coll., later Univ. of 165, 603 British Academy 216, 219, 284, 618, 620, 832 British Association for the Advancement of Science founded (1831) 447 inquiry (1913) 590 O. meeting (1894) 472, 482 O. objection to Cayley as Pres. 452 Report (1867), published in PP 1868, science in schools 12 mentioned 453, 459, 462, 701, 817 British Commonwealth 540 British Empire 689±716 passim critics of empire 696±7, 713 enthusiasm not revived after First World War 715 Forestry, hope of school for 475 imperialism and the Univ. 636, 639±41 letters from administrators 707 memoirs of colonial students 714±15 natural scientists' attitude to 701 Oxford Survey of the British Empire (1914) 658 proposed federation 381 Roman Empire, supposed relation to 346 statistics of employment in 705±6; women working in 593, 706 students at O. 713±14 supported by majority of dons 698 mentioned 273, 371, 601, 872 British and Foreign Bible Society 649 British Medical Association 477 British Museum 352, 460, 468, 489, 500 British Museum (Natural History) 467, 484 British Navy 477, 858±9, 860 British School: Athens 340, 357, 358±9, 619 Rome 340, 357 British Steel Smelters 679 Brittain, Vera (1893±1970): interest in feminist ideas 300 quoted 280, 286, 306, 862 mentioned 259 Broad, Charles Dunbar (1887±1971) 322 Broad Church 90, 634 Broad Street 162, 663, 753, 754, 783, PC 18, PC 24 Brodie, (Sir) Benjamin Collins (the younger), Bt 1862 (1817±80): quoted 69±70 mentioned 23, 237, 451, 462, 484 Brodie, Douglas E. (d. 1916) 719 Brodie, Lady (Philothea Margaret) (d. 1882) 237

892

index

Brodrick, George Charles (1831±1903), Warden of Merton Coll. (1881±1903) 130 opposes admission of women to examinations 257 on `socialistic' effect of Selborne settlement 53±4 quoted 71, 272, 797 Brodrick, (William) St John, succ. as 9th Visc. Midleton 1907, cr. Earl of Midleton 1920 (1856±1942): Secretary of State for India 694, 699 mentioned 168 Bromsgrove 552 `Bromwich Albion' 846 Brooke, Charles Edward 188 Brooke, Christopher Nugent (1927±) 867 Brown, John MacMillan, (1846±1935) 691, 709 Brown University, see United States of America Browne, (Frances) Stella (1880±1955) 291 Browne, George Forrest (1833±1930), Bishop of Bristol 831 Browning, Oscar (1837±1923) 552±3, 559 Browning, Robert (1812±89) 132, 167±8 Bruce, Alice Moore (1867±1951) Plate 58, PC 58 Bruce, Henry Austin, see Aberdare, 1st Baron Brugmann Carl 421 Brussels 863 Bruton, Edward George (d. 1899) 747, 768, 769 Bryce, James, cr. Visc. Bryce 1914: Regius Prof. of Civil Law 391 in anti-suffrage movement 302 Arnold Historical Prize (1863) 381 British and Roman imperialism compared in Essay 348 criticizes analogies from classical experience 364 historical lectures 390 Law Quarterly Review (1884) 394 J. H. Newman:congratulatory speech to 90 opens Barnett House (1914) 852 optimistic Liberal attitude to working class 846 report on Lancashire girls' schools (1860s) 571 school of historical jurisprudence, part in development 617 Selborne Commission 53±4, 77±8; clerical fellowships 85±6 Univ. expansion 602±3 Victorian Commissions 602 Vinerian Scholar (1861) 389 a voluntaryist 23

war, comments (2 Aug. 1914) 862±3 women's education, champion of reform 237±8 work mentioned: The American Commonwealth (1888) 92 quoted 53, 78, 80, 92±3, 237±8, 348, 571, 602 mentioned 78, 91, 314, 608, 694, 705 Bryce Commission, see Commissions: Secondary Education Buccleugh, 5th Duke of, succ. 1819 (1806±84) 176 Buchan, John, cr. Lord Tweedsmuir 1935 (1875±1940) 329, 534, 784, Plate 30, PC 30 Buchanan, (Sir) George, Kt (1831±95) 470 Buchanan, Thomas Ryburn (1846±1911) 220 Buck, (Sir) Percy Carter, Kt 1936 (1841±1947) 440 Buckeridge, C. 768, 769 Buckland, Herbert Tudor 758 Buckle, George Earle (1854±1935) 220 Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821±62) 318 Buckler, Charles Alban (1825±1905) 737, 765, 767 Buckler, John (1770±1851) 736, 766 Buckler, John Chessell (1793±1894) 173, 736±7, 762, 766±7, 769 Budget (1909) 624 building trades 205 buildings (in the University) 729±77 passim building efforts of 1880s and 1890s 782 building programme 87 estimates of requirements (1875, 1877) 73 Bull, George (1634±1710) 98 Bullingdon Club 124±5, 227, 517, 520, 536, 811 Bullingdon Green 520 Bullock-Marsham, Robert (1786±1880), Warden of Merton Coll. (1826±80) 128, 130 bump-races, bump suppers, see sport: rowing Burdett-Coutts, Angela Georgina, Baroness Burdett-Coutts 1871 (1814±1906) 181 Burdon-Sanderson, (Sir) John Scott, Bt 1899 (1828±1905) Plate 40, PC 40. Regius Prof. of Medicine 472±3, 504 Wayn¯ete Prof. of Physiology 466, 489±91 anti-vivisection agitation against 482±3, 625 defence of specialized science syllabus 490 dismisses supporter of compulsory Greek 629 mentioned 470, 493, 505, 506 Burge, Hubert Murray (1862±1925) 141, 527, 534 Burges, William (1827±81): Worcester Chapel 742, 768

index Burgesses, see Members of Parliament for Oxford University Burgon, John William (1813±88): Dean of Chichester 586 on scholarships 586 originally named for Selborne Commission 76±8 sermon on women in Oxford (1884) 60±1, 252±3, 292 Vicar of St Mary's 746 quoted 60±1, 252±3, 586 mentioned 116, 173, 174, 257, 590 Burke, Edmund (1729±97): works mentioned: On American Taxation (1774) 714; Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) 714 mentioned 368 Burmese 415 Burne-Jones, (Sir) Edward Coley Bt 1894 (1833±98) 741 Burnet, John (1863±1928) 345 Burnet, (Sir) John James, Kt 1914 (1857±1938) 738 Burrows, Christine Mary (1872±1959), Princ. of St Hilda's Coll., (1910±19), Princ. of O. Home Students (1921±9) Plate 52,PC 52 mentioned 288 Burrows, Esther Elizabeth (Mrs) (1847±1935), Princ. of St. Hilda's Hall (1893±1910) Plate 52, PC 52 effect of personality on Hall 288 gains full recognition from AEW (1896) PC 52 standards of neatness 279 mentioned 264, 290 Burrows, Montagu (1819±1905): Chichele Prof. of Modern History 68, 416 Greats: danger to faith 26 on history lecture arrangements 47 interrogated during bribery investigation, Parl. election 43 as lecturer 47 a strong Conservative 68 quoted 16, 26, 32, 47, 416 Burrows, Winfrid Old®eld (1858±1929) 143 bursars: domestic bursars 834 estates bursars 72, 215 hostile reaction to Cleveland Report (1874) 72 Keble Coll.: ®rst Bursar (Legge) 182, 184; member of Council 179; proposal for ®nancing new building 190 supervision of JCR subscriptions 151 Univ. Coll., furnishing of former Master's Lodgings 750 mentioned 4, 72, 145, 157, 159, 392, 633

893

Burton, (Sir) Richard Francis, KCMG 1885 (1821±90) 499 business 7, 493, 579, 592, 614, 822±3, 843 diploma proposal (1913) 705, 855±6 see also commerce business education 834 Buss, Frances Mary (1827±94) 244, 295 Butcher, Samuel Henry (1850±1910) 128 Butler, Arthur Gray (1831±1909) 60, 129, 139, 246, PC 4 Butler, (Christina) Violet (1884±1982) 284, 299, 783 n.9 work mentioned: Social Conditions in Oxford 299, 783 n.9 Butler, Joseph (1692±1752): works mentioned: Analogy of Religion (1736) 25, 98; Fifteen Sermons (1726) 316 mentioned 26, 313, 315 Butler, Josephine (1828±1906): campaign over Contagious Diseases Acts 189, 242, 245 butlers 145 Butter®eld, William (1814±1900): architect of Keble 173, 176±7, 179, 744±6; Bursary, etc. 771; Chapel 185±6, 746, 769, PC 16, Plate 16; Hall and Library 769; North quadrangle 768; Servants' Building 769; Warden's Lodgings 745, 770 Balliol Chapel, 738, 767, PC 14 High Churchman 744 Merton Coll.: Chapel restoration 767; Grove Building 744, 768 quoted 185±6 mentioned 737, 761 buttery 146 Buzzard, (Sir) Edward Farquhar, Bt 1929 (1871±1945), Regius Prof. of Medicine Plate 63, PC 63 by-elections, see elections Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, succ. 1798 (1788±1824): work mentioned: Childe Harold (1812±18) 714 mentioned PC 33 The Bystander 153 Bywater, Ingram (1840±1914): Regius Prof. of Greek 325 on Balliol 628 continental contacts 619 Delegate of the Press 653, 654 as lecturer 315, 330 member of The Club 628 O. Aristotelian Society 325 philological interests 324 private tutors of 314 Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (from 1897) 655

894

index

Bywater, Ingram (contd ) stories in SCR 144 work mentioned: ed. Aristotle's Poetics (1911) 330, 618, 655 quoted 34, 628 mentioned 339, 354, 407, 607 Byzantine studies 330, 354 cabinet 9, 75, 180, 219, 605, 637, 863, 872 Caen, Univ. of 689 Caesar, Gaius Julius (102/100±44 b c ) 334, 347±8 Caird, Mrs (Caroline Frances) (1831±1916) 278 Caird, Edward (1835±1908), Master of Balliol (1893±1907) 62; ®rst lay Master 166 anthropology proposal supported 502 `Balliol breakfasts' 278 Gifford Lectures 103 Idealist school 109, 323 `lay sermons' 642 Manchester Coll. Visitor 103 O. Society of Historical Theology 103 as private tutor 314 protest about honorary degree for Rhodes PC 71 Ruskin Hall, support for 676 trades unionism, encouragement of 642 women's education, advocate of 166 quoted 166 mentioned 166±7, 283, 720, 813 Cairo 358 Caius College, C. 485 Calcutta 55, 246, 290, 710, 712 Univ. of 710 Cambon, Paul (1843±1924) 859 Cambridge Higher Locals 244 Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, see 568±9 Table 23.A5 Cambridge Review 553 Cambridge Union Society 859 Cambridge University: characteristics: `anti-religion', Von HuÈgel on 857; architectural tradition 733, 741; authority to print Bible and Prayer Book 645; colleges, proposed amalgamations 124; Cornford on the Non-Placets 626; games, charges of overemphasis 800; homosexual inclinations, comparison with O. 36, 798; Kipling on O. and C. 819; lower middle- and working-class representation 586, 591; ordinands 174; pattern of undergraduates' expenses similar to O.'s 147; previous education of those matriculating (1902±4), see 567 Table.A3 23; public school element 552±3;

residential system, Rhodes on bene®ts 717; revival of colleges, late 19th cent. 115; secularization 251; social exclusiveness 622; speech claimed to differ from O. accent 549; survey of school backgrounds 553 Classics: Classical Tripos: archaeology 350; course shorter than O.'s 6; philosophy 312; compulsory Greek 13, 822, 875; medicine, a classically-educated eÂlite for 631; `ritualists' 331, 356 courses and examinations: Poll degree course 472; Previous Examination 434, 488, 869; school examinations opened to girls (1865) 9, 237, 560; teaching of history 364; theology degrees, secularization passed by Senate 605±6; tripos: advantages of Part 1 and 2 system 789, Historical Tripos (1893) PC 4, Modern Languages School Tripos established (1886) 423, students encouraged to spend time abroad 426, Wranglers 485 mentioned 240, 256, 488; extension: ahead in (1870s) 636; co-operation in setting up of Univ. Settlements 672; Extension Lectures 10, 668; Local Lectures Syndicate 667; school examinations organized 560±1; settlement movement 670 ®nance: backs campaign for increased state funding for science 638; Common Univ. Fund 608; petition against ®nancial inquiry 69; Statement of the Needs of the University (1899) 822 institutions: Common Univ. Fund 608; comparisons: less worldly univ. than O. 604, more centralized and facultydominated structure (after 1882) 628; compulsory OTC proposed 639±40; Conservative Caucus 839; founding of Selwyn Coll. 188; missionary societies 711; `New Jerusalem Caucus' 832; noncollegiate students 200; Of®cer Training Corps 639±40, 811, 862; Slade bequest 508 mathematics: Analytical Society (1814) 443; Babbage, Charles 445; the compulsory prerequisite 444; ethos, contrasted with O. 634; mathematicians teaching in Empire 708; not obstructed by religious tests 444; not subordinated to Classics 443±4; prestige of Tripos 443 national issues: as contributor to national education 602; India: civil service 164, 691, 699, Forestry Service 702, students: less well integrated than O.'s 714, 804,

index numbers (1913) 806; omissions of Victorian commissioners 602; Parliamentary Commission (1877) 77, 78, 82, 487, 831; percentage of population educated 602; petition against ®nancial inquiry 69; reform issues (1888, 1900±12) 95, 640±1, 824±5, 838±9, 840; teaching staff supplied to new univs 603; Univ. Tests Bill 29; well represented in 1905±8 cabinet 830 Philosophy and Philology: Idealism, C. philosophers challenge 616; Philological Society (1872) 344; philosophy 312; Political Philosophy and Science Club 620 science and medicine 457±97 passim attractive curriculum 486; `C. for Science' 457; Cavendish Laboratory 71, 458, 485; engineering, thirty years ahead of O. 66; expansion facilitated 608; funding of posts 486; Mechanical Sciences Tripos 471; medical and science education, ahead in 65, 636; medicine, a classically educated eÂlite for 631; Natural Science Tripos 458, 471, 614; science, reasons for success 485±6 sport: Boat Club PC 59; Boat Race, see sport: rowing; Varsity match PC 64 teacher training: ahead in 636; C. Day Training Coll. 559; Diploma in Education 637; more positive view of teacher-training than O.'s 556; teachers in Empire 708 women: anti-degree party back scheme for `Queen's Univ.' 268; arts subjects, fewer women take 281; BA, bid to open 265; `blues' 289; C. ahead (1870s) 244±5, 636; C. women thought less well integrated 278; coeducation, reaction against 268±9; earlier support for women's suffrage 302; Girton Coll., ®rst plans for 237±8; hostility encountered 240, 251; Local Examinations 9, 249, 636; MA degree, not until 1948 240; marriage rates 294; medical education 241; Newnham and Girton, of®cial recognition (1881) 250; Pass School closed to women 257; problems peculiar to O. and C. 242; progress before 1914 239; residence and other requirements 257; school examinations opened to girls (1865) 9, 237, 560; social spectrum narrower than for men 581±2; social and welfare work, O. and C. compared 299; suffrage movement 300±1, 305; Tripos examinations 240, 249; unruly scenes at

895

Senate vote (1897) 267; women's suffrage 300±6; see also 282 Table 10.1 mentioned 20, 245, 246, 258, 267, 322, 328, 417, 450, 506, 507, 648, 650, 669, 673, 751, 787, 867 see also 554 Figure 23.2 Cambridge University Association 822 Cambridge University Cricket Club 539 Cambridge University Press 651 Syndics 651 Cambridgeshire Village Colleges 639 Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society, Cambridge 733 Camden, William (1551±1623) 340 Cammel Lairds 856 Campbell, John Edward (1862±1924) 454±5 Campbell, Lewis (1830±1908) 65, 585, 603, 615 Campbell, Richardson 684 Campbell-Bannerman, (Sir) Henry, GCB 1895 (1836±1908): honorand at Encaenia (1907) 828 Prime Minister (1905±8) 828 Canada: Canadians at O. 713 Foreign Service 713 Geological Survey 502, PC 42 Governor General 725 OUP branch set up (1904) 656 provinces to provide Rhodes Scholars 718; additions to original number 721 Univs.: McGill 465; Toronto 713, 715 mentioned 63, 690, 701, 720 Candide see Voltaire Cannae 357 Cannan, Charles (1858±1919): ambitions 655 appointed Delegate of the Press, later Secretary 654±5 character 656 cut in Press subsidy 616 imperial themes 658 projects (1900s) 657±8 resists attempt to increase Press subsidy to Chest 852 Cannan, Edwin (1861±1935) 283 Cannan, May (1893±1973) 861, 872 Canning Club 811±12 Canterbury, Archbishops of, see archbishops Canterbury (NZ) Association 708 Cantor, Georg (1845±1918) 454 Cap and Gown 803 Cape Town 55 Capel, Thomas Edward (1770±1855) 209 Capes, William Wolfe (1834±1914) 34 Cardwell, Edward (1787±1861), Princ. of St Alban Hall (1831±61), Camden Prof. of Ancient History 314

896

index

careers: analysis of Balliol graduates (1874±83) 165 of Modern History School graduates (1873±1914) 382±3 Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 new avenues in second half of 19th cent. 593 of those having received ®nancial assistance (1912) 593 Warden Spooner on the `more ennobling careers' 855 mentioned 273 see also 297 Table 10.2 Caria 358 Carlisle, Rosalind Frances, Countess of (1845±1921) 285 Carlyle, Alexander James (1861±1943): modern Greats, discussions on 852 Political Philosophy and Science Club (1909) 620 Ruskin Hall, support for 676 trades unionism, encouragement of 642 as tutor 279, 283 work mentioned: History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (1903±36) 618 mentioned 381 Carlyle, Thomas (1795±1881) 279, 665 Carnarvon, 4th Earl of, succ. 1849 (1831±90) 176 CaroÈe, William Douglas (1857±1938) 758 Carolina 689 Caroline Code, see Statutes, Laudian Carpenter, ( Joseph) Estlin (1844±1927) 103, 305, 635 `Carroll, Lewis', see Dodgson, Charles Carson, Edward Henry, Kt 1900, Lord Carson 1921 (1854±1935) 809, 862 Carter, John (1862±1944) 839 Carter, Thomas Thellusson (1808±1901) 176 `Casaubon, Dorothy' 91 Case, Thomas (1844±1925), Pres. of CCC (1904±24) 131, Plate 37, PC 37 Wayn¯ete Prof. of Moral Philosophy 402, 626 anti-degree (for women) cttee secretary 266 at outbreak of war 626, 863 compulsory Greek 837 continued resistance to progressive moves 626 Day Training Coll. opposed by 558 Diploma of Education course attacked by 557 English proposals attacked by 402 Finance Statute opposed by (1910±12) 837 leadership of Non Placet Society 626 lifelong commitment to resisting modern innovations 626

O.U. Cricket Club, Hon. Treasurer 531 postal voting in Convocation, assists rejection 852 Tutorial Classes Cttee grant opposed by 848, 851 quoted 258, 402, 557 mentioned 531, 775 The Case of Richard Meynell, see Ward, Mrs Humphry Cassell and Galpin, publishers 652 `catholic', `catholicism' 90, 97, 186, 634, 635 Catiline Club, see reform of the University Catte St 729 Cauchy, Augustin Louis (1789±1857) 447 Cave, Walter Frederick (1863±1939) 758, 773, 774 Cavendish, Lady Frederick (Lucy Caroline) (1841±1925): quoted 181±2 mentioned 70 Cavendish, Lord Frederick Charles (1836±82) 70 Cavendish, Lord Richard (1812±73) 176 Cayley, Arthur (1821±95) 452 Cecil family 632 Cecil, James Edward, succ. as 4th Marquess of Salisbury 1903 (1861±1947) PC 1 Cecil, Lord Hugh Richard, cr. Lord Quickswood 1941 (1869±1956) 41, 305, 633, 838, PC 31 Cecil, Lord Robert, see Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of Cecil, Lord Robert, cr. Visc. Cecil of Chelwood 1923 (1864±1958) 58, PC 1 celibacy 94, 562±3 Celtic 415, 422, 613 census of®cials 704 Central Joint Advisory Committee for Tutorial Classes 687 Central Labour College 686, 845, PC 72 Ceylon 703, 706 Chamberlain, Joseph (1836±1914) 603, 812 Chamberlain, (Sir) (Joseph) Austen, KG 1925 (1863±1937) 809, PC 75 Chambers, (Sir) Edmund Kerchever, Kt 1925 (1866±1954) Plate 33, PC 33 Champneys, Basil (1842±1935): Indian Institute 754±5, 771, 773, Plate 24, PC 24 Jackson's domination challenged 754 LMH, new block (1880±4) 770, PC 54 Mans®eld Coll. 755, 772, 775 Merton buildings 755, 775 New Coll., Robinson Tower, Holywell front 774, PC 21 Newnham Coll., C. 259 Oriel Coll., High St front 755, 776

index Renaissance style 755, PC 24 Shelley Memorial 755, 773 Somerville Library 755, 775 trained as a strict Goth 751 mentioned 747, 748, 751, 754, 771 Chancellors: Curzon, see under Curzon, 1st Marquess of Derby 43, 228 Goschen 633, 826±7 Grenville 228 Laud, Archbishop 834 Milner, Viscount (Chancellor elect) 694 Portland 228 Salisbury, see under Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of Wellington 228, 837 mentioned 233 Chancellor's English Essay Prize, Latin Verse Prize, see University Prizes Chantrey Gift 735 Chantrey, (Sir) Francis Legatt, Kt 1835 (1781±1841) 766 chapel: chapel attendance 145, 787±8; no longer compulsory 17, 108 decline in in¯uence (by 1914) 148 New Coll. choir 436 shortcomings in services, later improvement 106±7 undergraduate pranks at Trinity 140 variations in coll. arrangements 104±5, 147±8 mentioned 31, 55, 108, 144, 276, 279 chaperons 248, 274, 276, 278, 797 chaplains: effect of reduction in clerical fellowships 104±5 New Coll. services 436 pastoral care and liturgical duties 104±5 mentioned 209 Chaplin, Henry, Visc. Chaplin 1916 (1840±1923): hunting as an undergraduate 525 Chapman, David Leonard (1869±1958) 464 Chapman, Edward (1839±1906): urges science tuition in colls 137 quoted 489 mentioned 493 Chapman, Robert William (1881±1960): obituary of Cannan 656, 657 Secretary of the Press 656 Charity Commission 550 Charity Organisation Society 144, 242, 299 Charles I, King (1600±49) 43, 645 Charsley, William Henry (c.1820±1900) 120 Charsley's hall 120, 435 Charterhouse, 216, 221, 552, PC 69

897

Charteris, Guy (1886±1967) 792 Chartists 381 Chase, Drummond Percy (1820±1902), Princ. of St Mary Hall (1857±1902) 119 on the numerous poor men of the middle class 588 quoted 25 Chatham Club 811 Chattaway, Frederick Daniel (1870±1944) 464 Chavasse, Francis James (1846±1928) 107, 635 Cheesman, George Leonard (1884±1915): death in battle, First World War 356 work mentioned: The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army (1914) 360 mentioned 341 Cheltenham 263±4, 560, 797 Cheltenham College 159±60, 545, 551 Cheltenham Ladies' College, 250, 263, 288, 296, 573, 581, PC 52 chemistry: careers of graduates 493 chemical kinetics 463±4 laboratories: Museum laboratory 739, 741; for organic chemistry 465; the science best catered for in coll. laboratories 462; Univ. laboratories in `lamentable state' (1904) 464 percentage of Firsts 462 proportion of graduates 492 research tradition 464, 617 women not encouraged in research 470 mentioned 30, 136, 224, 248, 869 Cherwell, River 278, 760, 828 Cherwell Edge 288 Cheyne, Thomas Kelly (1841±1915): Oriel Prof. of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture 100, 617±18 Childe Harold, see Byron Childs, William Macbride (1869±1939) 680 Chilver, Guy (Edward) Farquhar (1910±82) 357 China, Chinese 694±5, PC 28 Chinese (academic subject) 415, 714, PC 25 choirs 430, 436±7 Choragus, see Music (academic study) Christ Church (`The House') 221±31 passim academic standard: proportion taking pass degrees (1911) 806; under Liddell 223, 225±6 appointment of salaried Steward 145 buildings: bell-tower competition 747, 751; Choir School 757; Great Tom 226, 227; Hall 223, 225, 228; Library 222, 225; Meadow Buildings 223, 225, 742±3; Peckwater Quad 222, 227; Tom Quad, 223, 225, 226, PC 31

898

index

Christ Church (`The House') (contd ) careers of graduates: fellows of All Souls 210, 212, 216; MPs 228±9; Prime Ministers 228 Cathedral 83, 148, 223, 225, 229; Bishop's Throne 747; organ 228, 230 Censors 141, 221, 223±4 Ch.Ch. Mission in Poplar 230 Chancellors 228; Chancellorship election (1907) 633 character and composition: considered as possible coll. for Prince of Wales 806±7; Etonians 550; Indian princes 803; nobility at 225±6, 582±3; proportion of public school men 551; range of intake 807; `the English of Eton and Christ Church' 549 closed awards 552 Dean and Canons: end of their complete dominance 16; mentioned 83, 222±4, 416, 536, 787; see also Gaisford; Liddell; Paget; Strong `Divvers Prelim' 783 ®nance: cost of Deanery and Canons 72; coll. contribution 86±7; internal income 71±2; tuition fees and scholarships 161; up to 50 sets of rooms empty (mid-1890s) 124±5; variable rents in different buildings 784; Welsh tithe war 580 foundation of O. Mission, Calcutta 710 hierarchy of colls 784 inadequate undergraduate library 149 India, succession of Governors General (early 19th cent.) 690 lectures of divines 94 losing lead in O. society (after 1850) 525 Macan removed from Studentship 58, 222, 857 ordinances of 1858 116, 224 reading party (1890) 143 religion: analysis of non-Anglicans 580; chaplains, team of 105; junior members petition successfully for weekly communion service 148; sermons 229 science: laboratory 136, 455, 477; Lee's readerships 137; patronage of 485, 491 Senior Common Room 224, 227, 230±1; conversation, story-telling 234; Dodgson as Curator of 232±6; membership 233 servitors at (incl. Stubbs, Edwards) 45, 536, 586±7 sport: beagles 525; early rowing successes 525; hunting 525; Torpids (1910) PC 61 statutes 582

Students 180, 222; clerical Studentships 86; designation `Student' 180; Studentship for extension lecturer (1892) 669 subjects: mathematics, mathematicians 443, teaching of Dodgson 449; success in Modern History School 224 tutors 224±5 undergraduates: the Blenheim Row 124±5, 226±7, Plate 31, PC 31; Bread and Butter Row (1865) 145; burning of O. pageant grandstand 790; JCR (1886) 151; Library riot (1870) 140, 221±2; Loder's club (1870) 221±2; rituals 783; undergraduate breakages 791 Univ.: `the Eton and Christ Church view' (1907) 682 mentioned 35, 209, 248, 721 Christ Church Days (1867) 63 Christchurch (NZ) 708 Christian Platonists 100 Christian Social Union 57, 110, 634±5, 642, 839 Christian socialism 107, 109±110, 112, 586, 625, 642 The Christian Year, see Keble, John: work mentioned Christianity: beliefs as basis for morality 19, 27 Butler's Analogy 25, 313 Christian and Byzantine studies 354 Church party view 30 doubts about miracles 787 F. Temple's Bampton Lectures (1884) 60 Gardner's enthusiasm for evolutionary Christianity 351 Gladstone: bulwarks against unbelief 41 imperialism: in¯uential books 691 increasingly pluralistic world of 635 inculcation before univ. 31 Jowett's appeal to idealism of Plato 32, 38 missionaries 709±12 Peile's Bampton Lectures (1907) 642 philosophy teaching's supposed threat to 25 protest at honorary degree for Rhodes 601 Ruskin Hall founders 676 sacred writings of other religions 102±3 Salisbury's position 30±1 social implications, the Idealists 108±10 Somerville's liberal Christianity 247 mentioned 643, 696 Christopher, Alfred Millard (1820±1913) 107, 709±10 Christ's Coll., C. 124 Church, Arthur Harry (1865±1937) 471 Church, Richard William (1815±90) 176, 226

index Church, (Sir) William Selby, Bt 1901 (1837±1928): quoted 491 Church of England 97±112 passim Acts of Parliament governing 187 Baring gift 118 coll. livings 733 on compulsory Greek 630 Darwin's hypothesis becomes respectable in (1884) 97 founding of Keble 173, 744 High Church clerics`out of touch' 58 Jowett: view on in¯uence of 26 O. `lost to' (after 1882) 55±7, 90 and Pater's Renaissance 33 patronage 632 strong position among coll. heads, brief favourable reaction (1882±4) 625; deans and tutors (1871) 24 theology school, examiners 875 yearning for honours course that would not `unsettle' (1870s) 43 mentioned 20, 144, 150, 273, 712, 714, PC 1 see also archbishops; bishops; Broad Church; `catholic'; clergy; Evangelicals; High Church Church of England Purity Association 139 Church of England Temperance Society 138±9 Church League for Women's Suffrage (CLWS) 304 Church Missionary Society 711 Church party: alarm at effect of Greats 27 Christianity a dogmatic system to 30 faces annihilation 55, 625 maintenance of clerical fellowships 23 mentioned 8, 21, 45, 57, 58, 85 Church of Scotland 22, 103, 580 Church Union 108 Churchill, (Sir) Winston Leonard Spencer, KG 1953 (1874±1965) 631, 729 Cicero (106±43 b c ), 327±8, 330, 344±5, 618, PC 32 Cicero, see Strachan-Davidson Cicero Select Letters (How, 1925) 342, see How, (William) Walsham: work mentioned; Watson, Albert: work mentioned cigar makers 674 cinema 782 City (Livery) Companies 196, 588 City of London 529 City of London School 63 City of Oxford 43, 477, 708, 762. See also Pt. 1, Ch. 13 City Temple 298

899

civic universities 363, 397, 603, 610, 638, 650, 785, 843 civil list 340 civil service: admission of univ. women to higher civil service 299±300 Balliol men who graduated 1863±87 160, 165, 168 Civil Service Commission 427 competitive examination 168, 317, 325, 623, 726, 869; committee appointed to revise 869; cramming 789±90 examination combined with ICS 346 MacDonnell Report 866 recruitment 574±5 mentioned 66, 382, 397, 579, 593, 620±1, 699, 815 see also Commissions (MacDonnell) Clarendon, 4th Earl of, succ. 1838 (1800±70) 550 Clarendon building: outgrown by Press, repairs to 646, 731 mentioned 194, 195, 196, 449±50, 754 Clarendon Commission, see Commissions Clarendon Hotel 79 Clarendon Laboratory: early aspirations, decay in Clifton's later years 460±2 poor record 616 mentioned 457, 626, 743, 757 Clarendon Press, see Oxford University Press Clarendon schools, see public schools Clarendon Trustees 743 Clarendon University Club 195 claret 600 Clark, Albert Curtis (1859±1937) 345, 618 Clark, Andrew (1856±1922) 573 Clark, (Sir) George Norman, Kt 1953 (1890±1979) 216, 374 Clarke, Fr Richard Frederick, SJ (1839±1900) 120 Clarke, (Sir) Fred, Kt 1943 (1880±1952) 558±9 Clarke, Somers (1841±1926) 758, 773 class, see social class; social issues classical archaeology 325±6 Classical Association 631 The Classical Museum 336 Classical Review 344 Classics: adverse effects on schools of O.'s compulsory Classics 11, 64, 866±7 attacked on utilitarian grounds 630 Board of Studies (1872) 333 Butler's Analogy in syllabus 25 classical heritage, literature 399±400

900

index

Classics: (contd ) classical scholarships: colls dare not reduce number (1870s) 13; great majority among O. scholarships 126 division into Mods. and Greats (1850) 45, 313 erosion of the European tradition 630 fears about adverse effect of new courses: English 399±401, 402, 403; Modern Languages School 413 fellows teaching (Michaelmas 1892) 133 growing opposition to (c.1870) 8 Hellinistic revival (1900±14) 631 predominance of 6, 13, 612, 864 publications: editions of the Classics 342, 631; mid-19th cent. commentaries 330; Oxford Classical Texts 658 supremacy not challenged by Stubbs 44 teachers in Empire, classicists 708 unsuitability of O. classical course for women students 252 mentioned 99, 209, 211, 260, 399, 608, 700 see also Greats (Literae Humaniores), Greek; Latin; Greek and Latin authors; Moderations Clay, Agnes Muriel (1878±1962) 342 Clay, (Sir) Henry, Kt 1946 (1883±1954) 687 Cleaver, William (1742±1815) 646 clergy: anti-clerical feeling weakens (1860s to 1880s) 58 anti-clerical spirit (1860s) 19 and classical syllabus 7, 864 clerical headships 76±7 coll. endowments seen as protection for (to 1850) 587 compulsory Greek, interest in retaining (1911) 630 Congregation votes held by local clergy (1854) 64 `dearth' of clergy feared (from 1890s) 627 growing opposition to power in O. (1860s) 8 material rewards offered (1800±50) 572 medical studies, alleged obstruction of (1877) 8 ordinands: 38 per cent of undergraduates aim to become (1870) 7; Boer War, urged to enlist 690; declining proportion (1890s) 579, 627; hopes of Keble's founders 174, 176, 188; include `quite poor men' (1912) 839; and theology school 98; Wycliffe Hall, St Stephen's House 108; see also Pt. 1, 489, for decline in output from O. after 1890 sons of clergy: at Balliol 159, 164; fees charged 573; fewer among

undergraduates from 1890s 622; proportion among O. ordinands 592 support for Non Placet views 626±7 votes in Convocation 605 weakening of connection with Univ. (1880s, 1890s) 578 mentioned 8, 75, 545, 547, 609, 610; see also archbishops; Bishops; Church of England; clerical fellowships; Deans; High Church clerical fellowships: abolition proposals, arguments, and voting: Commons (1877) 55±6, 77, 79; Lords (1876) 76±7 Archbishop's veto on application to Privy Council (1866) 17 High Church petition for retention (1875) 74±5 Jowett and Selborne Commission's policy 18 Liberals move for drastic reduction 85 reductions in: effect on chapel duties 104±6; in interests of tutorial ef®ciency 18; under Selborne Commission Statutes (1882) 55, 86, 609 Salisbury's support for 23, 55±6 in a `scienti®c age': Macan's view (1877) 56 Selborne Commission discussions 82, 86 statutory position: clerical strength (1870) 24; much weakened (1882) 90 Wordsworth, John, on `bene®ces' (1880) 57 mentioned 4, 5, 57 Clerk-Maxwell, James (1831±79): work mentioned: Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 449 mentioned 458 Cleveland, 4th Duke of, succ. 1864 (1803±91): appointed to chair Commission 70 quoted 70 mentioned 67 Cleveland Commission 69±73 passim circular of inquiry 70 estimate of agricultural rents in 81 Report 72±3 mentioned 3, 14, 18, 67, 213, 615, 842 Clifton, Robert Bellamy (1836±1921) 459±62 passim Prof. of Experimental Philosophy 459 on Royal Commission on Accidents in Mines 477 quoted 460±1 mentioned 471, 493, 495, 629 Clifton College 129, 130, 545, 662 clinical medicine, see anatomy, physiology Clinton, 20th Lord, succ. 1866 (1834±1904) 70 Clipsham stone 749, 752

index The Clothworkers' Company 196, 474 Clough, Anne Jemima (1820±92) 10, 249 Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819±61) 105 The Club: ancient historians and archaelogists in 359, 628 compulsory Greek: in favour of abolition 630 Council of Faculties proposal 628 degrees for women, divided on 630 Faculties Statute, support for (1910) 836±7 most important pressure group for reform (late Victorian era) 628 petition to Chancellor 831 programme, activities 627 split of 1906 629 support for science 628 mentioned 340, 823, 829, 838 clubs, see Bullingdon; Loder's; Vincent's Cluny 345 Clutton, Henry (1819±93) 746, 769 co-education, univ. colls and univs 241 Co-Ef®cients Club 695 Co-operative Brass Dressers 674 Co-operative Congress: 1878 663 1882 664 1883 665 1898 675 Co-operative movement: Hughes and Neale Scholarships 643 and Toynbee Hall, work of Mansbridge 674±5, 680 WEA campaign 841 work of A. H. D. Acland 663±5 mentioned 842±3, 849±50 see also Co-operative Congress Co-operative Union 675, 684, 841, 842, 845, 847 Co-operative Wholesale Society 674, 675 coal, coal-mines 162, 583, 812 Cobbe, Frances Power (1822±1904) 483 Cobden, Richard (1804±65) 665 Cockerell, Charles Robert (1788±1863): Queen's Coll. Library 766 Taylorian building 734±5, 766 mentioned 761 Codrington, Robert Henry (1830±1922) 501 coins 335±6 Coke, Desmond Francis (1879±1931): work mentioned: Sandford of Merton 785 Cole, George Douglas Howard (1889±1959) 167, 305, 374, 575, 643, 835, 849, PC 72 Coleridge, (Sir) John Duke, Kt 1868, cr. Lord Coleridge 1874 (1820±94): quoted 69 mentioned 172, 176, 185

901

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772±1834) 634 college barges 526, 529, 756 college gardens 760 College Histories 524 college magazines 290 college servants 144±6, 205, 526 college societies 812 college statutes: 1854 Act, revision after 115 chapel services and religious instruction (1882) 106 High Church petition to limit changes by colls (1875) 74±5 poverty preferences, abolition of (1856) 585 Selborne Commission: colleges to submit resolutions 82; freer than 1854 Commission in making statutes 75 mentioned 69 see also Statutes, University colleges: advantages for undergraduates in coll. system 55, 145 building programmes 125, 741±2 catering and domestic arrangements 145 `collections' 789 coll. lectures 80 `college men' in dispute with Univ. and/or professoriate 626±7, 836±7 collegiate character of O. and C., contrast with Continent 599 collegiate development of women's halls 256 cttee work 144 contributions for Univ. purposes (post-1877) 600, 609, 826 corporate spirit 156, 799 costs of living 145±7, 622 discipline, major changes in 137 diversity 783, 800 endowments, claims of `need' and `merit' 587±8 English School, poor support from colls (1894±1907) 405 furnishing of undergraduate rooms and Senior Common rooms 750 gaudies 156 hardship funds 589±90 honorary fellowships 157 inter-collegiate: co-operation 608; rivalry 524 missions in east and south London 671±2 Natural Science, problems 485, 487, 491 ordinances (1855±8) 586 organization of teaching (1870s) 15 poorer colls unable to expand 122±4

902

index

colleges: (contd ) reform party's aims, colls an obstacle 827±8, 829, 864 religious life in 55, 57 reluctant to spend on books 149 retain control of arts subjects (1877 onwards) 52 revival of colls, late 19th cent. 115, 124 scholarships, inter-coll. rivalry 125±7 Selborne Commission: contributions for Univ. purposes 79, 85, 86±7; preliminary inquiries 78 sport: changes in organization of 528; success enhances standing 527 statute reforms 115±16 voluntary contributions, inquiries by Univ. (1874, 1876±7) 73±4 weaker colls need passmen's fees 623 see also individual colls Colles, Henry Cope (1879±1943) 440±1 Collingwood, Robin George (1889±1943): on relative situations of Greek and Roman history (c.1910) 352±3 quoted 352±3 Collingwood, Samuel 646, 647, 731 Collins, John Churton (1848±1908): contempt for philology 399 furious attack on proposed School of Modern Languages and Literature 399±401 Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824±89) 222 work mentioned: Man and Wife (1870) 222 colonial history: lectureship 640, 692 professorship (1905) 611, 640, 692 mentioned 715 Colonial Of®ce 168, 348, 531, 692±3, 704, 706 Colonial Secretary 694, 706 colonial service 165, 168, 502, 531, 623, 640, 694, 715 colonial studies 640 colonial universities 610 colonies: administration 502±3 Forestry Schools 475 founding of 689 in¯uence of colonials on O. 690 Special Students 203 mentioned 290, 389, 693 Coltman, Mrs (Constance Mary), see Todd, C. M. Coltman, Claud Marshall, (1889±1971) 298 Colvin, (Sir) Howard (Montagu), Kt 1995 (1919±): quoted 729, 735 Combe, Mrs (Martha Howell) (1806±93): presentation of painting to Keble Coll. 186

Combe, Thomas (1797±1872) 647, 649±50 Commemoration 241, 520, 537 Commemoration Ball 154 Commentaries on the Laws of England, see Blackstone, (Sir) William: work mentioned Commentary on Herodotus, see How, (William) Walsham: works mentioned commerce: anti-commercial feeling 9, 40 need for scienti®c education 10 proposal for Diploma in Commerce and Economics defeated 855±6 mentioned 4, 7 commercial academies 12 Commissions: O. Univ. (1850), see Royal Commission (1850) Royal Commissions: Civil Service (MacDonnell, 1912) 299±300, 574±5, 589, 802, 814, 866, 867; O. and C. Univs.: O., H. H. Asquith, chairman (1919) 457±8, 588, 630, 800, 821, 852; Physical Training in Scotland (appd. 1902) 541; Property and Income: Univs and Colls: O. and C. (Cleveland, 1872), see under Cleveland; Public Schools (Clarendon, 1861) 32, 550, 636; Schools Inquiry (Taunton, 1864) 11±12, 238, 548, 550, 561, 571, 586, 636, 663, 863±4, 865; Scienti®c Instruction (Devonshire, 1870) 12, 13, 65, 74, 79, 117, 137, 452, 457; Scottish Univs (1892) 264; Secondary Education (Bryce, 1894) 556, 561, 637, 668; Univ. Education in Wales (1916) 869 Statutory Commissions: O. and C. Univs: O., Lord Selborne, chairman (1877), see under Selborne; O. Univ., Executive Commission (1854) 3, 69±70; O. Univ. (1923) 875 mentioned (Royal and Statutary) 608, 609, 829, 843 Committee for National Memorial to Gladstone 852 Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (1919) 876 Common University Fund (CUF): C. CUF 487, 608 funds available to researchers 615 General Board takes over management (1911) 837 principle of coll. liability 600 responsible, with Chest, for Univ. ®nance 607 Selborne Commission: colls to contribute to CUF 52, 68±9, 73±4, 86±7, 213;

index criticisms of younger progressives 53; Faculty Boards, responsibilities 88 in Statutes (1882) 487 mentioned 405, 411, 416, 501, 556, 610, 611 Commons, House of: Asquith and Grey dominate (1914) 863 declaration of war 871 Goschen on zeal of new House (1906) 826±7 MPs elected from: All Souls 219; O. Historical Seminar 380±1 rebuilding of 729 Selborne Commission: introduction of Bill and con®rmation of Commissioners 77; proposed abolition of clerical fellowships (1880) 86 Select Cttees: on the Jameson Raid (1897) PC 71; legal education in England and Ireland 385±6; on opening O. and C. to Non-Coll. students (Ewart, 1867) 48, 68, 69, 79±80, 194; Scienti®c Instruction (1868) 12, 13 Speaker 828 Stubbs on 44 Univ. Commission, pressure for (1907, 1908, 1912) 830, 833, 842 univ. extension, attitude to (1892) 669 mentioned 52, 241, 571, 632, 794, 850, PC 38 Commonwealth 640, 698 Commune, Paris 19, 418 Community of the Resurrection 711 Comparative Assyrian Grammar, see Sayce, Archibald Henry: works, mentioned comparative philology 77 comparative religion 700 Compatriots' Club 695 Comper, (Sir) ( John) Ninian, Kt 1950 (1864±1960): panelling and glass, Oriel Hall 759, 776 Compton, Francis (1824±1915) 216 compulsory Greek: abolished (1920) 875 appeal against (1870) by Chief Commissioner, Endowed Schools 13, 554, 564 C. proposal (1904±5) 822 complaints and criticism from: Assistant Masters 630; Bishop of Hereford (Percival) 831; Headmasters' Conference 564; Lord Curzon 834; Lord Rosebery 640±1; `Mr Raeburn' 863; public schools 564, 636; science committee (1918) 869 Congregation, proceedings in (1904±14) 633, 822, 837, 840, 857±8 Convocation, `the stalwart six' (1911) 837

903

deterrent effect 554; applies less to C. 488; in grant-earning schools 622, 807; on potential donor and Winston Churchill 631, 855 lingering consequences 866 Rhodes Scholars and 705, 719, 723, 725 scientists, position and views of 65, 94, 629, 822, 837 survival of Greek, new secondary schools 564 mentioned 280, 606, 633, 836 Comte, Auguste (1798±1857) 315, 696 The Concise English Dictionary (H. W. and F. G. Fowler, 1911) 657 Conference of Universities of the Empire 603 Congregation: composition and procedure: aims of reform groups (from 1903) 821±2, 834; increasingly `unrepresentative' nonacademic members 64, 605±6, 630, 832, 852; postal voting (1960s) 606; right of legislative initiative extended to (1908) 832; science: 60 members teaching or researching (1914) 458; The Times, suggestions for reform (1907±9) 835; tutors' strength in colls, not in Congregation (1870s) 48 proposals: attempt to abolish Herbert Spencer Lecture (1909) 805; award of certi®cates to secondary teachers (1880) 555; compulsory Greek, abolition (1905±20) 633, 822, 837, 874; controversies over clerical examiners (1902±22) 111, 874; Curzon on Congregation votes (1912) 838; Diploma in Commerce and Economics (1913) 855±6; Eights Week, examination dates (1905) 537; Honour School of Agricultural Science (1898) 474; School of Modern European Languages projected (1887) 399, 423, 613, 626; takeover of St Edmund Hall, proposal fails (1903) 119; `Unattached Students', changing title (1881) 199±200 statutes etc.: Day Training Coll.: little opposition to (1887±91) 558; English School (1893±4) 403±4; English Fund Statute (1909) 408, 410±11; Keble, statute (1871) 184; location of laboratories, etc. in the Parks 478, 479; Modern Languages School (1903) 424; Tutorial Classes Cttee, grant (1913) 851 women: allowed to take certain examinations, statute (from 1884) 256±7; Delegacy Statute passed (1910) 270; limit imposed on number (1927) 272; nonresident BA diploma, narrowly defeated

904

index

Congregation: (contd ) (1896) 268, PC 27, PC 39; resolutions on BA (1896) 266, 630 mentioned 341, 417, 836 Congregational, Congregationalists 58, 103, 205, 298, 632, 755, PC 25 Congreve, Richard (1818±99) 696±7 Conington, John (1825±69): Corpus Prof. of Latin 142, 330 commentaries on Virgil and Persius 328, 330 reading parties (early 1860s) 142 mentioned 151 Conroy, (Sir) John, 3rd Bt 1869 (1845±1900) 136±7, 464, 493 Conservative Party: after 1874 election 73 basis of party's imperial policies 695 hegemony in inter-war years 600 in Lords 93 MPs, burgesses, and ministers 246, 631±3, 872 realities of C. politics 67±8 Verney's ancestral beliefs 143 mentioned 292, 301 Conservatives, Tories: amendment to 1854 Bill 64 Canning Club 811 conservatism in religious doctrine 98, 100, 111, 700 cons. colls 88, 124 Cons. heads, profs, tutors 88, 122, 366, 376, 600, 625±6, 632±3 Curzon 832, 833 and German scholarship 414±15 Liberal split, effect (1886) 624 and non-academic Congregation voters 630 in O. Union 809±10 peers 24 petition on Univ. reform (1875) 74±5 and the poor 586 Salisbury's Chancellorship 632 on Selborne Commission 76, 83 mentioned 68, 73, 93, 122, 143, 246, 301 see also Conservative Party Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World, see Toynbee, Arnold Joseph: works mentioned Constitutional Antiquities of Sparta and Athens, see Gilbert, Gustav constitutional history 45, 361, 375 Constitutional History of England down to 1485, see Stubbs, William: works mentioned Contemporary Review 38, 67, 401, 697 Continent 54, 443, 450, 452±3, 455, 617, 864

Continental universities 132, 618, 629, 823 Convent of the Holy Rood 242 Convent of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity 242 Convocation Plate 11, PC 11 composition and powers: 6,700 members (by 1909) 605; Bible-printing, instruction to Delegates (1780) 645; clergy and schoolmasters well represented 605, PC 11; curtailment of legislative veto (1926) 821; delayed poll proposed (1913) 838, 852; Delegacy for Women Students, majority membership (1910) 269; large non-resident element 604, PC 11; member voting against `that damned intellect' (1860s) 30; Rashdall, reform proposal 840; Rosebery on power to block reform (1907) 853; The Times, suggestions for reform (1909) 835 proposals and changes accepted: admission of women to certain examinations (1884) 256±7; building of physiology laboratory (1883) 482; Diploma of Anthropology (1905) 356; Diploma of Education (1896) 556; extension (1868, 1908) 193±4, 685; Jackson's design for Examination Schools (1876) 748; Keble, permission to matriculate (1870) 181; OUP, new building for (1825) 646; petition for inquiry into secondary education (1893) 637; philosophy not discouraged (1871) 26; religion, no heresy-hunts (from 1870) 635; residence outside colls, statute prohibiting (1808) 730; Tutorial Classes Cttee, grant (1913) 851; Univ. Boat Club, grant (1881) 527, 532±3; Univ. Museum, scheme (1853) 739 proposals defeated: Clarendon Laboratory, electricity laboratory (1887) 459±60; compulsory Greek, option for mathematicians and scientists (1911) 837; Congregational divine, nominated for Rudiments (1883) 58, 625; Diploma in Commerce and Economics (1913) 705, 834, 855±6; Forestry degree course (1910) 702; Forestry School (1910) 476; theological examiners, laymen barred (1904, 1913) 111, 822, 852±3 reformers' criticisms: `Delenda est Convocatio' 840; obstructiveness 58, 829, 853 mentioned, 64, 451, 557, 700, PC 24, PC 26 Conway, Moncure Daniel (1832±1907) 245 Conybeare, Frederick Cornwallis (1856±1924) 621

index Cook, Joshua 646 cooks 145 Cooper, Alfred Duff, cr. Visc. Norwich 1952 (1890±1954) 790, 818 Cooper, Alice Jane (1846±1917) 298, 612 Cooper, Sydney (1862±1942) 380±1 Cooper's Hill College 475 Copenhagen 507 Univ. of 473 Copleston, Edward (1776±1849), Provost of Oriel (1814±18) 548 Corbridge 355 Corfe, Charles William (1814±83) 441 Corn Exchange 245 Corneille, Pierre (1606±84) 425 Cornell University, see United States of America Cornford, Francis Macdonald (1874±1943): C. `ritualist' 356 parody of academic politics 624 on `the Non-Placet' 626 quoted 626 Cornmarket 724 Cornwall 667, 737 Corpus Christi College: academic standard: all undergraduates to read for honours (by 1873) 93, 137; competition in scholarship examining 126; few undergraduates require outside tuition (1866) 135; high academic standards and success on the river (1860s) 537; only rival to Balliol (1857±82) 131; scholars expected to aim at ®rsts 784 buildings: Annexe 753; coll. barge by Jackson 756 careers of graduates: in Empire 706; of Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 chaplain 105 character and composition: colour prejudice, Pres. Case 800±1, 806; a friendly coll. 809; high proportion of scholars 127 debating society 150 hon. fellowship for Ruskin 132, 691 Garden Master 808 high table procession, Plate 37, PC 37 life fellows 808 The Owlets Club Plate 33, PC 33 Pelican Record 621 philosophy: `9 more hours of pragmatism' 818 portraits of old members as models to the young 572 Pres.: election of (1904) 624; quali®cation for Presidency 130

905

Professorships (Latin, Comparative Philology) 415; proposal for Romance Languages 417 Rhodes Scholar (1904) 720 sport: and coll. unity 154; football in both codes 524; Fowler resists athleticism 528; rowing men 152, 521, 524 undergraduates: Conington's reading parties (early 1860s) 142±6; JCR dissolved (1852) 150; schools attended by 547; volunteers at outbreak of war 863 Corpus (Latin inscriptions) 355 Corran School, Watford 295±6 Correspondence with Trajan, see Pliny Coryphaeus, see Music (academic study) Cottingham, Lewis Nockalls (1787±1847) 732, 765 Cotton, Hugh Benjamin (1871±95) PC 60 Cotton, Richard Lynch (1794±1880), Provost of Worcester Coll. (1839±80), V.-C. (1852±6) 585 Coulton, George Gordon (1858±1947) 545 The Council of Trent, see Froude, James Antony: works mentioned country gentry, see aristocracy and gentry, landowners country parsons 482 country sports, ®eld sports 517, 527, 533, 536, 583 county council awards 588 Coupland, (Sir) Reginald, KCMG 1944 (1884±1952) 826 `Courtenay, Mr' 63 The Courtier (Castiglione, trans. Hoby) 406 Courtney, Mrs ( Janet, neÂe Hogarth) (1865±1954) 299, 300±1 Courtney, (Dame) Kathleen d'Olier, DBE 1952 (1878±1974) 300 Courtney, William Leonard, Lord Courtney 1906 (1850±1928): chairs O. Conference on Trade Unionism 674 Editor of Fortnightly Review 299 a pro-athletic don 527, 532±3 work: `Oxford Democratic and Popular' 623 mentioned 134, 626 Coventry 551, 740 Cowley Marsh, 202, 523, 538, PC 62 Cowley Place 237 Cowley Road 195 Coxe, Henry Octavius (1811±81) 508 Crabbet Club 798 Craigie, (Sir) William Alexander, Kt 1925 (1867±1957) 345, 655

906

index

Cram, Ralph Adams (1863±1942) 762 Cramer, John Antony (1793±1848), Princ. of New Inn Hall (1831±47) 42 Cranborne, Visc., see Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of Cranborne, Visc., succ. as 4th Marquess of Salisbury 1903 (1861±1947) PC 1 Cranbrook, 1st Earl of, see Hardy, GathorneCranmer, Thomas (1489±1556) 733 Craven Scholarships, see University Prizes and Scholarships Crawley, Frances, see Wells, Mrs Crawshay, Rose Mary (1828±1907) 245 Creighton, Mandell (1843±1901): inter-coll. lecture scheme 46±7, 374 involvement in sport 528 Scott Holland's memorial sermon 19±20 quoted 3, 46, 243 mentioned 53 Creighton, Mrs (Louise) (1850±1936) 243, 298 Cremona, Luigi (1830±1903) 450 Creoles 714 Crete 358 Crewe, 1st Earl, cr. 1895, Marquess 1911 (1858±1945): quoted 831 mentioned 681, 843 Creweian Oration 586 Crick Road PC 54 cricket, see sport Crimean War 13, 449, 697 criticisms of Oxford 9±10, 29, 869 Critique of Pure Reason, see Kant, Immanuel: work mentioned Crockford's Clerical Directory 547 Cromer, 1st Earl of, cr. 1901 (1841±1917) 720 Cromwell, Oliver (1599±1658) 692, 805 Crooks, William (1852±1921) 681 The Crown 180, 629 Cruso, Henry Alford (1874±1947) PC 29 Cruttwell, Charles Robert (1887±1941) PC 74 crystallography 468, 469 CSU, see Christian Social Union Cuddesdon College 108, 182 CUF, see Common University Fund Cumberland 552, 587 cuneiform 354 Cunningham, Henry Julian (1876±1918) 341 curates 7±8 Curtis, Lionel George (1872±1955) 640, 695±6, 715, 802 Curtius, Ernst (1814±96) 335, 338, 352 Curzon, George Nathaniel (1859±1925), cr. Lord Curzon 1898, advanced to Earldom 1911, to Marquessate 1921, Chancellor (1907±25): career: achievements 832; Arnold Historical Essay Prize (1884) 381;

`excluded' from House of Lords (1907) 831; fellow of All Souls (1883) 215; imperialist views 695; Lothian Prize (1883) 381; mistrust of (1908) 832; Pres. of the Union 694; in Union debate (1879) 273 Chancellorship: election (1907) 633; his view of 834 installation 828, opening of Talbot building, LMH (1910) PC 56 Indian Viceroy 168, 215, 220, 381, 641, 694, 695, 699, 832 and O. U.: on O.'s image as rich man's univ. 622; attempt to improve entrance examination 64; on coll. system forming character 641; on Commission proposals: consulted by Asquith (1912) 843, not in favour of 831, 840, 850; extension, support for 683±4; Hebdomadal Council likened to cabinet 605; Hebdomadal Council's response to reform proposals 202; lack of interest in science depts 839; new coll. for working men suggested 847; O. Re-Endowment Fund 626, 795, 828, 833, 853; on O.'s constitutional machinery 838; O.'s part in education of nobility 583; preoccupation with benefactors 839; promotes `reform from within' 600, 608, 832; reform of the Univ. 832±36; some entrenched opposition to reform proposals 630; suggests diploma in business education 613; on Univ. ®nance 607; on Univ. research ef®ciency 615 women's education and rights: anti-suffrage movement 302, 630; BA for women included in C.'s reform programme 269, 271, 630, 834; warning against agitation 269 work mentioned: Principles and Methods of University Reform (1909) 831±3 quoted 583, 600, 607, 622, 641, 700, 832, 833, 834, 838, 839, 840, 843±4, 849±50, 851 mentioned 119, 262, 496, 606, 705, 798, 852 Cushing, Harvey Williams (1869±1939) 506 Cuyp, Albert (1620±91) 233 Cyprus 353 Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315±386 a d ) 98 Daily Express 794±5 Daily Mail 794 Daily News 670, 696 Daily Telegraph 630, 682 Dallin, Thomas Francis (c.1841±80): Public Orator 76 a secretary to Selborne Commission 76, 79 Danes 693

index Daniel, Charles Henry (1836±1919), Provost of Worcester Coll. (1902±19) 797 `arts and crafts' movement, Daniel Press 532 opposes grant to O.U. Boat Club 532±3 quoted 76, 532 Dante Alighieri (1265±1321) 417, 621 Dante Society 620 Darbishire, Helen (1881±1961), Princ. of Somerville Coll. (1931±45) 284, 285, PC 73 Dardanelles, see First World War Darwin, Charles (1809±82): acceptance of his hypothesis 97 attempt to exclude from honorary degree list (1870) PC 1 in¯uenced by Baden Powell's writings 447 works mentioned: The Descent of Man (1871) 19, 690±1; Origin of Species (1859) 18, 100, 690±1 mentioned 20, 60, 62, 493, 495 Darwin, John (1948±) 641, 803 Darwinism, Darwinists 33, 60, 108, 467, 704 Das Antlitz der Erde, see Suess Daubeny, Charles Giles Bridle (1795±1867): pioneer of scienti®c agriculture 473±4 Davidson, Randall Thomas, Lord Davidson 1928 (1848±1930): on lack of tutoring (Law and Modern History) 135 quoted 135 mentioned 553 Davies, (Sarah) Emily (1830±1921): ®rst bid to open C. BA (1887) 264 plan for C. coll. 9, 237, 240 quoted 237 mentioned 250, 280 Davis, Henry William Carless (1874±1928): Regius Prof. of Modern History 374 quoted 376, 847 mentioned 167, 219 Davison, Emily Wilding (1872±1913) 300 Davitt, Michael (1846±1906) 155 Dawkins, Richard McGillivray (1871±1955) 358±9 Dawson (Robinson to 1917), (George) Geoffrey (1874±1944) 220, 695±6 Dawson, William 646 Day Training College, see Oxford University Day Training College de Grey, 2nd Earl, Marquess of Ripon 1871 (1827±1909) 180 De Morgan, Augustus (1806±71) 444, 446 De Morgan, William Frend (1839±1917) 750 de Sainte Croix, Geoffrey Ernest (1910±2000) 353±4

907

De Sanctis, Gaetano (1870±1957) 360 Deane & Woodward 739, 767 Deane, (Sir) Thomas, Kt 1830 (1792±1871) 739, 742 Deane, (Sir) Thomas Newenham, Kt 1890 (1828±99): Chemistry and Physiology Laboratories 756 Ch.Ch.: bell-tower competition 747; Meadow Buildings 225, 742±3, 768 Clarendon and Physiology Laboratories 743, 768, 771 Examination Schools, invited to compete 748 Inorganic Chemistry laboratory 770 Parks Lodge 760 Pitt-Rivers Museum 500, 756, 771 Univ. Museum, Porter's Lodge 769 Deans (Ecclesiastical): Chichester: Burgon 175, 252, 586 Durham: Kitchin 648, 680 Ripon: Fremantle 212 Rochester: Scott 161 St Paul's: Church 226 Westminster: Bradley 128; Ireland 585; Stanley PC 11 Winchester: Hutton 380±1; Kitchin 199, 648 debating societies 150, 290, 812 debt 94, 147 declaration (religious test) 23 Degeneration, see Nordau degrees: BA, see bachelor of arts BCL, see bachelor of civil law BD 110, 257, 875 B.Litt., see bachelor of literature BM 257, 875 B.Mus., see bachelor of music BSc 203, 269±70, 459, 492, 619 DCL 23, 395 DD 110, 635, 875 D.Litt. 619, 635 D.Mus. 257, 429, 430, 433, 435 D.Phil. (Ph.D.) 619, 875 DSc 619 MA, see master of arts see also examinations; honorary degrees Degrees by Degrees 240, 265 Delegacy for Extension (1924±70 D. for Extra Mural Studies) 474, 684±5 Delegacy for the Inspection and Examination of Schools 561 Delegacy for Licensing Lodgings 144, 194 Delegacy of Local Examinations: controversy over religious content of examinations 560

908

index

Delegacy of Local Examinations: (contd ) Diploma of Education course organized by (1896) 556 established (1857) 560 examinations for women 240, 247±8, 258, 607 mentioned 244, 269±70, 280, 563, 661, 722 Delegacy for Non-Collegiate Students (Unattached Students till 1882) 121, 196, 198±9, 529, 753±4, 772 Delegacy for the Supervision of Women Students 250, 256, 269±70, 285, 832 Delegacy for the Training of Secondary Teachers 556±7 Demerara 801 democracy 60, 368 demonstrators (laboratory) 74, 460, 461, 464, 471, 477 Den Otter, Sandra 642 Denison, Edward (1840±70) 670 Department of Scienti®c and Industrial Research (1915) 876 Derby, 14th Earl, Edward Geoffrey SmithStanley, styled Lord Stanley 1834±44, Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe 1844 (1799±1869), Chancellor (1852±69): as Chancellor 43, 228 Prime Minister 43 mentioned 194, 366, PC 1 Derby, 17th Earl of, styled Lord Stanley 1893±1908 (1865±1948): consulted about coll. for Prince of Wales (1911) 806±7 quoted 806 The Derby 582 Desborough, Lord, cr. 1905 (1855±1945) 860±1 The Descent of Man, see Darwin, Charles: works mentioned Development Commission, Fund 638, 704 Deverell, Edith (1872±1958) 299 Devon, 11th Earl of, succ. 1859 (1807±88) 176 Devon 737 Devonshire, 7th Duke of, succ. 1858 (1808±91) 70 Devonshire Commission, see Commissions Devonshire marble 186 Dewar, (Sir) James, Kt 1904 (1842±1923) 485 Diamond Jubilee 782 Dicey, Albert Venn (1835±1922): Vinerian Prof. of English Law 394 Arnold Historical Prize (1860) 381 development of school of historical jurisprudence 617 mystical nature of imperial cause 691 supporter of women's education 302 work mentioned: England's Case against Home Rule 634

quoted 214 mentioned 641, 705, 846, PC 2 Dickens, Charles (1812±70) 233, 665 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes (1862±1932) 798 work mentioned: Autobiography ed. Proctor (1973) 798 dictionaries: Anglo-Saxon dictionary (Bosworth and Toller) 419 English Dialect dictionary (Wright 1891±1905) 297, 419, 618 Greek Lexicon (`Liddell and Scott') 221, 419 Icelandic±English dictionary (Cleasby) 231, 419 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Murray) 200, 414, 419, 615, 651±3, 655 Sanskrit±English dictionary (M. MonierWilliams) 419 Syriac Lexicon (Payne Smith) 647 Dictionary of Antiquities 447 Dictionary of National Biography 363, 455, 617 Dictionary of Political Economy, see Palgrave, (Sir) Robert Harz Inglis Diderot, Denis (1713±84) 279 Digby, (Sir) Kenelm Edward, KCB 1898 (1836±1916): Vinerian Reader in English Law 391 work mentioned: History of the Law of Real Property 393 Dilke, (Sir) Charles Wentworth, 2nd Bt (1843±1911) 76, 91 Dill, (Sir) Samuel, Kt 1909 (1844±1924) 341 dining clubs 153 Diplomas: Anthropology 356, 502, 611, 619, 705 Classical Archaeology 350, 611, 619 Commerce and Economics (proposed) 852, 855±6 Economics (from 1909 Economics and Political Science) 611, 613, 623, 686±7, 810, 857 Education 298, 556, 561, 607, 611, 612, 637 Forestry 469, 475, 611, 702, 705 Geography 563, 611, 619, 702, 705 Military Subjects 611 Rural Economy 474±5, 611 Scienti®c Engineering and Mining Subjects 477, 611 diplomatic service 160, 165, 168, 382 Disraeli, Benjamin, cr. Earl of Beacons®eld 1876 (1804±81): work mentioned: Lothair (1870) 94 quoted 42

index mentioned 44, 85, 94, 366 Dissenters, see Nonconformists divinity, see theology Divinity School 266, 726, 749 `Divvers Prelim', see Examination in Holy Scripture Dixey, Frederick Augustus (1855±1935) 489, 629, 631 Dixon, Harold Baily (1852±1930) 464 Dixon, William Samuel (1851±1925) 181 Doble, Charles Edward (b. c.1847) 653 dockers 674 Dodds, Eric Robertson (1893±1979): work mentioned: The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) 331 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (`Lewis Carroll') (1832±98) Plate 6 Ch.Ch. background in his books 230 Curator of Ch.Ch. SCR, 232±6 passim members' complaint book 232; membership 233; notices and pamphlets 234±5: Curiosissima Curatoria 234±5 story-telling 234; wine cellars 232±3 on the `Girton Girl' 253 heavy teaching load 449 mathematics tutor at Ch.Ch. 224±5, PC 6 origin of nom-de-plume PC 6 work on theory of games and of voting 450 works mentioned: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) 225, 232, 235, PC 6; An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867) 449±50; Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) 449±50; The Hunting of the Snark (1876) 232, 235 quoted 30, 60 mentioned 51, 226, 275, 330, 450, 451, 477, 508, PC 1, PCs 6, 7 dogs 138 DoÈllinger, Johann Joseph von (1799±1890) 16 Donkin, William Fishburn (1814±69): Savilian Prof. of Astronomy 446±8 music and acoustics 447±8 mentioned 449, 450, 451 `Dons and Beaks' (1886) 563 `Doolittle, Eliza' 425 Dove, (Dame) ( Jane) Frances, DBE 1928 (1847±1942) 295 Drage, Geoffrey (1860±1955) 299 Drapers' Company 461, 486, 503, 640, 757, PC 20 Dreyer, Georges (1873±1934): Prof. of Pathology 473, 507 established reputation of dept 507 tuberculosis vaccine claim 507

909

vaccinations in First World War 507 drink 506, 790±1 Drinkwater, Harry George (1844±95) 760, 773 Driver, Samuel Rolles (1846±1914): Regius Prof. of Hebrew 97, 502, 617±18 Dublin 38, 268, 296, 430 `The Due Recognition of Women by the University' 266 Du¯ou, Georges 418, 419 Duke Humfrey's Library, see Bodleian Library Duke of York, see George V, King Duleep Singh, Princess Bamba 581 Duleep Singh, Princess Catherine Hilda (d. 1942) 581 Dulwich College 800 Dunbabin, John Paul (1938±) 81, 85 Dunbabin, Thomas James (1911±55) 353±4, 357 Duncker, Maximilian Wolfgang (1811±86) 338, 352 Durham 172 County 221 Dyhouse, Carol 296±7 Earle, John (1824±1903): Rawlinson Prof. of Anglo-Saxon 402±3, 404, 416, 418 Early Science in Oxford, see Gunther, Robert William: work mentiond East End (of London): mentioned 91, 154, 263, 670±5, 786 East India Company 700, 710 Eastlake, Charles Locke (1836±1906): work mentioned: A History of the Gothic Revival (1871) 743 Eaton, John Richard Turner (1825±1911) White's Prof. of Moral Philosophy 57 Ecclesiastical Commission 827 ecclesiastical history 43, PC 4 EÂcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes 10 Economic Journal 642 Economic Review 642 economics 325, 326 discussions on modern Greats 852 historical economics 616±17 in relation to Empire 704 Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro (1845±1926): Drummond Prof. of Political Economy 617 in¯uence of Spottiswoode 448 works mentioned: Mathematical Psychics (1881) 448; New and Old Methods in Ethics (1877) 448 Edinburgh 793 Univ. of: places for Indian Forestry trainees 475, 702; Professorships 476, 555; uproar at lectures 88; mentioned 317, 603, 717

910

index

Edinburgh Review 9, 418, 647 education: adult education 623, 841 class-segregated schooling 639 concern at country's failings (late 1860s) 10 decline of Greek in schools 631 Diploma in, see under Diplomas educational endowments: demand for enquiry (1910±14) 841 educational politics (1900±14) 832 elementary: schools 553, 558±9, 589, 637, 824, 841±2; teachers, Day Training College for 124, 590±1 eligibility for scholarships 586 examinations (secondary education): O. and C. Joint Board (1873) 561; O. Locals 9, 560, 661, 663; Secondary School Examinations Council (1917) 562; for secondary school pupils (1878) 81; univ. entrance examination see Oxford University, admissions grant-earning schools 554±5, 594 growing demand for graduates in state schools 622±3 higher: demand for 601±2, 623; post-war surge in 793; state funding of 638 Holmes-Morant circular (1911) 841 Inspectorate (HMI) 299, 557, 559, 825, 841 Labour Party and TUC demands 825, 840±1 local education authority awards 553 in MacDonnell Report (1914) 866 middle-class schools 559 `Mr Raeburn' on (1915) 863 national education policies 638±9 O.'s in¯uence on schools 11, 64±5, 115, 636 premature specialization 866 pupil teachers 558 religious controversy: legacy of 639 school-leaving exhibitions 588 secondary: access to 622; conference in Examination Schools on state of (1893) 637; crucial defects in 196, 865; postFirst War surge in 793; regulations (1907) 594 success of day schools in scholarship competitions 590 teachers' register (1902) 556, 557 mentioned 636 see also grammar schools, public schools (especially Eton College, Rugby School, Westminster School, Winchester College); preparatory schools; schoolteaching; women's education Education Department 168 Code of 1890 558 Queen's Scholarships 558

Edward VII, King, see Prince of Wales, Albert Edward Edwards, (Sir) Owen Morgan, Kt 1916 (1858±1920) 136 Edwards, William George 536 Egerton, Hugh Edward (1855±1927): Beit Prof. of Colonial History 692±3, 816 inaugural lecture (1906) 816 mystical nature of imperial cause 691 quoted 692, 712 mentioned 220 Egerton, Philip Reginald (1832±1911) 189 Egypt 168, 294, 344, 345, 354, 711, PC 74 Egyptology: Readership in (1912) 611 Eighteenth Brumaire, see Marx, Karl: Work mentioned Eights, see sport: rowing Eighty Club 858±9 Elamite 354 Elcho, Lord, succ. as 8th Earl of Wemyss 1883 (1818±1914): quoted 225 Eldon, 2 nd Earl of (1805±54) 742 Eleanor Cross, Waltham 733 elections, constituencies: by-elections: C. (1911) 839; O. (1878) 82, 631 general: 1868 21, 22; 1874 73; 1880 56, 86; 1895 301; 1900 812; 1906 157, 633, 826; 1910 ( Jan.) 809±10, 844 single-member constituencies (1884±5) 44 electoral reform 450 electric light 782 electricity and magnetism 460 An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, see Dodgson, Charles: works mentioned Elements of Jurisprudence, see Holland, (Sir) Thomas Erskine: work mentioned Elements of Law, see Markby, (Sir) William: work mentioned Elgin, 9th Earl of (1849±1917) 168, 374, 699 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819±80) 91 Elizabethan literature 278±9 Ellenborough, 5th Lord (1841±1915) 831 Ellerton, Edward (1770±1851) 585 Elliott, Edwin Bailey (1851±1937): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Pure Mathematics 455 work mentioned: The Algebra of Quantics 455 Ellis, Robinson (1834±1913) Plate 37, PC 37 quoted 129 mentioned 314, 344 Ellis, Thomas Edward (`Tom') (1859±99) 380±1 Elliston and Cavell, drapers 690 Elmhirst, William (1892±1916) 781±819 passim character 781

index church-going 788 commoner of Worcester 781 death in Battle of the Somme 781 Diary (1911±12) 549, 592, 791 enjoyment of enlarged area of social contacts 801 on ragging and destruction 791 use of `-er' terms 549 `Elsmere, Robert' 95 Elton, Oliver (1861±1945) 370, 654 Ely, (George) Herbert (1866±1958) 657 Emmanuel College, Cambridge 124 empiricism 317 Encaenia 241, 522, 828, 859, 861, PC 71 procession (1899) Plate 71, PC 71 Encyclopaedia Britannica 299, 339, 617 Endowed Schools Commissioners 554 `Endowment of Research' group 87, 91±2 Engel, Arthur Jason (1944±) 87 engineering 493, 564 engineering science: Diploma (Scienti®c Engineering and Mining Subjects) 477, 611 Hon. School (1909) 476, 563±4, 611, 832 laboratory 479, 868 Professorship (1907) 66, 471, 611, 832 small Treasury subsidy 638 mentioned 12, 471±2, 612 England, R. 757, 776 England in the Age of the American Revolution, see Namier, (Sir) Lewis: works mentioned England's Case against Home Rule 634 Engelbert (1185±1225) 379 English Historical Review 363, 619 English Language and Literature 397±411 passim, 513 Figure 21C.3 account by Firth 414 courses weighted towards medieval language 613±14 ®nancial restrictions 611 Honour School 280, 419, 423, 563, 611, 613, 627 letter to colls (1907) 407±8 popularity of school among women 282 proposal for School of Modern Languages and Literature (1886±7) 399±402, 423 publications 657 women tutors 284 mentioned 296, 340±1, 606, 608, 837 513 Fig.21C.3 The English Novel, see Raleigh, (Sir) Walter: works mentioned English Seamen, see Froude, James Anthony: works mentioned English Studies Course for Foreigners (1913±14) 859

911

The Enlightenment 319 Ensor, (Sir) Robert Charles Kirkwood, Kt 1955 (1877±1958) 374, 620 Entente Cordiale 859 entomology: Hope department: entomological centre of Empire 701; international reputation 467 entrance examination, see Oxford University, admissions environment 478 epigraphy 337, 342 episcopal bench, see bishops epistemology 320 Epistles of Paul, see Jowett, Benjamin: work mentioned Erasmus (c.1467±1536) 618 Erasmus, see Froude, James Anthony: works mentioned Erle, (Sir) William, Kt 1845 (1793±1880) 151 eschatology 110, 111±12 Escott, Thomas Hay Sweet (d. 1924) 134 Escreet, Henrietta (1883±1970) 299, PC 73 Espin, Thomas Espinall (1824±1912) 100 An Essay on the Government of Dependencies, see Lewis, (Sir) George Cornewall essays 782 Essays Introductory to the Study of Constitutional History, see Wakeman Essays and Reviews (1860) 18, 32, 60, 97, 100, 160, 451 Esson, William (1838±1916): Savilian Prof. of Geometry 446, 455 collaboration with Vernon-Harcourt 463 ®rst detailed studies of chemical kinetics 451 mentioned 453 the establishment 853 ethics 320 Ethics, see Aristotle: works mentioned ethnography 499±503 passim ethnology 468, 691 Eton College: `Eton and Christ Church': English pronunciation 549; view of O. 682 former pupils of 70, 214, 432, 694, 718; at Balliol 159, 164, 167, 168±9, 801; at Ch.Ch. 550; at Magdalen 807; at Merton PC 10; fellows of All Souls 216 Head Master, see Lyttelton, Edward master: E. Warre (1867) 26 more Etonians at O. than at C. (1907) 553 problem of compulsory Greek 564, 858 Provost 363, 374 sport: cricket 520; dominance in rowing 522; Eton±Harrow match 539; football and Field Game 523±4, 534; rowing men at Ch.Ch. 525

912

index

Eton College: (contd ) undergraduates in groups of former schoolfellows 548 Euclid ( ¯. c.300 b c ) 63, 447, 449±50 eugenics 574 Euphrates 850 Europe, continental 725 nobility and landowning classes of 583 Evangelical, Evangelicalism 97±112 passim Evangelical interest in election of MonierWilliams 700 Green, T. H.: Evangelical background 319; importance of Evangelical religion 319 Hertford Coll.: revival of 118 public school heads' retreat from 62 visits to O. of Moody and Sankey (1882), Mott and Speer (1892) 139, 711 Wycliffe Hall an in¯uential centre 635 mentioned 26, 59, 107, 141, 696, 788, PC 3 Evans, (Sir) Arthur John, Kt 1911 (1851±1941): Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum 337, 622, 838 against `popularising' Univ. 846 member of The Club 359, 628 poem on Ramsay's resignation 349±50 proposal to stand at ®rst 1910 Election 838 used private means to fund research 622 mentioned 340, 345, 353, 356, 501, 826 Evans, Daniel (c. 1769±1842) 765 Evans, (Dame) Joan, DBE 1976 (1893±1977) 294 quoted 351 Evans, (Sir) John, KCB 1892 (1823±1908) 294 Evans, Lady (Maria, neÂe Lathbury) (1856±1944) 294 Everyman Plate 73, PC 73 Ewart Committee, see Commons, House of: Select Committees Ewart, William (1798±1869): unattached students: attempted amendment to 1854 Bill 193; Bill (1867) 194 Examination Boards 88 Examination in Holy Scripture (`Divvers Prelim') 783±4, 875, PC 37 Examination Schools, High Street Plate 22, PC 22 building of, and costs (1876±82) 748, PC 22 competition for design 748 converted to hospital (1914) 863 Delegacy for Non-Collegiate students (corner site) 753±4 funded by Press pro®ts 762 importance in history of mid-19th cent. architecture 760 mentioned, 199, 258, 265, 305, 634, 637, 666, 668, 682, 751, 759, 833, PC 40

Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned Examination Statutes 333 examinations (O Univ.) 282 Table 10.1 course length: effect of reform on 6 detrimental effects, examiners and undergraduates 51, 75, 80, 823 English School regulations 404±5 law: examinations said to be prejudicial to legal studies (1846) 386 Lit. Hum. Statutes (1872, 1907) 333, 344 mathematical curriculum, 1850 reforms 444±5 Special Subjects 335 Statutes 607: 1800 311; 1850 313, 362 Univ. entrance examination, see Oxford University, admissions women, opening of examinations to 252, 256±8 mentioned 80, 335 pattern, 1914, 512±14 Figs 21C. 1±5 see also degrees; Examination Schools; examiners; honour schools; Pass School; Responsions; and subject entries examiners: coll. tutors `audit their own accounts' 50 Congregationalist rejected as examiner 58 nomination of 88±9, 89±90, 93, 393 women not invited to examine 285 Exeter 560, 736 Exeter College Plate 66, PC 66 bible clerkship 584±5 buildings: Broad St and Turl fronts 732; Chapel 148, 187, 737±8, 741, 759, PC 14, Plate 15, PC 15; Hall 758; Rector's Lodging 738 careers of Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 fellows: chaplain fellow 105; resignation on marriage 5, 339 ®nance: Cleveland inquiry 161±2; coll. barge (1872) 529±30; room rentals PC 66 intellectual heyday (1880s) 339 J. C. Wilson teaches for (1873±1905) 392 Pass Mods requirements 137 Rectorship, quali®cation for 130 societies: Adelphi Club 153; music society 437; Stapeldon debating society (1869) 150 sport: amalgamated clubs 529±31; boat club debt 529±30; essential sports gear 155; rowing men 524 unable to maintain position after 1870 122 undergraduates: magazine lists public schools represented (1906) 547; no

index science scholars (1870) 13; organ scholarship (1859) 148 extension (univ.) 661±87 passim, Plate 26, PC 26 (for changes in the use of the term `extension', see Pt 1, 310 n. 17) assessment of movement (1885±1914) 636 collective advancement the main aim 571±2 degrees for women: `extensionists' divided 630 Hebdomadal Board cttee on (1846) 171±2 Jowett and clerical conservatives: objective in common (1870s) 88 local lectures 663±4, 667±8 lodging houses (1868) 21 origin of many civic univs. 603 report (1866) 173±5 Select Cttee on (Ewart, 1867) 22 sole control of Univ. not acceptable in projects (from 1900) 847 summer meeting for foreign students 862 summer meeting (from 1889) 478, 600, 623±4, 636, 825, 847, Plate 70, PC 70 supported by Percival 579, 625 unattached students proposal (1854) 193 mentioned 94, 132, 369, 480, 495, 600, 609, 824, 827, 850 see also Delegacy for Extension extra-mural teaching 81, 661 Fabian Society 278, 624, 634, 639, 642, 643, 678, 853 factory inspectorate 299 faculties: de®ciencies in system laid down in 1882 statutes 608±9 Faculties Statute (1911) 836±7 Selborne Commission proposals 93 mentioned 340±1, 608 Faculty Boards 52, 86, 88, 89±90, 599±600, 607, 837, 838 Fairbairn, Andrew Martin (1838±1912), Pres. of Mans®eld Coll. (1886±1909) 247, 502, 635, 637 Fairbairn, (Sir) William, Bt 1869 (1789±1874) 740 Fairbridge, Kingsley Ogilvie (1885±1924) 713 Faithfull, Lilian Mary (1865±1952) 291, 296, Plate 50, PC 50 Far East 346 Farnell, Ida 589 Farnell, Lewis Richard (1856±1934), Rector of Exeter Coll. (1913±28), V.-C. (1920±3): anthropology supported by 502 archaeology supported by 356 bibliography of fellows' and tutors' work (1914) 861 and coll. bon®res 139

913

commands troop of mounted infantry 639 critical of competitiveness 532, 535, 536, 799 founder member of The Club 359, 627±9 Hibbert Lecturer (1905) 103 on meeting of Oxford Philological Soc. 344 partisan of professoriate 532 secretary of anti-degree (for women) cttee 266 quoted 340, 347 mentioned 341, 345, 350, 359, 398, 534, 589, 838 Faucit of Balliol, see Merivale, Herman Charles Faulkner, Charles Joseph (1834±92): Bursar of Univ. Coll. 750 furnishings in Univ. Coll. 750 partner of William Morris 72, 642, 750 mentioned 453 Faussett, (Robert) Godfrey (later GodfreyFaussett) (1827±1908): Treasurer of Ch.Ch. 72 quoted 72 Fawcett, Henry (1833±84): leading C. Liberal, radical MP 69 petition against inquiry limited to ®nance 69 quoted 69 mentioned 245 Fawcett, (Dame) Millicent, DBE 1925 (1847±1929) Plate 13, PC 13 ®rst woman speaker in a Union Debate (1908) 303, 809 lecturer at O. 249 recruits O. and C. women for central executive cttee of NUWSS 300 well-liked in C. despite support for women's suffrage 245 quoted PC 13 `Fawley, Jude' 583±4 Fell, Dr John (1625±86), Dean of Ch.Ch. 1660±84, V.-C. (1666±9) 227, 710 Fellowes, Edmund Horace (1870±1951) 441 fellows, fellowships: in 1854 Act 4 age-structure (1900) 610 anti-vocational bias 864 career structure, absence of 626 Classics: disdain for other courses than 8±9; proportion of classicists (1912) 609±10 disinclination for change (1860s) 7 effects of fellowship examinations and open elections (1857±82) 131 examinations for teaching fellowships dispensed with (from 1869) 16, 140

914

index

fellows, fellowships (contd ) `Fellow and Tutor' 18 honorary fellowships 132, 157, 211 `idle' fellows 4, 15, 18, 132, 609 inward-looking tendency in coll. appointments (from 1882) 141 lay life fellows 609 limitation to favoured districts (to 1854) 584 married fellows: proportion of (1912) 610; fellows resigning on marriage 5, 14, 16, 708 Michaelmas 1892: numbers and subjects taught 133 non-resident fellows 4, 75, 133 over 40 per cent under 35 (1878) 131 prize (later `ordinary') fellowships 15, 52, 54, 69, 76, 77, 81, 132, 835, 840 property disquali®cations attached to tenure 16, 584 research fellowships (1909) 615 tutorial duties 16, 133 mentioned 4, 5, 82 see also clerical fellowships; Wadham statutes feminism 300, 301 Ferrier, James Frederick (1808±64): works: Institutes of Metaphysic (1854) 316, 317 Ffoulkes, Edmund Salusbury (1819±94) 100 Fiedler, Hermann Georg (1862±1945): Taylorian Prof. of German 417, 426 visits of Prince of Wales to Germany Plate 43, PC 43 Fifteen Sermons, see Butler, Joseph: works mentioned Filippino 852 Finance, Colleges and University: Cleveland Commission 14, 69±73, 213 Finance Board (1912) 835, 837, 842, 844, 852 need to determine coll. resources (1870) 14 O. Univ. Press revenues 616, 652, 653±4, 734±5, 762, 852 poverty of women's colls 274 Selborne Commission: `taxation of colleges' 86, 213 University Re-Endowment Fund (1907) 607, 626, 795, 828, 833, 853 see also Common University Fund Finch-Hatton, Murray Edward, succ. as 12th Earl of Winchilsea 1887 (1851±98) 379 Fine Art, Honour School of: established (1978) 511 Ruskin's proposal (1875) 510 First World War: affects later views about Edwardian O. 785±6

applications of science in 477, PC 45 battles: Cambrai 786; Dardanelles, Gallipoli 360, 462, 812; Jutland 228; Loos (1915) 863±4, 870; the Somme (1916) 781, 786, PC 74; Ypres PC 64 chemical warfare in 483 emergency medical services 504 enthusiasm for Empire not revived after 715 German ultimatum to Belgium 863 inef®ciency due to defects in education 869±70 outbreak 871±3 possibility of war discussed 859±60 propaganda 863 research into alcohol problem 506 Univ.'s preoccupations in academic year 1913±14 855 mentioned 169, 253, 268±9, 271, 276, 292, 295, 357, 396, 495, 504, 507, 540, 643 Firth, (Sir) Charles Harding, Kt 1922 (1857±1936): Regius Prof. of Modern History 370, 407, 614 controversy with tutors 370±2, 614, 816, 867±8 English School: assistance in early development 402±3, 407; Cttee for English Studies 407, 411; monograph on 409±10, 414 Ford's Lectures (1900) 370 member of The Club 628, 629, 829 Oxford Reform Association 836 Stanhope prize-winner 370 on training of graduates 410, 822 verses on a `Trinity University' 268 quoted 370±1, 387±8, 404, 405, 406, 409±10 mentioned 218, 366±7, 381, 619, 838 Fisher, Charles Dennis (1877±1916) 228 Fisher, Edmund 758, 776 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens (1865±1940), Warden of New Coll. (1925±40) 610, 821 colonial administrators' letters to 707 Education Bill introduced by (1917) 571 Home Univ. Library 618 on O. as democratic and cosmopolitan 851 as scholar and writer 621 as tutor 134, 374, 818 quoted 571, 845, 851±2 mentioned 283, 284, 345, 758, 818, PC 71 Fisher, Mrs (Lettice, neÂe Ilbert) (1875±1956): founder of National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child 299 O. Health and Housing Association 299 women's suffrage 300 mentioned 284, 594 Fisher, Walter William (1842±1920) 464, 477 Flecker, James Elroy (1884±1915) 353

index Fleet Street 811 Fleetwood School 171 Fletcher, Charles Robert Leslie (1857±1934): as lecturer 817±18 work mentioned: History of England (1911) 693 mentioned 715, 861 Fletcher, (Sir) Lazarus, Kt 1916 (1854±1921) 460 Fletcher, Reginald William (1892±1914) 861 Folk Lore Society 353 football: Football Asssociation 540, PC 63 spread of, in 20th cent. 540 as undergraduate sport, see sport Forbes, Alexander Penrose (1817±75) 175 Ford, Edward Onslow (1852±1901) 755 Ford's Lecturership in English History 355, 370, 375 Foreign Of®ce 68, 168, 360, 706±7, 850 forestry: Diploma (1905) see under Diplomas Forestry School (1905) 475, 613, 640, 702 Indian probationers 475±6, 702 Pass School 476 premises in Parks Road 474, 757, 832 Professorship (1919) 475 mentioned 471, 638 Forster Act, see Parliamentary proceedings Forster, Johann Reinhold (1729±98) 501 Fortnightly Review 78, 299, 697 Foster, Joseph (1844±1905): work mentioned: Alumni Oxonienses (1887±8, 1891±2) 573 mentioned 574 Foster, (Sir) Michael, KCB 1899 (1836±1907) 466, 472±3, 489±90 Foundations (1912) 111, 825±6 founder's kin 209±10 Four [revised to Five] Stages of Greek Religion, see Murray, (George) Gilbert: work mentioned Fowler, Francis George (1870±1918): works mentioned (with H. W. Fowler): The Concise English Dictionary (1911) 657; The King's English (1906) 657 Fowler, Henry Watson (1858±1933): works mentioned: see above quoted 657 Fowler, Thomas (1832±1904), Pres. of CCC. (1881±1904), V.-C. (1899±1901): Plate 71, PC 71 criticism of `sets' 154 on duties of heads 128 on large accession of Nonconformist students 580

915

opposes establishment of English School 403 on proposal for Chair of Romance Languages 417 on strain of work as V.-C. 607 unsympathetic to sport 528 quoted 51, 132, 154, 403, 580, 607 mentioned 68, 78, 80, 131 Fowler, William Warde (1847±1921): anthropology supported by 356 criticism: of Greats 822; of over-teaching 136 not over-in¯uenced by Mommsen 339 Virgil, work on 341 quoted 136, 351 mentioned 341, 345, 478, 609 Fox, Charles James (1749±1806) 368 Fox, Herbert Francis (1858±1926) 534 Foxcombe 754 Fraccaro, Plinio (1883±1959) 360 France: French Ambassador (Paul Cambon) 859 French observer (Bardoux) 107, 110 German attack on 872 Union debate on Triple Entente (1914) 859±60 mentioned 14, 41, 540, 614, 689, 870 Franciscan Order 496 Franco-Prussian War 14, 185 Franks Commission (1964) 601 Franks, (Sir) Augustus Wollaston, KCB 1894 (1826±97) 500 Fraser, Alexander (Alek) Garden (1873±1962) 711 Frazer, Ewan Richards (1867±1930) 473 Frazer, (Sir) James George, Kt 1914 (1854±1941): works: The Golden Bough (1890±1915) 356, 704 mentioned 331 Free Church, see Nonconformists Free Church League for Women's Suffrage 305 Free Church of Scotland 580, 803 Free Fooder 633 free trade 838 Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823±92): Regius Prof. of Modern History 401 architectural `development' 733 attack on Froude 369 on Balliol Chapel 738 counterblast to Churton Collins 401±2 hostility to science 481 praise of Mommsen 334 racial superiority: contribution to attitudes of 692 withdrawal from School's activities 369

916

index

Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823±92): (contd) quoted 336±7, 377, 401, 481, 692, 736, 738, 746 mentioned 88, 345, 366, 367, 380±1 Fremantle, William Henry, (1831±1916) 98, 106, 212 French (language) 415, 423, 613 Old French, ProvencËal 417 professorship established (1919) 875 French Universities 156, 619 Frere, (Sir) Bartle Edward, Bt 1876 (1815±84): quoted 75 Fresher's Vade Mecum 291 freshmen (`freshers') 153±4, 547 Frewen Hall 721 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 496 Friere-Marreco, Barbara Whitchurch (d. 1967) 469, 502, Plate 42, PC 42 The Fritillary 290, 293 From Clergyman to Don (Engel, 1983) 87 Froude, James Anthony (1818±94): Regius Prof. of Modern History 370 fervent supporter of empire 692 works mentioned: English Seamen (1895) 370; Erasmus (1894) 370; The Council of Trent (1896) 370; The Nemesis of Faith (1849) 369±70 quoted 692 mentioned 366 Frowde, Henry 652, 656±7 Fry, Charles Burgess (1872±1956): Plate 63, PC 63 career in sport 542 ®nancial troubles as undergraduate 784 mentioned 724 Fry, (Sara) Margery (1874±1958), Princ. of Somerville Coll. (1926±31): pessimism about prospects for women 293 warden of women's hostel, Birmingham 593 mentioned 280 Furneaux, Henry (1829±1900): works: edns of Tacitus: Agricola (1898), Annals (1884±91), Germania (1894) 336, 342 Furnivall, Frederick James (1825±1910) 398, 651 Furse, Michael Bolton (1870±1955) 141, 690 Furse, (Sir) Ralph Dolignon, KCMG 1941 (1887±1973) 531 Fyfe, (Sir) William Hamilton, Kt 1942 (1878±1965) 826 Gainsborough, Thomas (1727±88) 233 Gairdner, William H. Temple (1873±1928) 711 Gaisford, Thomas (1779±1855), Dean of Christ Church (1831±55) 221, 224

Regius Prof. of Greek 330 Byzantine lexicographers, work on 330 Delegate of Press (1807±55) 647 quoted 572 mentioned 225, 229, 230 Gaius (c.110±c.180 a d ) 394 Galbraith, Vivian Hunter (1889±1976): Regius Prof. of Modern History 374 Galsworthy, John (1867±1933) 592 Galton, (Sir) Douglas Strutt, KCB 1887 (1822±99) 749 Galton, (Sir) Francis, Kt 1909 (1822±1911) 449, 467 The Gambia 714 Gandell, Robert (1818±87) 118 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869±1948) 689 Garbett, Cyril Foster (1875±1955) 535 Garbett, William (1770±1834) 729±30, 753, 764 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (1829±1902) 45, 218, 229, 370 Gardner, Arthur Duncan (1884±1978) 507 Gardner, E. Bensley (d. 1873) 649 Gardner, Percy (1846±1937): Prof. of Classical Archaeology 325 attempts to make archaeology major option in Greats 325, 350 member of The Club 359, 628 personal characteristics 351 work mentioned: Oxford at the Crossroads (1903) 822, 823 quoted 343, 350 mentioned 341, 344, 345, 353 Garner, Thomas (1839±1906) 747, 750, 752, 769, 770, 771, 772, PC 19 Garrod, (Sir) Archibald Edward, KCMG 1918 (1857±1936): Regius Prof. of Medicine 507 Garrod, Heathcote William (1878±1960): quoted 654 Garrod-Thomas, Richard Noel (1884±1952) PC 45 Garton Foundation 858 Gaskell, Mrs (Elizabeth Cleghorn) (1810±65) 9, 665 work mentioned: North and South (1855) 9 Gasworkers' Union 841 gaudies, etc. 156, 290 Gauss, Karl Friedrich (1777±1855) 453±4 Gazette, see Oxford University Gazette Geddes, (Sir) Patrick, Kt 1932 (1854±1932) 505 Geikie, (Sir) Archibald, KCB 1907 (1835±1924) 496 Gell, Philip Lyttelton (1852±1926):

index criticized for placing pro®t over scholarship 616 his criticisms and complaints 654 illness and retirement 655 Jowett proteÂge 600, 652±3 Secretary of the Press 652±5 quoted 653, 654, 655, 670 mentioned 656 General Board of the Faculties (1912) 600, 608, 620, 837 gentlemen commoners 519 Gentlemen versus Players Cricket Match 542 gentry, see aristocracy and gentry Geography: classical studies, travel and geography in 357 demand for textbooks after Education Act (1902) 703 Diploma, see under Diplomas diploma group photograph (1901) Plate 41, PC 41 the Empire: geography bene®ts from interest in 702±3; imperial geography 702±3; importance to 705; loss of imperial fervour 715 Mackinder's contribution 702±3 Oxford Survey of the British Empire (ed. Herbertson and Howarth, 1914) 703 Pelham a founder of School 340±1 political geography 703 Readership 611, 702±3 woman demonstrator (1906) 612 mentioned 617 Geological Society 468 geology: branch of Natural Sciences School 465, 469, 488 disadvantaged by specialized syllabus of Natural Sciences School (from 1885) 490 Ruskin encourages exploration of 510 geometry 445 George, Hereford Brooke (1838±1910): criticizes lack of undergraduate effort 138 criticism of over-teaching 136 quoted 392, 49 mentioned 49 George I, King (1660±1727) 692 George V, King (1865±1936) 806, PC 71 Georgia 689 German (language) 415, 416, 423, 613 professorship (1907) 611 German Universities: admiration for 599 America favours German univ. paradigm 619 comparatively centralized and regimented system 620

917

German victory of 1870±1 proof of effectiveness 14 Joseph Wright's experience of 420 linguistic training 419 O. graduates studying at 618 O. unfavourably compared with 10 percentage of population 602 prejudice against 8, 414 `professional' German historians 384 provision for teaching and research 416 scholarship: change in view of German philosophical and theological work 18±19; debt of Stubbs to 44; ideal admired by some history tutors 372; microscopic analysis 621; model in Roman imperial history 346; `new philology' (early 19th cent.) 413; O.'s undergraduates unimpressed 859; Pattison's `learning' 618; research training 144; respect for and emulation of (1914) 859, 861; tutors' relationship with 338, 343, 357±8, 616; univs' preeminence in 602 student experience contrasted with O. 156 superior educational methods (E. Poulton) 702 mentioned 9, 89, 465 The German Universities and University Study (Paulsen, trans Sadler, 1906) 621 Germania, see Tacitus Germany 700 Ambassadors (Marschall von Biberstein, Prince Lichnowsky) 807, 859 Britain declares war on 863 central control in education 865 generous state provision for science 480, 701 German navy 872 innovations in language study 413 in Rhodes's scheme for union of Englishspeaking peoples 718 Special Students 203 students at O. far outnumber French 859 ultimatum to Belgium 863 Union vote against Triple Entente (1914) 859 visits of Prince of Wales Plate 43, PC 43 warlike intentions not apparent to British statesmen 872, 873 mentioned 16, 144, 317, 334, 361, 380, 387, 614, 807 see also German Universities; Rhodes Scholars Gerrans, Henry Tresawna (1858±1921) 563, 654, 655, 721±2 Ghose, Manmohan (1869±1924) 155 quoted 155±6

918

index

Gibbs, Alexander 746 Gibbs, Anthony (1841±1907) 186, 188, 744 Gibbs, Henry Martin (b. 1850) 188, 744 Gibbs, John 768 Gibbs, William (1790±1875): Keble Chapel donor 185, 744 quoted 185, 186 mentioned 188 Gibraltar 696±7 Gibson, Alexander George (1875±1950) 507 Gifford, William (1756±1826) 584±5 Gifford Lectures: Caird (1891±2, 1900) 103 Gilbert, Gustav: work mentioned: Constitutional Antiquities of Sparta and Athens (trans. 1895) 352 Gilbert, (Sir) Joseph Henry, Kt 1893 (1817±1901): Sibthorpian Prof. of Rural Economy 474 Gilbert and Sullivan operas 273 Gill, W. M. PC 75 Girls' Public Day School Company 243 Girton 10, 237 Girton College, Cambridge: bid to open BA 265 early plans 237 the `Girton Girl' 253 modelled on men's foundations 239 percentage of clergy daughters 580 regarded as undenominational 250 Tripos opened to (1881) 240 mentioned 245, 262, 280, 295, 305, 459 Gladstone, Herbert John, cr. Visc. Gladstone 1910 (1854±1930) 41, 633, 784 Gladstone, William Ewart (1809±98): 1854 Act, chief author of 4 All Souls, honorary fellow of 211 approves Non-Collegiate body: gift to library 121±2, 195 Burgess 67, 160, 228±9, 698 on clerical fellowships 56, 79 commends study of Homer 35 ®nancial inquiry promised (1871) 69 governments: 1868±74 600; 1880±5 86; 1892±4 668 Greats: W.E.G. on `unsettling' theories 27, 41 halls, W.E.G. relies on 5±6 Home Rule 94, 697±8 Homer, address to the Union on (1890) 601 on idlers in O. and C. (1879) 138 involvement in O. politics diminishes (after 1871) 67 Keble Chapel: mediates over consecration question (1876) 187 Keble memorial (1866) 175 memorial of support for (1888) 624 Midlothian campaign (1879) 138

National Memorial and Gladstone chair (1912) 852 nostalgia for undergraduate days (1890) 632 place of Aristotle and Plato in Christian Education: W.E.G.'s view 32 reviews Robert Elsmere 95 on study of history (1875±6) 41, 44 supports shorter period of residence (1878) 82 Tests Abolition Bill (1870±1) 22, 24±5 Univ. dealings contrasted with Salisbury's 68±9 wins election of April 1880 86 quoted 25±6, 32, 35, 41, 180, PC 3, PC 63 mentioned 70, 74, 76, 128, 161, 171, 176, 199, 648, 663 Gladstone, William Glynne Charles (1885±1915) 784 Glaisher, James (1809±1903) 450 Glasgow 125 Univ. of: Prof. of Scottish History and Literature 363; Rector (Rosebery) 472; uproar at lectures 88; mentioned 138, 160, 166, 330, 406, 720, 825 Glastonbury 741 Gloucester Green 559, 783 Godley, Alfred Denis (1856±1925), 143, 496, 497, 625±6, 828, PC 32 work mentioned: Aspects of Modern Oxford (1894), PC 32, PC 62 Godley, (Sir) (John) Arthur, KCB 1893, cr. Baron Kilbracken 1909 (1847±1932) 699 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749±1832) 331, 425±6 The Golden Bough 356, 704 Goldman, Lawrence 638, 846 Goldsmiths' Company 408 Goodhart-Rendel, Harry Stuart (1887±1959) 752, 759 Gordon, Osborne (1813±83): disappointed of advancement 68, 224 membership of Selborne Commission 82 quoted 87±8 mentioned 586±7 Gore, Charles (1853±1932): attacked over Lux Mundi 101±2 Bishop of Birmingham 823 Bishop of O. 305, 635, 856 Christian Socialist; disciple of Green 110, 586 Commission, House of Lords question, debate (1907), 823±4, 830±1 Community of the Resurrection, founding of (1892) 711 criticisms of 635

index in¯uence comparable to that of Newman 711 missionary pupils 711 Princ. of Pusey House 102, 107, 634±5, 691, 711 reform: continued agitation for 839; spokesman for (1907) 682, 825 women's suffrage supported by 305 quoted 823, 831 mentioned 64, 105, 111, 680±1, 840 Goring-on-Thames 721 Goschen, George, cr. Visc. 1900 (1831±1907), Chancellor (1903±7): as Chancellor 632±3, 826±7 Chancellor of the Exchequer 400±1 fellowships: amendment to remove clerical restrictions on 67 London Soc. for the Extension of Univ. Teaching 400±1 in Selborne debate (May 1876) 77 quoted 8, 400±1, 826±7 mentioned 638, 832 Gospels, see Bible Gotch, Francis (1853±1913): Wayne¯ete Prof. of Physiology 466, 505±6 Gothic, see architecture GoÈttingen 398, 603 governesses 251 government service 493, 610, 622±3 in the Empire 706 graduate students, see postgraduate students Grammar of the Homeric Language (Monro) 618 grammar schools: attended by: Balliol undergraduates (1874±93) 164; fellows of All Souls 216, higher civil servants 169 and compulsory Greek 13, 554 O. precedent for competitive scholarships 586 Taunton Commission 11 transformation of group of endowed schools 545 mentioned 6, 64±5, 585, 622 Grant, (Sir) Alexander, succ. as 8th Bt 1856 (1826±84) 134, 316 Grant, Alexander (1866±1941) 583 Grant, William Lawson (1872±1935) 713 Grant-Duff, (Sir) Mountstuart, GCSI 1887 (1829±1906) 10, 29, 77 Granville, 2nd Earl (1815±91) 76 The Graphic PC 12, PC 53 Gray, George Buchanan (1865±1922) 635 Gray, Herbert Branston (1851±1929) 126 Great Charter (1636) 645 The Great Illusion, see Angell (Sir) (Ralph) Norman: work mentioned

919

Great Western Railway 90, 476, 589 Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Lucas, 1912) 348 Greats (`Lit. Hum.') 311±26 passim admired throughout the univ. world 865 admission of women to examinations (1888) 257 advantage to candidates for Home Civil Service and ICS 346±7, 699, 789±90 and All Souls fellowships (1857±64) 212 alternative Greats suggested for those without Greek (1911) 344 Appleton's view (1871) 31 archaeology, attempts to include 325, 350 basic quali®cation for degree (1850±64) 93, 313, 387 Butler's Analogy in 25 change from being pre-eminently philosophical (1870s) 333 classical scholarships, effect 64±5 duplication in lecture list 49, 608 early syllabus: Greek and Roman history 312 essay work 135 48 per cent of graduates had read Greats or `Pass Greats' (early 20th cent.) 612 Gardner's indictment (1903) 822 Gladstone's view of `damage' done to (1876) 41 Greats men and Empire 693, 697, 715 Greats men reading Modern History as second school 814±15 honours list of 5 Aug. 1914 863 limitations of course 818±19, 866±7 Literae Humaniores: title in 1800 Examination Statute 311 modern economics and politics included 316, 816±17 options, narrower spread than in History 373±4 parents disquieted about reports (1870s) 39 and Pattison 28, 31 philosophy papers (1870s) 25 Plato's works increasingly important 31, 37 pre-eminence of 99, 814 proposals for change (1900±14) 325±6, 614, 822±3 rise in honours awarded: late 1870s 40; early 1880s 60 routes to ®nal honours in 512 Fig. 21 C.1 Salisbury's suspicions 57, 90, 93±4 Special Subjects 619 Spooner on course in 1860s 315±16 support for `Non-Placets' 626±7 three-year course debated (1880s); rejected (1909) 614 training `Guardians' 634

920

index

Greats (contd ) tutorials with coll. tutors 393 tutors' views on relevance (1900±14) 815±16 women seldom take course 281 mentioned 20, 99, 119, 209, 283, 403, 784, 789 Greece (ancient): homosexual practices in 35, 38 mentioned 66, 328, 716 Greece (modern) 339, 354, 357, 358, 614, PC 74 Greek: early Greek music 447 in Greats 315, 325 Greek Defence Cttee 631 Greek prose 350 `Liddell and Scott' 221, 419 mentioned 63, 248, 313, 652 see also Classics; compulsory Greek Greek authors: Aeschines 327 Aeschylus 330, 331 Aristophanes 331 Demosthenes 327±8 Euripides 329, 331 Herodotus 316, 336, 344, 352, 355 Lucian 657 Polybius 333 Sophocles 330 Strabo 647 Theocritus 327 see also Aristotle; Homer; Plato; Thucydides The Greek Commonwealth, see Zimmern, (Sir) Alfred: work mentioned Greek history: Athenian empire 694 city state 694 comes into its own in First World War 358 contribution of travellers 354±5 Grundy on the lectures (1889) 351 O. late in adopting methods of German scienti®c scholarship 352 parallels seen by teachers of colonial history 694 Sicilian expedition 694 translations from the German 352 weakened by split from archaeology 351 Greek inscriptions 336 Greek (modern) 419, 425 Greek New Testament 7, 630 Greek sculpture 34, 350 The Greeks and the Irrational, see Dodds Green, Alexander Henry (1832±96): Prof. of Geology 468±9

Green, Mrs (Charlotte Byron, neÂe Symonds) (1842±1929): quoted 260 mentioned 241, 244, 259 Green, John Richard (1837±83) 43±4, 58 n. 313, 223 quoted 43 mentioned 670 Green, Thomas Hill (1836±82) 318±23 passim, Plate 5, PC 5 White's Prof. of Moral Philosophy 319 assessment of his philosophical work 322, PC 5 concern for welfare of labouring classes 641, 846 election to Balliol fellowship (1861) 159, PC 5 Evangelical background 319 Idealist school 62, 109±10 in¯uence: on disparate groups 57±9; on Lux Mundi group 634; a major in¯uence 109, 318, 322; through younger colleagues 322±3 kept out of White's Professorship (1874) 57 lectures on political obligation 321 local civic politics 109±10, 319, 634 Macan on `a master mind' 857 memorial volume to 323 moral social action 109, 691±2 non-denominational Hall for women 246 `popular philosophy' 319 reform in women's education 238, 241 religious beliefs 321, 787, PC 5 on signing 39 Articles declaration 24 univ. extension 662, 664 works mentioned: edition (with T. H. Grose) of Hume's Treatise 319±20; Prolegomena to Ethics (posthumous publication, 1883) 60, 320, 321 quoted 60, 577 mentioned 59, 91, 92, 95, 112, 163, 166, 247, 314±15, 317, 335, 642, 671, 672, 676, 786 `Green, Verdant' 95, 145, 535 Greene, Wilfrid Arthur, cr. Lord Greene 1941 (1883±1952) 389 Greenidge, Abel Hendy Jones (1865±1906): suspected of `a tendency towards research' 339±40 works mentioned: Handbook of Greek Constitutional History (1896) 352; Sources for Roman History 133±70 BC (with Clay, 1903) 342 mentioned 344, 345, 359 Greenshields, Thomas (c.1800±c.1845) 765 Grenfell, Bernard Pyne (1869±1926) 345, 616 Grenfell, Julian (1888±1915) 793

index Grenville, (Sir) Richard, Kt 1570? (1541?±1591) 689 Grenville, William Wyndham, cr. Lord Grenville 1790 (1759±1834), Chancellor (1809±34) 228 Greswell family 587 Greswell, Richard (1800±81) 760 Grey, Albert Henry, 4th Earl, succ. 1894 (1851±1917) 718±19, 725 Grey, (Sir) Edward, succ. as 3rd Bt 1882, Visc. Grey 1916 (1862±1933) 168, 694±5, 863, 871 Grif®th, Frederick Llewellyn (1862±1934) 341 Grif®th, James (1761±1821), Master of Univ. Coll. (1808±21) 730 Grif®ths, John (1806±85), Warden of Wadham Coll. (1871±81): resignation 130 School-book Cttee and Finance Cttee of Press 648, 649 mentioned 82 Grif®ths, Maud Ann 581 Grigg, Edward William, Baron Altrincham 1945 (1879±1955) 695±6 Grillparzer, Franz (1791±1872) 425±6 Grimbly Hughes, grocers 690 Grissell, Hartwell de la Garde (1839±1907) 155 The Grocers' Company 196 Grote, George (1794±1871): Greek history dominated by, late 19th cent. 335 lasting in¯uence 352 quoted 37 work mentioned: History of Greece (1846) 316 mentioned 312, 336, 338, 351 Grove, (Sir) William Robert, Kt 1872 (1811±96) 76, 78, 79, 82, 87 Grove St 676 Grundy, George Beardoe (1861±1948): Plate 37, PC 37 argues for Diploma of Archaeology 350 battle®elds prospected 357 maps of ancient world still in general use 357 modern system of coloured contours introduced to Britain 357 responsible for Admiralty Handbook of Macedonia 359 quoted 351, 355 mentioned 340, 341, 629 Guards regiments 794 Guedalla, Philip (1889±1944) 216, 802, 809 Guild of St Matthew (1884) 642 Guinness company 493

921

Guizot, FrancËois Pierre Guillaume (1787±1874) 316 Gunn, James A. (1882±1958): Prof. of Pharmacology 507 GuÈnther, Albert Charles (1830±1914) 489 Gunther, Robert William (1869±1940): Greek Defence Cttee 631 St Swithin's building 752 work mentioned: Early Science in Oxford (1920±67) 486 mentioned 497, 761 Guy Fawkes night 795 Gwyer, (Sir) Maurice Linford, KCB 1928 (1878±1952) 220 Hadow, Grace (1875±1940), 284, 302±3, PC 73 Princ. of Society of Oxford Home Students (1929±40) PC 73 quoted 287 Hadow, (Sir) (William) Henry, Kt 1918 (1859±1937): quoted 430, 432 mentioned 283, 435, 441 Hahn, Kurt Matthias (1886±1974) 807 Haigh, Arthur Elam (1855±1905): works mentioned: Attic Theatre (1889) 331; The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896) 331 Haigh, Lilla Elizabeth (1860±1926) 258 Haileybury College 129, 545 Hakewill, Henry (1771±1830) 764, 765 Hakluyt, Richard (1552?-1616) 689 Haldane, John Scott (1860±1936) 466, 477, 506, PC 40 Haldane, Richard Burdon, cr. Visc. Haldane 1911 (1856±1928): addresses O. clubs 858±9 funding for science 458 Of®cers' Training Corps 639, PC 74 Territorial Army 810 quoted 641 mentioned 603, 832, 842 Haldane, Mrs J. S. (Louisa Kathleen) (1863±1961) 690 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey (1751±1830) 699 Halifax, Earl of, see Wood, Edward Hall, (Sir) (Alfred) Daniel, KCB 1918 (1864±1942) 704 Hall, Frederick W. (d. 1933), Pres. of St John's Coll. (1931±3) Plate 34, PC 34 Hall, Joseph (1574±1656) works: Collective Edition (1863) 649 Hall, Pickard 649±50 Hall, Sydney Prior (1842±1922) 238, PC 23, PC 26 Hallam, Henry (1777±1859): quoted 44

922

index

halls: coll. halls 6, 22 denominational halls (non-Anglican) 120±1 founded before 1800 70, 117±20 private halls 6, 21, 120±1, 173, 184 see also Balliol hall; Charsley's hall; Magdalen hall; Marcon's hall; St Edmund Hall; Turrell's hall Hals, Franz (1580±1666) 233 Halsey, Albert Henry (1923±) 599 Hamilton, Archibald 645 Hamilton, Walter Kerr (1808±69) 175 Hamilton, (Sir) William, 5th Bt 1816 (1788±1856) 193, 317 Hamilton, (Sir) William Rowan, Kt 1835 (1805±65) 447±8 Hammond, John Lawrence (1872±1949) 384, 697, 818 Hammond, (Lucy) Barbara (1873±1961) 384, 594 Hammonds, Dorothy Margaret (1885± 1974) 289, 299 Hampden, Renn Dickson (1793±1868), Princ. of St Mary Hall (1833±48): mentioned 25, 317, 548 Handbook of Greek Constitutional History, see Greenidge: work mentioned Hannibal's Legacy, see Toynbee, Arnold Joseph: work mentioned Hannington, James (1847±85) 689 Hanoverian 541 Harcourt, (Sir) William George, Kt 1873 (1827±1904) 76, 462 Hardie, William Ross (1862±1916) 345 Hardwick, Philip (1792±1870) 739, 766 Hardwick, Philip Charles (1822±1892) 739, 766 Hardwick, Thomas (1752±1829) 763 Hardy, Ernest G. (1852±1925), Princ. of Jesus Coll. (1921±5): mentioned 341, 345 Hardy, Gathorne Gathorne-, cr. Visc. Cranbrook 1878, Earl of Cranbrook 1892 (1814±1906): defeats Gladstone in 1865 Burgess election 228 Lord President of the Council 669 Selborne Commission Bill (1877) 78 quoted 85 mentioned 79, 261 Hardy, Hugh Gathorne 176 Hardy, Thomas (1840±1928) 583 work mentioned: Jude the Obscure (1895) 583 Harper, Hugo Daniel (1821±95), Princ. of Jesus Coll. (1877±95) 129 mentioned 246 Harriott, Thomas (1560±1621) 689

Harrison, Frederic (1831±1923) 643, 697, 698 Harrison, G. A. 757, 776 Harrison, James Park 737, 773 Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850±1928) 302±3, 304, 356 Harrison, Nathaniel William 757, 776 Harrison, Thomas (1744±1829) 764 Harrod, (Sir) (Henry) Roy, Kt 1969 (1900±78) PC 35 Harrow School: academic Liberals from (1860s) 550 accent 549 Eton±Harrow match 534, 539 footballers 523±4 former pupils of: Balliol undergraduates (1854±63, 1874±83, 1894±1903) 159, 164, 167; ex-Balliol higher civil servants, etc. 169; fellows of All Souls 216 Head Master 36 suf®x `-er' 549 mentioned 212, 819 Harrowby, 2nd Earl of 1847, Viscount Sandon, 1809±47 (1798±1882) 27, 28, 31, 61 Hart, Horace Henry (1840±1916) 650, 652, 655, 656 Hartley, (Sir) Harold Brewer, Kt 1928 (1878±1972) Plate 45, PC 45 chemical warfare 483, 812 quoted 493 mentioned 167, 465, 477 Harvard University, see United States of America Hassall, Arthur (1853±1930) 149, 224, 227 Hastings, 4th Marquess of (1842±68) 582 Hauer, Jacob Wilhelm 863 haute bourgeoisie 581 Haver®eld, Francis John (1860±1919): Camden Prof. of Ancient History 340, 355 excavating techniques disparaged 355, 616 Ford's Lecturer in 1907 355 founder of Romano-British archaeology 355 member of The Club 359, 628 Oxford Ancient History Soc. 345 Soc. for the Promotion of Roman Studies (1910) 340 quoted 141, 355±6 mentioned 339, 341, 344, 345±6, 360, 826 Hawkins, Edward (1789±1882), Provost of Oriel Coll. (1828±82): quoted 8, 46 mentioned 128, 129, 548 Hawkins, T. 454 Hawksley, Bourchier Francis (c.1851±1915) 719, 721, 726 Hayward, John (1801±1891) 736, 766

index Headington Hill 283 Headington Hill Park 861, PC 74 Headington Poor Law Union 299, 808 Headington stone 749 Headlam, Arthur Cayley (1862±1947) 111, 345 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth (1847±1924) 642 Headmasters' Conference: compulsory Greek 564 membership of 550±1 and reform campaign (1912) 853±4 resolutions on lectures in educational methods 555 scholarship examinations 126, 822 school examinations 561±2 mentioned 129 heads of houses: Cleveland Commission, circular of inquiry 70 commoner admissions 127, 799 Curzon reforms, warnings of resistance to 835 heads in Orders 24, 131 lodgings 730 need for headships questioned (1860s) 127±8 Olympian ®gures 813 pressures of of®ce 130 problems of seniority of holders of doctorates (1900) 619 quali®cations required 130±1 reading essays to 813 restrictions on powers (from 1858) 128 seats on Hebdomadal Council 605, 852 mentioned 238, 495, 605, 609 see also Hebdomadal Council Heath, (Sir) (Henry) Frank, KCB 1917 (1863±1946): on constitution of a Commission 843 Heathcote, (Sir) William, 5th Bt 1825 (1801±81) 175, 176, 211, 228 Heawood, Percy John (1861±1955) 454 Hebbel, Friedrich (1813±63) 425±6 Hebdomadal Board: cttee on `extension' (1846) 171±2 mentioned 585, 649 Hebdomadal Council Agricultural Science, Council proposal for Honour School (1898) 474 and anthropology (1904) 502 appointments and building, Council's estimate of needs (1902) 822 BA degree for women: Council's Cttees (1895±6, 1913±14) 266, 271 B.Mus., Council's part in reform (1898, 1910±11) 430, 432

923

and Bodleian Library (1859) 748 certi®cates to schoolteachers, Council's proposal rejected (1880) 555 Clarendon Laboratory, problem of electricity (1882±1914) 459 clerical restrictions on examining (1894, 1903±4, 1912) 110±11 and compulsory Greek 858 consulted by Salisbury on `Selborne Commission Bill' 78 Council's Liberal majority (1870) 73, 93 Education: Council rejects proposal for chair (1880) 555 Election contests, Council seats: activities of The Club (from 1889) 627; of party caucuses 624, 625; professorial seats (1872) 45; scientists elected 495 election to Council, effects 626 engineering: approach from Birmingham Univ. (1907) 472 entrance examination, Council's impotence 65 establishment of English School, memorial to Council (1891) 402±3, 405 ®nance 408 Fine Art degree, Council decline (1875) 510 Forestry, Council proposal for Hon. School (1910) 475 heads of house on 852 and Herbert Spencer Lectures, controversy (1909) 805±6 and Keble Coll. (1870) 180 MacDonnell Commission: Council's evidence (1912) 589, 802 Mechanics chair, Council rejects proposal (1884) 460 Modern Languages and Literature, Council proposal for Honour School (1886±7) 399, 399±402 Pitt-Rivers collection offered, report to Council (1882) 500 professorial duties, Council's redrafting suggestions (1880) 89 proposal for degree course in political economy, etc., Council cttee (1915) 868 reform of Council: Council's `notorious secretiveness' 851; proposals 606, 834, 837±8, 852 reforms enacted (1915, 1924) 875 reform of the Univ., Curzon's proposals 831±2; legislation process (1910±12) 836±8; reasons for hostility 838±9 school examinations: Council's cttee (1857) 559±60; in¯uence on Board of Education's Consultative Cttee (1911) 562

924

index

Hebdomadal Council (contd ) Selborne Commission: Council's proceedings: consulted on proposed Statutes (1881) 86; `Statement of Requirements' (1877) 79 and Tutorial Classes Cttee (1908±12) 685, 848±51 Unattached/Non-Collegiate students: proposals for change of name (1908±10) 202; Pusey tries vainly to obstruct proposal (1866±8) 194 women at O., position and problems: admission to certain examinations, Statute on (1884) 256±7; O. Locals, Council refuse to open examinations to women (1855±60) 9; offer of Council representation on governing bodies of Halls 264; petition about examinations and response (1875) 244; space for AEW of®ce 264 mentioned 47, 48, 341, 510, 561, 562, 702, PC 2, PC 24, PC 71 see also Hebdomadal Board Heberden, Charles Buller (1849±1921), Princ. of BNC (1889±1920), V.-C. (1910±13): demonstration against (1898) 799 ®rst V.-C.'s oration in English 851 as V.-C. 259, 838 mentioned 547 Hebrew 99, 312, 354, 416, 585 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm (1770±1831): Anglo-Hegelianism 620 Green, T. H., version of Hegelianism 318 Jowett's early enthusiasm for 317 as new philosophical guide 31±2 readers of, in O. (1860s) 318 works mentioned: Logic (1812±16) 317; Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) 318; Philosophy of History (trans. 1857) 316, 318; Philosophy of Right (1820) 318 mentioned 109, 323 Heidelberg 284, 629 Heine, Heinrich (1797±1856) 425±6 Heineccius 388 work mentioned: Syntagma 388 Hellenic Society 354±5 Hellenism 38, 40, 329, 798, 826 Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig von (1821±94) 452 Henderson, Bernard William (1871±1929) 341, 344 Henderson, George Cockburn (1870±1944) 713 Henderson, (Mrs) Isobel (1906±67) 344 Henley Regatta 154, 542, 861, PC 67 Henniker, Percy George (b. c.1866) 435

Henson, (Herbert) Hensley (1863±1947) 88, 99, 189, 201, 380±1, 418, 547, 626 Heraclitus ( ¯. c.500 b c ) 325 Herbert Spencer Lecture 805 Herbertson, Andrew John (1865±1914) Plate 41, PC 41 enthusiasm for Empire 703 Prof. of Geography 620 Reader in Geography 617 work mentioned: ed. with O. J. R. Howarth Oxford Survey of the British Empire (1914) 703 Hereford 552 heresy 856 Herkomer, (Sir) Hubert von, Kt 1907 (1849±1914): Slade Prof. of Fine Art, PC 39 mentioned 211, 341 Herschel, (Sir) John Frederick William, Bt 1838 (1792±1871) 446 Hertford College: buildings Plate 20, PC 20; Catte St front 772; Chapel 753, 776; extension including Hall and bridge 753; North quadrangle 775 debating societies 150 great bon®re (1881) 139 and inter-collegiate lectures 46, 374 low and high churchmen appointed fellows 118 revival, endowment: benefaction of T. C. Baring, and stipulation 117±18; conservative in¯uence of founder 88, 119; Hertford Coll. Act (1874) 118; rebirth following dissolution of Magdalen Hall 117±18; receives statutory recognition (1874) 73; trustees for the endowment 131 sport: success used to enhance standing 527; undergraduate's world record for hurdles 527 mentioned 131, 196 Hertford Scholarships, see University Prizes and Scholarships Hervey, Lord Francis (1846±1931) 94, 699 Hewart, Gordon, cr. Visc. Hewart 1940 (1870±1943) 548 Hewins, William Albert (1865±1931) 666, 691, 695, 704 Hibbert Lectures: 1905 (Farnell) 103 (Macan) 222 Hibbert Trust 58 Hicks Beach, (Sir) Michael, cr. Visc. 1906, Earl St Aldwyn 1915 (1837±1916) 227, 229 Hicks, Edward Lee (1843±1919): lay fellowship at CCC 19

index work mentioned: Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions (with Hill, 1882, 1901) 342 quoted 337 mentioned 20 Hicks, (Frederick Cyril) Nugent (1872±1942) 639 hieroglyphics 354 `Higgins, Professor' 421 High Church 97±112 passim admission of women to examinations causes rift in 625 Anglo-Catholic character of Univs' Mission to Central Africa 711 Church Union (1896) 108 defeated in Convocation over election of Select Preacher (1872) PC 11 founding of O. Mission to Calcutta 710 `in®delity' in Greats 26 Lux Mundi 91 missionaries sympathetic to local traditions 712 O. out of touch with mainstream opinion 58 and proposed consecration of Keble Chapel PC 16 scientists excluded from honorary degree list (1870) PC 1 shortcomings of chapel practices in 1860s 147±8 women's education 94, 240 mentioned 19, 20, 26, 31, 36, 40, 43, 44, 57, 60, 74, 76, 90, 100, 101, 176, 532, 585, 635 High Street 689, 731, 748, 752±5 higher education: provision for women 58, 68 Highgate School 181 The Highway 643 Hignett, Charles (1896±1966) 352 Hill, (Sir) George Francis, KCB 1933 (1867±1948): works mentioned: Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions (with Hicks, 1882, 1901) 342; Sources for Greek History &c (1897, 1907) 342 Hill, Octavia (1838±1912) 189 Hinds, Samuel (1793±1872) 548 Hindu 580, 689, 710, 714 Hindustani 415 Hinksey 721 Hinksey Road 691 Hirst, Francis Wrigley (1873±1953) 798, PC 29 Historical Association 363 Historical Manuscripts Commission 363 history, see ancient history, modern history History of the Doric Race, see MuÈller History of England, see Fletcher, Charles; Ranke, Leopold von

925

A History of the Gothic Revival, see Eastlake History of Greece, see Abbott: work mentioned; Grote: work mentioned The History of Herodotus, see Rawlinson, George: work mentioned History of the Law of Real Property, see Digby: work mentioned History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, see Carlyle, Alexander James: work mentioned History of Religions, Third International Congress of 103 History of the Romans under the Empire, see Merivale, Charles History of Rome, see Mommsen The History of `The Times' 860 History Tutors' Association 47 The History of the University of Oxford: VI: Nineteenth-Century Oxford: Part I 22, 128, 735 VIII: The Twentieth Century 868 Hitchin 10, 237 Hitler, Adolf (1899±1945) 344 Hittites 355 HMI, see Education: Inspectorate Hoare, (Sir), Samuel, succ. as 2nd Bt 1915, cr. Visc. Templewood 1944 (1880±1959) 818 Hoare, Henry (1838±98) 176 Hobbes, Thomas (1588±1679) 316 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawny (1864±1929) 610, 639±40, 642, 697, 825 Hobson, John Atkinson (1858±1940) 697 Hodder & Stoughton, publishers 657 Hodgkin, Robert Howard (1877±1951), Provost of Queen's Coll. (1937±46): mentioned 370 Hodgson, Kirkman Daniel (1814±79) 70 Hofmann, August Wilhelm (1818±92) 451 Hofmeyr, Jan Hendrik (1845±1909) 713 Hogarth, David George (1862±1927): Keeper of the Ashmolean 358 Director of Arab Bureau 358 mentioned 345, 353, 862 Holdsworth, (Sir) William Searle, Kt 1929 (1871±1944) 395, 617 Holland, Henry Scott (1847±1918): Christian Social Union 634±5 `Holy Party' 245±6 Junior Censor of Ch.Ch. 138 proctorial action against prostitution 139 Regius Prof. of Divinity 111, 610 supporter of women's suffrage 305 quoted 59, 139, 160, 190±1, 639 mentioned 19 Holland, (Sir) Thomas Erskine, Kt 1917 (1835±1926):

926

index

Holland, (Sir) Thomas Erskine, Kt (contd ) Chichele Prof. of International Law 391 Vinerian Prof. of English Law 390 evidence to Selborne Commission 392 Law Quarterly Review (1884) 394 work mentioned: Elements of Jurisprudence (1880) 393±4 mentioned 393, 617 Holland, William Edward (1873±1951) 711±12 Holm, Adolf (1830±1900) 336, 352 Holmes, Edmond (1850±1936) 841 Holmes-Morant circular 841 Holyrood 812 Holywell 275, 306, 527, 754 Holywell Music Room 429, 435, 438 Home Of®ce (Department) 169, 210, 212, 477 Home Rule, Ireland 94, 639, 697±8, 701, 810 Home Secretary 70, 213 Home Students, see Society of Oxford Home Students Home University Library of Modern Knowledge 618 Homer 67, 129, 284, 327±8, 331, 350, 364, 601, PC 32 homosexuality 34±8, 59, 797±9 Hong Kong 706, PC 25 honorary degrees: DCL: Chancellor's installation list (1870) PC 1; Lichnowsky 859; Martineau 61; Parkin 725; Rhodes 601, 607, PC 71; time limit imposed by Hebdomadal Council PC 71 honour schools: account for four-®fths of degrees awarded (c.1914) 788 Balliol's record (1874±83) 164 effect of new Schools 5, 6 honours men outnumber pass men (late 1860s) 93 results published separately for men and women 95 staf®ng needs (early 1870s) 73 mentioned 265, 387 see also degrees, examinations Hook, Walter Farquhar (1798±1875) 560 Hooker, (Sir) Joseph Dalton, KCSI 1877 (1817±1911) 760 Hooker, Richard (1554?±1600): work mentioned: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie (1593±7) 98 Hope, James Robert, from 1853 Hope-Scott (1812±73) 585 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844±89) 318 Hopkins, (Sir) Frederick Gowland, Kt 1925 (1861±1947) 506, 507 Hopkins, Thomas Henry Toovey (c.1832±85) 760

Horace (65±8 b c ) 313 Horne, John William (b. 1865) 559 Horner, Edward (1888±1917) 785±6 Horner, Olivia Stuart (Lady Barker) (b. 1892) PC 65 Horsburgh, Edward Lee Stuart (1857±1931) 670, 684 Horton, Robert Forman (1855±1934) 58, 103, 625 The Hour 187 The House, see Christ Church House, Colonel (1858±1938) 871 House of Commons, see Commons House of Lords, see Lords Housman, Alfred Edward (1859±1936) 152 Housman, Laurence (1865±1959) 828 How, Archibald Barwell (1860±1947) 531 How, (William) Walsham (1823±97): founding of O. House 189 works mentioned: Cicero Select Letters (1925) 342; Commentary on Herodotus (with Wells, 1912) 342 mentioned 341, 345 Howarth, Osbert John (1877±1954): works mentioned: ed. with A. J. Herbertson, Oxford Survey of the British Empire (1914) 703 Hudson, John 763 Hugall, John West (¯. 1849±78) 747 Hughes, Thomas (1822±96): at Co-operative Congress (1878) 663 Hughes and Neale Scholarships 643 work mentioned: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) 535±6 quoted 663 Hugo, Victor (1802±85) 425 Hull, Arthur Eagle®eld (1876±1928) 435, 441 Human Anatomy 298, 467, 490, 756 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1769±1835) 414 Hume, David (1711±76): T.H. Green's view of 319±20 works: Treatise of Human Nature (1739±40) 319±20 Hunt, Arthur Surridge (1871±1934) 616 Hunt, William Holman (1827±1910): `The Light of the World' (1854) presented to Keble Coll. 186 Hunter, (Sir) William Wilson, KCSI 1887 (1840±1900): works mentioned: `Rulers of India' Series 701 Hunter-Blair, (Sir) David Oswald, succ. as 5th Bt 1896 (1853±1939) 120 hunting, see sport Hursley 175, 744 Hutchinson, Francis Ernest (1871±1947) 684

index Hutton, William Holden (1860±1930) 215, 380±1, 701, 832 Huxley, Gervas (1894±1971) 794 Huxley, (Sir) Julian Sorell, Kt 1928 (1887±1975) 493±5, 812 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825±95): debate with Wilberforce 447, 482 declines headship of Univ. Coll. 129 exclusion from honorary degree list (1870) PC 1 techniques of botany teaching 471 quoted 13 mentioned 20, 40, 467, 480, 483, 484, 485 Hymns Ancient and Modern 148 Ibsen, Henrik (1828±1906) PC 33 Icelandic 231 ICS, see Indian Civil Service `The Idea of a University' 604 Idealist philosophy: contribution to social theory 62, 616 critics of 323±4 extent of in¯uence on educational policies 638±40 German Idealists 317 ideas spread by tutors in many subjects 62 O. school founded by Green and Caird 109 mentioned 91, 329, 634 If¯ey Road 195 Ihne, Wilhelm (1821±1902) 334 Ilbert, Lettice, see Fisher, Mrs Iliad 328 Illinois 678 Illustrated London News 670, PC 13 Imperial Air Fleet Committee 860±1 Imperial College of Science and Technology, London (1907) 458, 465 imperial federation 694, 705, 713 Imperial Federation League 719±20 Imperial Institute 805 Imperialism, see British Empire In Memoriam 36 Ince, William (1825±1910) 246, 262, 530 Incorporated Law Society 385 Independent Review 827 India: administrators: con®dence, followed (after 1900) by doubt 707 All Souls connections with 219, 220 British attitude to Indian intellectuals 697 career openings 698, 699 Congress Party 703 and conversion to Christianity 416, 699±700, 710±12 Curzon's services to India 832; his quarrel when Viceroy 694 Goldwin Smith on `a splendid curse' 696

927

Governor-Generals 233, 690, 701 Indian elements in decoration of I. Institute 754±5 Indian independence 805 Indian students at O. 714, 803; fewer than in C., but happier 714; future leaders 805±6; government cttee (LeeWarner, 1907) 714, 804; Hindus, Parsees, Muslims (1871±93) 714; Indian princesses 581; numbers rise after exemptions from Greek, etc. (1913±14) 714; some thoroughly assimilated 804, unpopular after Wyllie assassination (1909) 805 Indian studies in Honour School of Oriental Languages (1886) 612 Indians in government, con¯icting views 694±5, 696 lessons for Indian rule from study of Roman imperial history 346, 816 Manmohan Ghose on O. taste 155 Marathi, New Testament translated (late 16th cent.) 699 Morley±Minto proposals (1909) 804 Nationalist Party 805 O. Univ. Press branch set up (1912) 656 Positivists urge relinquishment of 697 Princes 703 Punjab, Ruskin's view 691 Secretary of State for 694 terrorism (1909) 805 Viceroys 233; Chelmsford, Irwin 220; Curzon 168, 215, 381, 641, 694, 832 mentioned 167, 169, 361, 633, 651, 693, 706 India on the Eve of the British Conquest, see Owen, Sidney James: work mentioned India House (1909) 805 India Of®ce 168, 220, 475, 638, 704, 804 Indian Civil Service: anthropology diploma for probationers 703 Balliol's record 160, 164±5, 347, 691 colls supplying 705±6 compared to Plato's Guardians 707 dearth of candidates after First World War 715 domination of Greats in examination 346±7, 699 entry conditions (1870s) 75 examination combined with Home Civil Service (1896) 346 lectures organized by Geography School 703 and Oriental Studies 423 probationers 698, 705 mentioned 168, 213, 475, 593, 698±9, 700, 701, 702, 704, 706±7, 709, 714

928

index

Indian Education Service 557 Indian Forest Service 203, 475, 640, 702 Indian History, Reader in 374 Indian History and Law, readership in (1868) 700±1 Indian Institute 600, 689, 700, 754±5, Plate 24, PC 24 Indian Law, readership in (1878) 214±15, 705 Indian Sociologist (1909) 805 Indian Studies 612, 698±701 Indiana 675 indigentes 585 Industrial Revolution, see Toynbee, Arnold: work mentioned industry, industrial: Britain's leading position 855 disputes, unrest 674, 843 history graduates in 382 Industrial Fatigue Board 506 industrial relations 643 Industrial Revolution 381 need for education: higher technical, scienti®c 10, 457, 865 need to produce scientists for 492±3 `primarily a national service' (1918) 856 mentioned 7, 622±3 Inge, William Ralph (1860±1954) 108, 345 Ingram, James (1774±1850), Pres. of Trinity Coll. (1824±50) 210 Inland Revenue 168 Inns of Court 386, 576 Inner Temple 805 Inspectorate, see Education Institut FrancËais 496 Institute of Chemistry 465 Institute of Historical Research 363 Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics 638, 704 Institutes, see Justinian Institutes of Metaphysic, see Ferrier Institution of Civil Engineers 476 Institutions established after 1914 which affected British universities 876 Integrative Action of the Nervous System, see Sherrington: works mentioned intellectuals 40, 601 Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904) 467 Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, see Sewell, William: work mentioned Ionian Islands 696, 706 Ireland, Irish: Home Rule 94, 639, 697±8, 701, 810 Irish Channel 862 Irish peers 582 Land League 155 language 613

Nationalist volunteers 862 threat of civil war 858, 862 mentioned 692, 693, 701, 731, 740, 870 Ireland, John (1761±1842): bible clerk at Oriel 585 Dean of Westminster 585 founded scholarships and chair of divinity 585 Ireland Scholarships, see University Prizes and Scholarships Irenaeus (b. c.130 a d ) 98 Irving, Edward (1792±1834) 229 Irvingite Church 45, 229 Isaac, Florence (1880±1924) 469 Isis 272±3, 290, 533±4, 536, 799, 800, 810 `Isis Idols' 800, PC 30 Isis, River 95, 278 isolationism 871 Italian (language) 415, 423, 613 professorship established (1919) 875 Italy: Roman uni®cation of 333 univs of 238 Jackson, Clement Nugent (1846±1924) 527, 531 Jackson, John (1811±85) 161 Jackson, (Sir) Thomas Graham, Bt 1913 (1835±1924): 74 High St 199, 753±4 Balliol Coll., King's Mound 773 Bodleian Library restoration 749, 770 BNC: Chapel restoration 774; extension in late Gothic to High St 752, 755, 771, 772, 776 Cherwell bridge 770 CCC Annexe and restoration of Beam Hall 771 cricket pavilion in Parks 756 Delegacy for Non-Collegiate students 753±4, 772 domination challenged by Champneys 754 Electrical, later Clarendon, laboratory 757, 776 Examination Schools, 748, 759, 770, Plate 22, PC 22 Hertford Coll. Plate 20, PC 20 bridge 753, 777; Catte St front 772; extensive work at 753; North quadrangle, Chapel 775±6 Lincoln Coll., Grove Building, works in Hall 770, 773 Local Examinations Delegacy 774 Merton Chapel exterior, etc. 772 Oriel Chapel, enlargement 759, 771 O. High School for Boys 752 Queen's Coll., Chemical Laboratory 775

index Radcliffe Observatory, new tower 757, 775 Radcliffe Science Library 756, 774 Renaissance style suited to O. patrons 752 St Mary's, restoration 773 Somerville: new block 771; `Queen Anne' addition to 751 Trinity Coll., Pres.'s House, front quadrangle 753, 771 Wadham Coll.: organ loft in chapel 771; works in Warden's Lodgings 769 mentioned 738, 750, 757 Jackson, William 645 Jackson, William Edward (1852±1921) 189 Jackson, William Walrond (1838±1931), Censor of Non-Collegiate Students (1883±7), Rector of Exeter Coll. (1887±1913): Exeter boat club debt 530 Princ. of O.U. Day Training Coll. 558, 559 supporter of teacher-training 557 quoted 269, 578±9 mentioned 201 Jackson's Oxford Journal 434 Jacobi, Karl Gustav Jacob (1804±51) 453±4 Jacoby, Felix (1876±1959) 352 Jaeger, Muriel (1892±1969) 589 Jamaica 718 James, Herbert Armitage (1844±1931), Pres. of St John's Coll. (1909±31) 624 James, William (1842±1910) 324 Jameson Raid PC 71 Jameson, (Sir) Leander Starr, Bt 1911 (1853±1917) 719 Jamison, Evelyn (1877±1972) 285, PC 73 JCRs, see Junior Common Rooms Jebb, Eglantyne (1876±1928) 284, 594 Jebb, Richard (1874±1937): work mentioned: Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905) 696 Jebb, (Sir) Richard Claverhouse, Kt 1900 (1841±1905): edition of Sophocles (1883±96) 330 Regius Prof. of Greek at C. 330 Jelf, William Edward (1811±75) 230 Jenkin, Charles Frewen (1865±1940): Prof. of Engineering Science 476 quoted 481 mentioned 479 Jenkins, Arthur (1882±1946) PC 72 Jenks, Edward (1861±1939) 827 Jenkyns, Richard (1782±1854), Master of Balliol Coll. (1819±54), V.-C. (1824±28) 159, 735, 736, 738 Jericho (Oxford) 195, 559, 646±7, 650, 679 Jervis-Smith, Frederick John, formerly Smith (1848±1911) 460, 464, 477, 493 Jespersen, (Jens) Otto (1860±1943) 421

929

Jesuits 61, 104, 120, 699 Jesus College: buildings: Chapel 759; new front (1854±6) 737; Ship St front 757 chapel services 105 degrees in Celtic languages 422 ®nance: Meyricke bequest 84; Trust Income 161 `Jaggers' 549 patronage of science 485 Principalship: friction during Harper's time 129; quali®cation for 130 proportion of public school men 550, 551 resurgence as `national college for Wales' (1890s) 124 scholarships 84, 161 societies: Elizabethan Society 152; music society 437 sport: amalgamated clubs (1883) 529; eight banned (1844) 526 Jeune, Francis (1806±68), Master of Pembroke Coll. (1843±64), V.-C. (1858±62) 148, 579, 585, 736 Jeune, Francis Henry, cr. Lord St. Helier 1905 (1843±1905) 118 Jevons, Francis Byron (1858±1936) 356 Jews, Judaism 61, 444, 580, 610, 617, 794, 802 Jex-Blake, Henrietta (1869±1953), Princ. of LMH (1909±21) 288 Joachim, Harold Henry (1868±1938) 323, 345 John of Salisbury (¯. 1120±80) 618 Johnson, Arthur Henry (1845±1927) 136, 219, 244, 265, 266, 374, 376, 379, 479 Johnson, Bertha Jane (Mrs) (1846±1927), Princ. of Society of Oxford Home Students (1893±1921) Plate 47 PC 47 Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women (AEW), hopes for expanded role for 260 resignation from Secretaryship 260, PC 47 backs plan for `Queen's University' 268 Charity Organization Society 299 con¯ict over appointment of tutors 259±60 ®rst woman with senior Univ. appointment 269 opposes opening of BA to women 264, 266 resists trend towards assimilation 281 Secretary of LMH 259 student at Slade School of Art 244 supporter of women's suffrage 301 women gain fewer Firsts because `less original' 286 a women's Hall, cttee for founding 246 quoted 260, 270, 273±4 mentioned 245, 256, 264, 267, 278±9, 288

930

index

Johnson, George Henry Sacheverell (1808±81): Savilian Prof. of Astronomy 446 member of 1850 Royal Commission 443 Johnston, John Octavius (1852±1928) 101 Joint Matriculation Board 562 Joint Tutorial Classes 665 Joinville, Jean, Sire de (c.1224±1317) 425 Jones, Benjamin (1847±1942) 673±4 Jones, Daniel (1881±1967) 422 Jones, (Sir) Henry Stuart-, Kt 1933 (1867±1939) 345 Jones, John Cemlyn (b. 1891) 791 Jones, John Viriamu (1856±1901) 460 Jones, (Sir) Lawrence Evelyn, succ. as 5th Bt 1954 (1885±1969): chapel-going 787±8 on ease of modern relationships 797 ®nals and fellowship examination 789 as prisoner of war 874 quoted 787±8, 797, 874 mentioned 801 Jones, Ronald P. 775 Jones, (Sir) William, Kt 1783 (1746±94) 689, 699 Joseph, Horace William Brindley (1867±1943) 788 Jouffroy, TheÂodore Simon 316 Jourdain, Eleanor Frances (1863±1924), Princ. of St Hugh's Coll. (1915±24): Pres. of Modern Language Association 284 work mentioned: An Adventure (with Annie Moberly) 284 mentioned 284, 292, 295±6, 303 Journal of Education 604 journalism 132, 165, 382, 533, 579, 604, 610, 620 Jowett, Benjamin (1817±93), Master of Balliol Coll. (1870±93), V.-C. (1882±6) Plate 2, PC 2 Regius Prof. of Greek 314, 329, 337 accedes to power in Balliol (1866) 159 aims and interests 329 Balliol's in¯uence in London world, keen to retain 15 Balliol's statutes, revision of PC 2 on the battle against dominance of science 65±6, 93 and Bradley, A. C. 322 and Broad St front of Balliol PC 18 and Browning, Robert 132 building for Non-Collegiate students (1886±8) 754 chair of statistics, attempt to endow 448±9 champion of Unattached/Non-Collegiate students 199±200, 204, 583

change in attitude to need for coll. tutors (1867±77) 48 on coll. heads 128 colleges as `almshouses' 585 comparisons: with his own undergraduate studies (1865) 25; with undergraduates of 1840s (1885) 155 discouragement of clerical ambitions 583 dislike of `Manchester School' of economics 691 drafts Bill on reform (1853) 160 early enthusiasm for Hegel 317 and Edgeworth, F. Y. 448 education for the professions 612 Empire, Jowett's views and in¯uence 691±2 encouragement: of sport 527; of theatrical productions 627 Essays and Reviews 26, 160 and extension 583, 636 favours concentration on teaching 14 fund-raising 743 and Green, T. H. 58, 109, 319, PC 5 his Liberalism 74 hostility to archaeology, etc. 336, 337 ICS, Indian studies 698 and inter-coll. lectures 49, 335 `the ladder of competition' 572 on Martineau 61 as Master of Balliol 159±66; Balliol's address to House of Lords (1876) 162; begging letters 162±3; bursar's functions transferred to Master PC 2; changes effected 161; `colonization' of other colls 131; disciplines coll. 793; pays for coll. hall organ 437±8; personality stamped on coll. 167; scheme for lodgings 163; succeeded by Caird 62 New Testament, interpretation 102±3 Non-Placet Society formed in opposition to 626 O. U. Press: appointment of Gell 652±3; interest in 616, 654, 655; typography 650 and Pater 34, 37 and Percival 129 Plato, interpretation 32, 36, 37 and Pre-Socratic philosophers 316±17 reading essays to the Master 803 regarded by Pusey and other High Churchmen as a heretic 98, PC 2 representative of `liberal' Anglicanism 97 requirements for Selborne Commission 80±1 ridiculed in New Republic 38 service to the state and to poor 692 special decree for Cornelia Sorabji 714 supports: O. English Dictionary 615, 652; rowing (1881) 532±3

index suspicion of research 329, 337, 359, 615 teaching for Greats 314 theology: opinion of Lux Mundi 102; pamphlet with Stanley 97; treatment of theology and Theology School in Balliol 98 translations 329, 336, 618 urges involvement with local colls 662±3 as V.-C. 65, 91, 97, 166, 199, 337, 482, 600, 625, 650, 708 on waste of endowments 826 on Waterhouse, Alfred 743 work mentioned: Epistles of Paul (1855) 38 quoted 12, 15, 18, 22, 32, 41, 80±1, 88, 106, 162±3, 204, 241, 337, 472, 482, 662, 743 mentioned 21, 22, 61, 66, 68, 105, 109, 151, 323, 330, 339, 574, 603, 604, 628, 709, 801, 824 Jude the Obscure, see Hardy, Thomas Judge's Lodgings 833 Junior Common Rooms (JCRs) 150±1, 154 jurisprudence 385±96 passim fellows teaching (Michaelmas 1892) 133 historical jurisprudence 617 Prelim 265 routes to ®nal honours in 512 Fig. 21C.1 see also law (academic study), and 389 n. 34 for name of Honour School Justinian (527±65 a d ): work mentioned: Institutes 386±7, 388, 394 Jutland see First World War Kaiser (Wilhelm II) (1859±1941) 718, 721, 723, 871 Kant, Immanuel (1724±1804): British Idealist school 109 work mentioned: Critique of Pure Reason (1781) 316 mentioned 318 Kapurthala, Maharaja of 807 Keatinge, Maurice Walter (1868±1935) 556 Keble, John (1792±1866): Creweian Oration (1839) 586 death, 29 Mar. 1866; plan for coll. as memorial 175±7 on exclusion of plebeian students 586 work mentioned: The Christian Year (1827) 175 mentioned 172, 548, 744 see also Keble College Keble College 171±91 passim Appeal (1866), Memorial Fund 117±18, 175±7, 200 building and organization of coll., Library 744±5 buildings: Butter®eld's design 744±6; chapel 185±8, Plate 16, PC 16 addition

931

of Liddon Chapel 758, criticism of architecture 187, interior 746, seating arrangements 745; Hall 188, 744±5; later reaction against style 761; library 188; Liddon Quadrangle 744; Pusey Quadrangle 744±5; site 177, 74±5; use of brick 745; Warden's Lodging 188, 745 by 1881, third largest coll. 88 careers of graduates 188; in Empire 706; Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 ceremonies: chapel, consecration deferred 187, opening (1876) 187; opening of coll. (June 1870) 181±2 and Church of England Purity Association 139 clientele 588 collection of illuminated MSS 188 contrast with Hertford 119 Council 131, 179±80 ®nance: economies as example for other colls 146, 190; ®nancial problems 190 ®rst undergraduates 181±2 food 182±4 furnishings, staff 178 gaudies as reunions 156±7 halls no longer cheapest form of residence (1870s) 119 inequalities perceived between colls 784 London Settlement 639 Marriott's ®rst proposals 172±4 messenger service 183 and mission ®eld 639 opposition in the Univ. (1870±1) 180, 184 organ scholarship (1876) 148 OTC platoons (1914) 862 prince from British Guiana 801 regulations 183 Royal Charter 181 sport: percentage of rowing men 521; sports ground 185 The Tenmannetale 152 theology, numbers reading 99 Tractarian in¯uence on foundation 580 Visitor (Tait) 187±8 mentioned 131, 138, 274, 746 Keble Road Triangle 478 Keene, Henry (1726±76) 225 Keith, Arthur Berriedale (1879±1944) 793 Kelvin, Lord, cr. 1892 (1824±1907) 468 Kemp, E. S. 435±6 Kempe, Charles Eamer (1837±1907) 757±8, 771, 773 Kennard, Charles H. (1840±1920) 104 Kenyon, (Sir) Frederic George, KCB 1912 (1863±1952) 345 Kenyon, John Robert (1807±80): Vinerian Prof. of English Law 385, 391

932

index

Kenyon, John Robert (1807±80): (contd ) evidence to Select Cttee (1846) 385 Ker, William Paton (1855±1923): cttee on examination syllabus of English School 404 contributor to memorial volume to T. H. Green 323 Kerr, Philip Henry, succ. as 11th Marquess of Lothian 1930 (1882±1940) 715, 818 Kew Gardens 489, 760 Keynes, John Maynard, cr. Lord Keynes 1942 (1883±1946) 59, 448, 620 Kiel Canal 861 King, Edward (1829±1910): on cttee for founding a women's Hall 246 Princ. of Cuddesdon Coll. 182 mentioned 188, 223 King, Joseph (1860±1943) 632, 850, 852±3 King Edward Street 717 King Edward's School, Birmingham 579 King's College, Cambridge 124, 798 King's College, London, see London: University of The King's English, see Fowler, Francis King's Printer 645 King's School, Canterbury 129 Kingsley, Charles (1819±75) 665 Kingston Road 195 Kipling, Rudyard (1865±1936) 693, 799, 819, 828, 870 Kirkaldy, Jane Willis (d. 1932) 283, 306, 491 Kitchener, Lord, cr. Earl Kitchener 1914 (1850±1916) PC 71 Kitchin, George William (1827±1912), Censor of Non-Collegiate students (1870±83): achievements 200±1 appointed 194±5 Dean of Durham 680 Dean of Winchester 199 extension movement, support for founding of 680 lectures opened to women 248 migration problem 197±8 Secretary to Board of Delegates of Press 648 quoted 196, 197, 561 mentioned 202, 206, 230, 231, 650 Kitson, Charles Herbert (1874±1944) 434, 441 Kleist, Bernd Heinrich von (1777±1811) 425±6 Knottesford Fortescue, Edward Bowles (c.1816±77) 172 Knowles, (Sir) Francis Howe, 5th Bt 1914 (1886±1953) 502, Plate 42, PC 42 Knox, Edmund Arbuthnott (1847±1937): checking extravagance and idleness in Merton 527

lectures and tutorials 134 principal of postmasters (Merton) 141 Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott (1888±1957) 783±4, 788, 798, 810, PC 13 Knox, Winifred, see Peck, Lady Kortum, Hermann 454 Krishnavarma, Pandit Shyamaji (b. 1857) 805±6 laboratories: Balliol±Trinity laboratory 136, Plate 45, PC 45 buildings (1890±1914): Manley, Morphological, Pathological, Chemical, Engineering 756±7 Christ Church 136, 455, 477 Clarendon see separate entry coll. laboratories 460 Daubeny laboratory 136, 464 electricity laboratory, plans for 461, 626, PC 20 encroachment on the Parks 627, 829 the freedom of the coll. laboratory 620 medical laboratories 473 physiology laboratory 482, 483, 506, 625, 743 Selborne Commission: resources for 87 sites for new science laboratories 478 suspicions harboured by Museum profs 136 Univ. Museum, building of 739, 741 mentioned 283, 743 see also University Museum Labour College movement 686 Labour Party, labour movement: Conference 825, PC 69 demand for increased access for workers not seriously backed by 854 education programme ( January 1914) 853 fear of: Strachan-Davidson 851 links with O. Univ. 641, 642±3, 832, 844, 845 report by Mansbridge, Bowerman, and Mactavish 850±1 Ruskin Coll., control of 847, 854 scholarships: expropriation alleged by 586 univ. reform: Westminster Gazette articles (1905) 824; attack expected in Parliament, Goschen's warning (1906) 826±7; in¯uence on Liberal government (from 1906) 830; agitation about endowments (1911±12) 841 WEA a pressure group within (1912) 848 mentioned 360, 812, 848, 858±9, PC 70, PC 72 Ladies' Educational Association 10

index Lady Margaret Hall Plates 49, 73, PC 49 PC 73 AEW lectures 247 buildings Plates 54, 55, 56, PC 54, PC 55, PC 56; additional buildings 262; Champneys's design for ®rst new building, 751, PC 54; chapel 279; dining room PC 55; Lodge building PC 54; Talbot building library, PC 56; Wordsworth building (1896) PC 54, 55; work of Blom®eld (1896±1926) 758, PC 54, 56 Burgon's sermon (1884) 252±3 character and composition: bias towards humanities 282; clergy daughters at 580; closely supervised lifestyle 274; `hostel for young ladies' 261; policy towards tradesmen's daughters 581; records of students' backgrounds 581 competitive entrance examination (from 1913) 280 divided on opening of degrees (1894±6) 264 ®nance: appeal to ®nance expansion (1894) 261, PC 55; dif®culty of raising money 252, PC 55 former members: travellers 294; working in Empire 706 founding of 58, 94, 189, 246 opening (Oct. 1879) 246 pressure to appoint tutors 259 religion: `a Christian family' 251; Anglican culture 250, 287, 580, 581, PC 54 sport, hockey XI (1912±13) Plate 65, PC 65 suffrage society 303 `The Apple of Discord' 273 transition to coll. more dif®cult than at Somerville 261 mentioned 60, 239 Lagrange, Louis de (1736±1813) 453 laicization 40, 56, 64, 78, 83 Laing, Robert (later Cuthbert Shields) (1840±1908) Plates 33, 37, PC 33, PC 37 benefaction in memory 417 claim to be a White Druse 808±9 inter-collegiate lecture scheme 47 quoted 47 mentioned 117, 374 Lake District 511, PC 34 Lancashire 548, 571, 666, 667, 679 Lancastrian 689 Lancing College 171, 355, 545 Land Campaign 843 landowners 70, 160, 165, 576, 577, 591 Lang, Andrew (1844±1912) 356 Lang, (William) Cosmo Gordon, cr. Lord Lang 1942 (1864±1945):

933

Archbishop of Canterbury 219 Archbishop of York 806 extension and settlement lecturer 666, 787 O. Church Union founded by 108 Vicar of St. Mary's 107 quoted 189 mentioned 99, 106, 283, 380 Langridge, Edith (1864±1954) 283, 290, 710 Lankester, (Sir) Edwin Ray, Kt 1907 (1847±1929): Linacre Prof. of Comparative Anatomy 484, 701 attack on appointments for ICS, etc. 701 Director of Natural History Museum 484 London Chair at age 27 483 member of The Club 628 on the O. summer term 485 pugnacity 483±4 Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 470 research seminar places, laboratory space for women 467, 470 Romanes Lecture 481, 486 and science: antagonism towards humanities 481; campaign to broaden biology teaching 489; colls' duty to offer fellowships 491; dispute over syllabus 490; increased spending demanded 480 quoted 8, 483 mentioned 471, 501 Lansbury, George (1859±1940) 844 Lansdowne, 5th Marquess of, succ. 1866 (1845±1927): in Commission debate (1907) 831 ®rst 1910 Election, intervention in 838 Jowett, L.'s debt to 582±3 Viceroy of India 168, 699 quoted 831 mentioned 168 Larmor, (Sir) Joseph, Kt 1909 (1857±1942) 839 Lascelles, (Sir) Alan Frederick, KCVO 1939 (1887±1981): ®nancially advantaged 784 quoted 792, 795 mentioned 801 Lascelles, Frank (1875±1934) 828 Lascelles, Lady (Mary Emma) (d. 1897) 294 Laski, Harold Joseph (1893±1950) 305, 381, 575 Lathbury, Maria, see Evans, Lady Latimer, Hugh (?1492±1555) 733 Latin: compulsory 280, 857 in Greats 315, 325 pronunciation of 345 mentioned 63, 248, 313, 636

934

index

Latin authors: Catullus 327 Lucretius 330 Persius 330 Pliny 342, 348 Propertius 327 see also Cicero; Livy; Tacitus; Virgil Latin Language 618 Laud, William (1573±1645), Chancellor (1630±41) 746, 834 LaugeÂe, DeÂsire FrancËois PC 2 law (academic study) 385±96 passim admission of women to examinations (1890) 257 coll. posts, rapid increase 611 essay work, increased importance of (1870s) 135 Faculty of (1882) 93 Faculty Board, All Souls accused of `packing' (1906) 219 historical jurisprudence at O. 617 Honour School 93, 611 Indian law: special provision made for study 705 popular School with American Rhodes Scholars 724 Preliminary Examination 265 School of Law and Modern History (to 1872) 41, 210, 211, 212, 312±13, 362, 385, 386±9 mentioned 6 law (profession) 160, 579, 622 Law Quarterly Review 394, 618±19 Law Society 386 Lawes, (Sir) John Bennet, Bt 1882 (1814±1900) 474 Lawrence, Dorothy (1860±1933) 295 Lawrence, Millicent (1863±1925) 295 Lawrence, Penelope (1856±1932) 295 Lawrence, Thomas Edward (1888±1935) 358, 815 Lawson, John James (Jack), cr. Lord Lawson 1950 (1881±1965) 679 Layard, (Sir) Austen Henry, GCB 1878 (1817±94) 354 Le Keux, John Henry (1812±96) Plates 14, 15, PC 15 Lea, Elizabeth, see Wright, Mrs League of Nations 360, 716 Leander Club 720 Lear, Sidney 175 Leathersellers' Company 196 Leathes, (Sir) Stanley Mordaunt, KCB 1919 (1861±1938) 427, 867, 869 lecturers 16, 74, 341, 477, 837 lectures Plate 32, PC 32 catechetical 49, 392, PC 32

coll. lectures 388, 392, 453 CUF lecturership 411 duplication, complaints of 608 inter-collegiate scheme: in Greats 143, 314±15, 351; in law 392; in mathematics 453; in Modern History School 47±63, 52, 134, 335, 374; `no substitute' for tutor 135 mentioned 124 lecture lists 52, 599±600 lecturership in colonial history (1904) 692 lectures for ladies 238 Millard lecturer 464 mentioned 276, 285 see also Bampton Lectures; Ford's Lecturership, Romanes Lecture Lectures and Essays on . . . Latin Literature &c., see Nettleship, Henry: work mentioned Lee, Lancelot J. (1832±1902) 72 Lee, Margaret Lucy (1871±1955) 283, 295 Lee-Warner, (Sir) William, Kt 1898 (1846±1914) 805 Leeds 190, 560, 637, PC 17 Grammar School 560 Univ. of 10, 603 Lees-Smith, Hastings Bertrand (1878±1941) 684 Legge, Edward Henry (1834±1900) 182, 184 Legge, James (1815±97) Plate 25, PC 25 Prof. of Chinese PC 25 works mentioned: editions of Chinese classics (1861±94) PC 25 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646±1716) 443 Leigh, Henry Devenish (1863±1903) 150 Leighton, Francis Knyvett (1807±81), Warden of All Souls Coll. (1858±81), V.-C. (1866±70): mentioned 180, 214 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (1870±1924) 697 Lenwood, Frank (1874±1934) 803±4 lesbianism 291 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729±81) 425±6 L'Estrange, Charles James (1867±1944) 657 Lethaby, William Richard (1857±1931) 738 Letters, see Pliny Letto-Slavic (language) 613 Leuctra 357 Levett, (Ada) Elizabeth (1881±1932) 284, 297±8, 302±3, 581 Lewes, George Henry (1817±78) 320 Lewis, David Malcolm (1928±94) 342, 353±4 Lewis, (Sir) George Cornewall, succ. as 2 nd Bt 1855 (1806±63): work mentioned: An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841) 348 Lewis, Percy Tyson (1884±1976) 722 lexicography 330, 414, 419, 652, 657±8 Ley, Henry George (1887±1962) 228

index Liberal Imperialism 640, 713 Liberal Party: Asquith, H. H., Liberal Premier (1908±16) 167, 673, 781 attacks on Milner (1906) 694±5 attitude to Salisbury (1870) 67 Bryce's safe seat (1880) 90 cabinets 637, 824, PC 31 general elections (1868, 1880, 1906, 1910) 21, 157, 826, 844 Green, T. H. and Liberal politics 319 Home Rule split (1886) 94, 697±8 land policy 809 leaders unable to moderate isolationist attitudes (1906±14) 872 Liberal press 682, 824 Liberals, a minority among undergraduates 63 Modern History School's appeal for Liberals 368 MPs 26±7, 64, 82, 85, 830 obstruct Curzon's membership of Lords 831 in opposition (1874±5) 73, 74 as pre-war party of government 600 setback (1874) 73 unlikely to promote Univ. reform (1892) 669 women's suffrage, split in O. Liberal party (c.1912) 305 mentioned 293, 462, PC 70 Liberal Unionism, debated in Corpus Christi (1889) 150 Liberals, national issues: attitude in O. to Gladstone and Salisbury 67 Bradley, G. G., on Commission (1880) 86 C., `New Jerusalem Caucus' 832 caucus, candidates for Hebdomadal Council 624 Cecil, Lord Hugh, and Liberals (1910) 838 `clerical' Hertford Coll., Liberal protests (1874) 73 and Cleveland Commissioners 70 electoral tactics, O. Liberals (1906) 633 Ewart's Cttee, Roundell's evidence 68±9 favour slow-moving Commission (1878) 85 `Gladstonians' in Tory and High Church `coalition' (1875) 74 Goschen accepted as Chancellor by O. Liberals (1903) 633 Green, J. R., on Stubbs 43±4 Liberal bursars 72 Liberals proposed as Selborne Commissioners (1876) 76 Liberals' unity in O. and C. wearing thin (1868) 69

935

Liddell's cttee (1875) 74 majority among fellowship in most colls (1879) 88 Manchester Guardian, O. Liberals on staff 698 Masterman, J. C., on `the curse of British Liberals' 862 in the O. Union (from 1900) 809 protest against honorary degree for Rhodes (1899) 601 public school Liberals in O. (1860s) 550 reactions to Curzon's scheme (1909) 835 reintroduction of Tests, Liberal suspicions 79 and Religious Tests 68 Roundell, C. S., criticized (1874) 73 Ruskin's lectures, Liberal suspicions 90 Salisbury's Bill (1876), Liberal comments 78 Smith, Henry, a Selborne Commissioner (1877) 78±79 Stubbs acceptable to O. Liberals (1866) 366 traditional Liberal belief about working class 846 The Tribune 825 and univ. reform, Joseph King (1892) 632 women's education 94 liberals, Oxford: advocate use of lodgings 21 and Butler's Analogy 25 Caird's lecture (1896) 103 Davies, Emily, and O. liberals (1867) 237 educational issues, liberals command bipartisan support 639 extension, liberal initiatives 636 government measure, liberal hopes (1875) 75 liberal catholic beliefs (1889) 634±5 Liberal imperialism, O. version 640 `liberal', term used for many attitudes by 1914 111 liberal theology examiners (1880s) 100 liberals found Somerville Hall (1879) 246 liberals no longer seen as chief threat to religion (late 1880s) 108 Lux Mundi (1889) and liberalism 101, 102 Mallock's satire 21, 38 Mill, J. S., states doctrine 29 non-dogmatic Christians 30 Pusey favours theology school by late 1860s 98 reverence for German scholarship a liberal hallmark 414 rifts and weaknesses among liberals (post1871) 22, 625 Univ. examinations opened to women; liberals divided (1884) 257 Wadham a liberal coll. (c.1878) 82

936

index

liberals, Oxford: (contd ) weak in Convocation 30 women students at O., liberal doubts (1870s) 241 mentioned 398, 452 Liberty fabrics 243, 259 libraries: Codrington 212 colls criticized for neglect of 148±9 English Library 411 posts in 593 mentioned 610 see also Bodleian Library; Radcliffe Science Library Lichnowsky, Prince (1860±1928) 859 Liddell, Alice, from 1880 Mrs R. G. Hargreaves (1852±1934): the Alice books 225, PC 6 friendship with Prince Leopold 226 Laing's love for 47 taught by Ruskin 230 mentioned 330, 508, 509 Liddell, Henry George (1811±98) Dean of Ch.Ch. (1855±91), V.-C. (1870±4) 221±31 passim architectural activities 225 aristocratic extravagance, tolerance of 582 colls as `almshouses' 585 education for the professions 612 extension, sub-cttee chaired by (1866) 193±4 Headmaster of Westminster School 221 interests not those of Canons 223 involved in O. City problems 223 `Liddell and Scott'(1843) 221, 330 Ruskin Drawing School, trustee of 508±9 School-book Cttee of Press 648 Univ. reform, chairs 1875 meeting 74 quoted 5, 9, 222 mentioned 223, 607, 747, PC 6, PC 11 Liddell, Mrs (Lorina) (d. 1910) 241 Liddell, Lorina PC 6 Liddell, Violet 230, PC 6 Liddon, Henry Parry (1829±90): Prof. of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture 617 admission of women to examinations opposed by 257, 625 Athanasian Creed committee 176 conversations with Dodgson 234 gift of books to Non-Collegiates' library 195 Greats an `in®del' course (1868) 25 John Keble's funeral 175 Keble Coll: controversy with Butter®eld 746; disapproves of mosaic 185; gift of MSS 188; Liddon Chapel 186; offer of Wardenship 177±8

Lux Mundi, hostility to 102 and nomination of Stanley as Select Preacher (1872) PC 11 on opening of women's Halls 242 physiology laboratory, leads opposition to 482 as preacher 229 on reduction of clerical fellowships 55 quoted 25, 55, 91, 175, 177, 258 mentioned 21, 26, 30, 31, 74, 101, 179, 187, 240 Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, see Abbott: works mentioned `The Light of the World' 186, PC 16 Lightfoot, John Prideaux (c.1803±87), Rector of Exeter Coll. (1854±87), V.-C. (1862±6) 13 Lightfoot, Joseph Barber (1828±89) 20 Lillingston, Septimus Ernest Luke Spooner (b. 1863) 435 Lincoln, Abraham (1809±65) 873 Lincoln College: ®nance: coll. contributions 86±7; coll. income 83; details of coll. charges 147 Grove Building 752 JCR hostile to women's rights 812 proportion of public school men 550, 551 proposal for amalgamation with BNC 124 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; privileges for boat club members 535 Visitor has new statutes rejected (1882) 57, 116 mentioned 341, 801 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, cr. Visc. Cherwell 1956 (1886±1957) 460, 492 Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, cr. Lord Lindsay 1945 (1879±1952), Master of Balliol (1924±49), V.-C. (1935±8): comparison of undergraduate generations 786 modern Greats, discussions on 852 quoted 792 mentioned 167, 341, 344, 534 Lindsay, Wallace Martin (1858±1937): work mentioned: Latin Language 618 Linear B 350±1 linguistic studies 414, 419±20 Linnean Society 470 Lister, Charles (1887±1915) 788 Literae Humaniores see Greats Little, Andrew George (1863±1945) 363, 374 Little Clarendon Street 251 `Little Englanders' 860 `Little-Go', see Responsions Littlemore 732 Liverpool 507, 560, 677

index Univ. of (Univ. College to 1903) 358; Charter (1903) 363; History School 363; mentioned 406, 603, 826 Livingstone, David (1813±73) 710±11 Livingstone, (Sir) Richard Winn, Kt 1931 (1880±1960), Pres. of CCC (1933±50), V.-C. (1944±47): as author 328 discontent with Classical Mods. (1904) 328 Univ. reform: in `conspiracy' (1907) 681, 826, 827 Union speaker on 810 quoted 328 mentioned 330 Livy (59 b c ±?a d 17) 41, 316, 333 Lloyd, Charles (c.1824±62) 224 Lloyd George, David, cr. Earl Lloyd-George 1945 (1863±1945) 124, 624, 695, 809, 817, 835, 842, 843, 857 local examinations 9, 240, 661, 663 local government 75 Board 168 education of of®cials 824 local lectures 663±4, 667±8 Lock, Walter (1846±1933), Warden of Keble Coll. (1897±1920) 183 Locke, Alain LeRoy, (1885±1954), ®rst African-American Rhodes Scholar 804 Locke, John (1632±1704) 316, 320, 689 Lockyer, (Sir) (Joseph) Norman, KCB 1897 (1836±1920) 480, 638 Loder's Club 221±2 Lodge, Eleanor Constance (1869±1936), 261, 284, 285, 292, 297±8, 304, PC 54 Lodge, (Sir) Oliver Joseph, Kt 1902 (1851±1940) 472 Lodge, (Sir) Richard, Kt 1917 (1855±1936) 367, 374, 375 lodgings: coll. expansion made possible through 122 Jowett's scheme for Balliol 122, 163 Liddell's sub-cttee on extension 193±4 lodging-house keepers 78 residence in allowed (1868) 21 Loggan, David (1635±1700?) 730 logic 311, 313, 316, 317, 444 Logic, see Aldrich; Aristotle: works mentioned; Bosanquet, Bernard: work mentioned; Hegel: work mentioned logical positivism 616 London: Balliol's in¯uence in 15 East London 58, 189 gas supply 477 Local Examinations (1858) 560 London Fabianism 643 men of letters 40

937

summer school for teachers (1885) 558 women in settlement work 299 mentioned 4, 9 London County Council 150, 553 London Ethical Society 57 London medical schools 268±9 London School of Economics 276, 284, 796, 824 London Society for the Extension of University Teaching 400±1 London, University of BA degree 257±8, 263, 296 Chancellor: Beauchamp PC 31; Rosebery 472 clinical schools 507 degrees taken by O. women 296 doctorates 10 extension 669 King's Coll. 445 a `national' univ. 603 Political Philosophy and Science Club 620 Principals: Miers 468; Reinold 460 school examinations 561 School of History 363 Slade School of Art 507, 509 student numbers, rapid rise in (after 1902) 603 Univ. Coll. 385, 404, 466, 483 women: admitted to degrees (1878) 239, 241; subject spread 281; marriage rates 294; women's colls 257, 296 mentioned 13, 242, 638 long vacation 653 Long, Walter Hume, cr. Visc. Long 1921 (1854±1924) 229 Longley, Charles Thomas (1794±1868) 176, 177, 186, 230 Longton 684, 849 Lord Chancellor 76, 85, 389, 548 Lord Chief Justice 151, 548 Lord President of the Council 180, 669 Lords of Appeal 389 Lord's Cricket Ground 517, 538, 724, 799 Lords, House of: debate on proposed Commission (1907) 552±3, 682, 831 Question in (1907) 823±4 Salisbury's effort to block examination statute (1882), 57, 631±2 Select Cttee on Tests Bill (1870±1) 25±9, 32, 41 mentioned 3, 22, 57, 75, 77, 93, 162 Loreburn, 1st Earl, cr. 1911 (1846±1923) 168 Loretto School 803 Lorimer, (Elizabeth) Hilda (1873±1954) 284, 285

938

index

Lorimer, Florence Mary (Mrs Cardew) (1883±1967) 299 Lothair, see Disraeli: work mentioned Love, Augustus Edward (1863±1940): Sedleian Prof. of Natural Philosophy 455, 477 `Love waves' 455 mentioned 495 Low Church 177, 186, 635 Lowe, Robert, cr. Visc. Sherbrooke 1880 (1811±92): on Univ. of O. Bill (1876) 77 quoted 12, 74, 162±3 Lowther, James William, cr. Visc. Ullswater 1921 (1855±1949): honorand at Encaenia (1907) 828 Speaker of the House of Commons (1905±21) 828 Lubbock, (Sir) John, 4th Bt, cr. Lord Avebury 1900 (1834±1913) 500 Lucas, (Sir) Charles Prestwood, KCB 1912 (1853±1931): approach to history of Empire 693 work mentioned: Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912) 348, 694 Ludlow, Henry Stephen (`Hal') (b. 1861) PC 29 Lumsden, (Dame) Louisa Innes, DBE 1925 (1840±1935) 295 Lushington,(Sir) Godfrey, GCMG 1899 (1832±1907) 212 Luther, Martin (1483±1546) 30, 425 Lux Mundi 57, 91, 101±2, 110, 111, 190, 634±5 Lyttelton, Arthur Temple (1852±1903) 188 Lyttelton, Edward (1855±1942) 858 quoted 564 Lyttelton, George William, 4th Lord, succ. 1837 (1817±76) 176, 554, 564 Lyttelton, Mrs (Mary Kathleen) (1856±1907) 189 MA, see Master of Arts Macan, Reginald Walter (1848±1941), Master of Univ. Coll. (1906±23): on coll. as religious institution (1917) 148 commentary on Herodotus 352 dispute concerning re-election to Studentship (1882) 58, 222, 857 elected fellow of Univ. Coll. (1884) 58 as lecturer 351 member of The Club 359 Reader in Greek History 353 reveres T. H. Green's memory (1917) 857 sceptical about On the Constitution of Athens 352 quoted 56, 148

mentioned 341, 344, 345, 359, 859 Macaulay, (Dame) (Emilie) Rose, DBE 1958 (1881±1958): work mentioned: Potterism (1920) 595 mentioned 294 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, cr. Lord Macaulay 1857 (1800±59) 698 McCallum, Ronald Buchanan (1898±1973), Master of Pembroke Coll. (1955±67): quoted 791, 792±3 Macdonald, Alexander (1839±1921) 509±11 MacDonald, (James) Ramsay (1866±1937) 845, 853 Macdonald, John Archibald Murray (1854±1939) 830 Macdonell, Arthur Anthony (1854±1930): Boden Professor of Sanskrit 416, 701 Macdonnell, Antony Patrick, cr. Lord MacDonnell 1908 (1844±1925), see Commissions, Royal C. on the Civil Service (1912): MacDonnell Commission, see Commissions Macdougall, William (1871±1938) 482 Mackarness, John Fielder (1820±89) 34, 182, 187, 246 McKenna, Stephen (1888±1967): quoted 786 Mackenzie, (Sir) (Edward) Compton, Kt 1952 (1883±1972): Daily Mail reporter hoaxed 794 on history tutors and lecturers 817±18 intelligence in First World War 358 revision for ®nals 789 work mentioned: Sinister Street (1913±14) 95, 785, 814 quoted 784, 817 mentioned 785, 807 Mackinder, (Sir) Halford John, Kt 1920 (1861±1947) Plate 41, PC 41 achievements 702±3 in Coef®cients and Compatriots Clubs 695 extension lecturer 669 geography, readership in 611 geography textbooks widely sold 703 strong advocate of imperial federation 702 mentioned 474, 696 MacKinnon, (Sir) Frank Douglas, Kt 1924 (1871±1946) Plate 34, PC 34 Mackintosh, (Sir) James, Kt 1803 (1765±1832) 316 Macmillan, Alexander (1818±96) 648, 651 Macmillan, George A. (1855±1936) 651 Macmillan, (Maurice) Harold, cr. Earl of Stockton 1984 (1894±1986), Chancellor (1960±86): Knox removed from private tutorship 788 O. Union: Plate 75, PC 75 speeches in favour of Home Rule and socialism 810;

index on the `Union style' 809; women's suffrage debate (1913) 306 on reading essays to the Master 813 religion, undergraduate talk of 787 quoted 783±4, 785, 787, 809, 813, 815 mentioned 277, 786, 798 Macmillan, Mrs (Helen) (1856±1937) 788 MacMillan, William Miller (1885±1974), 713, 785 Macmillan's Magazine 55 MacMunn, Nora (1875±1967) 298, 304, 612 Mactavish, John Mackenzie (b. 1872): quoted 683 mentioned 684 Madan, Falconer (1851±1935) 149 Mafeking 690 Magdalen Bridge 75, 120 Magdalen College: 10±fold expansion (1841±91) 122 academic standard: competition in scholarship examining (1891) 126; Divvers Prelim 783; weak academic record (1911) 806 buildings: Plate, 19, 32, PC 19 PC 32; cloister quadrangle 731 coll. barge 756; Founder's Tower 746; Hall for Choristers' School 736; planned expansion 729±30; Pugin gateway 736; re-Gothicization of chapel, competition 730, 732; St Swithin's quadrangle 752, PC 19 C. C. J. Webb's diary 143±4 chaplains, team of 105 character and composition: as aristocratic as Ch. Ch. 807; colour prejudice, Pres. Warren 801, 806; proportion of public school men in 551; socialist meeting broken up (1892) 155; undergraduate ragging 792 Dean of Divinity 787 demies 131, 150, 587 fellows: clerical fellowships 86; number disproportionate to undergraduates (1870s) 84, 144±5; titled fellow 216 ®nance: coll. contribution (from 1885) 86±7; contribution for Tutorial Classes Cttee (1911) 848 gardens: Fellows' Walk, Addison's Walk, King's Mill 144, 760 graduates: All Souls fellows 216; careers of Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 JCR 151 Presidency: veto abolished 116; Warren elected aged 32 130 Prince of Wales at 806±8 science: Daubeny laboratory 136, 464, 466; Natural Science Lecturership 136;

939

patronage of 485; regulations for tuition in Natural Science (1873) 137; teaching posts (1892) 491 societies: Maltese Glee Club concert 438; music society 437; Wayn¯ete Society 152 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; head of the river (1892±4) Plate 60; PC 60; prowess on river enhances standing 527 Tutorial Board 144 undergraduate hoax (1904) 794 women: lectures not open to (1897) 248 mentioned 35, 135, 752, 818, 862 Magdalen College School 757, 861 Magdalen Hall 117±19, 180, 729, 752, 753 Magdalen Street 166 Magdalene College, Cambridge 553 Magpie Lane 676 Magrath, John Richard (1839±1930), Provost of Queen's Coll. (1878±1930), V.-C. (1894±8): changes in discipline 138 cttee of senior tutors, secretary of 138 Queen's Coll. history 85 St. Edmund Hall, attempted take-over of 119 St. Hilda's Coll. supported by 264 as V.-C. 655 mentioned 139±40, 607 Maguire, James Rochfort (1855±1925) 219±20, 695 Mahaffy, (Sir) John Pentland, GBE 1918 (1839±1919): work mentioned: Social Life in Greece 38, 330 Maidstone 552 Maine, (Sir) Henry James, KCSI 1871 (1822±88): Corpus Prof. of Jurisprudence 390, 391, 394 Master of Trinity Hall, C. 78 school of historical jurisprudence 617 on separation of Law and end of combined school 390 work mentioned: Ancient Law (1861) 316 quoted 390 mentioned 76, 79 Maitland, Agnes Catherine (1850±1906), Princ. of Somerville Coll. (1889±1906) Plate 48, PC 48 dispute with AEW 260, PC 48 establishes coll.'s professional image 287 vice-pres., National Union of Women Workers 301±2 quoted 279 mentioned 256, 275 Maitland, Frederic William (1850±1906) 617 Maitland, see Smith, Arthur Lionel: work mentioned

940

index

Malaya 706 Malcolm, (Sir) Dougal Orme, KCMG 1938 (1877±1955) 220, 695 Mallet, (Sir) Charles, Kt 1917 (1862±1947) 806 Mallet, (Sir) Victor Alexander, Kt 1944 (1893±1969) PC 75 Mallock, William Hurrell (1849±1923) 21 work mentioned: The New Republic (1876) 21, 38 Malta 696, 697 Malvern College 545, 549, 801 Mammalian Physiology, see Sherrington: works mentioned Man 618±19 Man and Wife, see Collins, (William) Wilkie Manchester 65, 485, 560, 677, 678, 743, 872 Manchester College (York, later Oxford): design by T. Worthington 756 importance in development of liberal theology 103 Non-Collegiate students 205 of®cial opening (1893) 635 viewed with alarm 635 mentioned 104, 121, 298, 305, 623 Manchester Grammar School 548, 552, 583 Manchester Guardian 349, 604, 697±8 The `Manchester School' 696 Manchester, University of 288 Chemical Society 457 School of Administrative History 363 mentioned 662. See also Owens College, Victoria University. manciples 145 Mann, Thomas (1856±1941) 674 Manners, Lord John James, succ. as 7th Duke of Rutland 1888 (1818±1906) 176 Manning, Henry Edward (1808±92) 172 Mansbridge, Albert (1876±1952): against `spirit of intellectualism' at Longton 849 attempt to enter O. 583 comment on M's report by StrachanDavidson 851 Commission on univ. education: pressure for 841 on consultative cttee: Board of Education 684 founder of Workers' Educational Association (1903, title 1905) 583±4, 666, 675, 680±7 on joint cttee of WEA and Univ. 687 Report (with Bowerman and Mactavish, 1912) 850±1 Tawney's attempt to force Commission issue 848±9 on univs' co-operation with Labour 845

work mentioned: University Tutorial Classes (1913) 853 quoted 583, 845 mentioned 586, 590, 643, 841, 853 Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820±71): foundation of Keble Coll. 174, 176 School-book Cttee of Press 648 work mentioned: Prolegomena Logica (1851) 313, 316 mentioned 317, 318 Mansel House 754 Mans®eld, Edward Dillon (1845±1924) 338 Mans®eld College: buildings: Champney's masterpiece 755±6; Library 755±6 a centre for Nonconformists 104, 205 mentioned 121, 298, 623, 635 Mans®eld House University Settlement 632 Mans®eld Road 754±5 Mansion grammar school, Leatherhead 561 Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions, see Hicks, Edward: works mentioned manual workers 623±4, 847 manufacturers 39±40 Marathi 415, 699 Marathon 338 Marcon, Charles Abdy (1854±1953) 120 Marcon's hall 120 Marett, Robert Ranulph (1866±1943), Rector of Exeter Coll. (1928±43): advocates compulsory OTC training 810±11 anthropology: developed diploma in 468, 703±4; European recognition for work 617; lectures 356, 502; Reader in Anthropology 640 contact with pupils throughout careers 704 O. correspondent in The Athenaeum 604 quoted 639±40 mentioned 503, 617, 854 Margoliouth, David Samuel (1858±1940) 302, 617 Margoliouth, Mrs ( Jessie Payne) (1856±1933) 302 Marius the Epicurean, see Pater, Walter: works mentioned Markby, (Sir) William, KCIE 1889 (1829±1914): Reader in Indian Law 705, 827 on shortcomings of reform party 827±8 supports Ruskin Hall 676 work mentioned: Elements of Law (1871) 394 quoted 655, 828 mentioned 607, 654, 656

index Marlborough College 18, 128, 159±60, 171, 523, 545, 550 Old Marlburians 523, 792 Marlowe, Christopher (1564±93) PC 33 marriage, of O. men (1930±1979) 294, 295 Fig. 10.7 Marriott, Charles (1811±58): proposals for new hall 172±3, 588 quoted 172±3 Marriott, (Sir) John Arthur, Kt 1924 (1859±1945): on joint cttee of inquiry with WEA 684 Secretary to Extension Delegacy 376, 680, 685 quoted 680 mentioned 215, 380±1 Marshall, Alfred (1842±1924) 642 Marshall, C. G. (`Christopher St John') (1873±1960) 291 Marshall, Mary Paley (1850±1944) 59 n.319, 249 Marshall, Maude (d. 1940) 299 Marshall, W. C. 757 Marsham, Robert, see Bullock-Marsham Marten, (Sir) (Clarence) Henry (Kennett), KCVO 1945 (1872±1948) 363, 374 Martindale, Cyril Charles (1879±1963) 120±1 Martineau, James (1805±1900): work mentioned: Types of Ethical Theory (1885) 61 quoted 61 The Martyrdom of Man, see Reade Martyrs' Memorial 623, 733±5 Marx, Karl (1818±83): Marxist historians 844 work mentioned: Eighteenth Brumaire 334 Mary I, Queen (1516±1558) 733 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) 538 Maskelyne, see Story-Maskelyne Mason, Philip (nom-de-plume Woodruff ), (1906±1999) 707 Mason College 581, 603 Masonic Hall 859 Maspero, Gaston Camille (1846±1916) 132, 336 Massey, (Charles) Vincent (1887±1967) 713 Massie, John (1842±1925) 302, 304, 305 master of arts (MA): doctorates' seniority over 619 in Examination Statute of 1800 312 fees a signi®cant source of revenue 605 issue of opening MA to women 271 the Krishnavarma problem 805 MAs permitted to open private halls 120 non-resident MAs in Convocation 604, 835, 838

941

number in Convocation doubled between 1852 and 1909 605 and philosophy chairs 317 proposal on voting rights 832 religious test attached to 20, 22±3 resident MAs 257, 605 Master of the Rolls 389 Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney (1874±1927) 863, 865 Masterman, (Sir) John Cecil, Kt 1959 (1891±1977), Provost of Worc. Coll. (1946±61), V.-C. (1957±8): interned (1914) 862 quoted 862 mentioned 228 Matabeleland PC 71 materialism 40, 855±6 Mathematical Psychics, see Edgeworth, Francis: works mentioned mathematics 443±21 passim compulsory Greek 837 curriculum circumscribed: changes in structure 444±5 development of School by late 19th cent. 454 examination questions (1828) 444 fellows teaching (Michaelmas 1892) 133 ®rst combined coll. lectures 453 Honour School 93, 209, 256±7 isolation of English maths. from Continental developments 443 mathematical tradition at C. 485 mathematicians prominent in O. reform 443 mathematics and physics 209, 311 Mods. and Finals papers 445 printing of examination questions 446 professorships in early 19th cent. 445 routes to ®nal honours in 512 Fig. 21C.1 scholarships 126 share of high ability 812 subject not attractive to women 282±3 Univ. Mathematical Scholarships (1831) 446, 448, 450, 454 mentioned 99, 224±5, 226, 326 Matheson, Hilda (1888±1940) 291 Matheson, Percy Ewing (1859±1946): Chancellor's `correspondent' 633 on Curzon 833 educationist 125, 563 Greek History lectures 341 MacDonnell Commission 589 quoted 833, 851 mentioned 821, 827, 844 matriculation: fees 573

942

index

matriculation: (contd ) numbers increasing by late 1860s 5, 93, 577±8 matriculation register 553, 573, 579; problems of interpretation 576±8; status categories 576±8, 581 rise in proportion of those matriculating from overseas 782 University's ®rst matriculation examination: Unattached students (1868) 194 women not allowed to matriculate 95 mentioned 181, 193, 194, 201, 432 Maude, Joseph Hooper (1852±1927) 118 Mavor, Dorothea (d. 1961) 725 Max MuÈller, Friedrich (1823±1900) Plate 25, PC 25 on additional professorships 77 candidate for chair of Sanskrit 700 CC Prof. of Comparative philology 407 Delegate of the Press 650±1, 654; champions learned but unremunerative books 650±1 Indian Institute, hostility to 700 in¯uenced recognition of Oriental Languages 612 on lectures 418 non-examination fellow of All Souls (1858) 211 O. English Dictionary supported by 651±2 O. Society of Historical Theology 102 Privy Councillor 420 Prof. of Modern European Languages 415 researches 419 Sweet's antagonism 420±1 work mentioned: Sacred Books of the East (from 1875) 231, 611, 651, 701 quoted 241, 468, 651, 661 mentioned 91, 144, 231, 354, 399, 402±3, 405, 607, 621 Max MuÈller, Mrs (Georgina Adelaide) (d. 1916) 241, 243 Maynard, Constance (1849±1935) 291 Mazzini, Guiseppe (1805±72) 84 MCC, see Marylebone Cricket Club Meade, L. T. (Elizabeth Thomasina) (1854±1914) PC 46 The Meadows 744 Mearns, Andrew Daniel (1857±1925) 91 Measure for Measure 795 mechanics 460, 477 Medd, Peter Goldsmith (1829±1908) 188 Medical Research Council 507 medicine (Oxford University) 504±7 passim admission of women (1917) 875; attempt to open examinations, etc 241, 257

improved provision for teaching 611 inadequacies 822 `Lost Medical School' controversy 504 Medical Faculty (1886) 472, 608 medical graduates one-®fth of Cambridge total (c.1900) 471 alleged to be obstructed by clerical profession 8 support for compulsory Greek 631 mentioned 82, 600, 612 medicine (profession) 12, 160, 165, 579, 625 Medley, Dudley Julius (1861±1953) 215 Mee, John Henry (b. 1852), Coryphaeus (1891±9) 435±6, 439 `Megathym Splene' 796±7 Meiggs, Russell (1902±89) 342, 353±4, 359 Meikle, Wilma, O. 291 quoted 291 Melanesia 501, 689 Melbourne 55 Univ. of 704 Meldola, Raphael (1849±1915) 480 Members of Parliament: for O. Univ.: Anson 632±3; Cecil, Lord Hugh 305, 633; Gathorne Hardy 228; Gladstone 67, 160, 228, 698; Heathcote 228; Mowbray 228±9, 631; Prothero 633; Talbot 228±9, 246, 631 mentioned 576, 679, 700, 830, 843 Memoirs, see Pattison, Mark: works mentioned Men's Political Union 305 mental philosophy 312, 473, 482 Mercer, Cecil William (`Dornford Yates') (1885±1960) 789 Merchant Taylors' School 216, 548, 551 Merivale, Charles (1808±93): work mentioned: History of the Romans under the Empire (1850±64) 316 Merivale, Herman (1806±74): Drummond Prof. of Political Economy lectures on colonies and colonization (1839±41) 704 Under-Secretary at Colonial Of®ce and India Of®ce 704 Merivale, Herman Charles (1839±1906): work mentioned: Faucit of Balliol (1882) 63 Merton College Plate 10, PC 10 buildings: Fellows' Quadrangle 759; Hall rebuilt 747; St Alban's Quadrangle 755; Warden's Lodgings 755 careers of Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 fellows: in 1892, include no former Merton undergraduate 131; chaplain fellow 106; clerical fellows number reduced (1866±71) 17; number (1867) 69

index ®nance: coll. contributions 86±7; domestic arrangements 145; sales: of Keble site 173, of Parks 760 intercollegiate lectures 374 joint scholarship examination with Pembroke (1877) 126 MacMillan, W. M., reminiscences 785 Pass Mods requirements (1873) 137 Patteson ef®gy in Chapel 689 St Alban Hall annexed 119 societies: concert programme 439; music society 437 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; bump supper (1903), Plate 68, PC 68; `grinds' suppressed (1875±6) 527 subjects of study: coll's ®rst philosophy tutor (Caird, 1864) 315; Professorship of English Language and Literature (1878, 1885) 82, 460 tutor-fellows (1871) 17±20 undergraduates: Knox, E.A., on `extravagance and idleness' 527; low standards (1870) PC 10; members of Vincent's Club 536; student protests (1880, 1884) 141; whole coll. gated (1865) 140 Visitor (Archbp of Canterbury) 17 Wardenship: Bullock-Marsham's tenure (1826±81) 128, 130; lay wardenship 24, 83 mentioned 20, 48, 476, 496, 721, 744, 801 Merton Street 205, 260, 753, 754±5 Mesopotamia (Oxford) 760 metaphysics 109, 312 Methodists 711 Metropolitan Gas Referees 477 Meyer, Eduard (1855±1930) 336 Meyrick, Frederick (1827±1906): suppresses supper parties 138 quoted 90 Michael, Wolfgang 862 Michell, (Sir) Lewis Lloyd, Kt 1902 (1842±1928) 719, 725 Michell, Richard (1805±77), Princ. of Magdalen Hall (1868±74), and of Hertford Coll. (1874±7): evangelical in¯uence 118 objects to coll. status for Keble 180 revival of Hertford Coll. 117±18 Micklethwaite, John Thomas (1843±1906) 186, 758, 773 middle ages 44, 372, 671, 851 middle class 599 Middle English 397 Middlemarch, see Eliot Midlothian 86, 138

943

Miers, (Sir) Henry Alexander, Kt 1912 (1858±1942): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Mineralogy and Crystallography 468 crystallography laboratory 468 Secretary of Univ. Museum 466 quoted 469 mentioned 477 Milford, (Sir) Humphrey Sumner, Kt 1936 (1877±1952) 656±7 military history, military subjects: Diploma 611 professorship in (1909) 611 mentioned 612, 613 Mill, John Stuart (1806±73): attacked by High Church and Idealists 324 view of Hume 320 works mentioned: A System of Logic (1843) 26, 313, 316, 320; Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) 316, 317; On Liberty (1859) 714; Principles of Political Economy (1848) 365; The Subjection of Women (1869) 303; Utilitarianism (1861) 316 quoted 29 mentioned 29, 31, 665 Mill, William Hodge (1792±1853) 100 Mills, Lawrence Hedworth (b. 1837) 417, 611 Milman, Robert (1816±76) 246 Milne, Joseph Grafton (1867±1951) 345 Milner, Alfred, cr. Visc. Milner 1902 (1854±1925): Chancellor elect (1925) 694 on Cecil Rhodes 718 and the Empire: a `British race patriot' 695±6; High Commissioner in South Africa 694; imperial career 694±5; Imperial Federation 705; mystical nature of imperial cause 691; the Round Table 695±6 in¯uenced by Ruskin 691 `Milner's Kindergarten' 640, 694, 707, 715, PC 30 Pres. of the Union 63, 720 pro-Ulster speech 858 Rhodes Trustee 719, 725, 726 quoted 63, 655 mentioned 92, 168, 532, 652, 672, 690, 702, 872 Milton, John (1608±74): work mentioned: Areopagitica (1644) 714 Milton, see Raleigh, (Sir) Walter Alexander: works mentioned mineralogy 465, 468, 469 miners 678, 679, 680, 812 Ministry of Munitions PC 45 Ministry of Supply 359

944

index

Minkowski, Hermann 453, 454 missionaries: O. Mission to Calcutta 290, 710, 712 prestige enjoyed by O. missionaries 712 Univs' Mission to Central Africa 710 mentioned 132, 290, 594, 704, 706, 709±12, PC 13 missions: to O. (Moody and Sankey, 1882±3) 139 to undergraduates (Bishop of O., 1914) 856 Missouri 678 Mitchinson, John (1833±1918), Master of Pembroke Coll. (1899±1918) 437 Bp of Barbados 437 concern for chapel music 148 headmaster of King's School, Canterbury 129 quoted 437 Moberly, (Charlotte) Anne (1846±1937), Princ. of St Hugh's Hall, later St Hugh's Coll. (1886±1915) Plate 51, PC 51 coll. re¯ects her personality 287 policy on invitations to students 275 resists absorption by LMH 262±3 straitened family circumstances 580±1 work mentioned: An Adventure (with Eleanor Jourdain) 284 mentioned 250, 288, 291, 292, 301 Moberly, George (1803±85) 581 Moberly, (Sir) Walter Hamilton, KCB 1944 (1881±1974) PC 75 Moderations (Mods) 327±31 passim Honour Moderations Classical Moderations (Mods): English School, normal prelim. for 404; Examination Statute of 1850 6, 313; minor reforms: set authors (1872) 327; Modern History School candidates, requirement for 265, 377; `necessary books' for translation only (1886) 327±8; opened to women (1884) 257; Pass Mods preferred by women 281; scientists and lawyers freed from 627; special subject on Greek sculpture 350; mentioned 315, 330, 331, 488, 784, 789, 823 Mathematical Moderations 445 see also Ch. 21 Note C, Pass Moderations, and Pt 1 355±6 Modern English Biography, see Boase, Frederic Modern Greats 868 Modern History School 361±84 passim ancient history, united course, proposed 42 combined Law and Modern History School 41, 210, 211, 212, 312±13, 362, 385, 386±9 contemporary issues raised in examination questions 816, 857

controversy between Firth and tutors 370±2, 614 examiners rebuked (1857) 42 fellows, number teaching (Michaelmas 1892) 133 Honour School 41, 93, 362±3 in¯uence of tutors and books 817 lack of research training 822 optional thesis introduced (1908) 372, 378, 619 pioneers of inter-collegiate lecturing system 45, 46, 335, 392 popular with American Rhodes Scholars 724 produces 23% of graduates (early 20th cent.) 613 recent period, English History, ends at 1837 (until 1915) 816 recognized as separate Faculty (1911) 837 relevance of syllabus 816 research work, often derivative from German scholarship 616 rise in hons awarded (late 1870s) 45 routes to ®nal honours in, 512 Fig. 21C.1 scholarships 126 as a second School 814±15 share of high ability in School (1900±14) 815 shortcomings of course 867 special subjects 373, 378, 868 successes of Ch.Ch. in 224 weaknesses in School 45 women: many history tutors oppose degrees 630; most popular women's School 256±7, 265, 281±3 mentioned 6, 60, 93, 99, 387, 611, 617, 700, 715 see also colonial history; military history Modern History Association 259, 376, 614 Modern Language Association 284 Modern Languages School 413±27 passim, 513 Fig. 21C.4 colloquial pro®ciency not valued 613±14 con¯icting views on 9 courses weighted towards medieval language 613±14 ®nancial aid from Taylorian 611 Honour School (1903) 340±1, 413, 419, 424, 563, 611, 613 Leathes Cttee (1916±18), O. criticized by 427, 869 linguistic studies 414 literary studies, role 414 Modern European Languages School, proposal (1887) 626, 627 Modern History School students de®cient in foreign languages 45

index oral practice, little provision 426 Pass degree papers, low standard 423 permitted languages 425 Philology, proposed School (1852) 313 powerful conservative opposition to 413 prescribed texts (1909) 425±6 professorships in French and Italian established (1919) 875 recognized as separate Faculty (1911) 837 research by profs 419 secondary schools, teaching required 563 Special Subjects 426 women: dons 260, 284; students 280, 282, 612 mentioned 608 513 Fig. 21C.4 see also French (language); German (language); Romance languages Modern Painters, see Ruskin: works mentioned modern subjects 612 A Modern Utopia, see Wells, Herbert George `modernism' 787, 856±7 MolieÁre (Poquelin), Jean-Baptiste (1622±73) 425 Mombasa 711 Mommsen, Theodor (1817±1903): works mentioned: Corpus (Latin inscriptions) 355; History of Rome (trans. Schmitz, 1862±6) 316, 333±4; Roman Provinces (trans. 1886) 334, 346; RoÈmisches Staatsrecht (1871±88) 334; RoÈmisches Strafrecht 347 mentioned 312, 339 Monckton, Walter Turner, cr. Visc. Monckton 1957 (1891±1965): quoted 811 mentioned 786, PC 75 Monier-Williams, (Sir) Monier, Kt 1886 (1819±99): Boden Prof. of Sanskrit 416, 700, 701, 754 attempt to establish degree course in Indian Studies 700 founder of Indian Institute 700, 754 Monmouth, Monmouthshire 124 Monro, David Binning (1836±1905), Provost of Oriel Coll. (1882±1905), V.-C. (1901±4): cttee to draw up examination syllabus of English School 404 founder of O. Philological Society 344 founding Pres. of Classical Association 631 work mentioned: Grammar of the Homeric Language 618 quoted 401 mentioned 57, 129, 330, 399, 402±3 Montague, Charles Edward (1867±1928) 697

945

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533±92) 425 Montgomery, J. D.: quoted 668±9 The Month 61 Moody, Dwight Lyman (1837±99) 139 Moore, Edward (1835±1916), Princ. of St Edmund Hall (1864±1913) 119 Moore, George Edward (1873±1958) 616 Moore, Harry Wilkinson (1850±1915): Ashmolean Museum, large extensions, Beaumont St. Galleries 773 Ch.Ch. Choir School 757, 773 Clarendon Press Institute 773 Dept of Human Anatomy 756, 773 Foxcombe, Kybald House 754, 772 Museum Lodge, Parks Rd 757, 772 North O. 754 Univ. Coll.: bridge over Logic Lane 775; Durham Buildings, extension of Hall 775; lecture rooms &c. 774 Univ. Galleries, additions to 757 West Buildings, Somerville 757, 772 mentioned 771 Moore, Temple Lushington (1856±1920) 759, 776, PC 17 moral philosophy, see philosophy Morant, (Sir) Robert Laurie, KCB 1907 (1863±1920) 623, 637±8, 639, 682, 841, 842 Mordan, Clara Evelyn (1844±1915) 252, 301 Mor®ll, William Richard (1834±1909): Prof. of Russian and other Slavonic languages 417±18 Morley, Edith Julia (1875±1964) 296 Morley, John, cr. Visc. Morley 1908 (1838±1923) 211, 697 Morning Post 682 Morpeth, Visc., succ. as 10th Earl of Carlisle 1911 (1867±1912) 166 morphology 756 Morris and Co. 750 Morris, Henry (1889±1961) 639 Morris, William (1834±96) 72, 125, 155, 243, 642, 643, 741, 750, 752, 762 Morrison, Walter (1836±1921) 611, 738, PC 14 Moscow 647 Univ. 629 Moseley, Henry Gwyn (1887±1915): researches 461±2, 812 quoted 496 mentioned 465, 616, PC 45 Moseley, Henry Nottidge (1844±91): Linacre Prof. of Comparative Anatomy 461, 467, 490, 500 administrator of Pitt-Rivers Museum 500±1 mentioned 493 motor cars 782

946

index

Mott, John R. (1865±1955) 711 Mowbray, Alfred William Mardon (1849±1915) 757, 775 Mowbray, (Sir) John Robert, Bt 1880 (1815±99) 229±30, 631, 632 Mr Britling Sees It Through, see Wells, Herbert George `Mr Raeburn' 863, 865, 869 Muir, (John) Ramsay (1872±1941) 363, 374 MuÈller, Carl Ottfried: work mentioned: History of the Doric Race, (1830) 36 Munro, Hugh Andrew Johnstone (1819±85): commentary on Lucretius 330 ®rst prof. of Latin at C. 330 Munro, John Arthur Ruskin (1864±1944), Rector of Lincoln Coll. (1919±44): mentioned 341, 345 Murray, Agnes (1894±1922) 276 Murray, (George) Gilbert (1866±1957): Regius Prof. of Greek 331, 610, 697 anthropology, stresses importance of 356 compulsory Greek 837 critic of empire 697±8 Harvard Lectures (1907) 356 Hellenism: evangelist for 331 Home Univ. Library 618 writings, translations 331, 616 works mentioned: Four [revised to Five] Stages of Greek Religion (1912, 1925) 331; The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907) 331, 356 quoted 285, 610 mentioned 276, 285, 305, 481, 606, 631, 712±13 Murray, (Sir) George Herbert, KCB 1899 (1849±1936) 852 Murray, (Sir) Hubert, KCMG 1925 (1861±1940) 713 Murray, (Sir) James Augustus Henry, Kt 1908 (1837±1915) 615, 652, 655 Murray, John (III) (1808±92) 647±8 Murray, Lady Mary Henrietta (1865±1956) 305 Murray's Classical Atlas 357 Museum, see University Museum Museum of the History of Science PC 45 museums 593, 610 music: among non-collegiates 207 Church music: colls' attempts to raise standards 148 musical life in O. 435±40 Music (academic study) 429±42 passim Choragus 431, 433 Coryphaeus 435 music halls 150 Muslims 714, 806

Muspratt, Frank (b. 1860) 435 Mycenae 350±1 Mylne, Louis George (1843±1921) 138, 183 Myres, (Sir) John Linton, Kt 1943 (1869±1954): Wykeham Prof. of Ancient History 353 Admiralty Handbook to the Dodecanese 359 anthropology supported by 356 comment on Asquith Commission 821 First World War intelligence 358 geographical history, importance of 357 on limitations of specialism 343±4 member of The Club 359, 628, 826 Prof. of Greek at Liverpool 826 proctor (1904±5) 826 Student of Ch.Ch. 826 quoted 821 mentioned 341, 345, 350, 356, 469, 481 Nagel, David Henry (1862±1920) 465 Namier, (Sir) Lewis Bernstein, Kt 1952 (1888±1960): exclusion from All Souls 802 not elected to fellowships 384 works mentioned: England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) 802; The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) 802 mentioned 216, 374, 381, 786 Napier, Arthur Sampson (1853±1916) 397±411 passim Merton Prof. of English Language and Literature 421 member of The Club 628 philological studies in Germany 416 mentioned 283, 418, 425 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769±1821) 603, 859 Nash, John (1752±1835) 731, 764 National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis 505 National Conference of Friendly Societies 684 National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child 299 National Portrait Gallery PC 38 National Review 334, 807 National Union of Students (1921±2) 876 National Union of Teachers: Conference (1894) 637 mentioned 842 National Union of Women Workers 301±2 National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) 300, 302, 303, 304,306 Nationalist (Irish) volunteers 862 Natural History Society of Oxfordshire 492 natural philosophy 510

index Natural Sciences School 457±500 passim, 459 Table 20.1, 463 Table 20.2, 494 Table 20.3, 513 Fig. 21C.2 anthropology: degree course proposal defeated (1895) 469, 502 astronomy, degree course (1895) 469 C.'s success, reasons for 485±6, 614 Engineering degree course (1909) 471±2, 476±7, 611 Faculty of (1882) 93 fellows teaching (numbers at Michaelmas 1892) 133 few science scholarships awarded (1870s) 11, 12, 13 geology in NSS course (1885) 469 Honour School (1850) 6, 93, 257 Lankester, E. R., eminent and disruptive 484 mineralogy, degree course (1895) 469 organization into single-subject Schools (from 1885) 488, 489, 490 percentage of Firsts (1886±1914) 462 personal tuition in 136±7 philosophy, proposal for joint School with science (1912) 326, 481 `poor student' fund diverted to science (1853±67) 585 post-graduate facilities 10 scholarships (c.1900) 126 Science Prelims (from 1885) 326, 488±90 share of high ability 812 syllabus: changes of 1885 488; disputes over (1892) 489±91 third largest school (by 1910±14) 458, 812 women: admitted to Honour School (1884) 257; not attracted to O. course 282±3, 459 mentioned 398, 484, 501, 616, PC 40 see also science Nature 450, 480, 492, 638 Navy League 858 Nazi Germany 352 Neale, Edward Vansittart (1810±92) 643 Near East 354 Neate, Charles (1806±79): on `servitude' of tutors 51 quoted 5, 26, 30, 50, 53 Nelson, 3rd Earl (1823±1913) 175 Nelson, Edward Theophilus (1878±1940) 803 Nelson, Thomas, and Son, publishers 656 The Nemesis of Faith, see Froude: works mentioned Nettleship, Henry (1839±93): Corpus Prof. of Latin 330, 402 English School supported by 402 founding of Somerville 246±7 member of The Club 628

947

work mentioned: Lectures and Essays on . . . Latin Literature etc. 331 quoted 402 mentioned 248, 344 Nettleship, Richard Lewis (1846±92): his tutorial method described, 62 n.336, 135 in¯uence of T. H. Green 322 proposal for School of Modern European Languages, etc. 397, 400 quoted 91, 92, 400, 662 mentioned 75, 166, 402±3, 672 Neubauer, Adolf (1832±1907) 416, 610 Nevinson, Basil George (b. c. 1852) PC 66 New, Edmund Hort (1871±1931) 305 New Bodleian Library PC 24 New College: 1857 ordinances of 16, 122 academic standard: by 1873, all undergraduates to read for hons 93, 137; few undergraduates require outside tuition (1866) 135 D.Mus. candidate asking way to 432 buildings: Chapel, reredos 730, 747, 758; Hall re-roofed 747; Holywell St front 746, PC 21; Robinson tower Plate 21, PC 21; tutors' houses 746, 754, PC 21; Warden's Lodgings 758 Burgon's sermon (1884) 252 bursar (Robinson) PC 21 chaplains 105 character and composition: considered as coll. for Prince of Wales 806; proportion of public school men in 551; tone of coll. changed (by 1914) 794; Wykehamists in 548, 550 Cleveland questionnaire 72 closed awards 551 competition in scholarship examining 126 domestic arrangements 146; rules against dogs 138 expansion (after 1858) 122, 746 fellows: number of fellows out of proportion (to 1858) 84; O.'s ®rst Roman Catholic fellow 57; permission to elect fellows without examination 140±1 ®nance: contribution to Tutorial Classes Cttee 848; foundation of, and grant to, Univ. Coll. at Bristol 241, 662; tutors' pay increased 16 ®rst open scholarships (from (1860s) 126 graduates: at All Souls 216; recruits to Milner's Kindergarten 694 societies: discussion society 150; essay society (1868) 151; members of Canning Club 811; music society 437 sport: Eights (1894) PC 60

948

index

New College: (contd ) statutes 746 subjects: does not fund second physics chair 460; history graduates 818 undergraduates: bon®re 790; JCR 150±1; mass rustication (1868) 140, 151 union with Balliol for lectures 26, 46 Wardenship: quali®cation for 130; Warden Sewell a symbol of continuity 130 mentioned 209, 707, 788 New College Lane 753 New College School 757 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later Oxford English Dictionary) (Murray et al, 1888±1928), see Oxford English Dictionary New Guinea 713 New Inn Hall 119 sale of site 165 mentioned 35 New Inn Hall Street 721 New and Old Methods in Ethics, see Edgeworth: works mentioned The New Republic, see Mallock: work mentioned New Statesman 853 New Tory Club 860 New York 177, 656, 783 New Zealand 703, 708, 709, 718, 720 Univ. Coll. 691 Newcastle upon Tyne 162 Cathedral 753 Newdigate Prize, see University Prizes and Scholarships Newman, Francis William (1805±97) 142, 157 Newman, John Henry (1801±90): conversion to Rome 733 St Mary and St Nicholas Church, Littlemore 732 visit to O. (1880) 90 work mentioned: Apologia pro Vita Sua (1884) 91 mentioned 23, 157, 172, 176, 317, 537, 548, 604, 691, 711, PC 3, PC 15 Newman, William Lambert (1834±1923): on heads of colls 128 his 53 years of productive retirement 336 work mentioned: ed. Politics of Aristotle (1882±1902) 352 quoted 41±2 mentioned 335, 337 Newnham College (formerly Hall), Cambridge: BA, attempt to open 265 designed by Champneys 751 ¯exible approach to women's higher education 257

founding of 10, 239, 240 headmistresses, graduates of 295 secular constitution 247 `separatism' 249 Tripos opened (1881) 240 women's suffrage cautiously approached by 304 mentioned 251, 259, 300, 305, 459, 469±70 Newton, (Sir) Isaac, Kt 1705 (1642±1727): exaggerated respect for 443 work mentioned: Principia 444 mentioned 461 Nicholson, (Sir) Charles Archibald, succ. as 2nd Bt 1903 (1867±1949) 757 Nicholson, Edward Williams Byron (1849±1912): Bodley's Librarian 496, 600 opposes physiology laboratory 482±3 quoted 624 Nicholson, Ernest Wilson (1938±), Provost of Oriel Coll. (1990±) 617±18 Nicholson and Corlette 757, 775 Nicolson, (Sir) Harold George, KCVO 1953 (1886±1968) 786 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (1776±1831) 312, 333, 342 Nield, Walter 682±3 Nightingale, Florence (1820±1910): interest in statistics 448±9 on Jowett's view of Plato 61 mentioned 472 Nile, River 355 The Nineteenth Century 95, 301 Nobel Institute 495 Nobel Prize: 1902 (Mommsen) 334 1908 (Rutherford) 465 mentioned 462 noblemen 591±2 Noetics: only 2 from public schools 548 mentioned 25 Non-Placet Society 482±3, 496, 558, 625±630, 832 Non-Collegiate students (Unattached students until 1882) 193±208 passim achievement, but disappointed hopes 206±8, 622 amalgamated clubs 199 attempts to alter name 199±200, 202; St Catherine's (clubs) 121, 196 Boat Club 196 building: 74 High St/Merton St. corner (1886±8) 199, 202, 754, Plate 22, PC 22 Censors appointed: poor accommodation of (1876) 194±5

index character and composition 205 Table 7.1; age of students 206; careers 206; good behaviour of 121; inadequate schooling 196, 206; Indian students (1871±93) 714; Nonconformists among 104, 205; ¯uctuations in admissions 68, 197±8, 203; overseas students 122; postgraduate students 122; proportion of public school men 551; schools attended by 205±6; social backgrounds 204±5; Special Students 203, 207 coll. system strengthened by scheme 121±2 degrees, level of performance 207 examination regulations 201 favourable judgements of Delegates (1878) 204 ®nance: endowment recommended by Curzon 834; exhibitions 196; grant from All Souls 199; rents 195 Jowett's hopes for the `Scotch' solution 200, 204, 206 Matriculation Examination 196 and O. Univ. Day Training Coll. 558 problems of inward and outward migration 197±8, 201±2, 207 St Mary's Congregation House restored for chapel (1871) 769 scheme overlooked by Thomas Hardy 583 in Selborne report 81 societies 202 Students' Magazine 121 the term `extension' 661 `Toshers' 45, 63, 200 tutorial arrangements 133, 196, 199, 201 Univ. Statutes: establishing system (1868) 21; new Statute: Censor, teaching, buildings (1881) 198±9 Volunteer Corps, Non-Coll. Company 202 mentioned 46, 86, 125, 374, 547, 590, 676, 839, 847, PC 28 Non-Collegiate Students' Magazine 121 non-residents: after 1882 Statutes, continued existence of 609 clergy 100 fellows of All Souls 210, 219 music candidates 432 public interest encouraged by non-resident element 604 mentioned 4, 16, 829 Nonconformists 97±112 admitted as undergraduates at C. (before 1854) 444 divines on theology lecture list (1890s) 635 fear about ministers of®ciating in Anglican churchyards 187 growing numbers 103±4, 580

949

Mans®eld and Manchester Colls remove to O. 205, 635 proportion among ®rst Unattached students 194 proportion among Somerville students 247, 580 religious societies for undergraduates 108 mentioned 22±3, 61, 118, 594, 617, 623, 803, 845 Nordau, Max Simon (1848±1923): work mentioned: Degeneration (1895) 798 Norham Gardens 246, 262, 479 Norham Road 262 Normans 693 North America 689 North Hinksey 531 North Oxford: `a curious body of opinion' 276 brick buildings 745 building by H. W. Moore, N. W. Harrison 754, 757 eligible residential area 782 lady chaperons 274 Queen Anne style houses 259 St John's estate 122 suspicion of science 627 mentioned 94, 246, 251 North and South, see Gaskell Northcote, (Sir) Stafford, cr. Earl of Iddesleigh 1885 (1818±87) 548 novels (Oxford themes) 63 Novum Organum, see Bacon, Francis NSS, see Natural Sciences School Nuf®eld College social reconstruction survey 575 numismatics 335±6, 337, 350 Nuneham 520 Nutt, John William Macan (1834±1924) 100±1 NUWSS, see National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies the oak (outer door): 745 screwing up 140 Oakeley, Frederick (1802±80) 735 Oakeley, Hilda (1867±1950) 283 Obolensky, Prince Sergius (1890±1978) 807 Observatory, see Radcliffe Observatory; University Observatory Odling, William (1829±1921): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Chemistry 464±5 on Hebdomadal Council 495 work mentioned: The Technic of Versi®cation 464 quoted 65, 464 mentioned 629 Odlum, Doris Maude (1890±1952) 298 Odyssey 328

950

index

Oelsner, Herman (1850±1923) 417 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie, see Hooker, Richard Of®cers' Training Corps 639±40, 641, 782, 811, 861, 862, Plate 74, PC 74 Ogilvie, Charles Atmore (1793±1873) 443 Ogilvie, Robert Maxwell (1932±81) 342 Oglethorpe, James Edward (1696±1785) 689 OICCU, see Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union Old Convocation House 195 Old English 397, 398 Old French 284 Old Mortality 152 Old Norse 610 Oldham, Joseph Houldsworth (1874±1969) 711±12 Olivier, Edith Maud (1872±1948) 286 Olympic Games 542 O'Malley, Ida 300 Oman, (Sir) Charles William, KBE 1920 (1860±1946): Chichele Prof. of Modern History 372 Fellow of All Souls 215 Non-Placet Society 625±6, 832 O. Ancient History Society 345 O. Pageant (1907) 496, 828 Oxford Review 625±6 supporter of tutors against Firth 372 quoted 335, 366, 370 mentioned 380±1, 497, 628, 632, 815, 837, PC 12 On American Taxation, see Burke On the Constitution of Athens, see Aristotle: works mentioned On Liberty, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned On the Origin of Species etc., see Darwin, Charles: works mentioned ophthalmology 473 Order of the Holy Child Jesus 288, 298 ordinands, see clergy O'Regan, John Rowan Hamilton (1870±1922) 374 organs, organ scholarships 148 organists 434, 437±8 Oriel College: amalgamated clubs 529 buildings: college barge by Jackson 756; gate-tower 759; Hall porch, panelling, windows 759; Rhodes building 689 chapel services 105 Church of England Purity Association 139 coll. contributions 86±7 ®rst science fellow (1911) 137, 481 Hughes and Neale Scholarships for co-operators 642, 845

Monro elected Provost (1882) 57 proportion of public school men in 551 Provost's objections to teaching by `Unbelievers' (1868) 46 St Mary Hall 119, 731 schools attended by Noetics 548 mentioned 717, 730 oriental languages 413, PC 25 oriental mythology 419 oriental studies: admission of women to examinations 257 Honour School (1886) 423, 611±12 routes to ®nal hons in 512 Fig. 21C.1 within tradition of Classical Studies 313, 413±15 mentioned 313, 422 PC 25 Orientalists 103 Ormerod, Eleanor (1828±1901) 474 ornithology 510 Orr, John (1885±1966) 422 Osbaldeston, George (1787±1866) 525 O'Shea, James and John 740 Osler, (Sir) William, Bt 1911 (1849±1919): Regius Prof. of Medicine 473, 504 appointed as `the guardian of continuity' 504 on a classically educated eÂlite 631 Delegate of the Press 657 Hebdomadal Council member 495 in¯uence within O., and outside 504±5 international reputation 617 work mentioned: The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) 504 quoted 631 mentioned 492, 506 OTC, see Of®cers' Training Corps Otmoor 137 OUBC, see Oxford University Boat Club OUCC, see Oxford University Cricket Club OUDS, see Oxford University Dramatic Society OUP, see Oxford University Press Ouseley, (Sir) Frederick Arthur Gore, succ. as 2nd Bt 1844 (1825±89): Heather Prof. of Music 441 initiator of new examination syllabus 430±1 quoted 431±2 mentioned 433 Outlines of Roman History, see Pelham: works mentioned Oval Cricket Ground 539 overseas students 125, 156, 600, 624 Owen, Robert (1771±1858) 665 Owen, Sidney James (1827±1912): Reader in Indian History 374, 700±1 work mentioned: India on the Eve of the British Conquest (1872) 374

index quoted 240±1 Owens College 485 Oxford, Bishops of, see Bishops Oxford Almanack, PC 15 Oxford Ancient History Society 345 Oxford Aristotelian Society 325 Oxford at the Crossroads, see Gardner, Percy: work mentioned Oxford Book of English Verse, see QuillerCouch Oxford Browning Society 243 Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board (1873) 65, 561, 563, 636, 568±9 Table 23.A5 Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates' Journal 39 Oxford Canal 731 Oxford Cathedral, see Christ Church The Oxford Chronicle 205 Oxford City, see City of Oxford Oxford City Council 319, PC 24 Oxford Classical Texts 615 Oxford Conference on Trade Unionism 674 `Oxford Democratic and Popular', see Courtney, William: work mentioned Oxford and District Trades and Labour Council 675±6 Oxford English Dictionary: Concise English Dictionary 657 O. Univ. Press's decision to publish 651±2 publication begun (1888) 414, 419 doubts about continuing publication 655 `reluctant liberality' of Press 653 mentioned 200, 657±8 Oxford Essays (1856) 559 Oxford Girls' High School 243, 262, 797 Oxford High School for Boys 752 Oxford History of India, see Smith, Vincent Oxford House: contrasted with Toynbee Hall 189±90, 639 founding of 58, 189, 672 mentioned 110, 152, 787, 856 Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU) 57, 108±9, 155 Oxford Journal 205, 835 Oxford Library of Translations 616 Oxford Local Examinations 636 The Oxford Magazine: Boer War: ordinands urged to enlist 690 Comments on: the `-er' suf®x in O. slang 549; a D.Mus. asks directions to his coll. 432; business studies 856; Chair of Romance Languages 417; con¯icting opinions (1918±39) about Empire 715±16; Day Training Coll. proposal 558; English Literature as examination

951

subject 400; friendship with Germany 859; ICS examination results analysed 346±7; Non-Collegiate Delegacy, building for 121; O. Mission to Calcutta 710; O. Philological Society meeting 344±5; public controversy about the Univ. 604; social movement, meeting addressed by Barnett 671; Sweet's opposition to Modern Languages School 424; war prospects after Angell's visit (Nov. 1913) 860; women, opening of BA to 273 Exeter Coll. chapel (1965) PC 15 letters on conditions of colonial service 707 `mouthpiece of Non-Placet tendency' (1891) 558 Non-Placet dinner menu 626 Oxford Review launched in rivalry (1884) 625±6 patriotic poems (pre-1914) 715 Oxford Mathematical Society 480 Oxford Medical Mission 110 Oxford Mission to Calcutta 290, 710, 712 Oxford Movement, see Tractarians `Oxford and the Nation' (1907) 828, 829 Oxford Pageant (1907) 496, 790, 828 Oxford Philological Society 344±5 Oxford railway station PC 11 Oxford Reform Association (1909) 836 Oxford Reformer PC 72 Oxford Review 626 Oxford School Board 242, 559 Oxford School of Science and Art 509 Oxford Socialist 835 Oxford Society of Historical Theology 102±3 Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (later Oxford Architectural Society) (1839) 733 The Oxford Survey of the British Empire, see Herbertson: work mentioned Oxford Times 190 Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee 687, 847±8 Oxford Undergraduate's Journal 135, 145 Oxford Union Society 809±11 passim, Plates 12, 13, PC 12, PC 13 buildings: library 149, 273, PC 12; reading room, writing room 768; Waterhouse's Debating Hall 743±4; Woodward's Debating Hall 741 colonial students in 715 Cttee (1914), Plate 75, PC 75 Conservative members in majority (1873) PC 12 debates: admission of women to Univ. (1874) 240; compulsory OTC training (1910) 810±11; conscription (1899,

952

index

Oxford Union Society (contd ) early 1900s) 810±11; disestablishment of Church of England (1873) PC 12; `King and Country' (1933) 859±60; military power (1913) 858; Triple Entente (1914) 859±60; Univ. reform 810, 811; women's suffrage: (1908) suffragists narrowly defeated 303, 809, (1913) suffragists win 306, 802 a democratic in¯uence 809, 811 dress for debates PC 12 link with Westminster 809 poll on women's use of library (1879) 273, PC 56 possible effect of coll. debating societies 150 Presidents: Acland, Sir T. 663; Asquith 63; Buchan PC 30; Curzon 694; Lenwood 803±4; Milner 63, 694; Simon, J. A. 563; Smith, H. J. S. 450; Wedderburn PC 75 resurgence in 1890s 809 Ruskin Coll.: congratulatory vote on 857 Secretary (Parkin) 63 speakers: Gladstone on Homer 601; guest speakers 809; Mrs Fawcett 303, PC 13; success of Guedalla and Zangwill 802; the Union style 809 women admitted as chaperoned spectators 278 mentioned 66, 149, 151, 153, 536, 784, 800, 808, 856 Oxford University: administration: ad hoc Treasury payments 638; Assistant Registrar 607; Boards, cttees, and Delegacies 607; changes in fee-structure (mid-19th cent.) 573; defective administrative structure 605±7; ®nance (from 1900): annual de®cit, needs of science (c. 1902) 822; Appeal (1906) 822; confused accounts 841; Finance Board, Curzon's scheme 835, 836±7; private benefactions 611, 762; Re-Endowment Fund 417, 611, 626, 822, 828; state funding, case for 821, 835; use of resources 841; Registrar 206, 385, 574, 579, 581, 607 admissions: admission fees 573; become more diverse (after 1900) 156; entrance examination question 11, 64±5, 623, 636, 829, 831, 834, 857±8 866, 875; exemptions for graduates from Empire univs 707±8, 714; leading schools, admissions from 567 Table 23.A4; numbers 272; previous education 552, 554, Figs. 23.1, 23.2, 567 Table 23.A3

changing characteristics: attitudes to entrepreneurship 865; changing relationship with the churches 635; early connections with Empire 689; formative impact of Univ. experience 595; great activity in building (1860±1914) 741±2; in¯ux of overseas students 600; `Oxford Socialism' 641±2; postgraduate students: `prospectus' 640; privileges accorded to noblemen's sons (to 1870) 582; publication of research 621±2; resistance to idea of `schools' or orthodoxies 620; secularization 251; training in character, claims of O. and C. 115; uneven progress, conservative reaction (1880s, 1890s) 600; and women's suffrage movement 306; Workers' Educational Association, joint cttee with (1907) 683±4 class and privilege: charge of eÂlitism 623; continuing exclusiveness 622; debate over broadening basis of recruitment (from 1900) 623; failure to attract less af¯uent (1860s) 5; growing middle class element (1880±1914) 599; O. accent 548±9; schooling of undergraduates listed (1894) 547; weakening of hereditary connections with clergy and gentry (1880s, 1890s) 579; working-class students 583±4 national policy: as contributor to national education 603±4; effect of disappearance of `confessional state' 864; freedom from external control 601; in¯uence on Empire, and reciprocal in¯uence 639±41, 690; links between O. and national politics 631±3; a more worldly univ. than C. 604; national education policies 638±9; O. backs campaign for increased state funding for science (c. 1904) 638; OTC 782, 861, Plate 74, PC 74; political opinions of dons 624; proportion of population educated at O. and C. 602; Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (1913±14) 861; responsibilities as a national institution 662; well represented in 1905±8 cabinet 830 and other univs: areas where C. ahead (1870s, 1880s) 636; buildings, model for new univs 762; colls and univs in Empire, helped originally by alumni 708±9; graduates teaching in Empire 708±9; `nationalisation' 601; source of teaching staff for new univs 603 research and teaching: contemporary topics, study of 857; contribution to learning, assessment 616±18; distinctive academic

index style 621; innovations in range of courses taught 611; modern subjects, expansion 612; professional and vocational courses 612±13; opposition to vocational subjects at degree level 705; teaching, problems of organization 15; women in academic posts 285, 612 see also research and school teaching: close interaction with schools 562±3; Diploma of Education (1896) 556±7, 561; examination of schoolchildren, `Locals' 560±2; graduates teaching in Empire 709; response to changes in school curriculum 563; and teaching requirements in schools 563 Statutory Commission (1923) 875±6 strengths and weaknesses: advantages vis-aÁ-vis German univs 620±1; corporate tradition and community life, value of 288; national defects in education, sharing responsibility 864; omissions of Victorian commissioners 92, 602; parochialism 633; poor students' needs not met (1900s) 827, 834; public image problems 605; as source of cultural leadership 633; transmission of cultural heritage 855; working-class suspicion of 677 see also Common University Fund; women at Oxford; women's higher education Oxford University Appointments Committee 707 Oxford University Athletics Club 531 Oxford University Boat Club 527, 529, 533 Boat House Plate 59, PC 59 Oxford University Calendar: 1813 311 mentioned 707±8 Oxford University Cricket Club 523, 531, 538 Oxford University Day Training College (1892) 124, 558±9, 590±1, 637 Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) 278, 533, 536, 795 Oxford University Extension Delegacy 376 Oxford University Fabian Society 276, 278 Oxford University French Club 859 Oxford University Gazette 81, 401, 875 Oxford University Golf Club 202 Oxford University Junior Scienti®c Club (1882) 492 Oxford University Labour Club 642 Oxford University Musical Union 438 Oxford University Press 645±58 passim Bible Cttee, Bible Press 646±7, 649±50, 656 branches: London 651, 656, 657; New York 656, 783; overseas 656

953

buildings: cost of `Bible Side' 731; `Learned Side' (1829±30) 731; Walton St site chosen 731 Clarendon Press 205, 278±9, 419, 422, 478, 647, 648, 654, 656; Aristotle 657; important source of revenue 616; Rig Veda 700; Series 650, 652; `Educational Works' 648 Cleveland Commission, circular of inquiry 70 compositors, 31 worn out by Syriac Lexicon 647 Delegates 231, 449, 616 ®nance: contribution towards work on Clarendon Building 646; contributions to Chest (1885±96) 653±4; decline in revenues 87; Finance Cttee set up 649; losses on unpro®table books 650±1; patronage for research 615; Press pays for Univ. Museum building 739; pro®ts used for Univ. Galleries 734±5, 762 Joint Venture 657 Learned Press 646, 647, 649 Library of Translations 657 Oxford Book of English Verse 657 partnership 645 popular works (early 20th cent.) 616 Press sustained by dictionaries 657±8 Publications Cttee 650 responsibility for printing of bibles and prayer books transferred to London (1906) 656 Revised Version of New Testament (1881) 91 rise in number of titles (by 1891) 653 Rulers of India Series (Hunter) 701 Sacred Books of the East (Max MuÈller) 231 School-book Cttee 648, 650 Secretaries to Delegates 648, 649, 652±4, 861 sub-cttee on quality of printing 652 typography 650, 655 Univ. assumes full control: end of partnership (1884) 649±50 warehousemen, Warehouse Cttee 507, 647, 649, 656 World's Classics 657 mentioned 505, 600, 610, 693, 703 Oxford University Rugby Football Club 523 Oxford University Volunteer Corps 289, 467±8, 639, 690 Non-Collegiate Company of 202 Oxford University War and Peace Society 278 Oxford Women Students Women's Suffrage Society (OWSWSS) 303, 305 Oxford Women's Liberal Association 301

954

index

Oxford Women's Suffrage Society (OWSS) 302, 304 Oxford Workhouse 144 Oxford and Working Class Education (1908) 634, 687, 832, 846±7, 850 Oxfordshire 642 Oxyrhynchus 616 Paci®c 689 paganism 61 Paget, Francis (1851±1911), Dean of Chr. Ch. (1892±1901) 226±7 Bp of O. 227, 682, 831 on cttee for founding of a women's Hall 246 mentioned 190, 222, Plate 31, PC 31 Paget, Mrs 226 Pakistan 806 ®rst Prime Minister 806 palaeography 188, 372 Palestine 99 Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824±97) 3, 62 Palgrave, (Sir) Robert Harry Inglis, Kt 1909 (1827±1919): work mentioned: Dictionary of Political Economy (1894±1914) 617 Pali 714 Pall Mall Gazette 399, 531, 670 Palmer, Edwin (1824±95) 601 Palmer, Edwin James (1869±1954) 681 Palmer, Ronald William, see Poulton, Ronald William Palmer, Roundell, see Selborne, 1st Earl of Palmer, William Waldegrave, 2nd Earl of Selborne 1895 (1859±1942) 41 Palmerston, 3rd Visc. (1784±1865) 44 Palmerston Club 784, 811, 858±9 Papillon, Thomas Leslie (1841±1926): quoted 327 papyrologists 616 Paradise House 676 Paris: Conference (1919) 383 mathematical prizes of H. J. S. Smith 450 Sainte Chapelle 737 Univ. of 689; O. women with doctorates 284, 422 mentioned 19, 143, 418, 647 Parker family 646 Parker, Charles Stuart (1829±1910) 71, 85 Parker, Eric (1890±1941) PC 61 Parker, John Henry (1806±84) 646±7, 742 Parker, Joseph 646, 731 Parkin, (Sir) George Robert, KCMG 1920 (1846±1922): agent of Rhodes Trustees 719±20, 721±6; travels (1902±4) 720

appeals for a school of Government 705 devotion to O. 713 ideal of great imperial univ. 690, 705, 716 in¯uenced by Ruskin 691 Non-Collegiate student 63, 720 Princ. of Upper Canada Coll. 713, 720 Secretary of the Union, speaker on Imperial Federation 63, 694, 705, 720 work mentioned: (with Wylie) The Rhodes Scholarships (1912) 726 quoted 63 Parkinson, Joseph (1783±1855) 731, 764 The Parks, see University Parks Parks Road 120, 177±8, 475, 479, 502, 754, 757 Parliamentary Commissions, see Commissions: Executive Parliamentary proceedings: Acts: Ch.Ch. (O.) (1867) 16, 223, 224; Clerical Disabilities Act 184; Colonial Bishoprics Act 708; Contagious Diseases Acts 189, 245; Education Act (Balfour, 1902) 554±5, 564, 571, 593, 603, 637, 703, 824, 865±6; Education Act (Forster, 1870) 27, 185; Endowed Schools Act (1869) 586; O. Univ. Act (1854) 3, 4, 16, 17, 64, 115, 120, 173, 193, 586, 605; Parliamentary Reform Act (1832) 368, 818; Parliamentary Reform Acts (1867, 1884) 44, 368; Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 368; Public Schools Act (1868) 130; Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) 187; Technical Instruction Acts (1889, 1891) 474, 636; The Univs of O. and C. Act (1877) 105; The Univs of O. and C. Act (1923) 821; Univs Tests Act (1871) 34, 104, 118 Bills: Abolition of Tests 24±5, 29; Burials 187; Education (1917) 571; O. Univ. (1854) 193; Plural Voting (1906) 633; Reform (1866) 44; Univ. of O. Bill (1876) 55, 75, 76 dissolution (24 Mar. 1880) 86 government of 1868±74 600 Holmes-Morant circular denounced 841 lack of parliamentary interest in O.'s affairs (1880s) 631 legislation for admitting women to degrees elsewhere 630 Select Cttees: Opening O. and C. to NonCollegiate students (Ewart) (1867) 5, 22, 41±2, 68±9, 194, 204; Parliamentary Procedure (1914) 868; Religious Tests (1870, 1871) 20; Scienti®c Instruction (1868) 12, 13; State of Legal Education (1846) 385±6 mentioned 4, 63, 379, 693, 835, 840, PC 3 Parliamentary trains PC 26

index Parnells, contractors 177, 186 Parratt, (Sir) Walter, Kt 1892 (1841±1924): Heather Prof. of Music 434, 441 Parry, (Sir) (Charles) Hubert, Bt 1902 (1848±1918): Heather Prof. of Music 442 B.Mus. while at Eton 432 mentioned 433 Parsees 712, 714 Parsons, John (1761±1819), Master of Balliol Coll. (1798±1819) 646 Pascal, Blaise (1623±62) 425 Pass Moderations 281, 377, 404, 449, PC 10 pass school 514 Fig. 21C.5 4th in history originally thought easier 362 admission of women to examinations 257 Agriculture and Forestry 476 Aristotle's Ethics in 693 Balliol, proportion of passmen: 1854±63 160; 1874±83 164 colls (1900±14), stronger squeezing out passmen 788; weaker dependent on passmen's fees 623 disruption caused by Eights Week (1905) 538 English Literature included in Pass examination (1873) 397 law 395 in Mansbridge report (1912) 851 modern language papers, low standard of 423 more modern options introduced 612 Non-Collegiate tuition arrangements 196, 198 proportion of passmen at end 19th cent. 137±8 Selborne Commission and passmen 80 The Times on (1907) 829 mentioned 42, 68, 93, 134, 207, 265, 387, 613, 856 Passy, Paul Edouard 421 Pater, Clara (1841±1910) Plate 50, PC 50 represents vogue for aestheticism 243 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839±1894): architecture, interest in 761 brand of Hellenism out of fashion (1890s) 798 degree of in¯uence uncertain 59±60 `the demoralizing moralizer' 34 inaudible lectures 798 not nominated for professorship of poetry (1877) 38±9 passed over for proctorship (1874) 37 publication of The Renaissance (1873) 33 ridiculed in New Republic (1876) 38 unscholarly writing about ancient world 329

955

works mentioned: Marius the Epicurean (1885) 60; Plato and Platonism (1893) 329; Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) 33±4, 37, 39, 329 quoted 33, 34, 532 mentioned 35, 37, 243, 318, 331, 354, 798 pathology: Dunn School 507 important area for modernization 506 not examined in Final Honour School 507 professorship (1907) 505, 507, 611 reputation of department established by Dreyer 507 separate department, and laboratory 473 Paton, William Roger (1855±1921) 358 Paton, Mrs. W. R. 358 patristic theology 101 Patteson, John Coleridge (1827±1871) 689 Pattison, Mrs (Emilia Francis) (1840±1904) 91, 238, 243, 245 Pattison, Mark (1813±84) Plate 3, PC 3 anti-clerical tone 31, PC 3 coll. estates: central management suggested 827 collegiate O., criticism of 55, PC 3 death and funeral 91, 653 declining in¯uence 31 denounces `athletic furor' 518, 532, 537 deplores drive to accommodate more undergraduates 125 disparages Taylor Scholarships 415 Greats, inconsistent views on 28 his understanding of `learning' 618 ideal of a national univ. 604 O. Browning Society 243 philosophy, small contribution to 317 on philosophy of T. H. Green 58 as private tutor 314 professoriate, partisan of 532 and research 15, 84, 625, PC 3 on residential system 145 restriction on Rector's powers 127 Selborne commission, replies to 54 specialization by colls suggested 15±16, 77, 117 The Club 359, 627 tribute to H. J. S. Smith 452 women's education, champion of reform 237±8 works mentioned: Memoirs (posthumous publication, 1885) 91, PC 3; Suggestions on Academical Organization, (1868) 14, 15, 28, 69 quoted 12, 14, 15, 28, 31, 52±3, 90, 145, 311, 452 mentioned 25, 31, 74, 95, 245, 313, 339, 341

956

index

Paul, Hermann 421 Paulsen, Friedrich (1846±1908): works mentioned: The German Universities and University Study (trans. Sadler, 1906) 621 pauperes Christi 585 Payne, Joseph (1808±76) 560±1 Payne Smith, Robert (1819±95): work mentioned: Syriac Lexicon (publ. 1879±1901) 647 Peace and War Society 858 Peake, Arthur Samuel (1865±1929): on `Oxford socialism' 641±2 quoted 641±2 Pearson, John Loughborough (1817±97) 758, 772 Pearson, Karl (1857±1936) 448, 467 Pease, Joseph Albert, cr. Lord Gainford 1917 (1860±1943) 841 Peck, Lady (Winifred Frances, neÂe Knox) (d. 1962): quoted 278, 293 Peel, (Sir) Robert, 2nd Bt 1830 (1788±1850) 30±1, 42 Peile, James Hamilton (1863±1940) Plate 37, PC 37 Bampton Lectures (1907) 642 Pelham, Henry Francis (1846±1907), Pres. of Trinity Coll. (1897±1907) Plate 39, PC 39 Camden Prof. of Ancient History 339, 353 an `academic industry' 342 ancient historian heads of colls 359 British Schools (Athens, Rome) founding of 340, 619 career and achievements 339±41 discipline of geography supported 340, 357 intercollegiate lecturer 335 as lecturer 339 liberal and reformer (The Club) 340, 359, 628, PC 39 O. Ancient History Soc. 345 Soc. for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1879) 340 Somerville Coll., cttee for 340±1 women's halls, champion of PC 39 works mentioned: Essays 346; Outlines of Roman History (1893) 339 quoted 267, PC 39 mentioned 283, 285, 344, 350, 355, 607, 625 Pelican Record 621 Pellew, Henry Edward, succ. as 6th Visc. Exmouth 1922 (1828±1923) 176 Pembrey, Marcus Seymour (1868±1934) PC 40 Pembroke College: buildings: Chapel 757±8; SCR, Bursary, etc. (1845±6), and Hall 736 Canonry at Gloucester 83

centenary of JCR (1894) 150 chaplain fellow 105 debating society (1864) 149±50 `dire position', in 1890s 129 domestic arrangements 145 external income 161 joint scholarship examination with Merton (1877) 126 Music Society and Glee Club 437; Master's encouragement of music 437 `no-popery' attack on visitor 155 Selborne Commission: revised statutes 85 state of chapel services (1860s) 148 mentioned 68, 71 Pennsylvania 726 Penrose, (Dame) Emily, DBE 1927 (1858±1942) Princ. of Somerville Coll. (1907±26) Plate 58, PC 58 compulsory Latin 280 establishes coll.'s professional image 287 letter to new students 276 MacDonnell Commission, evidence to 299±300 `Rules of Discipline' (1909) 275 quoted 270, 271, 288±9 mentioned 256, 290, 292, 573 pensions 4, 17, 81, 830 see also Wadham College: statutes People's Budget 835 Percival, John (1834±1918), Pres. of Trinity Coll. (1879±87): Bp of Hereford 268, 680, 831 founding of Somerville 246, 247 headmaster of Clifton Coll. 579 headmaster of Rugby 128, 825 as Pres. 129±30, 138 and Unattached students 199 univ. extension, plea for 579, 625, 662 quoted 579, 853 mentioned 64, 130 Percy, Lord Eustace, cr. Lord Percy 1953 (1887±1958) 787 Pericles (Abbott, 1891) 338 Pericles (c.500±429 b c ) 328 Perkin, William Henry (1860±1929): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Chemistry 465, 839 mentioned 492 permanent private halls 104 Perrins, Charles William Dyson (1864±1958) 465, 757 Perry, John (1850±1920): quoted 480 Perry, John Frederick (1874±1935) 220 Persian 354, 415 Petersen, Julius 455 Petra 76 Petrie, (Sir) (William Matthew) Flinders, Kt 1923 (1853±1942) 345, 354

index Petzold, Gertrude von (1876±1952) 298 Pevsner, (Sir) Nikolaus Bernhard, Kt 1969 (1902±83): quoted 733, 736, 753 Pfeiffer Trust 259 Phaedrus, see Plato: works mentioned pharmacology 473, 507 Phelps, Launcelot Ridley (1853±1936), Provost of Oriel (1914±29): compulsory Greek supported by 836 on danger of expanding range of entry 800 letters from colonial administrators 707 tutorials for physiology student 137 quoted 800 mentioned 144, 672 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1807) 318 philhellenism 349, 357 Philip, John Birnie (1824±75) 738 Philipps, Elsbeth 301±2 Phillimore, Joseph (1775±1855): Regius Prof. of Civil Law (1809±55) 385, 388 evidence to Select Cttee (1846) 385±6 quoted 386 Phillimore, (Sir) Walter George, 2nd Bt, cr. Lord Phillimore 1918 (1845±1929) 389 Philological Society 414, 419, 615, 620, 651 philology: comparative philology 77, 612 historical linguistics 414 `new philology' (early 19th cent.) 413 School of Mental Philosophy and Philology suggested 415 work derivative from German scholarship 616 mentioned 103, 313, 325, 397, 398, 402, 613, 700 philosophy 311±26 passim development of essay work 135 discussions on modern Greats 852 `in®delity' of Greats course (1870s, 1884) 26, 252 pioneers in new tutorial system 135 `unsettling' theories 26±9, 40, 61 work derivative from German scholarship 616 mentioned 344, 350 Philosophy of History, see Hegel: works mentioned Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE): conceived as a unity 326 creation of School (1920) 384, 875 supplies graduates for Colonial Service after First World War 715 philosophy of religion 143 Philosophy of Right, see Hegel: works mentioned phonetics 422, 423, 548, 549, 611

957

photography 510 Physic Garden, see Botanic Gardens physics (incl. natural and experimental philosophy): Clarendon Laboratory's poor record in 616 new professorship (1900) 611 women not encouraged in research 470 mentioned 136 Physics and Politics, see Bagehot Physiological Society 470 physiology: department compared with C. and London 466 extension to laboratory (1907) 483 Final Honour School of Animal Physiology 506; ®nalists' group (1894), Plate 40, PC 40 percentage of Firsts 462 resistance to building of laboratory (1883) 482, 483, 625 rivals chemistry in popularity (by 1900) 473 separate branch of Natural Science School 137, 488, 490 success in Osler's time 505 Wayn¯ete chair (1882) and new laboratory (1884) 466 Pickard-Cambridge, (Sir) Arthur Wallace, Kt 1950 (1873±1952) 681 Pickford, Mary Ada (1884±1934) 293 Pinker, Henry Richard Hope (1849±1927) 496 Pitt, William (1759±1806) 368 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Henry (1827±1900) 499±503 passim collection based on `principle of continuity' 499 the `series' as a method of research 499 Pitt-Rivers Museum 499±503 passim Curator (H. Balfour), 704, PC 42 neglected state of Univ.'s collections 500 new annexe to existing Univ. Museum 500, 743 Upper Gallery, practical examination photograph Plate 42, PC 42 mentioned 600, 756, PC 44 Plataea 357 Plato (c.428/7±c.348/7 b c ): Guardians 707 homosexual attitudes in writings 37 and imperial administration 693±4 increasing importance in Greats (1860s) 37 Jowett's interpretation of 32; prefaces to Dialogues 329; translations 336, PC 2 more serious study of (after 1853) 313 in Pater's Renaissance (1873) 34 in Types of Ethical Theory (1885) 61

958

index

Plato (c.428/7±c.348/7 b c ): (contd ) works mentioned: Dialogues 32, 37; Phaedrus 36, 37; Republic 26, 63, 315, 316, 815±16; Symposium 36, 37 mentioned 38, 61, 63, 316, 323, 329 Plato and Platonism, see Pater, Walter: work mentioned Platonists 36 play-reading societies 152 Playfair, Sir Lyon, KCB 1883, Lord Playfair 1892 (1818±98) 12 playing ®elds 526 Pliny the Younger (a d 62± c.112): works mentioned: Correspondence with Trajan (ed. E. G. Hardy, 1889) 342, 348; Letters (ed. A. N. Sherwin-White, 1966) 342 Plowman, Thomas (1805/6±1828) 732, 765 plumbing 782 Plummer, Charles (1851±1927) 808, Plates 33, 37, PC 33, PC 37 Plumptre, Frederick Charles (c.1796±1870), Master of Univ. Coll. (1836±70), V.-C. (1848±52): mentioned 128 Plumptre, Henry Pemberton (b. 1870) PC 34 `Podsnap, Mr' 44 Poetics, see Aristotle: works mentioned Poetry, Professorship of, see professorships Pointer, Joseph (1875±1914) 678 Pole, William (1814±1900) 442 political economy 248, 315, 448, 611 Political Economy Club 855 Political History of England (1905, 1906) 368 political philosophy 316 Political Philosophy and Science Club 620 political theory and institutions: professorship in (1912) 611 Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, see Barker: work mentioned politics, politicians 66, 632±3 Politics, see Aristotle: works mentioned politics (academic study) 326, 616±17, 852 Pollard, Albert Frederick (1869±1948) 218, 363, 364 Pollen, John Hungerford (1820±1902) 740 Pollock, (Sir) Frederick, succ. as 3rd Bt 1888 (1845±1937): CC Prof. of Jurisprudence 394, 395, 695 Law Quarterly Review (1884) 394 Pollock Cttee 695 quoted 367 mentioned 617, 705 Pomfret collection 734 Poole, Austin Lane (1889±1963), Pres. of St John's Coll. (1947±57): mentioned 216 Poole, Rachel Emily Lane (1860±1937) 594 Poole, Reginald Lane (1857±1939) 367 Poor Laws 316

Pope, Alexander (1688±1744) 353 Pope, Fr John O'Fallon, SJ (1850±1934) 120 Pope, Mildred Katherine (1872±1956) 284, 422, Plate 58, PC 58 Pope, Richard William (1849±1923), Censor of Non-Collegiate students (1887±1919): quoted 557 mentioned 201, 206 Popham, Mervyn Reddaway (1927±) 350±1 Poplar 230 port 600 Porter, Mary Winnearls (b. 1886) 469 Portland, 3rd Duke of (1738±1809), Chancellor (1792±1809) 228 positivism 94, 643, 696 Posterior Analytics, see Aristotle: works mentioned postgraduate students 54, 122, 156, 372, 407, 410, 640 Postmaster General 183 Potter, Horatio (1802±87) 177 Potterism, see Macaulay, (Dame) (Emilie) Rose Pottinger, Henry Allison (1824±1911) 184 Poulton, (Sir) Edward Bagnall, Kt 1935 (1856±1943): Hope Prof. of Zoology 467, 701 attempt to raise money for scienti®c equipment 702 ICS, etc.: attack on appointment system 701 `The Empire and University Life' (1905) 701±2 quoted 483, 495 mentioned 493 Poulton (later Palmer), Ronald William (1889±1915) 794 and n.71, 870±1, PC 64 Powell, Baden (1796±1860) 445±7 passim Savilian Prof. of Geometry 445 member of 1850 Royal Commission 443 religious tests, deputation on 444 work mentioned: The Present State and Future Prospects of Mathematical and Physical Studies . . . (1832) 446±7, 454 mentioned 449, 450, 451 Powell, Eleanor Grace (1859±1945) 260, Plate 50, PC 50 Powell, Frederick York (1850±1904): Regius Prof. of History 370, 675 criticisms of 370 as Delegate of the Press 654, 657 drafts programme of The Club 627 English School, support for 399, 402±3,404 mentioned 231, 381, 610, 628, 648, 675 Powicke, (Sir) (Frederick) Maurice, Kt 1946 (1879±1963) Regius Prof. of Modern History 374

index Poynter, (Sir) Edward John, Bt 1902 (1836±1919) 508 PPE, see Philosophy, Politics and Economics pragmatism 324; `9 more hours of' 818 Pre-Raphaelites 33 Pre-Socratics 316, 317 preparatory schools 546, 555 Presbyterian 166, 711 The Present State . . . of Mathematical . . . Studies, see Powell, Baden: work mentioned the press arguments against Triple Entente (1914) 859±60 denunciation of Holmes-Morant circular (1911) 841 and the Univ.: critical comment in 604; Curzon Report, limited coverage 835; Daily Mail hoaxed by Magdalen ragging story (1904) 794; the `Oxford Correspondent', partisan commentaries 604; pressure for reform 824, 826±9, 830, 839; protest about a Shakespeare performance (1906) 795; stories of undergraduate ragging and riots 140, 794 Prestwich, (Sir) Joseph, Kt 1896 (1812±96) Prof. of Geology 468 Price, Bartholomew (1818±98), Master of Pembroke Coll. (1891±8): Chairman of Press Finance Cttee 653 Cleveland Commission, leading role 70 Delegate, later Secretary to Delegates, of Press 71, 91, 449, 647±55 Sedleian Prof. of Natural Philosophy 446, 449 as teacher 449 works on calculus 449 quoted 651 mentioned 68, 73, 74, 85, 443, 450, 451, 607 Price, Bonamy (1807±88): quoted 75, 50 Price, Charles James (1838±1905) 453 Price, Langford Lovell (1862±1950) 666 Price, Richard (1723±91) 316, 368 Prichard, John (1817±1886) 751 Prime Ministers, see Asquith; Balfour; Derby; Disraeli; Gladstone; Grenville; Lloyd George; Peel; Portland; Rosebery; Russell; Salisbury; Wellington Prince Arthur of Connaught (1883±1938) 828 Prince Consort (Albert) (1819±1861) 30, 64, 740±1 Prince Leopold, cr. Duke of Albany 1881 (1853±84) 226, 508 Prince Paul of Serbia 807 Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, from Jan. 1901 King Edward VII (1841±1910) 185, 226

959

Prince of Wales, Edward Albert, Edward VIII 1936, thereafter Duke of Windsor (the `Pragger Wagger') (1894±1972) 806± 8, 862, Plate 43, PC 43 PC 74 The Princess (Tennyson, 1847) 253, 286 Princess Ida (Gilbert, 1884) 253 Princeton University, see United States of America Principia (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica), see Newton: work mentioned Principles of the English Law of Contract, see Anson, (Sir) William: work mentioned Principles of Logic, see Bradley, Francis Herbert Principles and Methods of University Reform, see Curzon: work mentioned Principles of Political Economy (Mill, 1848) 365, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned The Principles and Practice of Medicine, see Osler: work mentioned Prior's Field School, Godalming 295 prison visiting 242 Pritchard, Charles (1808±93): Savilian Prof. of Astronomy 468 mentioned 493 private halls: Charsley's, Marcon's, Turrell's 120 foundation of Keble 173, 184 means of attracting less af¯uent 5±6 non-Anglican halls 120 private tutors (coaches): demand almost extinguished (1870s) 135, 147 in Greats 315, 393 in law 388, 393 mentioned 48, 80 Privy Council 17, 84, 140±1, 181, 216, 420, 585, 875 Cttee on Education 558 prizes, see University Prizes Problems of the Roman Criminal Law, see Strachan-Davidson: works mentioned Proctor, Robert George Collier (1868±1903) Plate 33, PC 33 proctors: action against prostitution 139, 795±6 Junior Proctor: (A. L. Smith) 199; (H. E. D. Blakiston) PC 71 nomination of examiners 89, 93 rebuke to History examiners 42 Senior Proctor 139, 140, 537 `vicious acts', problems caused by 795±6 women students, problems caused by 277, 797

960

index

proctors: (contd ) mentioned 139, 269, 270, 271, 272, 393, 791, 795, 797±8 PC 71 professions, professional class: burgeoning of (late 1860s) 5 careers: chemistry graduates in nonscienti®c posts 493; de®ciencies in preparation for 66; Jowett on science as preparation 12; length of O. course a drawback 7; women 573 cost of education to 62, 147 gains in in¯uence 16 overcrowding of 622 professional education, issue of 613, 829, 834 professionalization in Western univs. (1860±1930) 599 and public schools 61±2, 545 scholarship holders, mostly sons of 588±9 mentioned 29, 57, 163, 577, 781, 797, 839 professors, professoriate: All Souls, Royal Commission's professorship proposals (1852) 210 Burrows on position of Modern History School profs (1873) 47, 73, PC 4 Cleveland Commission's inquiry (1872) 70 and Faculties Statute (1910±11) 836±7 Hebdomadal Council: cttee on professoriate (1873) 73; estimate of professorial needs (1877) 73±4; professorial seats (1912) 605, 837±8 lack of retirement pensions (to 1914) 629 lectures 46, 47, 49, 53, 80, 88±9 Liberal views: House of Commons (1876) 77; O. (1875) 74 modern language profs' dif®culties 418±19 new chairs (early 20th cent.) 611, 875 ordinances on profs (1854 Commission) 69±70 problem of isolation (1877) 48 profs', readers' seminars: Herbertson, Sanday, Vinogradoff 620 Regius Chairs, appointment procedure 629 research by Modern History School profs 362 retirement age, superannuation (1924±5) 875 Selborne Commission: criticisms of Commission's policy 608; lectures, 89, 94; pay increases 52; resources for professoriate 87; suggested reforms: Bryce, Fowler, Jowett (1877) 80±1 state of the professoriate (1900±14) 629 study leave favoured by Jowett 615 professorships: Ancient History (Camden) 100, 314, 339, 340, 341, 353, 355

Ancient History (Wykeham) (1910) 353±4 Anglo-Saxon (Rawlinson, later R. and Bosworth) 403, 404, 406, 416±17, 418 Arabic (Laudian) 302, 617 Assyriology 355, 417, 611 Astronomy (Savilian) 446, 447, 468, 478±9 Biochemistry 505 Botany (Sherardian) 470, 471, 490, 613 Celtic 415 Chemistry (Aldrichian) 23 Chemistry (Wayn¯ete) 65, 464, 465 Chinese 415, PC 25 Civil Law (Regius) 23, 78, 214, 385, 386, 388, 391 Classical Archaeology and Art (Lincoln and Merton) 325, 341, 349±50, 354, 610 Clinical Instruction (Lich®eld) 505 Colonial History (Beit) 220, 611, 640, 692 Comparative Philology (Corpus Christi from 1877) 102, 399, 407, 415, 419, 421, 629 Divinity (Margaret) 632, 787 Divinity (Regius) 111, 305; and see below Exegesis, Interpretation of Holy Scripture Ecclesiastical History (Regius) 43, 173±4, 223, 229, 379 Engineering Science 66, 471, 476, 611 English Language and Literature (Merton) 398, 399, 406, 416, 421, 610 English Law (Vinerian) 214, 385, 386, 391, 394 English Literature (Merton, from Oct. 1914) 82, 398, 399, 406, 611 Exegesis of Holy Scripture 617 Experimental Philosophy 83±4, 452, 460, 492 Fine Art (Slade) 35, 90, 508, 509, 510±11 Forestry 475 General Linguistics 420 Geology 468±9, 490 Geometry (Savilian) 79, 444, 446, 451, 453, 455 German 417, 611 Greek (Regius) 285, 314, 325, 329, 330, 331, 337, 631, 697 Hebrew (Regius) 97, 416, 617 (Human) Anatomy 473, 500, 502, 505 International Law and Diplomacy (Chichele) 76, 211, 390±1 International Relations (Montague Burton) 360 Interpretation of Holy Scripture (Oriel) 100, 610 Jurisprudence (Corpus Christi) 76, 391, 394, 395, 629, 695

index Latin Language and Literature (Corpus Christi) 330, 331, 402, 415 Logic (Wykeham) 314, 324 Medicine (Regius) 257, 473, 474, 504±5, 508, 617, 631 Mineralogy and Crystallography (Wayn¯ete) 468 Modern European Languages 211, 399, 415 Modern History (Chichele) 68, 211, 215, 363, 372, 416 Modern History (Regius) 42, 45, 61, 88, 229, 238, 389±90, 614, 654, 675, 692, 696 Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (Wayn¯ete) 402, 626, 815 Moral Philosophy (White's) 57, 313±14, 317, 323 Music 430, 431, 433, 434 Natural Philosophy (Sedleian) 443, 449, 455, 477 Pathology 473, 505, 611 Pharmacology 505 Physics (Wykeham) 460, 461, 611 Physiology (Wayn¯ete) 466, 500, 505, 610 Poetry 38±9, 416, 483, 690; 1877 election 38±9 Political Economy (Drummond) 50, 75, 184, 214±15, 244, 448, 617, 704, 857 Political Theory and Institutions (Gladstone) 611, 852, 857 Pure Mathematics (Wayn¯ete) 455, 610 Romance Languages 417, 608 Rural Economy (Sibthorpian) 474 Russian and other Slavonic Languages 417±18 Sanskrit (Boden) 102, 416, 699±700, 701, 754, 805 Zend Philology 417, 610±11 Zoology and Comparative Anatomy (Linacre) 462, 466, 467, 482, 484, 489±90, 701 Zoology (Hope) 467, 500 Prolegomena Logica, see Mansel: work mentioned Prolegomena to Ethics, see Green, Thomas Hill: works mentioned pronunciation 548 property development 71 prostitution 139, 237, 242, 277, 795 Protestants, Protestantism 121, 580, 617, 635, 689±90, 733, 788 Prothero, Rowland Edmund, cr. Lord Ernle 1919 (1851±1937) 633 Prout, Thomas Jones (c.1824±1909) 224 Prussia, King of (Frederick William III) (1770±1840) 859 Prussian Academy of Sciences 450 psychiatry 298

961

psychology 326, 482, 614 public libraries 194 Public Orator 76, 496 Public Record Of®ce 363 public schools 545±55 passim, 565±6 Tables 23.A.1, 23.A.2 anti-intellectualism 824 aspirations of upper-middle-class parents 546 Barnett on the public schoolboy 824 Clarendon schools 216, 540, 550, 552, 566 Table 23.A2 complaints of classical bias at O. 636 headmasters 128, 557, 824 importance to O. 545 `intense communality' 548 new social caste 546 Nuf®eld Coll. survey (1944) 575 Public School Pronunciation, and -er endings 548±9 reform and expansion 5, 115, 124, 545, 546, 622 and reserved manners 714, 715 school stories, popularity 547, 549 sport: athletes favoured 519, 531, 535, 541; civilizing process of team games 526; in¯uence on O. sport 518±20, 523±4, 534; Isis critical of public school athleticism (1914) 800; school loyalties transcended by coll. sport (football codes) 524 teaching, syllabus: academic competition 546; classical syllabus 265; generally poor in science 485; history 363±4; O. and C. examinations 561 and the Univ.: 60 per cent of undergraduates from (by 1900) 61, 145, 552, 554, Fig. 23.1, Fig. 23.2; Balliol graduates from 168±9; cause of `separatism' in colls 532; creation of O. engineering department 563±4; distinction between school and univ. 786, 800; in¯uence in O. 545, 550; openings for young dons 610; proportion and distribution in colls 550±3; undergraduate ragging: perpetrators and victims 792; women Princs' connections with 288 Westminster Gazette attack (1905) 824 mentioned 7, 14, 48, 75, 120, 132, 147±8, 242, 273, 289, 476, 527, 781, 800, 825, 842, 870 see also Eton; Harrow; Marlborough; Rugby; Winchester public service 572 Pugin, Augustus Welby (1812±52): designs for Balliol Chapel, and buildings 735±6, 743, PC 18 Magdalen Gateway 766, PC 19

962

index

quoted 735 Punch Plate 27, PC 27 Purser, Louis Claude (1854±1932) 330 Purvis, June 295 Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800±82): Regius Prof. of Hebrew 617 advocates revival of `plebeian' status 585 `catholic' Anglicanism, representative of 97 enraged at honorary degree proposal for agnostic (1870) 31 funeral of John Keble 175 German univs, disapproval of 8 gift to Non-Collegiate students' library 195 has Macan removed from Studentship 58, 222, 857 Keble Coll.: Appeal 176; danger of fellowships 180; founding, Wardenship 174, 177±9, 188; preaches at opening of Chapel 187, PC 16; privileges of new foundations 184; question of scholarships 190 lodgings, opposition to 21, 194 Mill's Logic, efforts to dislodge from syllabus 26 and nomination of Stanley as Select Preacher (1872) PC 11 a powerful conservative force 97 as preacher 229 referred to by Stubbs as `the master' 43 theology school, opposition to, later support for 97±8, 164 Univ. Museum, support for 739 and women's Halls 242 quoted 31, 178, 181, 194, 585 mentioned 21, 27, 29, 32, 91, 223, 226, 548, 576±7, 626 Pusey House 102, 107, 252, 635, 691, 759, 870, Plate 17, PC 17 Puseyite sisterhoods 242 Pygmalion 421 Quarterly Journal of Medicine 505, 618±19 Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 470 The Quarterly Review 26, 584 Queen's Bench 212 Queen's College: attempted take-over of St Edmund Hall 119 character and composition: by 1850, unusual effect of closed local foundation 587; proportion of public school men 550, 551 cricket pavilion 756 Egles®eld Music Society 435, 437 ®nance: coll. contributions 87; Trust income 161

Hastings Exhibitions 552 honorary fellows 132 junior chaplain a fellow 106 quali®cation for Provostship 130 scholarships: ®rst open scholarships 126; joint examination with BNC (1870) 126; tied scholarships 84 Selborne Commission discussions 85, 86±7 The Queen's College ( J. R. Magrath, 1921) 85 undergraduates: schooling of undergraduates listed (1898) 547; transition to more ordered regime (1860s, 1870s) 138 mentioned 134, 801 Queen's College, Birmingham 100 Queens' College, Cambridge 183 Queen's College, Harley Street 295 Queen's Scholarships, examination for 668 The Quest for the Historical Jesus, see Schweitzer Quiller-Couch, (Sir) Arthur Thomas, Kt 1910 (1863±1944) 690, 819, 828 work mentioned: Oxford Book of English Verse 616, 657 Rabbinical scholar (Adolf Neubauer) 610 racial prejudice 803 Racine, Jean (1639±99) 425 Radcliffe Camera 243, 275, 497, 749 Radcliffe In®rmary 242, 505 Radcliffe Observatory 478, 479, 757 Radcliffe Science Library 486, 756, PC 20 Radcliffe Trust 479 radicals 94, 632, 639 Radley College 190, 557 railways, railwaymen 589, 605, 679 Rait, (Sir) Robert Sangster, Kt 1933 (1874±1936): Princ. of Glasgow Univ. 363 Prof. of Scottish History and Literature, Glasgow 363 Ralegh, (Sir) Walter, Kt 1584 (?1552±1618) 689 Ralegh Club 695, 715 Raleigh, (Sir) Thomas, KCSI 1904 (1850±1920) 705 Raleigh, (Sir) Walter Alexander, Kt 1911 (1861±1922) 406±11 passim Prof. of English Literature (Merton Prof. from Oct. 1914) 405±6, 411 Cttee of English Studies 407±8, 411 literary adviser to O. Univ. Press 657 Oxford Pageant (1907) 828 works mentioned: Introd. to Hoby's The Courtier (1899) 406; The English Novel

index (1894), Milton (1899), Wordsworth (1903) 406 quoted 410, 606 Ramsay, (Sir) William Mitchell, Kt 1906 (1851±1939): explorer of Greece and Asia Minor 339, 354 Prof. of Archaeology for one year 349±50, 354 mentioned 620 Randolph, John (1749±1813) 646 Randolph Hotel 176 Ranke, Leopold von (1795±1886): work mentioned: History of England Principally in the 17th Century, trans. Boase 374 Raper, Robert William (1842±1915) 141, 142, 479 Rashdall, Hastings (1858±1924): in favour of a limited Commission 840 harshest liberal critic of Curzon's Report 836 unsympathetic to sport 799 quoted 604, 836, 839 mentioned 612, 629, 639, 837 Rassam, Orumzd (1826±1910) 231 Rathbone, Eleanor (1872±1946) 293, 300, 594, 640 rationalism 95, 317 Ravensworth, Lord, cr. Earl of Ravensworth 1874 (1775±1855) 221 Rawlinson, George (1812±1902): Camden Prof. of Ancient History 339, 353 Bampton Lecturer (1859) 100 work mentioned: The History of Herodotus (with H. C. Rawlinson, 1858±60) 342, 352 mentioned 100, 336 Rawlinson, (Sir) Henry Creswicke, Bt 1891 (1810±95) 354 Rawlinson Road 421 Rayleigh, Lord, see Strutt, John William Read and Macdonald 775 Reade, William Winwoode (1838±75): work mentioned: The Martyrdom of Man (1872) 691 readers, readerships: ancient history 341, 353 anthropology 356, 468, 640, 703±4 Assyriology 611 chemistry 136, 464 economic history 857 education 556 Egyptology 611 English literature 408 geography 611, 702±3 Indian history 700±1

963

Indian law 700±1 law 214±15, 391 mental philosophy 473, 482 modern history 374 Old Norse 610 ophthalmology 473 pathology 473 pharmacology 473 phonetics 611 physics 136 physiology 466, 506 Rabbinical Hebrew 416, 610 Selborne Commission: draft statutes (1881) 86; scheme to increase number 52; Univ.'s needs estimated (1877) 74 mentioned 81, 609 Reading 237, 551, 669, 680 Reading College (1898±1902) 474 proposed co-operation in Agricultural Science course 474 reading parties 142±3, Plate 34, PC 34 Reading University College (1902±26) 296 professorship of English held by woman (E. Morley) 296 Red Cross 861 `Red Oxford' 642 Redesdale, 1st Earl of 1877 (1805±86) 76, 79 Redfern, Harry (1861±1950) 756, 774 Redmond, John Edward (1856±1918) 810 Reeves, Marjorie Ethel (1905±) 373 Reform Acts, 1832, 1867, see Parliamentary Proceedings: Acts Reform Essays (1867) 68 reform of the University 67±95, 821±54 passim `The Club' most important pressure group (late Victorian era) 628 disappointment at limited results (1870s) 577 enthusiasm for (early 20th cent.) 554±5, 610 ®nal decision against appointing Commission (1913) 852±3 House of Lords debate (1907) 830±1 mathematicians, part in reform 443 motives for, among academics 601 a national party issue 600 need for (late 1860s) 14 O. residents, many favour Commission by 1912 850 possible constitution of a Commission (1912) 843 reasons for slow pace of change (to 1914) 864 reform `conspiracy' (1905), Catiline Club 681±2, 825±6, 833±4, 854 `reform from within' 600, 840, 854

964

index

reform of the University (contd ) reforms: 1867±72 21, 61; enacted during and soon after First World War 875±6 separate Commissions for O. and C. suggested (1911) 842 support for Commission (1900±12) 823, 832, 840 Tawney's attempt to force issue of Commission 848±9 threat of Edwardian radical programme 821 why pre-1914 reform campaign foundered 853±4 mentioned 4, 6, 209, 303, 632, 782 see also Commissions: Oxford University: Executive Commission (1923) 875 The Reformation 604 Registrar, see Oxford University: administration Reinold, Arnold William (1843±1921) 460 relativity 626 religious doubt 18±20, 27, 30, 59, 108, 279 religious issues 97±112 passim coll. chapels competing with other centres of worship 148 concern with social implications of Christianity 109±10 diversity of religious views 57, 108, 635 religion important in, but no longer institutionally central to, O. life (from 1880s) 91, 148 religious condition of Univ. 57, 106±8, 635 science, no signi®cant resistance to (later 19th cent.) 482 see also Church of England; Christianity; clergy; Evangelicals; High Church; liberals; ordinands religious societies 108±9 religious tests: abolition (1871): a decisive point in Univ's. history 30; resulting aestheticism 33, 39 Act (1871): colls to provide religious instruction 105, 147 All Souls remains uniformly Anglican 219 Appleton on 28±9 fears of in®delity (1865±71) 22±5, 30 Keble, founding of 179 Lightfoot on (1870) 20 for MAs 20±4 obstacle to mathematicians 444 Salisbury on guard against religious doubt 27 `social' tests 8 view of opponents of tests 31, 57 mentioned 56, 59, 61, 67±9, 104, 118, 228, 577±8, 579, 601, 625, 708, 813 Renaissance 373

Reports of Hope and Linacre departments 467 Repton, George Stanley (d. 1858) 764 Repton School 825 Republic, see Plato: work mentioned research: general: applied research needed in O. 480, 701±2; and colls 17, 132, 144, 157, 211, 214±19, 339±40, 391, 481, 532, 536±7, 608, 615, 620, 629±30, 861; and continental univs 602±4, 618, 620±1; funding 54, 75, 86±7, 480±1, 608±9, 612, 614±16, 622, 822; O.'s defects 9±10, 157, 285, 343, 621±2, 632, 822±3; O.'s performance, assessments 599±600, 614±19; Parliament and public 74, 77, 604±5, 616, 618; research ethos 6, 14, 53±4, 92, 492±3, 495, 610±11, 614±15, 625, 627±8, 651±2, 655, 836; research training 132, 269±70, 284, 381±2, 395, 408, 410, 422±3, 446, 492, 615, 619±20, 627, 640, 857, 861±2, 874; Selborne report, background and effects 51±4, 74, 77, 80±4, 86, 610±12; teaching and research 54, 75, 343, 613±15, 622, 822, 854 institutions: national: Antiquaries, Soc. of 294; British Academy 618, 861 n. 38, British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831) 447; British Philological Soc. (1842) 414; British Schools, Athens, Rome 340, 619; Hellenic Studies, Soc. for the Promotion of 340; Historical Association 363; Historical Manuscripts Commission 363; Modern Language Association 284; Musical Association (1874, later RMA) 442; Public Record Of®ce 363; Roman Studies, Soc. for the Promotion of 340; Royal Geographical Soc. 294; Royal Society, 618, 861 n. 38; O.: Ancient History Soc. (1884±93) 345; Aristotelian Soc. 325, 620; The Club 359, 627±8; Dante Soc. 620; Historical Theology, Soc. for 102±3; Philological Soc. 345, 620; Political Philosophy and Science Club (1909) 620±1; scienti®c societies (chemistry, life sciences) 492; Stubbs Soc. 380±1 popularizing research results: Ashmolean Soc. 492; Greek tragedians, Gilbert Murray's translations 616; Home Univ. Library 618; O. Univ. Junior Scienti®c Club (1882) 492 publications: Biochemical Journal 505; Dictionary of Antiquities 447; Dictionary of the English Language (later Oxford English Dictionary) 200, 414, 419, 615, 651±3, 655; Dictionary of National

index Biography 363, 617; Dictionary of Political Economy 617; Encyclopedia Britannica (1911 edn) 617; English Dialect Dictionary (Joseph Wright) 297, 419, 618; English Historical Review 363, 618±19; Grammar of Homeric Language (D. B. Monro) 618; History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (A. J. Carlyle) 618; John of Salisbury (C. C. J. Webb) 618; Latin Language (W. M. Lindsay) 618; Law Quarterly Review (1884) 394, 618±19; Man (`monthly record of anthropological science', from 1901) 618±19; Medicine, Quarterly Journal of (1906) 505, 618±19; Microscopical Science, Quarterly Journal of 470; New English Dictionary see Dictionary of the English Language; Oxford Survey of the British Empire (11 June 1914 ) 658, 703; `Sacred Books of the East' (48 vols.) 231, 419, 651; Social England (H. D. Traill, 1894±8) 617; Syriac Lexicon, `Thesaurus Syriacus' (R. Payne Smith, 1879, 1901) 647; Victoria County Histories 297, 363, 617; Vulgate New Testament (John Wordsworth) 618 subjects: arts: Arabic 617, archaeology 294, 336±7, 349±50, 499, 616, Aristotle 618, 657, Armenian 621, Assyriology 354±5, Biblical studies 100, 102±3, Cicero 618, Classics 330±1, Dante studies 621, English 397±8, 406, Erasmus 618, ®ne art 508, Greek history 342±4, 351±5, Hebrew 416, Icelandic 231, jurisprudence 391, 393±4, 617, modern European languages and comparative philology 102±3, 284, 398, 414±23, modern history 361±2, 366±7, 370±2, 375, 380±1, Oriental studies 617, papyrology 616, philosophy 109, 144, 313±25, 616, phonetics 420±3, 424±5, Roman Britain 355±6, 616, Roman history 341±3, Sanskrit 416, Slavonic languages 417±18, theology 102±3, 635; mathematics: 445, 449±55; mixed group: anthropology 356, 468, 499, 501±3, 617, ethnology 499±503, geography 357, 611, 617, history of medicine 505, history of science 497, mathematical statistics 448; natural sciences: 457, 486, 492, 495±7, agricultural science 473±4, astronomy 468, 470, 478±9, biology 617, biometrics 467, botany 471, chemistry 462±4, 617, crystallography 468±9, engineering 476±7, forestry 475±6, geology 468±70, medicine 506, mineralogy 468±9,

965

morphology 462, 756, pathology 473, physics 461±2, physiology 466, 470, 505±6, seismology 468, 470, telegraphy 477, zoology 462, 466±7; social sciences: 284, economic history 616±17 Responsions (`Little-Go'): 1914 Statute defeated 852, 857±8 admission of women to exam. (1886) 257, 280 B. Mus. candidates 431 in Board of Education Consultative Cttee report (1916) 868±9 compulsory Greek 564, 836, 875 converted into Univ. entrance examination (1926) 875 equivalent examinations 280 Greek requiring 6±12 months' cram 488 Non-Collegiate students 196, 198±9, 201 quali®cations exempting Rhodes Scholars 720 support for inclusion of science (from 1900) 493 mentioned 65, 423, 444, 449, 630, 865±6 revolution (1848) 708 revolver-shooting 289±90 rhetoric 311 Rhodes, Cecil John (1853±1902) 717±26 passim, Plate 9, PC 9 and Aristotle's Ethics 641, 693 at Encaenia (1899) PC 71 criticism of his in¯uence 696 early will PC 9 estate 717 High St front of Oriel, benefaction of 755 honorary degree, controversy over 601, 607, PC 71 Imperial Oxford 640 membership of Vincent's and Bullingdon Clubs PC 9 mystical nature of imperial cause 691 passman at Oriel 717, PC 9 residential system, importance of 717 speci®cations for Scholars, and geographical distribution 718 will ( July 1899) 157, 822, PC 71; reception of news of provisions (1902) 623, 719 quoted 640, 717±18 mentioned 219±20, 689, 690, 691, 695, 696, 698, 705, 726 Rhodes, Francis William (1806±78) 717 Rhodes House 689 Rhodes scholars 717±26 passim academic studies: academic level 725; anthropology diploma for 703±4; high proportion of ®rsts in law 396; importance of legal studies in their

966

index

Rhodes scholars (contd ) countries 705; most to read for ®nal hon school 723; preference for law school 396, 617, 705, 724; pressure for engineering school 476 achievements of ®rst batch 810 action against `blood push' in Balliol 794 adjustment to coll. life 724 enrichment of O. life 725 entrance quali®cations 720, 722±3 entrants and coll. distribution (1903±6) 722 geographical distribution 718; additional Canadian Provinces 721 Germany: aim of linking British and German Empires 718; selection by Emperor 721; to read for diploma 723 Nonconformists among 104 originally condemned by O. Union 810 preferences among colls 723 provision for graduate students 640 qualities required by Rhodes 718 raising of age of entry 722 Rhodes Trustees provide additional funds 623 some of ®rst batch, at Balliol 167 South African scholars (from 1903) 723 United States scholars, see United States in Willie Elmhirst's diary 782 mentioned 371, 422, 624, 692, 712, 716, 791, 808, 813, 846, 852, 857 The Rhodes Scholarships, see Parkin: work mentioned Rhodes Trust, Trustees appointed 718 appointments of Secretaries 719±20 ®rst proceedings 719 mentioned 702 Rhodesia 713, 718, 720 Rhondda, Viscountess, succ. 1918 (1883±1958) 286±7, 300 Rhys family 305 Rhys, (Sir) John, Kt 1907 (1840±1915), Princ. of Jesus Coll. (1895±1915): Jesus Coll. becomes highly progressive 124 Pres., O. Women's Suffrage Soc. 302 mentioned 425 Rhys, Olwen 302 Richards, Franklin Thomas Grant (1872±1948) 657 Richards, George Chatterton (1867±1951) 345 Richards, (Sir) James Maude, Kt 1972 (1907±92) 760 Richards, William Upton (1811±73) 175 Richmond, (Sir) Ian Archibald, Kt 1964 (1902±65) 342 Ridgeway, (Sir) William, Kt 1919 (1853±1926) 839

Ridley, (Sir) Matthew White, 5th Bt, Visc. Ridley 1900 (1842±1904) 76, 79, 213 Ridley, Nicholas (?1500±1555) 733 ri¯es 499, 546 Rig Veda 700 Rigaud, Stephen Peter (1774±1839): Savilian Prof. of Astronomy 445 Savilian Prof. of Geometry 445 mentioned 447 The Rise of the Greek Epic, see Murray, George Gilbert: works mentioned Ritchie, David George (1853±1903) 323 Ritchie, James (1864±1923) 506±7 ritualism 60, 178, 186, 187, 223, 250, 733 Robarts, Charles H. (1840±1902): library reform 212 quoted 213 Robert Elsmere, see Ward, Mrs Humphrey: works mentioned Roberts, John Varley (1841±1920) 439 Robertson, Alexander 731 Robertson, (Sir) Charles Grant, Kt 1928 (1869±1948) 219 Robertson, Daniel (d. 1849): architect of OUP building 646, 731±2, 765 work on St Mary Hall, Wadham, All Souls, St John's 764±5 Robinson, Alfred (1841±95): Bursar of New Coll. 81, PC 21 commemorated by Robinson Tower PC 21 private means 142 re-establishment of JCR 151 as tutor 143 mentioned 87, 315, 607 Robinson, (George) Geoffrey, see Dawson, G. G. Robinson, Walter Croke (1839±1914) 57 Rochdale 663, 684, 849 Rochester 552 Rockefeller Foundation 507 Rodin, Auguste (1840±1917) 828 Roedean School 295 Rogers, Annie Mary (1856±1937): not elected to Delegacy (1910) 270 on opposition to the campaign for BA 266±7 O.'s success in integrating women 240 `Rules of Discipline' (1909) 275 Secretary of AEW (1894±1920) 259, 261 successful examinee (1877) 244 supporter of women's suffrage 301, 302, 304 `the Vampire of the AEW' 283±4 quoted 267, 271, 286, 307 mentioned 256, 258, 269 Rogers, (Sir) Frederic, 8th Bt 1851, cr. Lord Blachford 1871 (1811±89) 176

index Rogers, (James Edwin) Thorold (1823±90): Keble: opposes coll. status 184 petitions Council to admit women to examinations 244 speaks in Parliament about professoriate 632 women's suffrage, argues for 245 quoted 14±15, 50±1 mentioned 85, 245, 253, 617 Rogers, Leonard James (1862±1933) 454±5 Rolfe, C. C. 772 Rolleston, George (1829±81): Linacre Prof. of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy 466±7, 489 attacked by Lankester 489 on Cttee to found LMH 246 education, proposal for chair of 555 ethnological interests 500 mentioned 466, 467 Roman Britain: H. F. Pelham's promotion of study 340 Romano-British antiquities, archaeology 340, 616 mentioned 141 Roman Catholics, Roman Catholicism 97±112 passim approval for women to study at O. (1907) 288 attack on visitor accused of proselytizing 155 chaplain, chaplaincy 104 fear of in¯uence on undergraduates 788 of®cially forbidden to study at O. until 1896 104 O.'s ®rst RC fellow (1872) 57 private halls 120, 623 religious societies for undergraduates 108 Roman Catholic undergraduates, fears for their faith 61 mentioned, 61, 90, 580, 697, 708, 813, PC 13 Roman History 333±4, 339±49 passim contribution of H. F. Pelham 339±41 Empire period established in Lit. Hum. (1903) 347±8 less useful than Greek history in First World War 358 parallels seen by colonial administrators 694 relevance of study to British Empire 346, 347, 348±9, 706; government of India 346, 816 works of Mommsen 333±4 mentioned 325±6, 350, 374, 693, 710, 716, PC 39 Romance Languages: professorship 611 Romanes, Mrs Ethel PC 55

967

Romanes, Ethel Georgina (d.1914) 293±4, PC55 Romanes Lecture 486, 496 Romantic poets 319 Rome 298, 340, 619 RoÈmisches Staatsrecht, see Mommsen Rondebosch 723 Roosevelt, Theodore (1858±1919) 721 Rose, Herbert Jennings (1883±1961) 341 Rosebery, 5th Earl of, succ. 1868 (1847±1929): candidate for Chancellorship (1907) 633 Chancellor of London Univ. 472 does not give up racehorses (1869) 582 Empire, the O. product in the service of 641; union of white races 696 Lord Rector of Glasgow Univ. 472 refuses to contribute to Re-Endowment Appeal (1907) 853 Rhodes Trust 718±21, 725 quoted 641, 824, 853 mentioned 229, 370, 832 Roses matches 539 Rossall School 546 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828±82) 741 Rothamsted Laboratory 474 Round, John Horace (1854±1928): quoted 364 mentioned 367 Round Table 818 Round Table movement 640, 695±6, 698, 715 Roundell, Charles Savile (1827±1906): Ewart Cttee, evidence to 68±9 `idle' fellow of Merton 18 petition against clerical fellowships 86 on religious tests 23 secretary, Cleveland Commission 70±3 strong Liberal 18, 73 quoted 30, 69, 72, 388 mentioned 23, 85, 388 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712±78) 279, 425 Routh, Martin Joseph (1755±1854), Pres. of Magdalen Coll. (1791±1854) 116 Royal Academy PC 23 Royal Asiatic Society 612 Royal Astronomical Society PC 38 Royal College of Chemistry 451 Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh laboratory 506±7 Royal College of Science 480 Royal Commission (1850): All Souls debate on recommendations 210 on combining ancient and modern history 42, 867 degree of autonomy 75 Executive Commissioners (1854): All Souls fellowships 210, 212; fellowships and scholarships at Jesus Coll. 124; honorary

968

index

Royal Commission (1850): (contd ) fellows 132; ordinances (1855±8) 224, 586; properly constituted governing bodies 115; mentioned 160 in favour of recognizing Non-Collegiate students 193 Jowett's draft Bill 160 law 386 philosophy 312±14, 326 philosophy and philology 415 Report (1852) 213 scholarships 83±4 mentioned 69, 147, 159±60, 180, 221, 443, 578, 602, 649 Royal Geographical Society 294, 611, 702 Royal Holloway College 268, 287 Royal Institution 485 Royal Military Academy, Woolwich 36, 547 Royal School of Mines 461 Royal Society 65, 117, 213, 448, 458, 470, 471, 489, 496, 618, PC 38 Royal-Dawson, Oswald Sidney (d. 1917) PC 37 Royden, (Agnes) Maude (1876±1956): call for opening priesthood to women 298 lecturer for WEA 593 as preacher 298 women's suffrage 300 quoted 283 mentioned 287, 305 RuÈcker, (Sir) Arthur, Kt 1902 (1848±1915) 460 Rudiments of Faith and Religion (`Rudders') 58, 311, 314, 549, 625, 805 Rugby 177, 186 Rugby School: academic liberals 550 fellows of All Souls 216 former Rugbeians at Balliol (1854±63, 1874±83) 159, 164 John Percival (Headmaster) 129, 825 sport (rugby football) 523 Thomas Arnold: pupils 13, 128; reforms: origin of public school system 545 mentioned 94, 167, 169, 177, 224, 249, 319, 803±4, 853±4, PC 8 Runciman, Walter, cr. Visc. Runciman 1937 (1870±1949): quoted 842 Rural Economy: Diploma 474, 611 Sibthorpian Chair 474 mentioned 472 Rushforth, Collingwood McNeil (1868±1933) 345 Ruskin College (formerly Hall) 675±80, 684±8 passim changing views of, in Univ. 810, 857

Ramsay MacDonald and O. 's effect on 845 reconstitution under labour organizations 847 strike (1909) 845±6, Plate 72, PC 72 student activities 623 Trade Union support for 623 mentioned 593, 833, 843, 852, 854, PC 7 Ruskin Hall Correspondence School 679 Ruskin Hall Educational League 678 Ruskin, John (1819±1900) Plate 7, PC 7 Slade Professor of Fine Art 90, 508±11 passim; inaugural lecture 508, 691 art and architecture: `arts and crafts' movement 532; gifts to Univ., including Turners 508, PC 7; Meadow Buildings, Ch. Ch. 225; presses for degree in ®ne art 510; `Ruskinian tomfoolery' 746; on the teaching of art 510; and Univ. Museum design 740 disagreements with Macdonald 509±11 disillusionment with science 483 encouragement for colonizaton (1870) 691 hero in The New Republic 21 Honorary fellow of CCC 132 lecture audiences 94 mental illness and ®nal resignation 483, 510±11 Newdigate prize (1839) 710 opposition to sport 531 social theory: North Hinksey road improvement 531, 691; respected in labour movement 643; social role of state, teaching on 691 Whistler libel suit 510 works mentioned: Modern Painters (5 vols., 1834±60) 508±9; Unto This Last (1860) PC 7 quoted 35, 221 mentioned 225, 230, 278, 761, PC 57 Ruskin School of Drawing (1871) 508±11 passim Drawing Mastership 508 merged with School of Science and Art 509 trustees 508 mentioned PC 7 `Ruskinian colouring' PC 14 Russell, Bertrand Arthur, succ. as 3rd Earl Russell 1931 (1872±1970) 616 Russell, Lord John, cr. Earl Russell 1861 (1792±1878) 163, 444 Russell Club 155, 811, 858±9 Russia 581, 583, 859±60 Ambassador 807 Union debate on Triple Entente (1914) 859±60 Russian language 425 rustication 140

index Rutherford, Ernest, cr. Lord Rutherford 1931 (1871±1937) 465 Rutland 749 sacerdotalism 58, 90 Sacks, Jonathan, Chief Rabbi (b. 1948): quoted 27 Sackville West, William Edward (1830±1905) 184, 190 Sacred Books of the East, see Max MuÈller: work mentioned Sadler, (Sir) Michael Ernest, Kt 1919 (1861±1943), Master of Univ. Coll. (1923±34) 610 Bryce Commission member 637 national conference on state of secondary schooling (1893) 637 Toynbee Hall 671 Univ. extension, cttee for 600, 636, 666±9 quoted 603 mentioned 680, 681 St Alban Hall 119, 755 St Aldate's Church 107, 709±10 St Andrews, University of 29, 39, 90, 555, 655 St Barnabas's Boys' School 559 St Barnabas's Church 647 St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 298 St Catharine's Club 196 St Catharine's College, Cambridge 124 St Catharine's Hall 196 St Catherine's College, Oxford 21±2 St Cuthbert 808 St Cyres, Viscount (1869±1926) PC 31 St Ebbe's 676, 751 St Ebbe's Boys' School 558±9 St Edmund Hall: diary of passman (1885±8) 153 football in both codes 524 possibility of absorption by Queen's (1903) 119 proportion of public school men in 551 resignation of Barrow 35, 36 right to self-determination con®rmed (1913) 119 mentioned 124, 447, 7834 St Edward's School 185, 720 St Frideswide 828 St Giles's, (`the Giler'), 107, 166, 178, 304, 549, 676, 679, 736, 759, 833, PC 17 St Hilda's, Cheltenham 263±4 St Hilda's College (formerly Hall) Plate 52, PC 52 Anglican af®liation 250, 580 entrants: from Cheltenham Ladies' Coll. 288, PC 52; tradesmen's daughters barred in early years 581 etiquette 290

969

foundation (1893) 250, 263±4 graduates working in empire 706 most domestic and genteel of the Halls 288 only Hall started by initiative from outside Univ. 263 small bequest from Miss Beale 252 suffrage society 303 mentioned 237, 258, 279, 280, 289, 304 St Hugh's College (formerly Hall) Plate 51, PC 51 Anglican af®liation 250, 580±1 becomes `College' (1911) 263 buildings by Buckland and Haywood 758 country vicarage atmosphere 287 foundation by Miss Wordsworth (1886) 250, 262 graduates working in Empire 706 mixed dances 278 moves to new collegiate building (1916) 263 proposal that LMH should absorb resisted (1893±4) 262±3 records of students' backgrounds 581 suffrage society 303 wealthy patron 252, 301 mentioned 258, 289 St James's Church, Piccadilly PC 56 St John's College: buildings: Canterbury Quadrangle 758; Mansel House 754; Rawlinson Building 757; St Giles front 751, 753, 758, 759 careers of graduates: in Empire 706; Natural Science graduates 494 Table 20.3 chaplains 105 closed scholarships 552 creation of JCR 151 expansion of student numbers 122 fellows: elected under old statutes 131; reductions in clerical fellowships 86 ®nance: coll. contributions 86±7; and Forestry School 475 land: North Oxford estate 122; sells site for Keble Coll. 173, 177±8 Presidency: election (1909) 624; quali®cation for 130 societies: Archery Club 153; King Charles Club 153; Sunday-Night Essays 152 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; percentage of rowing men (1883) 521 mentioned 173, 209, 258, 476, 757 St John's College, Agra 712 St John's College, Cambridge 70, 183, 485 St Leonard's School 295 St Margaret's Road 263 St Mary Hall 119, 588, 689, 731 St Mary Magdalen Church 38, 733

970

index

St Mary Magdalen Hall, see Magdalen Hall St Mary and St Nicholas Church, Littlemore 732 St Mary's (University Church): Laud's porch, gatepiers 746 Pugin windows 736 re®tting 732 restoration of spire and interior 746 Univ. sermon 34, 104, 107, 229 Vicars: Ffoulkes 100; Marriott 172; Newman 732 mentioned 107, 177, 195, 689, 711, 755 St Paul (d. a d 62) 38, 98±101, 783, PC 35 St Paul's Cathedral 226, 229 St Paul's Church, Oxford 732 St Paul's School 167, 216 St Peter-le-Bailey 107, 751 St Peter's College 689 St Stephen's House 107±8 Saint-SaeÈns, (Charles) Camille (1835±1921) 230, 828 Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of (1830±1903); Viscount Cranborne (1865±8), Chancellor (1869±1903) Plate 1, PC 1 and abolition of Tests 22±9, PC 1 attitude to O. contrasted with Gladstone's 67±8 as Chancellor 27, 67, 74, 76, 181±2, 452, 631±2, 822, PC 1; installation, honorary degree list 31 church patronage 632 distaste for univ. life 632 evidence to Devonshire Commission 480 on Ewart Cttee 68, 69 fellow of All Souls 219 maintainance of clerical fellowships 23±4, 55±6 Pres. of British Association 482 as Prime Minister 219; success in khaki election (1900) 812 religious faith 30; sees threats to belief in Greats course 27, 30±1, 57, 66, 90, 94 Secretary of State for India 74 Selborne Commission legislation 75±6, 93 speaks at Keble against luxury and materialism (1876) 138 strong scienti®c interests 31, 67, 493 quoted 27, 74, 76, 118, 161±2, 251, 482, 632 mentioned 41, 61, 87, 128, 186, 187, 226, 228, 229, 452 Salter, Arthur, Lord Salter 1953 (1881±1975) 817 Salter & Son, boatbuilders 205, 529±30 Salvation Army 828 Salviati, Antonio (1816±1890) 738 Salvin, Anthony (1799±1881) 736, 737, 767 Sampson, Edward Frank (1848±1918) 226±7

Samuel, Herbert Louis, cr. Visc. Samuel 1937 (1870±1963) 374, 815, 872 Sandars, Thomas Collett (1825±94) 317±18 Sanday, William (1843±1920): Margaret Prof. of Divinity 787, 856 Prof. of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture 617 warned about attending opening of Manchester Coll. 635 mentioned 502, 620 Sandford, Charles Waldegrave (1828±1903) 224 Sandford 520 Sandford of Merton, see Coke Sandon, Viscount, see Harrowby, 2nd Earl of Sankey, Ira David (1840±1908) 139 Sanskrit 231, 313, 354, 415±16, 419, 699±700, 701, 714 Sarajevo 862 Saturday Review 8, 9 Saunders, George (1762±1839) 763 Save the Children Fund 284 Savile Road 757 Saxon, see Anglo-Saxon Saxons 693 Sayce, Archibald Henry (1845±1933) Plate 25 PC 25 extraordinary Prof. of Assyriology 355, 417, 610±11 incessant travel 354±5, 419 linguistic ability 354±5 supporter of movement for endowment of research PC 25 works mentioned: Commentary on Herodotus (1883) 352, 355; Comparative Assyrian Grammar (1872) 354 quoted 53 mentioned 132, 345 Sayers, Dorothy Leigh (1893±1957) 292, 299, 440, 589, PC 58 Scandinavian (languages) 613 scepticism 18, 20 Schiller, Ferdinand Canning (1864±1937) Plate 37, PC 37 admission of working men: fear of lowering standards 847 attacks on Idealism 324 misconceptions about O. 604 pragmatist 818 psychology, interest in 614 quoted 604±5, 614±15 Schiller, Johann Cristoph von (1759±1805): 425±6 Schlich, (Sir) William, KCIE 1909 (1840±1925) Prof. of Forestry 475, 702 efforts to achieve Hon. School status for forestry 475

index Schliemann, Heinrich (1822±90) 67, 132, 336, 345, 355 Schmitz, Leonhard (1807±90) 333 scholarships, colleges and University: age of scholars 6 annual competition 125±7 Asquith Commission's conclusions on effect of opening 588 criticisms of system: complaints of classical bias 636; headmasters' complaints at anarchy 126±7, 822; not awarded where most needed 6, 75, 609, 826, 842, 848 Curzon recommends rationalizing system (1909) 835 effect of increasing number (1860s) 14 limitations to regions or schools 6, 69, 84, 551±2, 584, 587 maximum value ®xed at £80 (1882) 588 means of supplementing 588 numbers of college scholarships 126 scholars and exhibitioners (c.1909), steady growth 622 `opening' scholarships, resulting problems (1860s) 6 for research, coll. and Univ. (1909) 615 senior scholarships for postgraduates (from 1880s) 54 social backgrounds of scholars (1912 evidence) 589±90 subjects: great majority in Classics 64±5, 126; law: Vinerian, Eldon (Univ.) 388±9; organ (1859, 1876) 148; science 13, 487, 590 suggested reforms (c.1907) 829, 840 in Wadham Coll. revised statutes (1878) 83±4 women's scholarships fewer and of lower value 581 mentioned 82 Scholes, Percy (1877±1958) 442 School Boards 27 school examinations, see education school-teaching: compulsory Greek 630 Day Training Coll. see Oxford University Day Training College fear of overcrowding of profession 622±3 government certi®cate 558 teacher training 124, 637; teachers' register 555±9; mentioned 260 teachers in the Empire 708±9; ideas and in¯uence 709 women in 243, 245, 293, 295±6, 573, 593, 594 mentioned 160, 165, 282, 493, 593, 607, 614, 625, 668, 706 see also education

971

Schools and Universities on the Continent, see Arnold, Matthew: works mentioned Schuchardt, Hugo Ernestus 421 Schuster, (Sir) George Ernest, KCMG 1926 (1881±1982) 693 Schwegler, Friedrich Carl 316 Schweitzer, Albert (1875±1965): work mentioned: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (trans. 1910) 112 science 457±97 passim aspects attractive to classical scholars 481 building of Univ. Museum 739 `C. for Science, O. for Arts' 457 careers of graduates 492±3 Classical Mods requirement (to 1887) 488 `The Club' supports science 628 coll. system causes problems 481, 485, 487, 491 compulsory Greek 65, 457, 488, 837 condescending attitude of some O. Arts men 496 CUF Delegacy, science under-represented 608 CUF system (1852) less favourable than C. arrangements 487 cultural and institutional resistance to science 481, 485, 491 Darwinism becomes theologically respectable (1884) 60 disadvantaged by 1882 Statutes 487 early scienti®c tradition in O. 486 effect on schools of classical bias 11, 867, 869 Empire better served by O. scientists after First World War 715 encroachment on the Parks 627 entrance examination with science component, not established 64 German univs superior to O. (1905) 701±2 Huxley's view on O. science 13 idea of allocating a coll. to science (early 1870s) 117 Imperial needs, allegation of neglect (1905) 701±2 industry, need to produce scientists for 493 and liberal education 40 modest recovery by O. (after 1900s) 492±3 national science lobby (1860s, 1890s) 480, 483 new buildings provided (1874±1916) 756±7 O. starts slowly in applied science 66, 471, 476, 492 Pass School, little interest in developing 492 popularizing science, interest at O. 492 proposal for School with philosophy (1912) 326, 481

972

index

science (contd ) representatives on Selborne Commission 76, 78, 79, 87 research, often derivative from German scholarship 616 resources for O. science criticized as inadequate (c.1900) 701±2 `Science Area' 761 science traditions in O. 486 science tutors, some colls. unwilling to appoint 137 `scienti®c illiteracy' in O. attacked (1905) 701±2 scientists in coll. life, fellows and undergraduates 495±6 state spending, great increase demanded after Boer War 480 syllabus unattractive (1880s, 1890s) 492 wartime investigation, report (1918) 869 Westminster Gazette articles (1907) 827±8 women assistants in research 469±70 mentioned 91, 625 see also Natural Sciences School Scotland, Scots: at Balliol 164, 216, 801 education, attitude to 602 matriculations to O. double (1885±1910) 125 Royal Commission on Physical Training (1902) 541 sons of Scottish peers 582 mentioned 85, 125, 165, 168, 193, 240, 293, 584, 803 Scott, Charles Prestwich (1846±1932) 349, 697±8 Scott, (Sir) George Gilbert, Kt 1872 (1811±78): All Souls: Chapel restoration 769 Cathedral restoration 747 Exeter Coll.: Broad St front 737, 767; Chapel, 737, 767, Plate 15, PC 14, PC 15; further buildings 767; Library 767 Magdalen: Founder's Tower restored 767 Martyrs' Memorial (1841±3) 733, 766 Merton Coll.: Hall restored 769 New Coll.: Chapel restoration 770; Hall roof, etc. 768; Holywell building 746, 769, PC 21 restoration work 746, 767, 768 St Mary's Congregation House 769 Univ. Coll. Library, etc. 742, 767 Scott, George Gilbert (the younger) (1839±97) 747, 751, 753, 758, 759, 770, PC 17 Scott, (Sir) Giles Gilbert, Kt 1924 (1880±1960) 759, PC 17, PC 56

Scott, John Oldrid (1841±1913) 747, 748, 756, 770, PC 59 Scott, Robert (1811±87), Master of Balliol (1854±70): Dean of Rochester 161 Delegate of the Press 647, 648, 649 disapproval of Univ. reform 159 high and dry Anglican 160 `Liddell and Scott'(1843) 221, 330 mentioned 17, PC 18 Scottish academies 216 Scottish Education Department 168 Scottish Universities 125 chairs in education 555 contrast with residential univs 541 democratic recruitment 599 lecture system 88 opening of degrees to women 264 percentage of population educated 602 Royal Commission on (1892) 264 support for poor students 193±2 mentioned 576 see also Aberdeen; Edinburgh; Glasgow; St Andrews scouts 146 Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis 655 Second World War 169, 344, 384, 391, 809 Secondary School Examinations Council (1917) 562, 876 sectarianism 107 secularization: of endowments 586 of fellowships 56, 339, 609 optimism about religious life of O. 108, 143 proposals of reformers 632 of theology degrees 110±11, 625, 822, 834, 852±3 women's higher education, relation to 251 seismology 468, 470 Selbie, William Boothby (1862±1944), Princ. of Mans®eld Coll. (1909±32) 635 Selborne, 2nd Earl of, see Palmer, William Waldegrave Selborne, Lord (cr. 1872), Roundell Palmer, Earl of Selborne 1882 (1812±95): chairman of Commission (1877) 76, 86 Lord Chancellor (1880) 389 resignation 85 mentioned 23, 79 Selborne Commission 79±95 passim advancement of knowledge 615 agricultural depression, effect not considered 487, 609 All Souls 1882 Statutes 213 anomalies not all removed 64 Bill introduced (May 1876) 77

index clerical fellowships 55, 88 Commissioners con®rmed 77 colls: advantages and drawbacks of coll. system 52, 55; Goldwin Smith's respect for system (1877) 55; Halls to be incorporated in 119; important vehicles for reform 84±5, 629; `spoliation' of (Brodrick) 53 and CU Fund 53, 487 effect of decisions 3, 52±3 entrance examination, with science element, not achieved 64 evidence on: clerical fellows 56; engineering 65; law and history school 390; medical study 8; music, degrees disparaged 432; philosophy 26; private tuition 134 examinations 51 `fellow and tutor' 18 formulation of reform aims in Gazette (1878) 81 intercollegiate lecture scheme 45±99, 48, 49 joint sessions with C. colleagues 82 language needs 45, 416 local (univ.) colls, Jowett urges involvement with 662 new posts 610 Non-Collegiates, Censor 198 O. Univ. Press, proposed approach on unremunerative books 650±1 professoriate: `billeting' of professors 132; and English Language and Literature Professorship 397; proposal to divide Camden Professorship (1882) 353; in science 460; and tutors 52 readerships 52, 74, 86 research 53 Salisbury's attempt to upset Lit. Hum. Statute 57 scholarships, annual maximum value ®xed 126 setting-up of Commission 75±6 tutors 50±1 voting rights in Congregation 64 women, admission not discussed 241 mentioned 68, 88, 392, 452, 472, 602, 608, 612, 626, 823, PC 21 Selby-Bigge, (Sir) (Lewis) Amherst, Bt 1919 (1860±1951): on scope of proposed Commission (1912) 842 quoted 842±3 Select Charters etc., see Stubbs: works mentioned Select Letters of Cicero, see Watson, Albert: work mentioned Select Preachers 34

973

Selections from Polybius, see StrachanDavidson: works mentioned Selincourt, Ernest de (1870±1943) 405, 408, 411 Sellar, William Young (1825±90) 330 Sellon, Priscilla Lydia (1821±76) 242 Selwyn, George Augustus (1809±78) 172 Selwyn College, Cambridge 183, 188±9 Seme, Pixley ka Isaka (1881±1951), founder of African National Congress 804 Semitic languages 413, 423, 612 Senior Common Rooms 751 Serbia 807, 871, 872±3 sermons, see University Sermon servitors 45, 229, 519, 535±6, 584, 586±7 settlements 189, 290, 299, 642, 670±2, 844 Sewell, James Edwards (1810±1903), Warden of New Coll. (1860±1903), V.-C. (1874±8): attempts to regulate behaviour of chapel choir 436±7 deportment 130 enforces rules against dogs 138 Sewell, William (1804±74) 37 suggests funding for professorships outside O. 662 work mentioned: Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato 37 Shackleton, (Sir) David James, KCB 1917 (1863±1938) 684, 687 Shadwell, Charles Lancelot (1840±1919), Provost of Oriel (1905±14) 481 Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of, succ. 1851, previously Visc. Ashley (1801±85) 171 Shairp, John Campbell (1819±85) 39, 90 Shakespeare (1564±1616) 404, 650, PC 33, PC 69 Shaw, George Bernard (1856±1950): on Henry Sweet 421 socialist meeting broken up 155 work mentioned: Pygmalion 421 quoted 421, 844 Shaw, (George) William Hudson (1859±1944): Balliol fellowship 669 univ. extension lecturer 666±70, 670, 684 on need for Univ.'s ®nancial contribution to extension 667 quoted 667, 669 mentioned 301 Shaw Lefevre, George John, cr. Lord Eversley 1906 (1831±1928) 247 Shaw Lefevre, Madeleine Septimia (1835±1914), Princ. of Somerville Hall (1878/9±89) 247, 259, 260, 273, 278, 290 Plate 50, PC 50 Shaw Stewart, John Archibald (1829±1900) 176, 178, 186, 190 Shaw-Stewart, Patrick (1888±1917): on exclusion of Namier 802

974

index

Shaw-Stewart, Patrick (contd ) quoted 802 Shef®eld, University College (from 1905 University) of 603 Sheldonian Theatre 177, 241, 257, 429, 430, 496, 664, 732, 758, 828 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792±1822) 401 Sheppard, Hugh Richard Lawrie (1880±1937) 787 Sherborn, Charles William (1831±1912) PC 5 Sherborne School 129, 545 Sherrington, (Sir) Charles Scott, GBE 1922 (1857±1952): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Physiology 466, 505±6 outstanding contribution to research 505±6 works mentioned: Integrative Action of the Nervous System 506; Mammalian Physiology (1919) 506 quoted 466 mentioned 492, 507 Sherwin-White, Adrian Nicholas (1911±93) 342 Shields, Cuthbert, see Laing, Robert Ship Street 757 Shirley, Walter Waddington (1828±66): plan for foundation of Keble Coll. 173±4, 176 mentioned 648 Shrewsbury School 216, 226 Shrimpton, Thomas 253, PC 25, PC 28, PC 29 Shropshire 552 Sibree, James (1836±1929) 318 Sidgwick family 305 Sidgwick, Arthur (1840±1920) Plates 33, 37, PC 33, PC 37 Chairman of O. Liberal Party 302, 624 critic of empire 698 encouragement of trades unionism 642 Liberal Unionism debate 150 O. correspondent in Journal of Education 604 Pelican Record on 621 Reader in Greek 621 Secretary, later President of AEW 249±50, 256 on Somerville Council 249 teacher-training supported by 556±7 women's suffrage supported by 249±50, 301 quoted 265, 280±1 Sidgwick, Mrs (Charlotte Sophia) (1853±1924) 249 Sidgwick, Mrs (Eleanor Mildred) (1845±1936) 79, 249, 265, 304 Sidgwick, Henry (1838±1900): comparison with T. H. Green 322 founder of Newnham 238±9

modernising of undergraduate curriculum 249 opening of degrees to women 265 women's suffage supported by 249±50 mentioned 79, 95, 245, 257, 265, 280 Sidgwick, Margaret (c.1881±1948) 249 Sidgwick, Nevil Vincent (1873±1952) 464 Sidgwick, Rose (1877±1918) 249 Sidgwick, William Carr (1834±1919) 238, 246±7 Sierra Leone 714 Simeon, Charles (1759±1836) 711 Simon, Brian 639 Simon, John Allsebrook, cr. Visc. Simon 1940 (1873±1954) 220, 563, 872 Simpson, Frank Gerald (1882±1955) 616 Singapore 549 Singer, Charles Joseph (1876±1960) 497 Singer, Mrs 497 Sinister Street, see Mackenzie: work mentioned Skene, Felicia Mary (1821±99) 242 Skidmore, Francis Alfred (1816±96) 738, 740 Skinner, James (1818±81) 175 Skipworth, Margaret Grey (1883±1964) PC 65 Slade, Felix (1790±1868) 508, 509 Slade School of Art 508 slavery, slave trade 360, 692, 694 Smirke, (Sir) Robert, Kt 1832 (1781±1867) 732, 765 Smirke, Sydney (1798±1877) 768 Smith, Adam (1723±90) 316 Smith, Arthur Lionel (1850±1924), Master of Balliol (1916±24): Ford's Lecturer (1905) 375 innovation of amalgamated clubs 528±9 Junior Proctor (1883) 139, 199 King's Mound 754 organizes meetings of tutors on reform 833 petitions to Chancellor 831, 840 some material for his lectures unchanged over many years 373, 815 sport encouraged by 527 as teacher 374±5, 377 the O. ideal 374±5 Univ. extension 664 WEA: on joint cttee of inquiry 684, 687; organizes summer meeting 847 on women students' disadvantages 286 work mentioned: Maitland (1908) 375 quoted 283, 286, 373, 529, 624±5, 723±4, 868 mentioned 261±2, 366, 369, 370, 372±3, 376, 379, 617, 672, 713, 806, 816, 836 Smith (Arthur) Lionel Forster (1880±1972) 806±7 Smith, David Nichol (1875±1962):

index Cttee for English Studies 411 Goldsmith's Reader in English 408 Smith, Eleanor Elizabeth (1822±96): failure of lecture scheme for ladies 238 management cttee of Radcliffe In®rmary 242 member of School Board 242 Smith, Frederick Edwin, Earl of Birkenhead 1922 (1872±1930) 389, 395, 548, 640, 803±4, 856, 872 Smith, Gilbert Oswald (1872±1943) Plate 63, PC 63 Smith, Goldwin (1823±1910): Regius Prof. of Modern History 696 Burgon preferred for Oriel fellowship 587 critic of empire 696 educational and political reform, long involvement with 664 on the French language 415 `Manchester School' 696 on Modern History School 42 Stubbs contrasted with 366 supposed portrayal in Lothair 94 quoted 3, 9, 21, 42, 55, 377, 388, 415 mentioned 74, 94, 241, 648, 713 Smith, Henry John Stephen (1826±83) 450±5 passim, Plate 38, PC 38 Savilian Prof. of Geometry 444, PC 38 Burgess election (Nov. 1878) 82, 452, 631 Chairman of Meteorological Council 452 international renown, Berlin and Paris prizes 450, 454 Keeper of Univ. Museum (1874) 452, 501 membership of Devonshire Commission 74, 79, 117, 452, PC 38 membership of Selborne Commission 78±9, 452, PC 38 modern geometry course introduced by 445 papers of 1861, 1875 453±4 president of the Union and Ireland scholar, 450, PC 38 reports on the theory of numbers 453 tribute by Pattison 452 quoted 117, 451 mentioned 91, 238, 443, 446, 462 Smith, Sir Hubert Llewellyn, KCB 1908 (1864±1945) 637, 642, 666, 674 Smith, John Alexander (1863±1939): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy 815 Idealist 323 proposal for degree in science and philosophy 481 psychology, interest in 614 on `relevance' of Greats 815, 818 quoted 815

975

mentioned 816 Smith, Mrs A. L. (Mary Florence) (1855±1946): quoted 243 mentioned 788 Smith, Samuel (1765±1841), Dean of Ch.Ch. (1824±31) 229 Smith, Sydney (1771±1845) 9, 712 Smith, Vincent Arthur (1848±1920): Reader in Indian History 701 work mentioned: Oxford History of India (1919) 701 Smith-Dorrien, (Sir) Horace Lockwood, KCMG 1890 (1858±1930) PC 74 Snell Foundation, scholars 125, 160, 164, 193, 720 Sneyd, Lewis (1788±1858), Warden of All Souls' Coll. (1827±58) 209, 210 Snow, Thomas Collins (1852±1926): quoted 631 Snowden, Philip, cr. Visc. Snowden 1931 (1864±1937) 682, 810 Soane, (Sir) John, Kt 1831 (1753±1837) 763 social issues: social analysis 783 social change 62 social class: changing composition of student body 573±91; class differences more obtrusive than those of colour (1900±14) 801±2; `poor scholar's hard road' 6, 577±8, 583±91 see also O.U. class and privilege Social Conditions in Oxford, see Butler, (Christina) Violet Social England, see Traill Social and Political Studies Association's course (1913) 299 social research 673 Social Science Club 642 social sciences, O.'s weakness (c.1891) 616±17 social studies, Barnett House 852 social theory: and Empire 691; and O. Idealism 616 social welfare 634, 635, 639, 641±3 social work (1880s±1914) 94, 856; course (1913) 299 Socialism: meetings broken up 155, 795 mentioned 60, 90, 381, 623, 671, 810, 846, 849, PC 7 Socialist League 642 Society of Antiquaries 294 Society of Oxford Home-Students: Delegacy for Women Students (1910) 269 disadvantaged by collegiate development of Halls 259

976

index

Society of Oxford Home-Students: (contd ) ¯exible curriculum 281 former students working in Empire 706 foundation (1893) 251 Home-Students cttee 251, 269, 270 Roman Catholic students 288 umbrella organization 288 mentioned 258, 270, PC 47 Society of Oxford Women Tutors 285 Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 340 Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 340, 355 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings 759 Society for Women's Suffrage (Cambridge) 302 Sociology 326, 783 Socrates (469±399 b c ) 32, 37, 40, 161, 322, 620 Soddy, Frederick (1877±1956) 465 Solicitor-General 216 solicitors 592 Sollas, Hertha 469±70 Sollas, Igerna 469±70 Sollas, William Johnson (1849±1936): Prof. of Geology 468±9 mentioned 469, 477, 502 Some Problems of Greek History, see Toynbee, Arnold Joseph: work mentioned Somervell, Donald Bradley, cr. Lord Somervell 1954 (1889±1960) 216 Somerville, Mrs (Mary) (1780±1872) 246 Somerville, (Sir) William, KBE 1926 (1860±1932): Sibthorpian Professor of Rural Economy 474±5 Somerville College (formerly Hall) Plates 50, 53, 58, 73, PC 50, PC 53, PC 58, PC 73 becomes `College' (1894) 258, PC 48 buildings: Hall (1880) Plate 53, PC 53; Hall (1913) 259, 758; JCRs Plate 57, PC 57; Library 259, 755, PC 48; Maitland Building 758, PC 58; porters' lodge and gatehouse 259; West Buildings 757, PC 57 character and composition: `dressiness' discouraged 279; ethos of liberal Christianity 247; ®rst Indian student (Cornelia Sorabji) 714; Indian princesses 581; no bias towards humanities 283; Nonconformist students 247, 580; numbers 251; professional image 287; records of students' backgrounds 581 cttee to establish non-denominational Hall (1879) 58, 94±5, 246±7

competitive entrance examination (from 1908) 280 Council 758 degrees, for women, S. favours unitedly (1895±6) 264 differences between LMH and 261 ®rst Hall to acquire tutors 249, 260, PC 48 former students: novelists 294, 589; prominent in Missionary Settlement, Bombay 712; working in Empire 706 Hebdomadal Council: offer of representation on coll.'s governing body accepted (1893) 264 research fellowships 469 rules for mixing with undergraduates (1909) 275 societies: Associated Prigs 278; suffrage society 303 mentioned 60, 238±63, 709, 751, 862 Somme Battle, see First World War Sorabji, Cornelia (1866±1954) 298, 714 Sorbonne 452 Soulsby, Lucy Helen (1856±1927) 262 Sources for Greek History etc., see Hill, George Sources for Roman History 133±70 b c , see Greenidge: work mentioned South Africa: All Souls connections with 219±20 Chinese Labour question 694±5 Keble graduates in 706 liberals 713 `Milner's Kindergarten' 694, 707, PC 30 Minister of Native Affairs 713 O. Univ. Press branch set up 656 schools and colls to provide Rhodes Scholars 718 South African Union 695 students at O. 713 Univ.: Witwatersrand 713 women graduates teaching in 706 work of Community of the Resurrection 711 mentioned 85, 479, 655, 692, 697, 701, 703, 720, 725, 785, 833 South America 185 South Kensington 467, 471 South Kensington Branch Museum 500±1 South Parks Road 721 Southampton 560 Souttar, James Andrew (1840±1921) 757, 774 Spain, Spanish 238, 647 Spanish (language) 415, 613 Old Spanish 417 Speaker of the House of Commons, see Lowther

index Speed, Launcelot (1860±1931) PC 62 Speer, Robert Elliott (1867±1947) 711 Spencer, 5th Earl, succ. 1857 (1835±1910) 475 Spencer, Dorothy (1896±1969) 292 Spencer, Herbert (1820±93) 320, 805 Herbert Spencer Lecture 805±6 Spencer, (Sir) Walter Baldwin, KCMG 1916 (1860±1929) 485, 495, 501, 641, 704 Spender, John Alfred (1862±1942): Editor of Westminster Gazette 681, 824 illness during ®nals 789 Univ. reform 681 quoted 793 Spens, Janet (1876±1963) 284, 285, 292 spies 354 Spooner, William Archibald (1844±1930), Warden of New Coll. (1903±24) Plate 35, PC 35 ®rst non-Wykehamist Warden since coll.'s foundation (1903) PC 35 on Hegel 318 member of Christian Social Union 642 opposition to: anthropology Honour School 502; business diploma 855±6; opening of BA to women 264 on the reading for Greats (1860s) 315±16 `Spoonerisms' PC 35 teaching for Greats 315 quoted 262, 316, 642, 855 mentioned 246, 317, 600, 706, 858 sport 517±43 passim games, etc.: association football 95, 518, 523±4, 531, 533, 540, 627, 846, Plate 63, PC 63; badminton 518; bicycling 518; billiards 518; boxing 517, 518; cricket 517, 519±20, 523, 526, 527, 533, 627, Varsity match 156, 517, 538±9, victory over Australians (1884) 542, Plate 62, PC 62; fencing 518; golf 518, 533, 534; gymnastics 289; hockey, 289, 518, 528, 533, PC 65; ice hockey 518; lacrosse 289, 518, 531, 533; lawn tennis 518, 531, 533, 534; racquets 518; real tennis 205, 518 ; riding 519; rugby football 125, 518, 523±4, 531, 534, 540, 627, 860, 870, O.±C. rugby match (Varsity match) 540, Plate 64, PC 64; shooting 518, 519; skating 518; steeplechasing 518; tennis 289, PC 62; water polo 518; yachting 518 general: advantage of prowess, in career 531; `aesthetes' and `hearties' 799±800, Plate 29, PC 29; amalgamated clubs and senior treasurers 151, 518, 524, 528, 531; Americans note: O. sport is for `the many' 542; athletes' privileges 535;

977

athletics 518, 526, 533; bene®cial effect on coll. life 149, 537; the Blue 517, 518, 536, 800: capacity to transcend public school loyalties 524; changes in organization 528; coll. sport for women 289±90; colonial students 715; decline of athleticism (1910±14) 534±5; differences in physique between classes 540; disapproval of emphasis on sport spreads among dons (1900±14) 526, 799; early 19th cent. sport not located in colls 520; educational purpose 535; emphasis on `character' 541; equivalent of Blues for women 289; expensive and socially exclusive up to 1850s 518; external support for 531; hunting 517, 519, 525, 792; less strenuous games favoured (from 1900) 534; management of clubs 145; many new sports (after 1870) 533; means of promoting coll. unity 154, 799; new demand for sports facilities (late 19th cent.) 756; O. sporting events of national interest 538±40; older meaning of `sport' in 1850s 517; participation and interest of dons 527±8; participation the keynote 542±3; pavilions, Univ. and colls 531, 756; prominence in residential univs 541; public schools, in¯uence on O. sport 518±20; Rhodes Scholars' in¯uence on inter-collegiate games 724±5; the `scholar-athlete' 800; serious disruption of academic work 485, 537; `spectatorism' PC 62; sporting `cliques' (1897) 533; sports grounds 185, 518, 526; success enhances standing of colls 527; team sports: `integrative and democratic' 519; `meritocratic', old-style ranking irrelevant 535; symbolize new pattern of undergraduate sociability 519 rowing 520±2 passim, Plates 59±61, 68, PC 59±61, PC 68; appeals to `college patriotism' 533±4; The Boat Race 517, 538, 543, 800, 860; bump suppers 139, 535, 788, Plate 68, PC 68; bumpingraces 143, 522; Captain of Boats, election procedure and duties 154, 535; coll. barges 526, 529±30, 531, 756; considered an art 534; Eights 196, 241, 279, 517, 520±22, 526, 537, 860, Plate 60, PC 60; Eights Week 522, 535, PC 29; ®rst intercollegiate competition 520; fours 521; hall dinner at 7 pm helps rowing men 525±6; head of the river 790, 860; high level of participation 521; O.'s `®rst love' 519; pre-eminence challenged, early 20th cent. 533±4, 799±800; qualities required by 526; running with

978

index

sport (contd ) the coll. boat 792; St Hilda's `a keen rowing college' 289; Torpids (`toggers') 517, 520±2, 543, 724, 792, 860, PC 29, Plate 61, PC 61; Univ. Boat Club, grant (1881) 527, 532±3; Univ. Boathouse 756; Plate 59, PC 59; Univ. eight dominated by Etonians 522; mentioned 63, 95, 289, 804 mentioned 62, 94, 188 Sportsman 870 Spottiswoode, William (1825±83) 448, 449 Spurgeon, Caroline (1869±1942) 296 `Spy', see Ward, (Sir) Leslie SS Ivernia 724 Stacey, John H.: manager of paper mill 649±50 quoted 650 Stadler, Ernst (1883±1914) 808 Staffordshire 209, 760 Stainer, (Sir) John, Kt 1888 (1840±1901): Heather Prof. of Music 442 mentioned 438 Stallbaum, Johann Gottfried 316 Stamp, Ernest (1869±1942) PC 32 Standard English, see pronunciation Stanley, Lord, see Derby, 17th Earl of Stanley of Alderley, 4th Lord 1869 (1827±1903) 20 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn (1815±81) Regius Prof. of Ecclesiastial History 223 election as Select Preacher (1872) PC 11 quoted 41 mentioned 97, 128, 223 Stanley, (Beatrice) Venetia (1887±1948) 873 Stanley, Lord (Edward Montagu Cavendish) (1894±1938) 806 Stanley, (Sir) Henry Morton, GCB 1899 (1841±1904) 711 Starkie, Enid Mary (1897±1970) 292 state scholarships (1920) 876 State Serum Institute, Copenhagen 507 statistics: O. graduates' contribution to development 448 mentioned 617 Statutes, University: Commissions, statutes resulting: Act of 1877 (statutes 1882) 55, 64, 609; Act of 1923 (statutes 1924±6) 821, 876 Examinations: Lit. Hum. (1800) 311±12; Mathematics (1800) 444; Music (1911) 433 Laudian Statutes (1636) 311 residence: in colls (1808) 730; in lodgings (1868) 21, 163; Unattached students (1868) 194

Responsions, etc.; Colonial and Indian univs 725; foreign univs 725; Summary, certain statutes enacted Nov. 1914 to Jan. 1932 875±6 see also college statutes Stead, William Thomas (1849±1912) 670 Stenning, John Frederick (1868±1959), Warden of Wadham Coll. (1927±38) 862 Stephen, (Sir) Leslie, KCB 1902 (1832±1904) 634 Stephens, Thomas (1549?±1619) 699 Stevenson, George Hope (1880±1952) 341 Stevenson, John James (1831±1908): a founder of Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings 758 Morphological laboratory 756, 774 new respect shown for 17th-cent. architecture 759 Oriel Coll., restoration 775 St John's, repair of Canterbury Quadrangle 758, 772 on unnecessary refacing 759 quoted 759 Stewart, John Alexander (1846±1933) 341, 502 Stewart, (Sir) Robert Prescott, Kt 1872 (1825±94) 430 stick makers 674 Stockport 677 Stocks, John Leofric (1882±1937): support for univ. reform and women's suffrage 270±1, 852 mentioned 796±7 Stocks, Mrs (Mary Danvers), cr. Baroness Stocks 1966 (1891±1975): on Oxford's `sex apartheid' 276, 796±7 quoted 271, 276 mentioned 284 Stokes, Edward (c.1823±63) 230 Stokowski, Leopold (1882±1977) 442 Stone, Lawrence (1919±1999) 206 Stonelake, Edmund (1873±1960) 678 Story-Maskelyne, Mervyn Herbert Nevil (1823±1911): Wayn¯ete Prof. of Mineralogy and Crystallography 451, 468 Keeper of Mineralogy, British Museum 468 mentioned 493 Stowell, Lord (1745±1836) 742 Strachan-Davidson, James Leigh (1843±1916), Master of Balliol Coll. (1907±16): concern to maintain applications 793 on Curzon 833 Finance Statute (1912), backing for 837 ICS examination 346±7, 699 as Master 166±7 `Queen's University', plans for 268, 273

index Tutorial Classes Cttee grant, support for 851 works mentioned: Cicero 347; Problems of the Roman Criminal Law (1912) 347; Selections from Polybius (1888) 342 quoted 833, 851 mentioned 339, 341, 345, 359, 738, 836 Strachey, (Evelyn) John St Loe (1901±63) 215 Strachey, Ray (1880±1940) 306 Strafford Club 811 `Strang, Herbert' 657 Strauss, Henry George, cr. Lord Strauss 1955 (1892±1974) PC 75 Street, George Edmund (1824±81): Jesus Coll. Chapel restoration 768 mentioned 173, 748, 752 Streeter, Burnett Hillman (1874±1937) 111, 787 Strickland, Agnes (1796±1874) 238 strikes 674, 812 Strong, Thomas Banks (1861±1944), Dean of Ch. Ch. (1901±20), V.-C. (1913±17): aim to make House `the home of average Englishmen' 807 an author of 1908 Report 847 Bp of O. (1920) 228 on danger of Commission (1913) 851 on `leading studies' of O. (1916) 497 musical interests 148, 227±8 reading party (1890) 143 secularization of theology degrees 111 unsympathetic to sport 528, 799 as V.-C. 497 and WEA (1907) 681, 684, 685, 687 quoted 221, 497, 636, 685, 807 mentioned 564, 848 The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, see Namier Strutt, John William, succ. 1873 as 3rd Lord Rayleigh (1842±1919) 70, 458 The Stuarts 368 Stubbs, William (1825±1901) Plate 4 PC 4 avoidance of the controversial 369 Bp of Chester 61, 380 Chaplain of Balliol (1877±9) 366±7 a dull lecturer 47, PC 4 from servitor to Honorary Student of Ch.Ch. 45, 229±30 High Church tory 43, 368±9 the History School: on division of Law and History School 389±90; his contribution to the School 365±9, PC 4; history contrasted with Classics 364; inaugural lecture 43; reassurance given by appointment 43; Regius Professorship (1866) 43, PC 4 not a narrow nationalist 44

979

on `Teutonic' origins of English institutions 692 on `tutorial bias' 367 works mentioned: Constitutional History of England down to 1485 (1873±8) 365, 367, 817; Select Charters etc. (1870) 365, 366, 380 quoted 43, 44, 45, 230, 363, 364, 366±7, 369, 390 mentioned 41, 46, 88, 369, 375, 376, 377, 398, 617 Stubbs Society 88, 380±1 Student Christian Movement 57, 108±9 Student's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Oxford (1873 and subsequent edns.) 336 1913 Handbook 814 Studer, Paul (1879±1927) 417 Studies of Colonial Nationalism ( Jebb, 1905) 696 Studies of the Greek Poets, see Symonds: work mentioned Studies in the History of the Renaissance, see Pater, Walter: works mentioned Studies of Roman Imperialism, see Arnold, William: work mentioned Studies in Secondary Education, see Acland, Arthur: work mentioned The Subjection of Women, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned submarines 506 Sudan 168, 355, 703, 706±7 Sudan Political Service 703 Suess, E. 469±70 Das Antlitz der Erde (1904±24) 469±70 suffrage, see women's suffrage Suggestions on Academical Organisation, see Pattison, Mark: works mentioned Sumerian 354 summer schools 165 Sumner, John Bird (1780±1862), Visitor of All Souls 212 Sutherland, Gillian 244 Swansea 678, 869 Swayne, William Shuckburgh (1862±1941) 99 Sweet, Henry (1845±1912): career 420±3 opposition to Modern Language School 424±5 Reader in Phonetics 611 quoted 420, 421 mentioned 651 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837±1909) 423, 616 Swindon 476, 589 Sydney University, see Australia Sykes, Ella Constance (d. 1939) 294

980

index

Sylvester, James Joseph (1814±97): Savilian Prof. of Geometry 444, 455 admitted to C. 444 deputation on religious tests 444 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, see Dodgson: works mentioned Syme, (Sir) Ronald, Kt 1959 (1903±89) 342, 357 Symonds, John Addington (1840±93): implicated in homosexual affair 35 not nominated for professorship of poetry 38 sexuality in Greek art and literature 34 work mentioned: Studies of the Greek Poets, (1873, 1876) 34, 38 mentioned 36, 38, 244, 331 Symons, Benjamin Parsons (1785±1878), Warden of Wadham Coll. (1831±71) 128 syndicalism 643, 853 Syntagma, see Heineccius Syriac 302 see also Payne Smith A System of Logic, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned Tacitus (c.a d 55±after 115): works mentioned: Agricola 342; Annals 336, 342; Germania 342 mentioned 316 Taine, Hippolyte (1828±93): complains about O. lecture audience 418 opinion of O. scholarship 419 on street vice 795 view of sport 518 Tait, Archibald Campbell (1811±82): non-collegiate students (1852) 193 opening of Keble Chapel 187, PC 16 quoted 55, 187±8 mentioned 17, 91, 171 Tait, James (1863±1944) 363, 381 Talbot, Edward Stuart (1844±1934) 178±90 passim Warden of Keble Coll. (1870±88) Hall for women, promotes plan for 246, 250 inter-collegiate scheme of lectures in modern history 47 on Liddell 226 O. House, Bethnal Green 672 quoted 19, 178±9, 188, 226 mentioned, 20, 74, 139, 247, 257, 287, PC 75 Talbot, Gilbert Walter Lyttelton (1891±1915) Plate 75, PC 75 Talbot, John Gilbert (1835±1910) 176, 178, 179, 228, 246, 631, 633 Talbot, Mrs (Lavinia, neÂe Lyttelton) (1849±1939): on cttee to found women's Hall 245±6

marriage 182 quoted 178±9, 182, 184, 189 mentioned 181, 190, 244 Talbot, Mrs (Meriel Sarah, neÂe Lyttelton) (1840±1925) 178 Talbot, Neville Stuart (1879±1943) 112, 794 Tamil 415 The Taming of the Shrew 238 Tapper, Michael John (1886±1963) 738 Tapper, (Sir) Walter John, KCVO 1935 (1861±1935) 738 Tariff Reform 632, 838 Tarr, Francis Nathaniel (1887±1915) PC 64 Taunton Commission, see Commissions Tawney, Richard Henry (1880±1962): admission of working men to colls as undergraduates 847 classes at Longton and Rochdale 684, 849 criticisms of Curzon's report 835 educated at Rugby 167 Extension Delegacy lecturer 825 as historian 384 investigations of 575 Labour party education programme 643 pupil of A. L. Smith 374 reform `conspiracy' (1905) 681±2, 825±6 Royal Commission proposed: attempts to force issue of (1912) 848±9; briefs deputations requesting (1910±14) 841 in WEA national leadership 687 Westminster Gazette articles (`Lambda') 681, 826±7 quoted 643, 683, 688, 835, 845±6, 847, 848 mentioned 270, 786, 818, 853 Tax Resistance League 304 Taylor, Edward Francis Lawrence (b. 1892) PC 74 Taylor bequest 413, 415, 734 Taylor Institution: competition to choose architect (1839± 40) 734 Curators of 285, 417, 611 Randolph Galleries 734±5 Raphael Gallery 734 Taylorian Scholarship Examiner 238 Taylorian Teachers 415, 416, 424; lecturer 417 mentioned 399, 418, 629, 760 Taylor Scholarships 423 Taylor, (Sir) Robert, Kt 1782±3 (1714±88) 734 Taylor, Susette Martha (d. 1920) 294 TCC, see Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee Teachers' University Association 558 Technical Instruction Acts (1889, 1891) 474, 636 Technische Hochschulen 638, 865

index technology 499 Telugu 415 temperance movement 319 Temple, Frederick (1821±1902): Archbp. of Canterbury 634 Bampton Lecturer (1884) 97; recognition of Darwinism 60 Bp of Exeter 450±1 scheme for local examinations (1857) 571, 661±2 work mentioned: contribution to Oxford Essays (1856) 559±60 quoted 562, 571, 661±2 Temple, William (1881±1944): Archbp. of Canterbury 634 contributor to Foundations 111±12 on Curzon 834 doctrinal doubts 787 Headmaster of Repton 825 `Holy Lunches' 825±6 as lecturer 815±16 President of WEA 633±4, 687, 849 in reform `conspiracy' (1905) 681, 825, 827 Secondary School Examinations Council chaired by 562 on univs' co-operation with Labour 845 quoted 106, 633, 813, 816±17, 834, 845 mentioned 99, 270, 610, 786 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne BronteÈ, 1848) 657 Tennyson, Alfred, cr. Lord Tennyson 1884 (1809±92) 36, 253, 286, 690 Territorial Army 810, 860 Tertullian (b. c.150) 98 `Teutonic' attitude to coloured peoples 694 theatre 35, 627 theological colleges 104, 108 theology: admission of women to examinations (1893) 257 ceasing to be `a protected discipline' (c.1908) 103 clerical fellows, reduction in number of 55 compulsory Greek seen as a bulwark 630 degree, seen as vocational quali®cation 98±9 as degree subject, not highly regarded (1887) 99 development of historical and critical school 617 Faculty of 93, 635 fellows teaching, numbers (Michaelmas 1892) 133 Honour School: 1875 examiners 100±1; 1895 failure rate 99; clerical examiners 110, 111, 875; creation of (1870) 97±8; early conservativism 98; ®rsts taken by

981

nonconformists 104; and `higher' critical issues 100, 110; syllabus 98; mentioned 612 increased importance of essay work (1880±1900) 135 liberal theology 97, 102±3 non-Anglican scholars and teachers 635 O. Society of Historical Theology 102±3 publication of Lux Mundi (1889) 101±2 routes to ®nal honours in 512 Fig. 21C.1 secularization of degrees 110±11, 605±6, 625, 822, 834, 852±3 work derivative from German scholarship 616 Thesiger, Frederick John, succ. as 3rd Baron Chelmsford 1905, cr. Visc. Chelmsford 1921 (1868±1933) 220 Thirty Years War: limit of period for Stubbs's lectures 44 Thirty-nine Articles: mentioned 23, 98, 444 see also religious tests Thiselton-Dyer, (Sir) William Turner, KCMG 1899 (1843±1928) 148, 471, 489 Thomas, Ernest Chester (1850±92) 148 Thompson, James Matthew (1878±1956) 787, 825±6 Thompson, Henry Lewis (1840±1905) 224 Thomson, Arthur (1858±1935) Plate 44, PC 44 Prof. of Human Anatomy 467, 490, 505 no reputation as scientist 505 mentioned 502 Thomson, (Sir) (John) Arthur, Kt 1930 (1861±1933) 473, 618 Thomson, (Sir) Joseph John, Kt 1908 (1856±1940) 458, 488, 496 Thomson, William, see Kelvin, Lord Thorley, George Earlam (1830±1904): evidence to Selborne Commission 134 Thorne, William James (1857±1946) 841 `Thornton, John' 9 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, see Burke Thring, Edward (1821±87) 722 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, see Dodgson: works mentioned Thucydides (c.460±c.395 b c ) 316, 329, 336, 337, 694 Thurs®eld, James Hugh (1871±1944) PC 34 Tiddy, Reginald John Elliott (1880±1916) 411, 826 tiles 750 Tillett, Benjamin (1860±1943) 787, PC 72 Tillyard, Alfred Isaac (1852±1929) 118, 603

982

index

The Times: criticism of Dean of Ch.Ch. (1894) 227 on election of Anson as Warden of All Souls (1881) PC 36 Firth's protest over English School 405 on legislation for reform 682, 835 obituarist 654; Chapman's obituary of Cannan 656 O. correspondent 861±2 `Oxford and the Nation' (1907) 828±30 Prof. Sanday's defence 856 Round Table's in¯uence spread through 695±6 two editors fellows of All Souls 220 quoted 15, 19, 36, 89 mentioned 28, 42, 212, 800, 804±5, 862 Times Book Club 299 Tizard, (Sir) Henry Thomas, KCB 1937 (1885±1959) Pres. of Magdalen Coll. (1942±6) 464, 477, 481, 496 Tod, Marcus Niebuhr (1878±1974) 341, 342, 344 Todd, Constance Mary (1889±1969) 298 Tom Brown at Oxford, see Hughes: work mentioned Tonbridge School 551 Tories, see Conservatives Toronto 74, 696, 713, 720 Univ., see Canada Torpids, see sport (rowing) Tout, Thomas Frederick (1855±1929) 363, 364, 367 Town Hall (Oxford) 860±1 Townsend, (Sir) John Sealy Edward, Kt 1941 (1868±1957): Wykeham Prof. of Physics 461 strained relations with Clifton 461 mentioned 477 Toynbee, Arnold (1852±83) Plate 8, PC 8 belief in service to state and to poor 692 founding of Toynbee Hall as memorial 672, PC 8 in¯uenced by Ruskin 691 lectures for AEW 248 tutors ICS candidates, 164, 691, PC 8 Univ. Extension 664 work in East End 672 work mentioned: Industrial Revolution (1884) 60, PC 8 quoted 664 mentioned 65, 91, 532, 634, 640, 643, 652, 671, 680, 691, 704, 818 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889±1975): outstanding Greek historian 359±60 travels 357 works mentioned: Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World

(1973) 360; Hannibal's Legacy (1965) 360; Some Problems of Greek History (1979) 360 quoted 347 mentioned 353 Toynbee Hall: close links with O. 672±4 connection with organized labour movement 673±4 founding of 58, 91±2, 634, 670 in¯uence of T. H. Green 321±2 links with working-class movements 674 meeting place of occupational unions 639, 674 opening of 166 thought to have too little speci®c church commitment 189 Trade Union links 639 tutorial classes 673 Wadham House (1887), Balliol House (1888) 673 wide variety of educational activities 673 mentioned 110, 637, 643, 652, 680, 681, 682, 684, 823, 825, 830 see also Barnett, Samuel Toynbee Record 853 Tozer, Henry Fanshawe (1829±1916) 339, 354 Tozer, William George (1829±99) 711 Tracey, John (1862±1947) 341 Tractarian(s) (Oxford Movement): aftermath 18, 25 and architecture 733, 761 associations with women's colls 250, 580 Balliol chaplain to keep T. theology out of the coll. 98 and Canterbury Association 708 church schools promoted by 171 feuds result in reaction against organized religion 690 gifts of MSS to Keble 188 Keble Chapel 745 and Lux Mundi 101±2, 634 pauperes Christi and indigentes 585 Peel acts against 42 Pugin's supporters regarded as dangerously Tractarian 735±6 Pusey House 635 responsible for interest in 17th-cent. works 648 schooling of Keble, Newman, Pusey 548 strength of movement among fellows of Exeter Coll. (1837) PC 15 Tait's hostility to 187 women's education 257 mentioned 118, 184, 187, 223, 450, 578, 634 trade unions: and Co-operators 674

index Hobhouse on demand for univ. education 825 occasional lectures on (A. L. Smith) 369 O. Conference on (1890) 674 Ruskin Hall 623, 675±6 supported by dons (1880s) 643 `The University and the Working Class' conference (1907) 682 Toynbee Hall, links with 639, 674 WEA campaign for reform of O. 841±3, 849 mentioned 75, 642, 845, PC 72 trades councils 675, 682 Trades Union Congress (1906±12) 825, 841, 850 Tradescant collection 500 tradesmen 594 traditionalists 610 The Tragic Drama of the Greeks, see Haigh, Arthur Traill, Henry Duff (1842±1900): work mentioned: Social England (1893±7) 617 Trajan (a d 98±117) 347±8 Trasimene 357 Treasury 168, 458, 559, 638, 842, 852 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, see Clerk-Maxwell Treatise of Human Nature, see Hume: work Tree, (Sir) Herbert Beerbohm, Kt 1909 (1852±1917) 828 Treitschke, Heinrich von (1834±96) 865 Trenton 678 Trevelyan, (Sir) Ernest John, Kt 1909 (1850±1924) 705 Trevelyan, George Macaulay (1876±1962) PC 4 The Tribune 681, 825, 826 Trinity College, Cambridge 30, 36, 70, 485 Trinity College, Dublin 38, 268, 296, 430 Trinity College, Oxford: Balliol Chapel `a personal insult' 738 Balliol±Trinity laboratory (from 1879) 136, Plate 45, PC 45 buildings: front quadrangle 753; Pres.'s Lodgings 753; storey added to Wren building 730 character and composition: colour prejudice, Pres. Blakiston 801, 804; `Harrow and Trinity' English 549; proportion of public school men 552; whole coll. threatened with rustication (1867) 140 `Divvers Prelim', R. A. Knox 783±4 fellows: all resident (Michaelmas 1905) 133; honorary fellowship for J. H. Newman (1877) 157; reforms effected (1857±8) 116; turbulent governing body under Percival 129

983

®nance: coll. contributions 86±7; external income, Trust income 161±2; management of kitchen 145 Presidency: powers challenged (1862) 129; resignation, Wayte, (1878) 130 reading party (1891) Plate 34, PC 34 religion: 2 chaplains 105; evangelical movement and mission ®eld (1892) 711 scholarship competition 126 science: Millard laboratory (from 1886) 460; patronage of science 485, 491; shares laboratory with Balliol 136 societies: Claret Club 153; music society 437; well-attended debating soc. 150 sport, reasons for lack of success on river 525 undergraduates: lawn laid in JCR 790; members of Canning Club 811; rivalry with Balliol 790; success of Raper as disciplinarian 141; suppression of supper parties 138 mentioned 138, 341, 788 Trinity Hall, Cambridge 79 Triple Entente 859±60 tripos, see Cambridge Tsuda, Ume (1864±1929) 581 tuberculosis 507 TuÈbingen 63 TUC, see Trades Union Congress Tuckwell, William (1829±1919) 436 Turkey 345, 354, 358 Turner, Frank Miller (b. 1944) 32 Turner, Herbert Hall (1861±1930) 468 Savilian Prof. of Astronomy 468, 830 on failure of reform group to consult with scientists 830 on joint cttee of inquiry with WEA 684 joint cttee (Statute, 1908) 687 promoter of Univ. Extension 495 request for house beside Observatory 478±9 seismological studies 468 quoted 849 mentioned 470, 846±7 Turner, Joseph Mallard William (1775±1851) 508 Turrell, Henry Joseph (1825±98) 120 Turrell's Hall 120 the tutorial 133±9 passim the `private hour' 49±50, PC 32 Tutorial Classes Committee 687, 847, 848±9 tutorial class movement 683±5 passim `compensatory' higher education 854 ®nance 848±9 goodwill towards Univ. 850 grant from Board of Education 623 Joint Tutorial Classes 665

984

index

tutorial class movement (contd ) O.' connections with Labour movement through 832 O.'s role in 637 supporters among dons 846 Tawney on shortcomings 847 and Toynbee Hall 673 univ. tutorial classes 670; experiments with 683±5 tutors 134±7 passim appointment and conditions of work: bias of colls towards `good college men' 620; burden on history tutors 372±3; coll. tutors and undergraduates' needs 56; complaints by coll. tutors against Council `weighting' 605; conditions start to improve (1869±73) 16±20; over-teaching, misgivings (c.1900) 136; professional coll. tutors (from 1880s) 335; shortage (by late 1860s) 5; strains on system (by 1870) 45±6; success of Modern History School arrangements (1870s) 48; tutors' `weekly grind' 343; women, inferior conditions 284±5 and coll. statutes on marriage 14±15, 52, 142 cttee of senior tutors on discipline (1867) 138 developments in tutorial system, criticism (1870s) 50±1 ®nance: ®nancial independence, important to tutors' reputation 142; tuition fees (1866, 1906) 147 Modern History School tutors 361 public school posts attractive to (1860s) 5 religion: cease to re¯ect clerical views (1870s) 56; proposed tutors' undertaking (1870) 24; `religious lay tutors' 105; substantial minority still in orders (1900) 56 Selborne Commission: tutors' memorial on professoriate (1880) 89 sport, tutors' involvement 528±9 tutorial system central to coll. revival 115 Tutorial Board 144 Tutors' Club (1898) 144 and undergraduates: duty to help bring out ability 813±14; gratitude to tutors 817; in¯uence on future members of eÂlite 62; pastoral role 104±5, 142±3; tutors' degree of in¯uence 62, 817; undergraduates' tutorial experiences 135±6 in women's Halls, con¯ict with AEW (c.1894) 259±60, 261 mentioned 4, 5, 77, PC 3, PC 34, PC 48, PC 50, PC 51, PC 52, PC 58, PC 73 see also private tutors, Wadham statutes

Tutors' Association 82 `Twain, Mark' (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835±1910) 828 Twickenham 870 Twiss, (Sir) Travers, Kt 1867 (1809±97), Regius Prof. of Civil Law 388, 390 Tylor, (Sir) Edward Burnett, Kt 1912 (1832±1917): Keeper of Univ. Museum 466 lectures 501 Pitt-Rivers collection 501±3 Reader, later Prof., of Anthropology 468, 500±1, 610±11 social anthropology 703 Tyndall, John (1820±93) 31, PC 1 Tyntes®eld 185 Types of Ethical Theory, see Martineau typhoid 507 typography 650, 655 Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton (1844±1914) 330 Tyrwhitt, Richard St John (1827±95): review of Symonds and Arnold 38 quoted 38, 40 mentioned 40 Uganda 711 Ugrian phonetics 422 Ulster 858±9 Ulster Covenant 858 volunteers 862 Unattached students, see Non-Collegiate students undergraduate life 1900±14: 781±819 passim `active virtues' at a premium (from mid1880s) 155 anti-Semitism (1904) 794 attempt, from 1890s, to counter earlier exclusiveness 153 aviators 782 battels 146±7 `bloods' 785 bon®res 139±40, 143 bump suppers 139 catering, criticisms 146 `climbing in' 139 coll. scholarships, social effects 588±9 coll. societies and clubs: debating 149±50; dining 153; essay 152; general 152±3, 812; music 152, 437±40; playreading 152; religious 150 conformity, `good form' 154 corporate unity 156 discipline: disciplinary of®cers in or near coll. 140; dogs 138; ®nes, gatings, rustications 138, 140±1; supper parties 138

index Eights week, importance in social calendar 522 examinations, strain 788±9 ®ctional accounts 785 homosexuality 797±9 JCRs 150±1, 154 later dinner hour (1880s) 525±6 O. accent, `Oxford-er' 548±9 parochialism, a danger (1892) 156 patterns of leisure 517, 525±6, 533±4 peer pressure 155 political clubs 811 pranks, riots 790±3 racial prejudice 790, 803±4 ragging, de-bagging 154±5, 794 religion 106±10, 147±8 reminiscences not always reliable 785±6 roll calls (`Rollers') 147, 549 rowing, team sports, and sociability 519, 522 school attended, importance 547 school and Univ., contrast 519 sexual conduct 139, 795±9 slang 253 theatrical productions 627 undergraduate press (from 1866) 145, 810 O.U. Union Debating Society, see separate entry; see also Isis; Oxford Undergraduate's Journal; reading parties; sport; undergraduates undergraduates 552, 554 Figs 23.1, 23.2, 565±8 Tables 23.A1±4 access, ®nancial `drop-out' low 590 aristocratic entrants 582±3 assimilation of black and Asian students 804 changes in colls' provision for 145 church-going, and biblical knowledge 787±8 closed awards 551±2 Convocation's meeting invaded (1884) 257 correlation of examination performance and later success (c.1907) 574 costs affordable by professional middle class 147 day schools, effect in broadening entry (from 1880s) 590 debates: over broadening basis of recruitment (from 1890) 623±4; over supposed effect of meritocracy in narrowing recruitment (from 1850s) 584±6 domestic bursars, conference suggested (1909) 834 educational backgrounds extremely varied (early 19th cent.) 548

985

®nancial inequalities 784 grant-earning schools, proportion of students 554 growth of numbers (1860±1911) 9, 68, 124±5, 133, 140, 577±8, 123 Fig.4.1 hereditary element in capacities, eugenic studies of undergraduates (c.1907) 574 Idealism, settlements, etc. 62, 640, 786±7 lay professional and business backgrounds supplying greater numbers (c.1897±8) 579 leading schools by O. admissions 567 Table 23. A4 lower middle and working class, proportion of entrants small but rising (1890±1910) 591 occupations of fathers noted (from 1870) 574, 577±80, 578 Table 24.1 pattern of occupational inheritance changes slowly 591±3 physical characteristics studied 574 proportion qualifying for degree (1900±10) 783 shortage of applicants (late 1860s) 9 social background: slow rate of change (1850±1900) 577±8, 590±1, 578 Table 24.1; quickens after 1900, effects 156 social questions, increased interest (early 1880s) 641±2 undergraduate courses, supposed threats to religious belief 27±8 Underhill, Frank Hawkins (1889±1971) 713 Underhill, George Edward (b. 1859) 341, 345 Underwood, Henry Jones (1804±52): Botanic Garden buildings 765 Exeter Coll.: Broad St front 737, 765; Turl St front 765 Greek revival buildings 732 Newman's church at Littlemore 732 Unionist Social Reform Committee 640 Unionists (from 1886) 94, 633, 634, 642, 831, 838 Unitarians 61, 103, 205, 245, 298, 635, 697, 756, PC 11 United Debating Society, see Oxford Union Society United Hockey Club PC 65 United States of America: American patrons of science more muni®cent than British 480 American undergraduates: at Balliol (1874±83) 164 important cohort (even before 1903) 624 impressed by O. colls' welcome to freshmen 153±4 in law school (after 1900) 389 sons of American plutocrats 583

986

index

United States of America (contd ) American visitors 186 Anglo-American co-operation in medicine 504 ®rst American Pres. of the Union Society (1913) 810 House, Colonel (1914) 871 O. Univ. Press branch in America (1895) 656 Rhodes scholars; African-American Rhodes Scholar (1907) 726, 804, objections from southern states ineffective 726 annual American `invasion' 719; differences between American scholars and others 724; scheme for union of Englishspeaking peoples 718; selection of Rhodes scholars 721; staggering of elections 724; States from which scholars to be selected 718 Thanksgiving dinner (1887) 624 univs, colls, and academic institutions: general characteristics: academics 602; alumni attachment 157; Bryce on role of 92; coll. system, Goldwin Smith on lack of 55; O. buildings as models 762; reaction against co-education (after 1900) 268±9; sport 542; institutions: Avalon Coll. 678; Cornell 614±15, 696; DePauw 675; Drake 846; Harvard 140, 156, 356, 410, 542, 726; Johns Hopkins 504, 617; Kansas 846; Michigan 846; Midland 678; Princeton 371, 846; Rice Institute, Texas 812; Southern California 614±15; Swarthmore College 371; Wesleyan University, New England 268±9; Yale 542 mentioned 95, 361±2, 384, 614, 624, 720 universal manhood suffrage 571 Universities' Mission to Central Africa 710±11 University Calendar, see Oxford University Calendar University Chest: Curators 411, 607 subsidy by Press 616, 653±4, 852 University Church, see St Mary's Church University College: buildings: Chapel 730, 746±7, 759; coll. barge by J. O. Scott 756; cricket pavilion 756; former Master's Lodgings 750; furnishings chosen by Faulkner 750; High St 736; Kybald House 754; Library 742; new rooms 730; Radcliffe Quadrangle 750; Shelley Memorial 755; ultra-Gothicisation of Hall, other Gothic detail 730

chapel 689; music introduced (1863) 148; services 105 closed awards 552 Diary of Charles Cree (1871) 549 domestic arrangements 145; dogs excluded 138 fellowship reforms (1871) 17 ®nance: coll. contributions 86±7; internal income 71 head of the river (1914) 860 Mastership, T. H. Huxley approached (1881) 129 Shakespeare Society 152 support for English School (1898) 405 tutors consolidate their position (1870s) 18, 48 undergraduates: by 1873, all to read for hons 93, 137; Canning Club members 811; The Churchwardens (1903) Plate 69, PC 69; complaints of catering 145; mass rustication threatened (1868), carried out (1880) 140; proportion of public school men (1860s, 1890s) 550, 551; protest after Morris lecture (1883) 155; Vincent's Club members 536 university colleges 65 University Galleries 508±11, 762 University Grants Committee (1919) 852, 876, PC 75 University lecturers 376 University Museum 457±97 passim building: architectural importance 741, 760; carving and ironwork 740; cost 741; design competition 739; Press pro®ts 762; purchase of site 760; surrounding buildings 743, 756, 829 Darwinists at 704 Huxley±Wilberforce debate (1860) 447 Jubilee (1908) 486, 496 laboratories 451, 471 profs, suspicions of other laboratories 136 scienti®c books removed to 749 survival ensured by academic conservatism 761 mentioned 12, 91, 117, 137, 173, 501, PC 40 University Observatory 461, 466, 468, 470, 479, 756 University Parks: building of Univ. Museum 91, 739 colonized by sportsmen 518 con¯ict over development of 478, 627, 829 design by Bateman (1863) 760 Observatory (Charles Barry Jr.) 756 O.Univ. Cricket Club moved to (1881) 523, Plate 62, PC 62; cricket pavilion (Jackson) 756

index Univ. purchase of (1853) 760 mentioned 94, 173 University Prizes: Arnold Historical Essay Prize 201, 349, 381, 382 Beit Prize 382 Chancellor's prizes 201, 382, 389 Ellerton Theological Essay Prize 201 Gladstone Memorial Prize 810 Marquis of Lothian's Historical Essay Prize 381, 382 Newdigate Prize: 1839 (Ruskin, `Salsette and Elephanta') 710; 1845 (J. W. Burgon, `Petra') 76; 1898 (Buchan, `The Pilgrim Fathers') PC 30; 1908 (Huxley, J., `Holyrood') 495, 812 Stanhope Prize, 370, 381, PC 30 mentioned 710 University Review 825 University Scholarships: Davis Chinese Scholarship 201 Eldon Scholarships 389 Ireland Scholarship 810, PC 38 Pusey and Ellerton Scholarship 201 Vinerian Law Scholarship 201, 388±9, 810 University Sermon 34, 104, 107, 229 university teaching 165, 493, 593 University Tutorial Classes, see Mansbridge: work mentioned University Volunteers, see Oxford University Volunteer Corps Unwin, George (1870±1925) 363 Uppingham School 545 Urquhart, Francis Fortescue (`Sligger') (1868±1934) 549, 788, 813, 818 Urwick, Lyndell Fownes (1891±1983) 306 Uthwatt, Augustus Andrewes, cr. Lord Uthwatt 1946 (1879±1949) 389 Utilitarianism (Mill, 1861) 316, see Mill, John Stuart: works mentioned Valentia, 11th Viscount (1843±1927) 301 Vanity Fair PC 35, PC 36 The Vatican 288 Library 496 Vaughan, Charles John (1816±97) 36 Vaughan, Henry Halford (1811±85) 42, 585 Veley, Mrs (Lilian Jane) (d. 1936) 470 Veley, Victor Herbert (1856±1933) 464, 470 Venice 738 Ventris, Michael George (1922±56) 350±1 Verne, Jules (1828±1905) 784 Verney, Richard (1869±1923), succ. 1902 as 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke 143 Vernon-Harcourt, Augustus George (1834±1919): applied work 477

987

chemical kinetics, ®rst detailed studies of 451 Lee's Reader in chemistry 462±4 mixed classes 248 non-denominational Hall for women supported by 246±7 original of the White Knight? 477 research and teaching 462±4 work in Ch.Ch. laboratory 462±3 mentioned 224, 283, 455, 472, 490, 493, 495 Vernon-Harcourt, Mrs (Rachel) (1848±1927) 244, 283 Vice-Chancellors, see Anson; Bellamy; Boyd; Cotton; Farnell; Fowler, T.; Jeune; Jowett; Leighton; Lightfoot, J. P.; Liddell; Lindsay; Livingstone; Magrath; Masterman, J. C.; Monro; Plumptre; Sewell, J. E.; Strong; Warren, T. H.; Wells, J.; Williams, D. Vice-Chancellorship: appointment of examiners 89±90, 93, 393 Cleveland Commission inquiry 70, 213 Delegacy for Women Students 269, 270 Herbert Spencer lectures (1909) 805 Indian students (1909) 805 licence for private halls 120 no of®ce or secretary for 607 riots, V.-C.'s warning (1907) 795 V.-C.'s Court 242 mentioned 244, 388, 400±1, 472, 489, 497, 508, 649, 684, 719, 797±8 Viceroys, see India Vicinus, Martha 287 Victoria County Histories 297, 363, 617 Victoria, Queen (1819±1901) 221, 268, 414, 420, 508, 690, 815±16, 855 Jubilee (1887) 690 Victoria University, Manchester (centre of federation until 1903) 65, 603, 669 Vigfusson, Gudbrandr (1828±89) 231, 610 Vincent's Club 536 Vinerian Scholarships, see University Scholarships Vines, Sydney Howard (1849±1934): Sherardian Prof. of Botany 470 obstructs courses in agriculture and rural economy 472, 474±5 unsuccessful tenure of Botany chair 470±1 quoted 471, 472 mentioned 483±4, 613, 629 Vinogradoff, (Sir) Paul Gavrilovitch, Kt 1917 (1854±1925): Corpus Prof. of Jurisprudence 395, 629 prof. at Moscow Univ. 629 seminars 297±8, 372, 395, 620 mentioned 629 Virgil (70±19 b c ) 327±8, 330, 341, 690

988

index

Visitatorial Board 86, 89 Visitors (of colleges) 69, 187, 212 viva voce 789, 823, Plate 23, PC 23 vocational studies 612±13 Voltaire (Arouet), FrancËois Marie (1694±1778) 27, 425 Von HuÈgel, Friedrich (1852±1925) 857 Vrooman, Mrs (Amne) 675±8 quoted 677 Vrooman, Walter Watkins 675±8, PC 72 Vulgate, The 100 Vulgate New Testament, see Wordsworth, John: work mentioned Wadham College: academic standard: bon®re to honour schools result (1818) 535; high standards and success on the river (1850s) 537 battels 146 breakdown of discipline (1879) 140 chapel 698 chaplain fellow 105 character and composition: characterized by headmaster of Bradford Grammar School (c.1903) 808; a Liberal coll. (1878) 82; small proportion of `Clarendon' public school men (1861) 550 lack of resources prevents expansion (1870s, 1880s) 122 resignation of Warden (1881) 130 scholarships: competitive examinations, a pioneering coll. 126; scholarship entry, early 1890s 127 science: teaching posts (1892) 491; to Robert Laing a potential `science college' (1876) 117 societies: Debating Society and Literary Club 808; Olympic Club 153 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; career of C. B. Fry 542; eight banned (1880) 526 statutes, as revised by Selborne Commission 82±4 Wadham House 673 Wadham positivists 643, 696±7; critics of empire 696 mentioned 127, 202, 599 Wakeman, Henry Of¯ey (1852±99) 215 work mentioned: (ed. with A. Hassall) Essays Introductory to the study of Constitutional History (1886) Wales: Meyricke bequest at Jesus Coll. 84 nonconformity 124 reform of secondary education 124 Univ. of 244, 460, 603 Welsh univ. colls 124, 591 mentioned 240, 540, 678, 680

Walker, Edward Mewburn (1857±1941) 341, 344, 353 Walker, Ernest (1870±1949) 442 Wall, Henry (1810±73), Wykeham Prof. of Logic 314 mentioned 159 Wallace, William (1844±97) 315, 323 Wallas, Graham (1858±1932): on Barnett's cttee (1907) 824 review of Westminster Gazette articles (1905) 824 quoted 824 mentioned 825, 839 wallpapers 750 Walton House 246, 258 Walton, (Sir) William Turner, Kt 1951 (1902±83) 228 Walton Street 205, 478, 643, 646, 648, 649, 679, 731 Wantage Sisterhood 293±4 war, see American War of Independence; Boer War; Crimean War; First World War; Second World War War Of®ce 168 Ward, George Robert Michael (c.1800±46) 587 Ward, George Sturton (b. 1828): Censor of Unattached Students 194±5, 198 quoted 198 Ward, Sir Leslie (`Spy'), Kt 1918 (1851±1922) PC 35, PC 36 Ward, Mrs Humphry (Mary Augusta) (neÂe Arnold) (1851±1920): anti-suffragist 245, 301, 302, 303 `Appeal against Female Suffrage' (1889) 301 lecture scheme for ladies 243 non-denominational Hall for women 246 Secretary of Somerville 247 Taylorian examiner in Spanish 238 writing of Robert Elsmere 95 works mentioned: The Case of Richard Meynell (1911) 59; Robert Elsmere (1888) 59, 95 quoted 33, 58±9, 244±5, 787 mentioned 244, 349 Ward, Thomas Humphry (1845±1926) 134, 246 Ward, William George (1812±82) 450 Ward, William Reginald (1925±) 635 Wardale, Edith (1863±1943) 284, 285, 303, Plate 51, PC 51 Warington, Robert (1838±1907), Sibthorpian Prof. of Rural Economy 474 Warkworth, Lord, from 1899 Earl Percy (1871±1909) PC 31 Warneford Mental Hospital 808

index Warre, Edmond (1837±1920) 26 Warren, Edward Prioleau (1856±1937) 756, 758, 772, 775, 777 Warren, (Sir) Thomas Herbert, KCVO 1914 (1853±1930), Pres. of Magdalen Coll. (1885±1928), V.-C. (1906±10): academic attainment, aristocratic patronage and sporting achievement 527±8 attends Wayn¯ete Society 152 Curzon's installation, ceremony for 828 education Diplomas, reluctant supporter of 557 `innocent conspiracy' to elect Raleigh 406 Jowett's ideal of headship, comparison with 130 lobbying against Commission (1907) 831 Museum Jubilee speech 496 as Pres. 130 Prof. of Poetry (1911±16) 690 threnodies for young noblemen 807±8 Unattached students 199 Univ. extension 664, 683 as V.-C. 471±2, 485, 684, 795, 828, 830±1, 838 quoted 156, 471±2, 475, 484, 496, 557, 600, 625, 684, 795, 821 mentioned 144, 758, 833, 834, 839, 850 Washington, George (1732±99) 805 Waterhouse, Alfred (1830±1905): Balliol buildings 162±3, 743, 768±9; coll. barge 756, 770, Plate 18, PC 18 Radcliffe Camera, alterations 772 Union Debating Hall 743±4 mentioned 748, 757, 758, 770 Waterhouse, Paul (1861±1924) 757, 758 Dyson Perrins laboratory 777 Watson, Albert (1828±1904), Princ. of BNC (1886±9): resignation 130 work mentioned: Select Letters of Cicero (1874) 342 Watson, Arthur George (1829±1916) 212 Watson, Edward William (1859±1936): Regius Prof. of Ecclesiastical History 379±80 Watson, Musgrave Lewthwaite (1804±47) 742 Wayte, Samuel William (1819±98), Pres. of Trinity Coll. (1866±78): resignation 130 Weavers Amalgamation 679 Webb, Clement Charles (1865±1954): diary of tutorial duties (1898±9) 143±4 work mentioned: edition of John of Salisbury 618 quoted 424±5, 857, 862, 863 mentioned 574, 631, 792

989

Webb, Mrs (Martha Beatrice) (1858±1943) 695 Webb, Sidney James, cr. Lord Pass®eld 1929 (1859±1947) 695 Wedderburn, Alexander Henry Melville (1892±1968), PC 75 Weldon, Walter Frank (1860±1906) 467, 485, 493, 502 welfare state 169 Wellesley, Richard Colley, 2nd Earl of Mornington 1781, cr. Marquis Wellesley 1799 (1760±1842) 228, 701 Wellington, 1st Duke of (1769±1852), Chancellor (1834±52) 228, 701, 837 Wellington College 563, 853±4 Wells, Herbert George (1866±1946): works mentioned: A Modern Utopia (1905) 815±16; Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) 863 mentioned 784 Wells, Mrs (Frances Mary) (d. 1925) 272 Wells, Joseph (1855±1929), Warden of Wadham Coll. (1913±27), V.-C. (1923±6): Non-Placet Soc. 625±6 Oxford Review 625±6 Roger Bacon memorial celebrations 497 quoted 315, 324±5, 333 mentioned 146, 272, 335, 341, 345, 359, 563, 858 Welsh (language) 613 Welsh tithe war (late 1880s) 580 Welsh university colleges, see Wales Wesleyan Methodist (Christ Church, 1889) 580 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 23 quoted 23 Wesleyans 22±3 Wesley, Charles (1707±88) 689±90 Wesley, John (1703±91) 689±90 Wesley, Samuel Sebastian (1810±76) 442 West Africa 715 West Indies, West Indians 693, 803 West, Washbourne (1811±97) 72 Westbury, Lord, cr. 1861, Richard Bethell (1800±73): ®rst class celebrated by bon®re (1818) 535 quoted 20 Westcott, Brooke Foss (1825±1901) 189 Western universities (1860s±1930s) 599 West®eld College 291 Westminster, 3rd Marquess of, cr. Duke of Westminster 1874 (1825±99) 162 Westminster 22, 77, 604, 809, 811 Westminster Abbey 68, 483, 826, PC 11 Westminster Gazette: `Kappa' and `Lambda' articles 681, 824, 826±7

990

index

Westminster Gazette: (contd ) reform articles 681±2 sceptical view of `reform from within' 832 Westminster School 216, 221, 224, 227, 552 Westmorland 552, 587 Weston, Frank (1871±1924) 711 Westwood, John Obadiah (1805±93): in cartoon 238 entrenched opponent of Darwinism 467 Hope Prof. of Zoology 500 Pitt-Rivers collection offered through 500 mentioned 474 Weyman, Stanley John (1855±1928) 230 Whately, Richard (1787±1863) 548 Whelan, Edward 740 Whewell, William (1794±1866) 30, 446 Whigs, 43 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1824±1903) 510 white slave traf®c 305 Whitechapel 91, 652, 671, 672±3, PC 8 Whitehall 604, 840±1, 842 Who's Who 219, PC 30 Wiese, Ludwig Adolf: quoted 80 Wilamowitz-MoÈllendorf, Ulrich von (1848±1931): work mentioned: Aristoteles und Athen 352 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac (1802±57) 172 Wilberforce, Samuel (1805±73) 171, 177, 187, 211, 447, 482, 747 Wilde, Henry (1833±1919) 460, 482 Wilde, Oscar O'Flahertie Wills (1854±1900): caricature, hostile skit PC 29 in¯uenced by Ruskin 90, 691 not actively homosexual at O. 59 not sympathetically regarded 798 Soc. for Promotion of Hellenic Studies, cttee member 340 works mentioned: Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) PC 29; Salome (1893) PC 29 quoted 39, 532 mentioned 275 Wilkins, William (1778±1839) 763 Wilkinson, Alfred 684 Wilkinson, (Sir) John Gardner, Kt 1839 (1797±1875) 354 Wilkinson, William (1819±1901) 176, 752, 768, 771, 772 William III, King (1650±1702) 379 Williams, Charles Francis Abdy (1855±1923) 429±30 Williams, David (1786±1860), Warden of New Coll. (1840±60), V.-C. (1856±8) 42 Williams, George (1762±1834) 646 Williams, Ivy (1877±1966) 298 Williams and Norgate, publishers 618

Williams-Ellis, (Sir) (Bertram) Clough, Kt 1972 (1883±1978) 756, 777 Wilson. C. T. 531 Wilson, (Sir) Charles William, KCMG 1881 (1836±1905) 354 Wilson, Horace Hayman (1786±1860) 699, 700, 701 Wilson, John Charles (1831±1905): account of coll. teaching 392 evidence to Selborne Commission 392 Wilson, John Cook (1849±1915) Prof. of Logic 323, 324, 621, 639 Wilson, John Matthias (1813±81), Pres. of CCC (1872±81): White's Prof. of Moral Philosophy 313±14 evidence to Royal Commission of 1850 313±14 mentioned 131 Wilson, Robert James (1840±97), Warden of Keble (1889±97) 190 proposal to found new Coll. 175 supporter of teacher-training 557 Winchester Cathedral 729±30 Winchester College: All Souls Wykehamists 216 Balliol Wykehamists 164, 169 closed scholarships to New Coll. 551 introduction of cricket to univs 520 more Wykehamists at O. than at C. (1907) 553 Winchester football 523±4 mentioned 130, 717, PC 35 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717±68): in Pater's Renaissance 34, 37, 39 quoted 34 mentioned 331 Winnington-Ingram, Arthur Foley (1858±1946) 189 Wisden ( John Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack, from 1880) 539 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef (1889±1951) 318 Wolff, Umberto (later Humbert Wolfe), (1886±1940) 808 Wolsey, Thomas (1475?±1530) 736, 747 Wolvercote Paper Mill 649 Woman's World (1887) 275 women at Oxford 237±307 passim academics: assistants in research in certain departments 470; examining, women excluded 271, 285; fewer early scientists than at C. or London 469; openings in higher education 296; small number of women connected with Univ. (1860s) 241±2; status of women dons 261, 270, 285; women tutors in Modern Languages School 284, 419 fathers' occupations 578 Table 24.1, 581±2

index halls and colls: Anglican support for women's Hall 245±6; associations with anti-suffrage movement 302, 303; differing characters of Halls 287±8; foreigners at the Halls 288; four stages in evolution of women's academic communities 256; Halls `extra-mural' until 1910 250, 258; liberal concern over Anglican `monopoly' 246; and Principles and Methods (1909) 833; relations with schools 295±6; shortage of money for Halls 252; sketchy teaching provision in sciences 283, 491 students 239 Figs 10.1, 10.2, 248 Fig. 10.3, 254 Figs 10.4, 10.5, 255 Fig. 10.6, 282 Table 10.1, 297 Table 10.2, 578 Table 24.1, Plate 27, PC 27; admission to examinations 256±8, 600, 607, 609, 612 834; campaign for degrees 264±8, 304, 630, 852, 868, 875; career opportunities 293±300, 593; caricatures 253±5; changes in tutorial arrangements 284; class composition 581±2; classes obtained 258, 286, 782; in competition with working-class applicants 269; complaints of overcrowded libraries, etc. 272, 623; Delegacy for the Supervision of Women Students (1910) 250, 256, 269±70, 280, 285, 832; dif®culty of classical basis of curriculum 264; diploma proposal 267±8, PC 27; dress codes dowdiness 279; effect of social origin on careers 594; English Language and Literature examinations (1881) 397; English school suitable for women (1893) 403; entrance and examinations requirements 280; fears of bringing women to O. (1860s, 1870s) 242; ®nancial pressures 269, 623; full membership (1920) 875; lesbianism 291; Local Examinations opened to girls (1869) 244; marriage rates 294±5, 575, 581, 594, 295 Figure 10.7; medical studies (1917) 874; no residence requirement for examinees 257; O. lifestyle thought unsuitable (1896) 273; O. students taking Dublin and London degrees 296; old students' associations 290; opposition, conservative mistrust 240±2, 251, 256±7; preferred subjects 281±2; problems peculiar to O. and C. 242; relations between staff and students 290; and school-teaching: in Britain 293, 593, in Empire 709; sport 289, United Hockey Club defeat C. (1912) PC 65; threat to monastic ethos 277, 307, 627; `unsuitable' texts 278±9

991

Women's Emancipation Union 301 women's higher education: careers, analyses of 575±6 condemned in Lincoln Coll. JCR debates 812 corporate life, educative value slowly realized 288 differences between O. and C. movements 244±5 extension classes help women 669 French studies, Goldwin Smith on excessive use in women's education (1868) 415 grammar schools 296 higher education, attitudes of O. wives (1870s) 238, 243, 246, 276 medical education 244±5 Missionary Settlement for Univ. Women, Bombay 712 O. and C. only British univs denying women degrees (from 1895) 264, 622, 630 O.'s unreadiness (1866) 238±40 public demand (1867, 1872) 68 public schools 295±6 reaction against coeducation in USA (after 1900) 268 scholarships, women's colls, families with earned or precarious incomes 589 secondary schooling; expansion increases demand for higher education and for school teachers 238, 293, 295, 593 separate women's univ., proposal (1895±7) 268 supporters of women's higher education doubtful about it in O. and C. 242 and worldly success 572 mentioned 188 Women's Institute 284, 301±2 women's movement: O. women's involvement in 300±6 mentioned 291 women's suffrage Plate 13, PC 13 O. a stronghold of non-militant suffragism 303 O. Union debates: 1908 809, PC 13; 1913 306 support for in O. and C. 245, 249±50, 300 Women's Suffrage Appeal (1893±4) 301 see also anti-suffrage Wood, Charles Lindley, succ. as 2nd Visc. Halifax 1885 (1839±1934) 176 Wood, Edward Frederick Lindley, Baron Irwin 1925, succ. as 3rd Visc. Halifax, 1934, cr. Earl of Halifax 1944 (1881±1959), Chancellor (1933±59) 220, 229, 815 Wood, (George) Arnold (1865±1928): quoted 709

992

index

Woodard, Nathaniel (1811±91) 171 Woodard Foundation 171 Woodgate, Walter Bradford (1840±1920) 536 Woodham Smith, Mrs (Cecil Blanche) (1896±1977) 299 Woods and Forests, Dept of 168 Woods, Francis Henry (b. 1850) 101 Woods, Mrs (Margaret) (1856±1945) 243 Woodstock Road 94, 185, 242, 259 Woodward, Benjamin (1815±61) 740, 741, 743 Woollcombe, Edward Cooper (1816±80) 68, 159 Woolley, John (1816±66): ®rst Princ. of Sydney Univ. 709 quoted 709 Woolner, Thomas (1825±92) 740, 743 Woolsack, see Lord Chancellor Worcester College: academic standard: 5 attempts at Pass Mods allowed (1873) 137; dif®culty in ®lling places (c.1910) 792 admission to proctorial cycle (1858) 117 `Botany Bay' 116 buildings: Chapel 742; Hall 742; new rooms 730; Pump Quadrangle 791 chaplain fellow 105 closed awards 552 Diary of William Elmhirst (1911±12) 781±819; mentioned 549 garden 760 honorary fellowship for F. W. Newman (1883) 156±7 newest coll. until foundation of Keble 179 not on intercollegiate lecture scheme (1877) 46, 374 small proportion of `Clarendon public school' men 550 sport: amalgamated clubs 529; football in both codes 524 unable to expand (1870s, 1880s) 124 mentioned 139, 646, 679, 801 Worcester Place 679 Wordsworth family 252 Wordsworth, Christopher (1807±85): has Lincoln's new statutes rejected (1882) 57±8 on the higher Education of Woman 251 Wordsworth, (Dame) Elizabeth, DBE 1928 (1840±1932), Princ. of LMH (1878±1909) Plates 46, 49, PC 46, PC 49 annoyed when council ban hockey 289 appointed (1878) 246 at the Browning Society 243 connections with boys' public schools 288 degrees, in favour of 264 on diploma proposal 267±8

encourages social contacts 278 erratic in enforcing rules 275 expansion and new buildings 261±2 founds St Hugh's Hall 250, PC 46 a High Anglican 250, 287 opposed to women priests 298 O. Pageant (1907) 828 proposal that LMH should absorb St Hugh's 262±3 on the purpose of univ. education 572±3 religious doubts of students, not concerned by 279 `The Apple of Discord' 273 quoted 251, 263±4, 267±8, 278, 282±3, 286, 293, 572, 594 mentioned 247, 301±2 Wordsworth, John (1843±1911): Oriel Prof. of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture 100, 617 open letter to Roundell 57 work: Vulgate New Testament(1889±1905, 1912) 618 quoted 33±4, 131, 251 mentioned 56 Wordsworth (Raleigh, 1903) 406 Workers' Educational Association 680±8 passim annual meeting (1912): Tawney's demand for Commission 848 foundation (1903) 623, 665, 680 intellectual standards of univ. entrants 847 presses for Commission on `University Education' (1909) 841 summer schools at Balliol 167 supporters among senior and junior members of Univ 110 and views of tutorial class members and others 849 wide circulation of The Highway 643 mentioned 369, 581, 584, 634, 666, 670, 679, 825, 843, 844±5, 850, 853 working class 583±8, 661±87, 844±7 passim agitation to divert endowments to 832 Curzon Report, ways of opening Univ. considered 834, 835 demand for higher education: stimulus to Univ. reform 601±2, 623±4 educational opportunities 865±6 `Oxford and Working Class Education' (1908) 634, 687, 832, 846±7, 850 physique, comparison with upper class 540 tutorial class system 623, 637 mentioned 269, 787 World's Classics 616 Worthington, Thomas (1826±1909) 756, 773 Worthington, Percy 777

index Wren, (Sir) Christopher, Kt 1672 (1632±1723) 730, PC 56 Wright, Mrs (Elizabeth, neÂe Lea) (d. 1958) 275, 284, 421±2 Wright, Joseph (1855±1930): CC Prof. of Comparative Philology 407 arbitrary dismissal of Taylorian teacher 629 Cttee for English Studies 407, 411 language classes for AEW 283 member of The Club 628 as a scholar 420 studies at Heidelberg and Leipzig 629 work mentioned: English Dialect Dictionary (1891±1905) 297, 419, 618 mentioned 284, 421, 838 Wright, William Aldis (1831±1914) 650 Wrong, Edward Murray (1889±1928) 713 Wrong, George Mackinnon (1860±1948): Canadian Round Table Movement 713 O. methods and teachers in Toronto Univ. 713 quoted 713 Wrong, Humphrey Hume (1894±1954) 713 Wrong, Margaret Christian (1887±1948) 713 Wulfstan (d. 1023) 398 Wyatt, James (1746±1813) 763 Wyatt, (Sir) Matthew Digby, Kt 1855 (1820±77) 508 Wyatville, (Sir) Jeffry, Kt 1828 (1766±1840) 732 Wychwood School 295±6 Wycliffe Hall 107, 118, 635 Wycombe Abbey School 295 Wyld, Henry Cecil (1870±1945) 422±3, 549 Wylie, (Sir) Francis James, Kt 1929 (1865±1952): Oxford Secretary to the Rhodes Trustees 720±6 work mentioned: (with Parkin) The Rhodes Scholarships (1912) 726 Wylie, Lady (Kathleen, neÂe Kelly) (d. 1969) 721 Wyllie, (Sir) William Hutt Curzon, KCIE 1902 (1848±1909) 805 Wyndham, George (1863±1913) 810 Wynter, Philip, (1793±1871), Pres. of St John's Coll. (1828±71) 177 The X Club (1860s) 480 Yale University, see United States of America

993

Yeats, William Butler (1865±1939) 329 Yonge, Charlotte Mary (1823±1901) 181 York, Yorkshire 420, 447, 552, 666, 679, 781, 789, PC 17 West Riding 824 Yorkshire College, see Leeds University Young, George Malcolm (1882±1959) 344 Young Oxford 677, 678, 679 Younger, Robert, cr. Lord Blanesburgh 1923 (1861±1946) 167 Yule, Charles John (1849±1905) 466 Zachariah, Kuruvila (1890±1955): quoted 804 Zangwill, Israel (1864±1926) 802 Zanzibar 55, 711 Zend Philology 417, 611 Zimmern, (Sir) Alfred Eckhard, Kt 1936 (1879±1957): Montague Burton Prof. of International Relations 360, 610, 716 on the bond between O. men in The Third British Empire (1926) 716 First World War intelligence 360 H.M. Inspector with responsibility for tutorial classes 825 on joint cttee of inquiry with WEA 684, 687 League of Nations: memorandum used in founding 360 member of The Club 359, 628 outstanding Greek historian 359 reform: articles in Independent Review and Westminster Gazette 827; in `conspiracy' (1905) 681, 682, 825±6 tutor to early Ruskin students 643 work mentioned: The Greek Commonwealth (1911) 360, 643 quoted 716, 823, 830, 834 mentioned 328, 341, 344, 353, 830 Zimmern, Alice Louisa (1855±1939) 295 zoology: percentage of Firsts 462 research tradition 462, 467 separate branch of Natural Science School 488, 490 mentioned 491, 704 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm, 1911) 725 Zulueta, Francis de (1878±1958): Regius Prof. of Civil Law (1919±48) 389 victim of undergraduate riot 790 Vinerian Scholar (1903) 389 Zupitza, Julius 398

Index compiled by Eleanor Brock