Wednesday, March 01, 2006
In laudem Collegii Wadhamensi
Having lamented, a couple of posts ago, the prevailing ignorance of my Alma Mater even within the otherworldly precincts of Oxford University, it would be remiss of me not to post a short description thereof here, drop in the ocean as such a little endeavour will be.
Most people have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards their education and this blogger is no exception. But one's attitude softens as one gets older and transmutes into a procession of notable images on a gently glowing background, clouded not, as in one's teenage years, by beer and cannabis sativa but by the mists of memory. As a Marxist I must, of course, admit that Wadham College is an institution of the ruling class; but one day it will be an institution of the working class, and I don't think turning the place into a workers' cooperative will greatly change the atmosphere for the students. It will simply admit the college workers into that same fellowship, and exclude the occasional, mercifully rare, private-school Tory wanker.
Among educational institutions, Wadham, is acknowledged by most of its current and former members to hold a special place. Here is what Michael Foot* (undergraduate 1931-4) had to say:
"And, finally, thrust into proper pre-eminence, above all the rest comes wondrous, exquisitely-proportioned Dr. Wilkins's Wadham; founded by a woman and thereby perhaps escaping the Oxford vice of misogyny; the college which proudly admitted Carew Raleigh to its civilities, just after the wretched James I had executed his father; the school where Robert Blake learnt to sail ships and Mr. Chr. Wren how to build churches, and Maurice Bowra how to bestow that most benign of Oxford blessings, a legitimate complacency: Wadham, of all places the greenest and most gracious, the peerless and most perfect in the whole green glory of Oxford."
Of course, Michael Foot was a bit older than I am when he wrote that, and he does see the history of the college through rose-tinted spectacles. Wadham's foundation by a woman didn't guarantee a commitment to women's liberation. At the beginning it was provided that only one woman should be allowed to enter the college, to do the laundry, and she should be "of such age and condition" that none of the male population should suffer temptation.
This lack of confidence in the seventeenth-century male wasn't entirely unjustified. John Wilmot, the "Wicked Earl" of Rochester, admitted at the age of thirteen as a favour to his father, one of Charles II's favourites, objected to the lack of female society and so took lodgings in Holywell Street, where he settled down, if rumour can be believed, into a more than business relationship with his landlady. And it was in one of the Holywell Street cottages, demolished in the late nineteenth century for the expansion of Wadham, that, two centuries later, William Morris (sadly at Oriel) met and was captivated by the woman who became his wife.
However, Wadham can be proud of being the first all-male Oxford college to admit a female student, in 1974. This was the beggining of the second great age of Wadham radicalism, when the "Red Dean" used college rooms to accommodate Greek Communist asylum seekers, the college became securely dominated, as now, by students from state schools and "Free Nelson Mandela" became the anthem of the newly-created Students' Union. It still is, and Wadham is also still the only Oxford college to have a proper SU (currently led by the lovely Navid Pourghazi) rather than separate bodies for undergraduates and postgraduates. I have always thought that naming a student body after a room was simply risible, and we Wadhamites, old and new, can justifiably laugh at the other colleges for this!
The first great age of Wadham radicalism began, despite the misogyny, with the college's foundation. There may indeed be some clue to this in the personality of the founder, apparently a determined and dictatorial old lady who looks classically Puritan in her portraits (one hangs in Hall, another in the MCR) with her black dress and Calvinistic frown.** But I am told she was a secret Catholic, and see no reason to disbelieve it. Wadham has never been at all keen on religious restrictions. Even in the age of Cromwell's Puritan Protectorate and the Anglo-Catholic monarchical restoration it was as if the prevailing religious notions did not exist within the college's harmonious walls.
One of Wadham's first radicals, and particularly close to my own heart because we read the same subject, was John Cooke, admitted to read law in (I think) 1625, subsequently a well-known radical lawyer, Parliament's Solicitor-General and, in 1649, chief prosecutor of Charles I for high treason. As everyone knows, he secured the ex-King's conviction with its concomitant death penalty; and immediately after the restoration in 1660 he was executed - or, more accurately, martyred - for this upholding of democratically legitimate law over monarchical tyranny.
One of Cooke's near-contemporaies at Wadham, Robert Blake, was a Parliamentary general and subsequently admiral, the real founder of British naval power after gross Stuart neglect. More significant for Wadham, though, was John Wilkins, Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law, who was Warden (head of the college) in the 1650s. During the republican period Wilkins assembled a remarkable group of forward-looking scholars at Wadham, including Christopher Wren. This group became the nucleus for the Royal Society. The overthrow of the monarchy had made it possible for Wadham to become the foremost centre of scientific research and education in Europe, and although the reconciliation of the British ruling classes in the restoration and the bourgeois-Protestant "glorious revolution" of 1688 greatly reduced the significance of Wadham, the legacy remained.
For most of the next two centuries, as far as I can tell, Wadham, "slept...forgetful of the world, by which she was forgotten" (to quote Gibbon, outrageously out of context!) Only one bit of excitement intruded briefly into the otherwise untroubled slumber of this academic Abyssinia, when in 1737 the Warden, the Revd. Robert Thistlethwaite, had to flee to France after propositioning an undergraduate. Apart from a couple of doggerel rhymes pointing out that "Wadham" rhymes with "Sodom", and the beginning of a reputation for sexual deviance that I'm happy to say flourishes to this day, the episode wasn't productive of much.
By the later nineteenth century Wadham was a poor college. A fundraising drive to build a new quad on Holywell Street didn't raise enough funds, and Wadham appeared as "Outland" in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno books, where the Sub-Warden tricks the Warden into resigning by the childish subterfuge of covering all but the valediction of the fatal letter with an innocuous document. Needless to say, the current Sub-Warden, my old tutor Jeffrey Hackney, Wadham Incarnate, would although an equally astute lawyer be incapable of such a thing - in fact he has refused a titular professorship and showed no interest in the Wardenship, both of which I hope he won't mind me saying he richly deserves.
I suppose the recovery started with the 1880s, when the whole student body was expelled following a riot in which the Dean was thrown out of a second-floor window. From then on it's been up and up, with the distinguished literary scholar Maurice Bowra as Warden from 1938 to 1971 and the philosophers Freddie Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, the mathematician Roger Penrose and left luminaries such as Terry Eagleton teaching at the college. Bowra kept up the gay tradition: on hearing of the marriage of two well-known Bohemians he remarked "Splendid couple - slept with both of them!" and, rather less creditably, explained that he married his wife because "Buggers can't be choosers!" I think Bowra would have enjoyed the current much-loved institution of Wadham Queer Bop, though I doubt he would have dressed in high heels and a bin bag as a few bop-goers do every year!
So, big up to those currently at Wadham, Kate, Kieran, Navid, Jack and Raoul. Enjoy the history, the intellectual distinction, the craic, and the college bar's cheap if somewhat watery beer!
*Foot's portrait now hangs in the Okinaga Room. Why isn't there a Foot Room? I have nothing against Dr. Okinaga but no-one's ever heard of him, and I doubt he ever expressed the glories of Wadham so eloquently. In fact, it occurs to me that Wadham has a pretty poor record with naming things. The Iranian section of the library was originally to be named after the Shah of Iran, who had given the money for it, but the college narrowly escaped infamy when he was overthrown and the library was promptly renamed after al-Firdausi, a medieval Farsi poet. I can't help feeling, though, that we got the worst, ethically speaking, of both arguments by first taking the money from the old tyrant, and then changing the name simply because he was no longer in power. Then there's the semi-officially named Ho Chi Minh Quad. While Ho's aspirations for the independence of his country are entirely laudable, he did have an unfortunate predilection for Stalinist dictatorship and having people shot. I'm sure there are some real Marxists we can name the quad after to show international solidarity!
**The really strange thing is that I am apparently (very) distantly related to the Wadham family, though I only found this out after graduating. It doesn't make me superstitious about coincidences or anything, but still it is rather spooky!
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Most people have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards their education and this blogger is no exception. But one's attitude softens as one gets older and transmutes into a procession of notable images on a gently glowing background, clouded not, as in one's teenage years, by beer and cannabis sativa but by the mists of memory. As a Marxist I must, of course, admit that Wadham College is an institution of the ruling class; but one day it will be an institution of the working class, and I don't think turning the place into a workers' cooperative will greatly change the atmosphere for the students. It will simply admit the college workers into that same fellowship, and exclude the occasional, mercifully rare, private-school Tory wanker.
Among educational institutions, Wadham, is acknowledged by most of its current and former members to hold a special place. Here is what Michael Foot* (undergraduate 1931-4) had to say:
"And, finally, thrust into proper pre-eminence, above all the rest comes wondrous, exquisitely-proportioned Dr. Wilkins's Wadham; founded by a woman and thereby perhaps escaping the Oxford vice of misogyny; the college which proudly admitted Carew Raleigh to its civilities, just after the wretched James I had executed his father; the school where Robert Blake learnt to sail ships and Mr. Chr. Wren how to build churches, and Maurice Bowra how to bestow that most benign of Oxford blessings, a legitimate complacency: Wadham, of all places the greenest and most gracious, the peerless and most perfect in the whole green glory of Oxford."
Of course, Michael Foot was a bit older than I am when he wrote that, and he does see the history of the college through rose-tinted spectacles. Wadham's foundation by a woman didn't guarantee a commitment to women's liberation. At the beginning it was provided that only one woman should be allowed to enter the college, to do the laundry, and she should be "of such age and condition" that none of the male population should suffer temptation.
This lack of confidence in the seventeenth-century male wasn't entirely unjustified. John Wilmot, the "Wicked Earl" of Rochester, admitted at the age of thirteen as a favour to his father, one of Charles II's favourites, objected to the lack of female society and so took lodgings in Holywell Street, where he settled down, if rumour can be believed, into a more than business relationship with his landlady. And it was in one of the Holywell Street cottages, demolished in the late nineteenth century for the expansion of Wadham, that, two centuries later, William Morris (sadly at Oriel) met and was captivated by the woman who became his wife.
However, Wadham can be proud of being the first all-male Oxford college to admit a female student, in 1974. This was the beggining of the second great age of Wadham radicalism, when the "Red Dean" used college rooms to accommodate Greek Communist asylum seekers, the college became securely dominated, as now, by students from state schools and "Free Nelson Mandela" became the anthem of the newly-created Students' Union. It still is, and Wadham is also still the only Oxford college to have a proper SU (currently led by the lovely Navid Pourghazi) rather than separate bodies for undergraduates and postgraduates. I have always thought that naming a student body after a room was simply risible, and we Wadhamites, old and new, can justifiably laugh at the other colleges for this!
The first great age of Wadham radicalism began, despite the misogyny, with the college's foundation. There may indeed be some clue to this in the personality of the founder, apparently a determined and dictatorial old lady who looks classically Puritan in her portraits (one hangs in Hall, another in the MCR) with her black dress and Calvinistic frown.** But I am told she was a secret Catholic, and see no reason to disbelieve it. Wadham has never been at all keen on religious restrictions. Even in the age of Cromwell's Puritan Protectorate and the Anglo-Catholic monarchical restoration it was as if the prevailing religious notions did not exist within the college's harmonious walls.
One of Wadham's first radicals, and particularly close to my own heart because we read the same subject, was John Cooke, admitted to read law in (I think) 1625, subsequently a well-known radical lawyer, Parliament's Solicitor-General and, in 1649, chief prosecutor of Charles I for high treason. As everyone knows, he secured the ex-King's conviction with its concomitant death penalty; and immediately after the restoration in 1660 he was executed - or, more accurately, martyred - for this upholding of democratically legitimate law over monarchical tyranny.
One of Cooke's near-contemporaies at Wadham, Robert Blake, was a Parliamentary general and subsequently admiral, the real founder of British naval power after gross Stuart neglect. More significant for Wadham, though, was John Wilkins, Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law, who was Warden (head of the college) in the 1650s. During the republican period Wilkins assembled a remarkable group of forward-looking scholars at Wadham, including Christopher Wren. This group became the nucleus for the Royal Society. The overthrow of the monarchy had made it possible for Wadham to become the foremost centre of scientific research and education in Europe, and although the reconciliation of the British ruling classes in the restoration and the bourgeois-Protestant "glorious revolution" of 1688 greatly reduced the significance of Wadham, the legacy remained.
For most of the next two centuries, as far as I can tell, Wadham, "slept...forgetful of the world, by which she was forgotten" (to quote Gibbon, outrageously out of context!) Only one bit of excitement intruded briefly into the otherwise untroubled slumber of this academic Abyssinia, when in 1737 the Warden, the Revd. Robert Thistlethwaite, had to flee to France after propositioning an undergraduate. Apart from a couple of doggerel rhymes pointing out that "Wadham" rhymes with "Sodom", and the beginning of a reputation for sexual deviance that I'm happy to say flourishes to this day, the episode wasn't productive of much.
By the later nineteenth century Wadham was a poor college. A fundraising drive to build a new quad on Holywell Street didn't raise enough funds, and Wadham appeared as "Outland" in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno books, where the Sub-Warden tricks the Warden into resigning by the childish subterfuge of covering all but the valediction of the fatal letter with an innocuous document. Needless to say, the current Sub-Warden, my old tutor Jeffrey Hackney, Wadham Incarnate, would although an equally astute lawyer be incapable of such a thing - in fact he has refused a titular professorship and showed no interest in the Wardenship, both of which I hope he won't mind me saying he richly deserves.
I suppose the recovery started with the 1880s, when the whole student body was expelled following a riot in which the Dean was thrown out of a second-floor window. From then on it's been up and up, with the distinguished literary scholar Maurice Bowra as Warden from 1938 to 1971 and the philosophers Freddie Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, the mathematician Roger Penrose and left luminaries such as Terry Eagleton teaching at the college. Bowra kept up the gay tradition: on hearing of the marriage of two well-known Bohemians he remarked "Splendid couple - slept with both of them!" and, rather less creditably, explained that he married his wife because "Buggers can't be choosers!" I think Bowra would have enjoyed the current much-loved institution of Wadham Queer Bop, though I doubt he would have dressed in high heels and a bin bag as a few bop-goers do every year!
So, big up to those currently at Wadham, Kate, Kieran, Navid, Jack and Raoul. Enjoy the history, the intellectual distinction, the craic, and the college bar's cheap if somewhat watery beer!
*Foot's portrait now hangs in the Okinaga Room. Why isn't there a Foot Room? I have nothing against Dr. Okinaga but no-one's ever heard of him, and I doubt he ever expressed the glories of Wadham so eloquently. In fact, it occurs to me that Wadham has a pretty poor record with naming things. The Iranian section of the library was originally to be named after the Shah of Iran, who had given the money for it, but the college narrowly escaped infamy when he was overthrown and the library was promptly renamed after al-Firdausi, a medieval Farsi poet. I can't help feeling, though, that we got the worst, ethically speaking, of both arguments by first taking the money from the old tyrant, and then changing the name simply because he was no longer in power. Then there's the semi-officially named Ho Chi Minh Quad. While Ho's aspirations for the independence of his country are entirely laudable, he did have an unfortunate predilection for Stalinist dictatorship and having people shot. I'm sure there are some real Marxists we can name the quad after to show international solidarity!
**The really strange thing is that I am apparently (very) distantly related to the Wadham family, though I only found this out after graduating. It doesn't make me superstitious about coincidences or anything, but still it is rather spooky!
