by Roy Jenkins
Then in the second quarter of that century there came the outbreak of grandeur in both universities in the form of Trinity here and Christ Church at Oxford. Christ Church was born only after two false attempts, which made it first Cardinal College, then King Henry VIII College and only finally Christ Church, all within thirty years. It is to the best of my belief the only college in the world that has a cathedral tucked away in its purlieus. But however firmly it may have the diocesan church in its embrace it has not got the university in this position. The original intention was perhaps precisely this - ‘a college which when finished will equal the rest of Oxford’ was an early statement of aim. It has never quite achieved that, although it has achieved the worldly feat of producing more Prime Ministers than the rest of the university put together. So has Trinity. Christ Church indeed in some ways resembles a bit of Cambridge in Oxford. It was wholly appropriate that its first dean - Cox - should have been imported from Cambridge. Perhaps for this reason it is more detached than is Trinity. Trinity may be uncomfortably large and rich for the rest of the university - like a province of an African state with an unbalancing amount of the minerals and therefore the wealth, a Katanga or a Biafra, although not I hope a candidate for secession, but it is also part of the core of the university and therefore its middle kingdom. Christ Church, both geographically and psychologically, is much more like a ship - some would say a luxury liner - moored off shore. However, they have both exhibited a worldly exuberance and physical splendour which make them suitable monuments to their royal founder as well as major moulders of the shapes of their universities.
In spite of these great developments the sixteenth century was a pretty rough time in Cambridge. Five of its nine Chancellors were executed, including the great Fisher in 1535. This was a degree of hazard to which my predecessors have never been exposed, which is surprising for, more recently, the Oxford tradition has favoured the choice, after contest, of more controversial Chancellors than has been the Cambridge habit.
The seventeenth century was one of almost equally great turbulence and fluctuating, almost contradictory, fortunes for both universities. Until the Civil War their numbers were rising strongly. Cambridge grew from a total of 1600 in 1550 to 3000 in the 1620s and 30s. Oxford moved more or less in step. Their influence rose proportionately. Oxford was particularly good at flattering the royal vanity of King James I. University MPs were introduced during his reign, but perhaps more significant was a very substantial increase to about a third in the proportion of the House of Commons that was Oxford or Cambridge educated.
The Civil War brought the increase in numbers to an end. Oxford became the Royalist capital, while Cambridge spawned the Earl of Manchester and Cromwell, although it was Oxford that had to accept the latter as its Chancellor in 1650. Cambridge saw ten of its sixteen colleges have their heads of houses removed from office - three colleges twice experienced the change - during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. Oxford took more enthusiastically to the Restoration and - a very Oxonian touch -led the way in establishing a one-day coach service to London and thus strengthening its links with court and government. In both universities, however, the long torpor of the eighteenth century was casting its shadow before it, numbers were falling heavily, and influence was declining. The intake of freshmen per year fell at Oxford from 460 in the 1660s to 300 in the 1690s. It became little more than a seminary for the Anglican church. Cambridge avoided such a complete retreat to a church bastion, but its total size was reduced by a third before the nadir of the 1770s.
Perversely, this period of academic and worldly decline was marked by the most glorious architectural flowering. Wren, Hawksmoor and Gibbs gave Oxford a large part of what one would most enthusiastically show to a first-time visitor. Between 1660 and 1730 there arose the Sheldonian Theatre, the Clarendon Building and the Radcliffe Camera in the university area, the Codrington Library and the North Quad of All Souls, Tom Tower and the completion of Tom Quad as well as Peckwater Quadrangle and the Library at Christ Church, Magdalen New Buildings and almost the whole of the Queen’s College, including its baroque façade on to the High Street.
From the same architects Cambridge gained Trinity Library, the chapels of Pembroke and Emmanuel, the Senate-House and the Gibbs Building at King’s. It is perhaps less dependent on the period than Oxford because it had more to show before. And for Cambridge the contrast between the splendour of buildings and the poverty of intellectual enquiry was less sharp, for it was the age of Newton as well as the age of Wren, although it could be argued that Newton found London and the Royal Society more stimulating than Trinity. After he had gone, however, and even though Bentley, the great classicist who was Master of Trinity for nearly fifty years, lingered on until 1742, the mid-eighteenth-century sleep into which Cambridge fell was even more profound than that of Oxford, which could at least claim to have sustained the century by educating Wesley, Johnson, Blackstone, Gibbon and Bentham, even though the last two did not think much of their alma mater.
What is the case is that the eighteenth century, the last century in which Oxford and Cambridge maintained their English university monopoly, and the century widely thought of above all others as that of the gentleman scholar, the easy-going squire/classicist who was as at home in his library as on his horse, at the production of which type they should have been so adept, was undoubtedly the first century amongst seven in which neither Oxford nor Cambridge was pre-eminent amongst the centres of learning of the territories within the realm of their sovereigns. Edinburgh was superior and so, after its foundation within his Electorate of Hanover by George II in 1737, was Göttingen.
The surprising thing is that Oxford and Cambridge, having been thus overtaken in the eighteenth century, regained their British intellectual pre-eminence in the nineteenth century although some would say that they took longer and the assistance of several Royal Commissions to get back to the top European league. How did they do it? The short answer is that Cambridge did it through mathematics and Oxford through religion, and that mathematics being on the whole a more serious subject than religion (at least as pursued by the Oxford liturgical disputes of the second quarter of the nineteenth century), there stemmed from this a certain Cavalier/Roundhead bifurcation which had not really occurred in the seventeenth century but which in the nineteenth century sent Oxford in a more metaphysical, frivolous and worldly direction and Cambridge on a more enquiring, serious and austere course.
The remarkable achievement of eighteenth-century Cambridge was that within a clerical shell it shed theology as its central subject and hatched out mathematics as its replacement. The ladder of wranglers as well as the tripos was established, and already when George III came to the throne the Senior Wrangler-ship was a coveted position strenuously striven for. Muscular intellectual competition began in Cambridge a good fifty years before cricket and rowing, the two first organized games to be brought into either university from the schools.
I last had occasion to write about the Cambridge mathematical tripos and its relationship to athleticism when, just over thirty years ago, I tried to describe the Leslie Stephen-inspired atmosphere of Trinity Hall for a life of Sir Charles Dilke, who went there in 1862, which I was then engaged in writing. ‘Stephen’, I wrote, ‘believed in plain living and hard work. He had a high respect for the discipline of the mathematical tripos and the habit of cool, detached enquiry, founded upon intensive application, to which it led. He was as distrustful of enthusiasm in affairs of the intellect (or of the emotions) as he was respectful to its exhibition on the tow-path. He disliked obscurity and ambiguity of expression, and thought of them as inevitable results of speculative generalization. Let a man stick to his last, write or talk only about those subjects to which he had applied himself (without attempting to weave them all into a single metaphysic), and it could all be done in good, calm, clear Cambridge English.’
I added that Stephen, having been a poor oar, had made himself one of the great rowing coaches of the cen
tury, had written the college boating song, liked thirty-mile walks and had at least once walked from Cambridge to London to attend a dinner and back again during the night. He was also the son-in-law of Thackeray, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was in addition, I suggested, ‘almost perfectly suited to the Cambridge tripos system of the day, under which a man reading for honours was toned up like an athlete and won his awards by a combination of staying power during the long period of preliminary work and speed in the examination room.’
The key Oxford/Cambridge phrases in my attempted analysis of the intellectual style of Dilke’s mentor, in which I suspect I was heavily influenced by Stephen’s biography by Noël Annan, which had been the first book of the then recently elected ‘boy Provost’ of King’s, were ‘without attempting a single metaphysic’ and ‘calm, clear Cambridge English’.
This distinction after which I was groping was given somewhat farcical Cambridge expression thirty years after Stephen had left Trinity Hall, although I did not come across this until fifteen years after I wrote my Dilke book. H. S. Foxwell, notable St John’s economist who lived in I Harvey Road for almost as long as John Neville Keynes, Registrary of this University, lived in 6 Harvey Road, was disturbed by rumours in the early 1890s that his neighbour was about to be enticed away by the chair of political economy in the University of Oxford. ‘Pray don’t go,’ he wrote in half-serious horror. ‘Think of the effect your move may have on your son. He may grow up flippantly epigrammatical and end by becoming the proprietor of a Gutter Gazette, or the hero of a popular party; instead of emulating his father’s noble example, becoming an accurate, clear-headed Cambridge man spending his life in the valuable and unpretentious service of his kind, dying beloved of his friends, venerated by the wise and unknown to the masses, as true merit and worth mostly are.’
Keynes père did not go, and Keynes fils was protected from the superficial worldliness of an Oxford education which Professor Foxwell rather oddly thought would necessarily follow from such a translation. John Maynard Keynes, it must be said, did not entirely eschew either epigram or fame, but he remained faithful, if not to the extent of emulating the ‘warp and woof’ Cambridge life of his parents, at least to that of becoming one of this University’s greatest twentieth-century ornaments.
Was Foxwell expressing a truth in mocking language or was he merely being complacently denigrating of the university he did not know? I think he did have a fragment of reality concealed within his joke. It can be differently expressed by saying that although as a matter of simple geographical fact Cambridge is and always has been three miles nearer to London than Oxford, in most other senses Oxford has long been closer to the capital. And that is not only a function of the superiority of the Padding-ton over the Liverpool Street train service. It pre-dates the railway age. The operator of that fast coach from Carfax to the court at Whitehall in the late seventeenth century had done his market research well. He knew that amidst the ‘dreaming spires’ below ‘the soft-muffled Cumnor hills’ and in ‘the home of lost causes’ there were plenty of moths who would respond to the prospect of a quick journey to the metropolitan candle.
Oxford gradually became more of a nursery of government. Of the fourteen eighteenth-century Prime Ministers, seven were at Oxford, five at Cambridge and two at neither. It should however be said that if stature is the test, both Walpole and the Younger Pitt were from Cambridge, with only the Elder Pitt of comparable quality from Oxford. Of the nineteenth century’s nineteen (not counting the two who overlapped), nine were Oxonians, six Cantabrigians, three from neither. Oxford’s stars were Peel and Gladstone, Cambridge’s Palmerston. In this century Oxford has eight, Cambridge three and ‘nowhere or elsewhere’ seven. This time the greatest stars, Lloyd George and Churchill, were amongst the ‘nowheres’. What is perhaps more significant is that because Cambridge had no nineteenth-century Prime Minister after 1868, the last 120 years give a score of Oxford eleven and Cambridge three.
Prime Ministers are the most obvious piece of litmus paper but also provide only a narrowly based test. However, if Lord Chancellors or Viceroys of India are put through the same sieve, roughly the same result is produced. In the past hundred years there have been thirteen Oxford Lord Chancellors to four Cambridge ones. In the ninety-year history of the viceroyalty there were fifteen Oxonians and five Cantabrigians.
Something the same has been true at the less elevated ranks both of politics and of administration, particularly overseas in the heyday of empire. Despite the tradition of the Butler family amongst a number of other Cambridge examples, Oxford was always twice as strong in the Indian Civil Service and in the Sudan Political Service. In the words of Richard Symonds, historian of Oxford and Empire: ‘No other university had a college such as [was] Balliol between 1870 and 1914, devoted to selecting and preparing young men for high office and then, through the network of old Balliol men, ensuring that they secured it. Nor elsewhere was there an institution comparable to All Souls … [which] appointed as its fellows the most brilliant graduates of each year who, as one commentator said in the 1930s, thus joined a committee which took upon itself no less a task than running the British Empire.’ It is tempting to comment that the main direction in which they ran it was into the ground.
This Oxford approach was as much a matter of attitude of mind as of the statistics of jobs procured. Its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit and interest, as I have said, were more worldly, more metaphysical and less empirically enquiring than those of Cambridge. Nor, surprisingly, was the attachment to ‘cool, clear Cambridge English’ quite so strong. Oxford sometimes preferred obfuscating a question with an epigram to clarifying it with quiet diligence. The Franks Report - the 1966 result of a seven-strong internal enquiry into the affairs of the university - proclaimed its determination that ‘reading and writing, rather than listening, should continue to be the salient characteristics of that Oxford system’. This was an illuminating comment and sensible declaration of intent, but it did not reveal the whole truth, which is that Oxford has now long been a university based hardly at all on listening, substantially on reading and writing, but above all on talking. The taciturnity of Whewell or the simple certainties of G. E. Moore would have sat ill with the unending and kaleidoscopic talk of Whateley or Bowra or Berlin.
Oxford at its worst has been glib and flippant: at its best it has constantly burnished with a new sparkle the store of humanistic learning of which it has been a crucial guardian; and in its median performance it has kept Britain well supplied with those good at the chattering occupations, such as defending the criminal classes, conducting television panels, and governing the country. But it cannot be denied that for nearly a hundred years after the important watershed of 1870 in the universities it unashamedly preferred the soft climate and lush meadows of a river valley leading smoothly to London, while being happy for Cambridge to live more robustly in the harsher East Anglian countryside and closer to the rugged frontiers of knowledge.
Cambridge had followed up the eighteenth-century birth of the mathematical tripos with the creation of the natural sciences tripos in 1849, but although this came after a period of very strong increase in numbers (substantially greater than any decline in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and much concentrated in Trinity and St John’s, which were between them responsible for half the admissions) it was not immediately followed by any significant provision of natural science facilities. In 1871, however, the lesser known of the two Dukes of Devonshire who between them occupied the Cambridge Chancellorship from 1861 to 1908 performed what turned out to be one of the rare significant acts of any Chancellor of either university for several centuries and made the gift that led to the creation of the Cavendish Laboratory. There was a good deal of scientific ferment in Cambridge before that. Darwin had come and gone at the end of the 1820s and the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Adam Sedgwick had comple
ted his long but active period as professor of botany in 1861. F. D. Maurice and then Henry Sidgwick dominated successive generations of the Apostles, which society was already nearly fifty years old. And the great interlocking dynasties of Cambridge families were already setting up their encampments west of the Cam.
Nevertheless, it required the foundation of the Cavendish, as both a cause and a symbol of a line of Cambridge development, to set this university’s first half of the twentieth-century style in a mould markedly different from Oxford. If in the 1920s or 1930s one had heard that a breakthrough in the natural or applied sciences, or in mathematics, or in economics, had occurred in a British university it would have been far more likely to have happened on the banks of the Cam than of the Isis. It would have been difficult for Oxford to have produced contemporary names that could stand in rivalry to Rutherford, Hardy, Russell, Keynes, Blackett, Dirac, Adrian, Chadwick or Aston. It could I think have been then fairly said that the baton not merely of British but of world pre-eminence on the frontiers of knowledge was in the hands of Cambridge.
Since then there have been two developments. First the war ran down Cambridge, England, in a way that was unreflected in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard (and MIT) was fortified by the great bonus of its post-1940 ingestion of European refugee scholars and by the stimulating effects, both psychologically and materially, of the post-war economic and political pre-eminence of the United States. Just as an Oxonian should not deny that the flame of intellectual enquiry burned most brightly beside the Cam in the inter-war years, so I do not think that either of us, Oxonians or Cantabrigians, should deny that in the forties and fifties it had substantially migrated, for reasons outside our control, to the banks of the Charles River and the purlieus of Harvard Yard. Quite where it is today is more difficult to decide. Still in the United States, I think, but more disseminated in accordance with the westward tilt in the balance of the country, and with Berkeley and Stanford able to claim at least a piece of the true cross.
