Portraits and Miniatures

by Roy Jenkins

  The second more domestic development has been Oxford’s success from the late 1950s onwards in grafting on to its humanistic core a major new research capacity in the natural and applied sciences, including medicine. Its facilities in this respect now equal, possibly slightly exceed, those of Cambridge. And, having first been generous the other way I think it can now be said that a break-through would be at least as likely to occur in Oxford as in Cambridge.

  Per contra Oxford has become somewhat less dominant politically. For the first time for many years there are more Cambridge alumni than Oxford ones in the present Cabinet, although there are not a great number of either. And it might I suppose be held that on power as opposed to numbers the edge was still with Oxford, even if dependent upon a not very enthusiastic member of that university.1 Oxford’s influence on the present-day Labour Party is hardly comparable with that in the first Wilson Government when it reached the extraordinary peak of fourteen Cabinet members out of twenty-one. And the new leader of the Liberal Democrats is not likely to be one of ours - or one of yours; this despite the fact that when we started out with the Gang of Four it was three-quarters Oxonian.

  So perhaps the two universities are becoming more like each other, rather as old married couples, unless they go violently in the other direction, are sometimes said to get to look alike, or (which would be depressing) as modern cities become less individual, with the same hotels, the same shops, the same banks, the same traffic jams, the same food. I hope that will not go too far and that visually Cambridge will remain grander and Oxford more intimate, Cambridge more on show (even though the Oxford character is more exhibitionist), Oxford more hidden, Cambridge more like Paris, Oxford more like Rome amongst European capitals, Cambridge more like Venice, Oxford more like Florence amongst Italian cities.

  We must not, however, become prisoners of our architecture, valuable a possession and formative an ambience though it is. Less physically we have in common the facts that we are both short of money, and that we are both still universities of the foremost world class, although neither of us can any longer take it for granted that this will continue effortlessly to be the case.

  For seven centuries before 1922 we had both been privately funded universities - although private finance in the pre-capitalist era meant something very different from today - and remained substantially so until 1939. Then over the next thirty years we gradually became predominantly publicly funded institutions. I do not think that did us any harm. I speak here for Oxford, but I am not aware of a very different Cambridge experience. Over that period Oxford broadened its entry, improved its examination results, magnified its research capacity, maintained its réclame and preserved most of its framework of man-made beauty.

  It is an over-austere - perhaps a doctrinaire - view that living off public money is enervating for an institution that knows how to spend it well. It is the cutting off of an adequate flow that is debilitating. But that has happened. There is no early prospect of a reversal, and if we are to maintain our reputations I see no alternative to major fund-raising efforts. I do not welcome the prospect. I think that there are considerable dangers in the idea of a university becoming increasingly that of extracting money from private benefactors, and skill in this task, which while important is not the greatest of the intellectual arts, becoming almost inevitably an important qualification for high academic office. I note with mild dismay that three-quarters of my conversation with the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford is devoted to this subject. I like to think that Curzon must have talked to Sir Herbert Warren about something more elevated. Yet I accept it as inevitable, made more so by the threat to university independence that is contained partly in the Education Reform Bill and partly in the proposal for contract funding which looms alongside it. Private money becomes necessary not only to preserve posts, to attract talent and to fund research, but also to maintain a hold on the independence of research and teaching judgement, without which no university can approach excellence.

  University fund-raising, while it can be done from a platform of advantage by both Oxford and Cambridge, also presents them with certain special difficulties. In Oxford’s case at least, the university’s need for money is now greater than that of the colleges. This does not mean that the colleges, even the richer ones, have no needs of their own and still less does it mean that they could, if they were so minded, meet all the needs of the university. What it does mean is that the colleges, broadly speaking, need money for new buildings in order to accommodate undergraduates for a higher proportion of their time, which is a desirable improvement, provided it does not mean spattering the university areas with second-rate buildings. The universities need money to maintain posts and research facilities, to prevent a damaging deterioration of performance. It is essential defensive need. The other is desirable and improving. But the colleges are much better placed for fund-raising. Their needs are more tangible and their contact with their old members is more intimate. There is a degree of mismatch.

  In both our universities the need for money will in my view force some adjustment of relationships between colleges and the central core. We will no doubt continue - and desirably continue - strongly collegial. But even the strongest colleges could not be much more than conveniently sited liberal arts institutions without the university. Only the universities can discharge the knowledge guarding and the knowledge extending roles of Oxford and Cambridge, and they will not be able to do this without substantial sums of private money, which they will not be able to raise without a recognition by the colleges that they are essentially part of an archipelago and not isolated islands.

  Glasgow’s Place in the Cities of the World

  A lecture given in April 1990 to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow to mark Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture.

  The Two cities of which Glasgow never reminds me, whether spontaneously or by design, are London and Edinburgh. With many other great cities of the world it has some affinity, with New York, perhaps with Chicago. I have also found echoes of Glasgow in Barcelona, Boston, Lisbon and Naples. But I never thought it had much to do with Paris (except for the Scottish Colourists, and they, unusually for schools of painting, owe as much to the east as to the west of Scotland) until in one brilliant November sunset last year I stood on the Pont de la Concorde and suddenly thought that the line of the Seine, while utterly dissimilar to that of the Thames, was rather like that of the Clyde. The Pont des Arts aroused a thought of the Suspension Bridge, the Institut de France could be the Custom House, and looking in the other direction the slopes above the Place de Chaillot rose up in a passable imitation of the West End.

  What does one mean by saying that one city reminds one of another? Not always a great deal could, I suppose, be a brutal answer. Sometimes there can be a certain logical basis for comparison, as when I suddenly realized that the reason brownstone New York, i.e. New York before skyscrapers or even large apartment blocks, seemed to me to have a considerable affinity with the less grandiose parts of Berlin was that, as great cities, they were contemporary with each other and with nowhere else. Both of them moved into the world league at almost exactly the same time, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Equally one could say that Lisbon is more like San Francisco than it is like Marseille or Genoa because although southern it is not Mediterranean but oceanic. More frequently, however, the thought of comparison comes suddenly and irrationally, although it can none the less be powerful and even productive as with the little dunked madeleine cake that set Proust off on the whole evocation of his childhood and the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

  Thus if I take the Glasgow/New York connection, which I find stronger than the link of either with London, it has most vividly come to my mind in largely irrational ways. As each week of the first autumn after I ceased to be Member of Parliament for Hillhead went by, I found that I increasingly missed Glasgow. It is paradoxical that I should have felt more nostalgic as the Glasgow evenings got even darker
than the London ones. But I have always found that the special metropolitan quality of the West End best expressed itself at the season of twilights soon after lunch. If I had to choose a single most evocative vignette it would be of an autumn or winter Saturday afternoon in the Kelvingrove Gallery with the organ playing, and then, as one came out, the light fading over the silhouettes of Gilmorehill and the other hillocks of the West End.

  In these circumstances I have several times experienced a stab of linking memory with coming out of the Frick Gallery on East 70th Street, in many ways the most attractive small museum in the world, and looking across at the setting of a December sun over the 1890s pinnacles of Central Park West. I cannot rationally say that Argyle Street is very like Fifth Avenue or Kelvingrove Park much like the granite outcrops of Central Park. It is not a direct physical resemblance that is at work. Few people if unblindfolded in the Byres Road would mistake it for Madison Avenue. It is more a common touch of metropolitan atmosphere and a feeling - that is why it being a Saturday is significant - that one is in both a city which in many ways is at its best at a weekend, and certainly not one which needs to be escaped from as soon as it has served its workaday purpose.

  This leads on to the question of what gives a city metropolitan atmosphere, which Glasgow in my view indisputably has, and which, amongst English cities, Birmingham and Leeds for example, although both now bigger in population than Glasgow, do not. It is obviously not therefore a simple question of size, although a certain minimum is a necessary qualification. To stick to English examples for the moment, York and Bath, Salisbury and Winchester are all satisfactory and indeed distinguished little cities, but no one could possibly describe them as metropolitan.

  Yet at the other end of the scale I do not think it is possible to deny metropolitan status to any of the really enormous cities of the world. Poverty and confusion by no means exclude it. Nowhere could be more pulsating with a metropolitan current that sparks well beyond the frontiers of the country of which it is the capital than is Cairo, with its seven million or so fairly wretched population and communications chaos. Nor can Calcutta, with ten million even more miserable inhabitants, be denied great city status. It is an artificial creation of the Raj, or at least of ‘John Company’ before that, and it is declining vis à vis Bombay and maybe Delhi too. But it has enough governmental, legal, commercial and journalistic tradition, expressed in its buildings and layout, to keep it in the metropolitan league. Shanghai, of approximately the same monstrous size as the other two, is another example like Calcutta of a city that has lost the purpose for which it was built. The early twentieth-century buildings of the Bund stand as an isolated and fossilized monument to Western commercial penetration. But as Shanghai remains the second city in political importance and the first in population of the biggest country in the world it too can hardly be pushed out of the league. Indeed it is Peking which, away from the contrasting authoritarianisms of the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People, looks unmetropolitan because of its unconcentrated layout.

  ‘Spread-outness’ is indeed in general the enemy of metropolitan quality. I cannot see Milton Keynes becoming a metropolis however large it grows. It is because New York is so far at the opposite pole that its position as the captain of the metropolises is not seriously in doubt. And it is a concept which provides a battlefield over which the metropolitan status of the other great American cities can be fought out.

  Chicago does not suffer from ‘spread-outness’. Fifty or sixty years ago it broke out of the constriction of the Loop which had previously held tight its downtown area. But it remains concentrated by its lakeside site, has the most striking high buildings in the world, and securely holds its position as America’s second city, culturally and commercially. This is probably because the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Chicago’s exact twin in population and the centre of a more rapidly growing area, is so scattered that it contains a peak significantly higher than Ben Nevis within the city limits. Its wealth, its size, its cultural resources, resulting partly from its position as world film capital, save it from being provincial, but its lack of a centre of animation means that it has never wholly vanquished the much smaller but superbly sited and highly concentrated San Francisco as the capital of the West Coast, let alone pushed Chicago out of national second place.

  Philadelphia and Detroit, the fourth and the fifth United States cities, have dull sites and unexciting terrain. Philadelphia is redeemed by its history. It claims to have been the second largest English-speaking city in the world until the very precise date of 1794, and one wonders to what it then ceded this distinction: New York, Edinburgh, or perhaps Calcutta (if ‘English speaking’ is defined as loosely as in much of America today)? Detroit’s start as a French fort does not give it a comparable historical redolence to William Penn’s city and it remains a manufacturing town rather than a metropolitan city, no more a rival to Chicago than Leeds is to Glasgow.

  Washington is the most intriguing example of a city that stands uneasily on the frontier of being a metropolis. It is also interesting as the oldest and the most important of the politically and artificially created capitals, and hence the one which has had the longest opportunity to grow into a real city. It is now large enough by any standards. With over three million in the metropolitan area it is bigger than any German city, and bigger than any other European one except for London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow. But for the first 130 years it remained a small town built on an often muddy brown marsh with remarkably few amenities. When Theodore Roosevelt, a fashionable New Yorker, became President in 1901, he regarded Washington as a place of adventurous exile and life in the White House almost like being in an army camp. British diplomats there were paid an unhealthy living allowance until well into this century.

  The city grew dramatically only when first Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, then his wartime administration, and then the American captaincy of the West under Truman and Eisenhower led to an explosion in the size of the Federal Government. This growth took an essentially suburban form even quite close to the hub of government. Quintessential mid-twentieth-century Washington is made up of detached houses in dogwood-lined hilly streets. Not only are there virtually no even modestly high buildings, except across the Potomac in Alexandria, but there are hardly any carrefours which count as centres of animation and of which at least a hundred could be found in Paris. Nor is there any view that proclaims ‘you are in the centre of a great city’ with anything like the assurance that does, say, the approach to Central Station in Glasgow, either up from Broomielaw or across Gordon Street. The 1890s Central Hotel of uninspiring name but magnificent woodwork forms an important part of either view, and it is a minor tragedy that its decline should have left Glasgow, architecturally the finest Victorian city in the world, without a single good hotel of the epoch, whereas even Edinburgh has two. To have lost the St Enoch Station Hotel and the Grand at Charing Cross was, as Wilde might have made Lady Bracknell say, a misfortune, but effectively to lose the third points to carelessness, or at least to the disadvantages of breaking up and privatizing the old railway hotel chain.

  I return for a moment to Washington where the suburban layout and the mono-cultural nature of the lifestyle (politics, politics all the way) make for provincialism, but are outweighed, although not by a wide margin, by the fact that the government of which it is the seat, and whose composition and doings are endlessly discussed, has been for the past fifty years the most powerful in the world. In Georgetown - the Kelvinside of Washington - the talk would be regarded by good West End standards as narrowly and unacceptably political, but it is at least conducted by the most famous journalists vying with the most favoured ambassadors to produce the most sophisticated witticisms about the most powerful cabinet officers to be found in any capital. And the talk is also perhaps less narrowly internal than political talk mostly is in London. That is one advantage of world leadership. Nevertheless, Washington remains essentially a one-purpose town.

 
; The ‘one-purpose town’ aspect is repeated still more strongly in Bonn, which although a much more ancient city (2000 years old in 1989 so it was claimed, re-founded by the Emperor Julian in 359, and the birthplace of Beethoven 1411 years after that) is a much more recent and, it now again appears likely, a much more temporary capital. It has also been much more of a gimcrack capital, with most of the business of government of the world’s third most powerful economy being carried on - and very successfully carried on - in a collection of thoroughly second-rate 1950s and 1960s buildings. For forty years there has been a remarkable contrast between the capitals of the two German-speaking countries. In Vienna the affairs of the little Austrian Republic have been conducted from what are by and large the grandest official buildings of any capital city. There is a touch of bathos about the Hofburg without the Habsburgs. In Bonn, on the other hand, the business of the Federal Republic of Germany, long the middle kingdom of the European Community, now the hinge power of the whole continent which recent events again make the pivot of the world, is conducted in the most modest surroundings in Europe. Just as the Federal Republic of Germany has tried to exercise less political power than is commensurate with its economic strength, so on a diplomatic visit to Bonn one may look in vain for marble staircases, plumed guards of honour, screaming police escorts and glittering state banquets. Whether a move to Berlin will bring with it a return to Wilhelmine grandeur and a more assertive style of government is a fascinating and to some a worrying question.