by Roy Jenkins
Bristol had a university college from 1876 and became a university in 1909. It was intellectually more widely based and pre-1914 had rather more students than Birmingham. Sheffield evolved from Firth College, founded in 1879, to a university in 1905. The University of Wales was created in 1902, a federation of the University Colleges of Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883) and Bangor (1885); Swansea was added in 1920. Lampeter, although an Anglican seminary from 1822, and UWIST, which is the only university institution to have brought off a take-over bid for another, came after the last war. The pattern of dates is a remarkably regular one: a college created by local endeavour and subscription in the high period of civic pride and industrial prosperity which burgeoned forth in the brighter plumage of a university when Victorian self-help gave way to more opulent Edwardian display. But of course the numerical impact of this string of seven new universities was very limited. Their total intake in 1914 was barely more than 2000 a year - perhaps a quarter of 1 per cent of the population of relevant age.
There was a second wave of civic universities, which mostly remained as university colleges under the aegis of London University until after World War II: Southampton (which grew out of the Hartley Institute and became a University in 1952), Nottingham, Leicester, Exeter, Hull. Reading was half in this category, but a double exception because it was sponsored by Oxford not London, and because it became a full university in 1929, the only institution to receive such a charter between the wars. Newcastle, whose Armstrong College had been part of the University of Durham following its foundation in 1871, split from its older (but not ancient, contrary to frequent popular supposition) parent in 1963 and became an independent university, as did Dundee from St Andrews in 1966. By this time, however, the second wave of civic universities, and the fifth wave of British universities as a whole (the first wave being Oxford and Cambridge, the second the four old Scottish universities, the third Durham and London, and the fourth the Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol group plus Wales) was being overtaken by the sixth and post-the 1963 Robbins Report wave, which was half made up of Colleges of Advanced Technology turned from pumpkins into coaches by a touch of the Secretary of State’s wand and half of ‘green field’ universities mostly established outside historic cities.
To recapitulate the late pre-Robbins position, however, there were then twenty-two universities in Great Britain (or twenty-three with Northern Ireland), of which the only one not so far mentioned is Keele, which was set up as an Oxford-inspired liberal arts college in North Staffordshire in 1947, with the then Master of Balliol becoming the first Principal, and which became a university on the eve of Robbins in 1962.
The 1960s took the number of universities up from twenty-three to forty-six, the proportion of admissions to 7.5 per cent of the population of relevant age, and provided a decade and more of vastly expanding employment and promotion prospects for the university teacher. This period now seems almost infinitely remote from the restrictive financial climate in which all British universities have lived for the past ten years.
Apart from the major broadening of the gate of entry to which this period of expansion led, it also produced a desirable loosening of the British university hierarchy. Oxford and Cambridge in their differing ways maintained their near duopoly of assumed English excellence for the first half of this century. There was of course major work done elsewhere, particularly perhaps in London, with its specialized schools of which the London School of Economics on the arts side was matched by a number of others in science and medicine. But, broadly speaking, the civic, provincial or red-brick universities were then seen by themselves and others alike as no more than subsidiary hills in a mountain complex of which the twin peaks were Oxford and Cambridge. Most undergraduates, certainly on the arts side, would have preferred to go to these latter two had not lack of money, or connection, or confidence, without exceptional scholarship-winning ability, put these institutions just outside their reach. And there followed from this limitation of reach a subsequent exclusion, with very few exceptions, from the highest ranks in the law, the public service, the Church, and perhaps less strongly a range of other occupations. There were notable professorial spans at Manchester, at Birmingham, in London and elsewhere. But a high proportion of those who achieved them either came from Oxford or Cambridge and went back to them, or went on to them, or both.
The American position (admittedly in a much bigger country) where the general pre-eminence of a few great universities existed alongside a patchwork made up of differing clusters of particular quality, seemed to me to be much better balanced. Over the twenty-five years, from, say, 1955, the English experience moved to some quite considerable extent in this direction, with apart from the continuing independent tradition of the Scottish constellation, universities like Manchester and Bristol, Warwick and Newcastle achieving very distinct styles, qualities, and pulls of their own, with no degradation of Oxford and Cambridge but a consequent and healthy dilution of their monopoly. But that era is, I fear, over. I at once accept and half regret that the beginning of my Chancellorship should have coincided almost exactly with the return of Oxford to major fund-raising. I accept it because there is no other way in which we can keep Oxford as one of the handful of world-class universities. Neither the present government (and maybe no future government) is going to enable us to compete with the vast and continuing endowments of Harvard and Stanford. And in our case we have the additional burden of keeping up matchless collections of books and manuscripts as well as expensive but irreplaceable buildings.
If Oxford were to fail to stay in that league I do not think that any other British university would do so. It is now the biggest British university except for the federated ones of London and Wales. While more may not be worse, bigness is clearly not in itself excellence, but it is nevertheless remarkable that Oxford, which pre-war was barely two-thirds the size of Cambridge, should now be marginally bigger. It is largely the result of the grafting on of what is virtually a new scientific university in the past fifty years. I do not think that any other European university would do so either, in spite of the ancient fame of Bologna, or the central intellectual position of Paris, or the traditional teutonic authority of Heidelberg, Göttingen or Tübingen: maybe Tokyo, maybe Toronto, maybe more doubtfully Sydney might compete, but if Oxford were to withdraw I doubt if there would be anywhere outside the United States that could claim to be in the first six or eight. I think that would be bad not merely for Oxford, but for Britain and indeed for the whole world balance.
I am therefore a resolute fund-raiser. But I am not a wholly joyous one for three reasons: it over-elevates the position of the rich. They have been far more courted and cultivated - this is no doubt part of the purpose of the enterprise - in Thatcherite Britain than they were in Churchillian or Wilsonite or Heathite Britain. There is also a danger of making universities and colleges too money-centred with fund-raising ability too much of a qualification for appointment to high academic office. There is the additional danger that it may reverse the highly desirable trend towards competing and more dispersed poles of excellence which I noted earlier. Ths concept of making universities more dependent on private fund-raising is certainly not a radical or an iconoclastic one. It is a deeply conservative (with a small 'c') one for it underpins the existing hierarchy. The competitive ability of universities and/or colleges to raise money from their alumni is an almost direct function of the rich undergraduate-attracting status of the various institutions a generation or two ago.
I therefore have no doubt about my duty in relation to fund-raising as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But I have a certain amount of general caution, I do not want ‘the idea of a university’, to use Cardinal John Henry Newman’s famous phrase, to become that of locating the nearest potential benefactor and squeezing him until the pips squeak.
A Selection of Political Biographies
A Daily Telegraph article of 1988.
Good Biography as a general rule dates much m
ore quickly than does good fiction. Perhaps this is simply because it is a lower art form, and therefore, like perfectly decent but undistinguished wine, suffers rather than benefits from age.
In any event I am convinced that it is so. No one who has ever liked Dickens or Dostoevsky, Jane Austen or George Eliot is likely to find them dated on a return visit. Yet the general run of good-quality pre-1914 biography is not much read or appreciated today. Maybe the highest peaks survive intact. In this category of outstanding Victorian biography there would, I suppose, be strong support for Froude’s Carlyle, G. O. Trevelyan’s Macaulay and Morley’s Gladstone. Yet I do not think that either Trevelyan or Froude survive as well as the subjects’ own non-biographical writing, and Morley’s smooth-flowing three-volume narrative does not capture the Grand Old Man’s massive inner turbulence, which made him so quintessential a figure of his age, nearly as well as do Gladstone’s own Diaries.
If we step down a rank, however, which means that we are still dealing with works that were greeted as highly competent and comprehensive portraits when they appeared, we are into a pace and style of treatment that seems as remote today as a hansom cab in a pea soup fog. When over forty years ago I first read books like A. G. Gardiner’s Sir William Harcourt and J. A. Spender’s Campbell-Bannerman I found them useful and enjoyable. Now, however, I would much rather re-read a chapter (in the course of looking up an incident) in the present Lord Moran’s C.B. (1973) just as I prefer Robert Blake’s Disraeli to Moneypenny and Buckle’s six volumes. On Harcourt, who was an engaging and rumbustious figure sometimes known as ‘the great gladiator’, there is nothing much to switch to, which makes him one of the rare undeveloped sites available to a young biographer in the overcrowded world of today.
Despite the Disraeli example the difference is not just a question of length. It is much more one of angle of view. The old tombstone lives, in Lytton Strachey’s words ‘those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’, mostly unrolled the career of the commemorated one with political respect and personal discretion. An occasional short chapter on his literary taste or country pursuits was about the nearest one got to inquisitive dissection of character. It is as impossible to imagine Alistair Home’s Macmillan being published fifty or sixty years ago, as it would be to imagine the Life of Sir Michael Hicks Beach by his daughter being published today.
Was it Strachey himself who was most responsible for the change? He was certainly contemptuous of the prevailing style, tried to miniaturize it as much as any Japanese woman ever did to constrict the size of her feet, and believed that in achieving this by a preference for aphorism over fact he could make each small picture into an iconoclastic work of art. In a sense he was as sterile as he was brilliant. He had remarkably few imitators. And, with a short pause for breath, the bland multi-volume portraits resumed their sway. Clustered around 1932, the year of Strachey’s death, were Ronaldshay’s Curzon, Spender and Cyril Asquith’s Asquith, and Mrs Dugdale’s Balfour, all of them in the strict tradition of the genre.
Yet Strachey had shot a destructive arrow into the established school, the poison of which spread slowly but surely. Eventually, when assisted by the wartime and post-war paper shortage, it did so fatally. In the 1940s and early 1950s the tombstones got much smaller (G. M. Young’s Stanley Baldwin, Keith Feiling’s Neville Chamberlain, even Harold Nicolson’s George V managed to do it in single not over-gross volumes). And when later a taste for books of 300,000 words and more was re-imported from America, where there has been a foolish trend to value biographies, as though they were fat cattle, by dead weight on the hoof, they were of a very different format and content. Simultaneous multi-volume publication was out and a mixture of scandalous revelation and psychological analysis was in.
Far less, therefore, than in the case not merely of fiction but of most other literary forms, do unchanging standards apply to political biography. I consequently think it best to confine my choice to the ‘moderns’ - mostly post-1945 with only a brief glance back to illustrate the change of habit.
First, J. L. Garvin’s Joseph Chamberlain as a good illustration of the tradition: spacious, sympathetic, even adulatory, but well written by a professional (much better than by a relation, which was only too frequent at that period), with even a touch of pace. The only trouble was that he never finished it and left the last two volumes (of five) to be done by Julian Amery over twenty years later.
Next, in view of what I have said about Strachey, Eminent Victorians must be included. None of the four subjects were politicians, of course, but they all, soldier, headmaster, worldly prelate, lady with the lamp, were sufficiently wily public figures to qualify for inclusion in the category. From the 1930s I chose Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. It wears remarkably well. The style is a bit florid, and he is much better on British politicians than on either foreigners or Bernard Shaw and T. E. Lawrence. The essays on Asquith, Balfour and Curzon each contain phrases that are as illuminating as they are memorable.
Moving on into the 1950s, I regard Philip Magnus’s Gladstone as a very good book, in no way definitive, but the work of a sensitive architect pulling together into a compact shape what had become a house almost submerged in a sprawl of outbuildings. Although substantially longer, Blake’s Disraeli deserves to be put in the same category, even though he had far less sympathy with Disraeli as a character that Magnus did with Gladstone.
John Grigg’s magnus opus opened in 1973 with the promise of being the long missing (but not for want of other people trying) great biography of Lloyd George. Now twenty years later he is showing signs of emulating Garvin on Chamberlain (or, from across the Atlantic, Schlesinger on Roosevelt) and leaving us stranded half-way across the river, three fine arches of the bridge built but not much early prospect of reaching dry land. He has been particularly good on what one would expect to elude him most; the socio-topographical background of Lloyd George’s North Wales life.
I end with two books which, although not in the least malevolently written, have greatly enhanced the reputations of the authors while putting their subjects through all the (fortunately posthumous) rigours of having their portrait painted in the style of Sutherland. John Campbell’s F. E. Smith (1983) and Ben Pimlott’s Hugh Dalton (also 1983, although supplemented by two volumes of his diaries in 1985 and 1986), are both memorable and definitive. They skilfully extract the treasures and seal up the tombs, probably never to be opened again.
The Maxim Gun of the English Language
This essay is based on a combination of a speech at an OUP lunch for the publication of the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and of an article in the Independent Magazine.
A Hundred and ten years ago James Murray started serious work on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was part of a great late-Victorian wave of collating information in a much more systematic way than had hitherto been done. Leslie Stephen began producing the Dictionary of National Biography in 1888. Who’s Who first appeared in something approaching its modern form in 1897.
Murray’s work took longer to mature. He began publication in 1884, but it was 1928 and thirteen years after his own death before the project was complete. There was a substantial supplement published in 1972, and in 1989 a complete new edition with 5000 new words and a total of over 21,000 pages in twenty separate volumes was launched upon the world at the modest price of £1500.
The period since Murray began has to a remarkable extent coincided with two superficially contradicting developments. The first has been the decline of British power in the world. The second has been the advance of the English language.
In 1879 the Empire was approaching its zenith, Queen Victoria, to whom the first edition was dedicated, had recently been made an empress by Disraeli, on top of being a queen. Hardly another empire was proclaimed until Jean Bédel Bokassa rather overreached himself in the Central African Republic a hundred years later. The Zulu War, the epitome of an imperialist adventure, was also be
ing fought in 1879 and Rorke’s Drift and Isandhlwana engraved themselves on the history of British bravery and incompetence. More significantly, Britain was still just ahead of Germany and the United States as an industrial power and the leading exporter in the world. Within a decade or so, however, the apogee was past, and it soon became downhill all the way for British imperial and industrial refulgence.
The language, on the other hand, supported by the Oxford English Dictionary, has gone from strength to strength. If the agents of the old imperialism sometimes advanced with a Bible in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, their descendants have replaced these insignia with the OED and a glass of British Council wine. Of course we have been lucky in this linguistic context in having the United States as an immensely powerful ally. Like Blücher at the battle of Waterloo, it may have arrived on the scene a little late in the day but its intervention has been even more decisive than was that of the Prussians in 1815.
The French were in both cases the victims of afternoon reinforcements, and I always felt a good deal of sympathy when I observed close up, and suffered some inconvenience from, their determined rearguard action to hold the European Community as the last international organization that was a Francophone bastion. With Britain alone they might at least have hoped to draw a linguistic war. But against Britain and North America, not to mention Australasia, most of Africa, and the curious influence of India - which is at once a great reservoir of English-speaking millions and the potential breeding ground of a new language that has some but by no means all of the characteristics of metropolitan English - the French, allied with the Québecois, the Maghreb, most of the Sahara, and hardly anybody else, are sadly outgunned.
