The Masters

Appendix Reflections on the College Past

Often, during that year of the Mastership election, I thought how much the shape of our proceedings was determined by the past. Coming back for that first college meeting in January, I began thinking about the agenda, and wondered how long that rigid order had stayed unchanged. The minutes were, of course, a recent innovation; within living memory there had been no record of any decisions except for the most formal acts, such as elections and the sale of land. It had been left to the recollection of the senior fellows — which suggested some not uncolourful scenes. But first the livings, second money: it seemed our predecessors had kept that order for at least two hundred years.

Many forms had stayed unchanged in this place for much longer still. Fellows had elected their Master, as we had to do that year, by a practice that scarcely varied back to the foundation. The statute Despard-Smith had recited at that January meeting was dated 1926, but the provisions were the same as those of Elizabeth. And the period of thirty days after the death, if the vacancy happened out of term, was a safeguard to prevent a snap election without giving men time to ride across country to Cambridge.

The forms had stayed so much unchanged that it was sometimes hard to keep one’s head and see the profound differences between us and our predecessors. It was very hard in a college like this, where so much of the setting remained physically unchanged. True, the college antiquaries told us that the windows had been altered in the seventeenth century, that the outer walls over the college had been at least twice refaced, that the disarray of the garden was an eighteenth-century invention, that no one could trace the internal arrangement of the rooms. But those were small things: a sixteenth-century member of the college, dropped in the first court now, would be instantaneously at home. And we felt it. However impervious one might be to the feeling of past time, there were moments when one was drugged by it. It was a haze which overcame one as one walked on the stones of the first court, touched the panelling in a room such as mine, looked over the roof to King’s: all these had been so long the same.

One felt it even in the streets of Cambridge. Walking as Roy and I had done on a rainy night, we passed through streets whose shape would have been comfortably familiar to our predecessors. The houses, the buildings, except for the colleges and churches, had all gone; but the colleges and churches defined the streets, and it was hard not to think of other men walking as we did, of the chain of lives going back so long a time, of others walking those same narrow streets in the rain.

As I said, this physical contact with past time made it hard to keep one’s head. It was so easy to imagine our predecessors as they walked through the same court, dined in the same hall, drank their wine in the same combination room, elected a Master according to the same forms. It was easy to go a step further and think the election of a Master two or three hundred years ago was almost indistinguishable from ours now: it was easy to think that our predecessors and ourselves could be exchanged with no one noticing. One lost one’s sense of fact. Of course, there would be resemblances between any elections to the Mastership; take a dozen men, ask them to elect their own head, and they will go through the same manoeuvres as we were going through now; put an ambitious man like Jago in the college three hundred years ago, and he would have wanted the Mastership — put Brown there too, and he would have tried to work it for him.

But there would have been one deep difference between then and now. The dozen fellows would have been mostly youths in their early twenties. The core of solid, middle-aged, successful married men who now gave the college its strong and adult character — of these there could be no trace. The Winslows, Browns, Chrystals, Jagos, Gays, Getliffes, Crawfords could have no counterparts at all. Of the present society, one might expect to find in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century college one or two old bachelors like Despard-Smith and Pilbrow — and apart from them only the very young. The average age of the fellows in 1937 was over fifty. In 1870 it was twenty-six. In 1800 it was twenty-seven. In 1700 it was twenty-five. For 1600 the figures are not so certain, but the average age seems to have been even less.

This juvenile nature of the society meant incidentally that the Master had a predominance quite unlike the present day. He was often elected as a young man (Francis Getliffe or I would have been a reasonable age for a seventeenth-century Master), but his dividends were much greater than the fellows’, he did most of the administration of the college, including the work of the modern bursar, he remained in the post for life and could be married. It was not an accident that the Lodge had its stately bedroom, while fellows’ sets, even those as handsome as mine, contained as sleeping places only their monastic cells. The Masters down to 1880 lived a normal prosperous adult life in the midst of celibates, young and old: and they inclined in fact to form a separate aristocratic class in Cambridge society.

By now that segregation had disappeared. The Mastership which Jago longed for would not make him rich among the fellows: as Brown calculated, he would lose a little money on it: in the comfortably middle-class Cambridge of the thirties, most dons drew in between £1,000 and £2,000, Masters as well as the rest. The old predominance and powers had gone. The position still had glamour, repute, a good deal of personal power. It carried a certain amount of patronage. But its duties had faded away. Anyone who filled it had to create for himself the work to do.

This was one of the signs which showed how the college itself was changing. The forms remained, but the college was changing now, as it had changed in essence before in its six hundred years.

Few human institutions had a history so continuous, so personal, so day-to-day, I thought one night, listening to the rain on the windows. The cathedral schools of Milan and the like have histories of a kind which takes one back to the Roman Empire; but they are not histories like the college’s, of which one could trace each step in the fabric, in the muniment-room, in the library, in the wine books, in the names scratched on the windows and cut into the walls. Over the fireplace, a couple of yards from my chair, there were four names cut in the stone: in the sixteenth century they had shared this room, and slept in bunks against the panelling: those four all became (it is strange that they came together as boys) leaders of the Puritan movement: they preached at Leyden, wrote propaganda for the Plymouth plantation, advised Winthrop before he went to Boston. Two of them died, old men, in America.

It was astonishing how much stood there to be known of all those lives. The bottles of wine drunk by each fellow were on record, back almost for two hundred years.

I looked at the names carved into the fireplace, and I reverted to my thought of a few moments before. All this physical intimacy with the past could fill one’s imagination as one sat before the fire; but there were times when it intoxicated one too much to see what the past was like. It was hard to remember, within these unchanging, yard-thick walls, how much and how often the college had changed, in all it stood for and intended to do.

It had begun as nothing very lofty. It had begun, in fact, as a kind of boarding-house. It was a boarding-house such as grew up round all the medieval universities; the universities drew students to the town, and there, as quite humble adjuncts, were houses for students to lodge — sometimes paid for by their clubbing together, sometimes maintained by an older man who paid the rent and then charged his lodgers.

The medieval universities came to full existence very quickly. They happened, it seems, because the closed, settled, stagnant world of the dark ages was at last breaking up; the towns, which had become small and insignificant in the seventh and eighth centuries, were growing again as — for some reason still not clear — trade began to flow once more over Europe, though still nothing like so freely as under the Antonines. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the exchange of trade was becoming lively; and there was a need for an educated professional class to cope with affairs that were daily growing more complex. This seems to have been the reason why western Europe suddenly broke out in universities — Bologna, Salerno, Pisa, Paris. In England Oxford became in the thirteenth century a university of European reputation; Cambridge, which originated by the simple process of a few masters leaving Oxford, setting up in the little fen market town, and starting to teach, was not a rival in the same class for a long time.

In these universities, students attended to hear the teachers lecturing in the schools. The lectures began early in the morning, finished at dusk, in the cold, comfortless, straw-strewn rooms. The stuff of the lectures, the Quadrivium and the Trivium, seems to us arid, valueless, just word-chopping; but out of it the students may have gained plenty of zest and facility in argument. The course was a very long one and many did not stay it. At the end there was a sort of examination; as with a modern PhD, everyone who stayed the course seems to have passed.

But this somewhat unattractive prospect did not put students off. They scraped money to come to Cambridge, some of them lived in bitter poverty and half-starved. There was one main motive: if they could get their degree, jobs lay ahead. Jobs in the royal administration, the courts, the church; jobs teaching in the schools — the fees were not light, and the teachers made a good living. The training was in fact vocational, and jobs lay at the end.

And the students liked the life. It was wild, free, and entirely uncontrolled. Some came as men, some as boys of fifteen or sixteen, some as children of twelve. They looked after themselves, and did as they wanted. The university offered them nothing but lectures, to which they went if they pleased. They found their own lodging, often in the garrets of the little town. Their time was their own, to talk, gamble, drink, fornicate. They seem to have been unusually active with their knives. They must have felt the wild hopes of youth, reeling hilariously through the squalid streets. Some of them wrote poems in silver Latin, full of ardour, passion, humour and despair.

The students liked their life, but no one else did. Certainly not the townspeople; nor the students’ parents; nor the teachers; nor possibly the more bookish and domesticated of the students themselves. So, almost from the origin of the university, there were attempts to get them out of their lonely lodgings into boarding-houses. Boarding-houses were cheaper, they could live four or five to a room and have meals in common — the salt meat, salt fish, beer and bread of a medieval Cambridge winter. It was possible to get a university teacher to live in the same house and keep an eye on them.

These boarding-houses had nothing to do with teaching; the students just lodged there, and went off in the morning to the schools. They were simply a sensible means of keeping those youths from the wilder excesses. Some of them were given money, rules, and became known as colleges, but their purpose remained the same.

They were a mixed crowd of people who endowed the first colleges — ecclesiastical politicians and administrators, country clergymen, noble ladies, local guilds, kings and lords. Behind the kings and noble ladies one can usually find the hand of some priestly adviser who had himself attended in the schools; those who knew the needs from direct experience set about getting money, and went as high as their influence could take them. And those who were persuaded, and provided a little money and the rents of a bit of land (for the gifts were small): what moved them? Possibly the sensible recognition of a need: not a specially important need, but one on which their confessor seemed to lay some stress. Possibly a spark of imagination. Certainly the desire to allay anxiety by having a few young clerks obliged to say each day in perpetuity a mass for the founder’s soul. Certainly the desire to have their names remembered on earth: no one likes to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. They were the same motives, rationalized into different words, as might now have moved Sir Horace Timberlake.

The endowments were small (no founder spent anything like the equivalent in medieval money of what Sir Horace was contemplating now). These glorified boarding-houses were not ambitious affairs. They were called colleges, for that was the jargon of the day for any collection of men — there were colleges of fishmongers, cardinals and undertakers. A large proportion of the endowments went into buildings, as is the usual wish of benefactors, since buildings are easy to see and give a satisfactory impression of permanence. They were good stout simple buildings, though not as a matter of fact as stout as they looked; for the money was never enough, there was a good deal of jerry-building, and the yard-thick walls of my rooms, for instance, contained two feet of rubble. In these buildings there were just the bare necessities of a medieval community: a kitchen; a large room to eat in; stark unheated rooms where the young men could live in twos and threes and fours; a set of rooms for the university teacher who was paid to look after the college and was called the Master (he was, of course, an unmarried priest till Elizabeth’s time, and the Master’s quarters in the early colleges were nothing like the great Lodges of later years). The only luxury was the chapel, which was larger than such a small community required; it was built unnecessarily large to the glory of God, and in it masses were celebrated for the founder’s soul.

The community was usually a very small one. This college of ours was founded, by taking over a simple boarding-house, towards the end of the fourteenth century. It was given rents of a few manors in order to maintain a Master (usually a youngish teacher, a master of arts who lectured in the schools), eight fellow-scholars, who had passed their first degree and were studying for higher ones (they were normally youths of about twenty) and thirty-six scholars, who were boys coming up for the courses in the schools. These were the college; and it was in that sense that we still used the arrogant phrase ‘the college’, meaning the Master and fellows. ‘The governing body’ was a modern and self-conscious term, which betrayed a recognition of hundreds of young men, who liked to think that they too were the college. The eight fellow-scholars elected their own Master; the number stayed eight until the college received a large benefaction in the 1640s.

This was the college when it began. It was poor, unpretentious, attempted little save to keep its scholars out of mischief, counted for very little. It had the same first court as now, a Master, some of the same titles. In everything else it was unrecognizably different.

Then three things happened, as in all Oxford and Cambridge colleges at that time. Two were obvious and in the nature of things. The third, and the most important, is mysterious to this day. The first thing was that the Master and the young fellow-scholars took to looking over the young boys’ studies. They heard their exercises, heard them speak Latin, coached them in disputing. Instead of staying a simple boarding-house, the college became a coaching establishment also. Before long, the college teaching was as important as the lectures in the schools. The university still consisted of those who lectured in the schools, conducted examinations, gave degrees; but, apart from the formal examination, the colleges took over much that the university used to do.

That was bound to happen. It happened in much the same fashion in the great mother university of Paris, the university of the Archpoet, Gerson, William of Ockham, and Villon, and in Bologna, Siena, Orleans, the universities all over Europe.

It was also natural that the colleges should begin to admit not only scholars to whom grants were paid, but also boys and young men who paid their own way — the ‘pensioners’. These young men were allowed into the colleges on sufferance, but soon swamped the rest in numbers. They added to the power and influence of the colleges, and considerably to their income — though the endowments were always enough, from the foundation down to the time of Brown and Chrystal, for the fellows to survive without any undergraduates at all.

That raises the question of the third process which gave Oxford and Cambridge their strange character and which is, as I said, still unexplained. For some reason or by some chance, the colleges flourished from the beginning. They attracted considerable benefactions in their first hundred years; this college of ours, which started smaller than the average, was enriched under the Tudors and drew in two very large benefactions in the seventeenth century (it then became a moderately prosperous college of almost exactly the middle size). The colleges became well-to-do as early as the Elizabethan period; old members gave their farms and manors, complete outsiders threw in a lease of land or a piece of plate. Astonishingly quickly for such a process, the colleges became wealthy, comfortable, in effect autonomous, far more important than the university. And the process once properly started, it went on like the growth of a snowball; the colleges could attract the university teachers to be Masters or fellows, because they could pay them more. The university was poor; no one left it money, it was too impersonal for that, men kept their affection and loyalty and nostalgia for the house where they had lived in their young manhood; the university had just enough to pay its few professorships, to keep up the buildings of the schools, where the relics of the old lectures still went on; the university still had the right to examine and confer degrees. Everything else had passed to the colleges. Quite early, before the end of the sixteenth century, they did all the serious teaching; they had the popular teachers, the power, the prestige, the glamour, and the riches. As the years passed, they got steadily richer.

And so there developed the peculiar dualism of Oxford and Cambridge. Nowhere else was there this odd relation between the university and the colleges — a relation so odd and intricate, so knotted with historical accidents, that it has always seemed incomprehensible to anyone outside.

It remains a mystery why this relation only grew up in England. Why was it only at the two English universities — quite independently — that the colleges became rich, powerful, self-sufficient, indestructible? At Paris, Bologna and all the medieval universities, boarding-houses were transformed into colleges, just as in England; at Paris, for example, they were endowed, given much the same start in property, and almost exactly the same statutes and constitution. Yet by 1550, when the Cambridge colleges were already dwarfing the university those in Paris were dead.

At any rate, I thought, this college was, except in detail, typical of all the middle-sized English ones, and had gone through all their changes. By the sixteenth century it had long ceased to be a boarding— house, and become instead a cross between a public school and a small self-contained university. The boys up to seventeen and eighteen were birched in the college hall (which would have been unthinkable in less organized, less prosperous, freer days). The young men went out, some to country livings, some to the new service of administrative jobs required by Tudor England. The Masters were usually married even now, the Lodge was enlarged, the great bedroom came into use; the fellows were predominantly, as they remained till 1880, unmarried young clerics, who took livings as their turn came round. Their interests were, however, very close to the social conflicts of the day: the active and unrebellious, men like Jago and Chrystal and Brown, were drawn into the Elizabethan bureaucracy: the discussions at high table, though put into religious words, must often have been on topics we should call ‘political’, and many of the idealistic young threw themselves into calvinism, were deprived of their fellowships by the government, and in exile led their congregation to wander about the wilderness across the Atlantic sea.

The seventeenth century saw, really for the first time, some fellows busy with scholarship and research. The times were restless and dangerous: trade was on the move, organized science took its place in the world. A few gifted men stayed all their lives in the college, and did solid work in botany and chemistry. Some of my contemporaries, I sometimes thought, would have fitted into the college then, more easily than into any time before our own.

The country quietened into the eighteenth-century peace, there was a lull before the technological revolution. For the first time since its foundation, the college, like all others, declined. In 1540 the college had been admitting 30 undergraduates a year, in 1640 the number had gone up to 50 (larger than at any time until after the 1914-18 war). In 1740 the number was down to 8. No one seemed very much to mind. The dividends stayed unaffected (about £100 a year for the ordinary fellow), the college livings did pretty well out of their tithes: it just remained for one of them to come along. The college had for the time being contrived to get cut off from the world: from the intellectual world of the London coffee-houses, from the rough-and-ready experiments of the agricultural revolution, from any part in politics except to beg patronage from the great oligarchs. The college had stopped being a boarding-house, a school; had almost stopped being in any sense a place of education; it became instead a sort of club. Most people think affectionately now of an eighteenth-century Cambridge college; it was a very unexacting place. Most people have a picture of it — of middle-aged or elderly men, trained exclusively in the classics, stupefying themselves on port. The picture is only wrong in that the men in fact were not middle-aged or elderly, but very young: they were trained first and foremost, not in classics, but in mathematics; and they drank no more than most of their successors. Roy Calvert would have joined one of their harder sessions, and gone off without blinking to give a lecture in German on early Soghdian. But they had the custom of drinking their port twice a day — once after dinner, which began about two o’clock, and again after supper at seven. They must have been sleepy and bored, sitting for a couple of hours on a damp, hot Cambridge afternoon, drinking their wine very slowly, making bets on how soon a living would fall vacant, and how long before the last lucky man to take a living got married or had a child.

By the nineteenth century, the deep revolution (threatened faintly by seventeenth-century science: acted on, in the nineteenth-century factories) was visible everywhere. There had never been such a change so quickly as between the England of 1770 and the England of 1830: and the college felt it too. Something was happening: men wanted to know more. The country needed scientists. It needed every kind of expert knowledge. It needed somewhere to educate the commercial and industrial middle class that had suddenly grown up. Between 1830 and 1880 the college, like all Cambridge, modernized itself as fast as Japan later in the century. In 1830 the young clergymen still sat over their port each afternoon; in the ‘80s the college had taken on its present shape. Nine English traditions out of ten, old Eustace Pilbrow used to say, date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The university courses were revolutionized. The old rigid training, which made each honours student begin with a degree in mathematics, was thrown away. It became possible for a man, if he were so adventurous, to start his course in classics. In 1860 it even became possible to study natural science; and the Cavendish, the most famous of scientific laboratories, was built in 1874. Experimental science was taught; and the new university laboratories drew students as the old schools had drawn them in the Middle Ages; here no college could compete, and university teaching, after hundreds of years, was coming back to pre-eminence again.

The college kept up with the transformation. It made some changes itself, in others had to follow the Royal Commissions. Fellows need not be in orders; were allowed to marry; were no longer elected for life. At a step the college became a secular, adult, settled society. For five hundred years it had been a place which fellows went from when they could: at a stroke, it became a place they stayed in. By 1890 the combination room was inhabited by bearded fathers of families. The average age of the fellows mounted. Their subjects were diverse: there were scientists, oriental linguists, historians — and M H L Gay, one of the younger fellows, had already published two books on the historical basis of the Icelandic sagas. The scholarly work of the college became greater out of all knowledge.

The college suddenly became a place of mature men. They were as frail as other men, but they won respect because of their job, and they had great self-respect. They were men of the same make as Winslow, Brown, Chrystal, Crawford, Jago, and Francis Getliffe; and Gay and Pilbrow had lived through from those days to these. From those days to now, the college had been truly the same place.

Gay and Pilbrow, as young fellows, had seen the college, the whole of Cambridge, settle into the form which, to Luke for example, seemed eternal. Organized games, bumping races, matches with Oxford, college clubs, May week, competitive scholarships, club blazers and ties, the Council of the Senate, most Cambridge slang, were all nineteenth-century inventions. Gay had been elected at a time when some of his colleagues were chafing for the 1880 statutes to become law, so that they could marry. He had been through four elections to the Mastership. They were all elections dominated by the middle-aged, like this one about to come. He had seen the college move to the height of its prosperity and self — confidence. And now, his memory flickering, he sat with us and heard of another election, the last that would come his way.

There was one irony about it all. Just as the college reached its full mature prosperity, it seemed that the causes which brought it there would in the end change it again, and this time diminish it. For the nineteenth-century revolution caused both the teaching of experimental science and the college as we knew it, rich, proud, full of successful middle-aged men, so comfortably off that the Master no longer lived in a separate society. The teaching of experimental science had meant the revival of the powers and influence of the university; for no college, however rich, not even Trinity, could finance physics and engineering laboratories on a modern scale. To cope with this need, the university had to receive contributions from the colleges and also a grant from the State. This meant as profound a change as that by which the colleges cut out the university as the prime source of teaching. It meant inevitably that the reverse must now happen. The university’s income began to climb into £1,000,000 a year: it needed that to provide for twentieth-century teaching and research: no college’s endowment brought in more than a tenth the sum. By the 1920s the university was in charge of all laboratories, and all formal teaching: it was only left to colleges to supplement this by coaching, as they had done in their less exalted days. There were, by the way, great conveniences for the fellows in this resurrection of the university; nearly all of them had university posts as well as college ones, and so were paid twice. It was this double source of pay that made the income of Jago, Chrystal, Brown, and the others so large; everyone between thirty and seventy in the college, except for Nightingale, was earning over £1,000 a year. But it meant beyond any doubt whatever that the colleges, having just known their mature and comfortable greatness, would be struggling now to keep their place. It sometimes seemed that the time must come when they became boarding-houses again, though most superior ones.

I regretted it. They had their faults, but they had also great humanity. However, that change was in the future. It did not trouble the fellows as I knew them. Of all men, they had the least doubts about their social value. They could be as fond of good works as Pilbrow, as modest as Brown, but they still were kept buoyed up by the greatest confidence and self — respect in their job. By the thirties, the conscience of the comfortable classes was sick: the sensitive rich, among my friends, asked themselves what use they were: but that was not a question one would have heard in the college. For everyone, inside and out, took it for granted that the academic life was a valuable one to live; scientists such as Crawford, Francis Getliffe, and Luke had become admired, like no other professional men, and the rest of us, with a shade of envy, took a little admiration for ourselves. In England, the country with the subtlest social divisions (Pilbrow said the most snobbish of countries), Oxford and Cambridge had had an unchallenged social cachet for a long time; even Lady Muriel, though she did not feel her husband’s colleagues were her equals, did not consider them untouchable; and so a man like Francis Getliffe, when asked what was his job, answered with a double confidence, knowing that it was valued by serious people and also had its own curious place among the smart. Many able men entered the academic life in those years because, with a maximum of comfort, it settled their consciences and let them feel that their lives were not utterly without a use.

For many it was a profound comfort to be one of a society completely sure of itself, completely certain of its values, completely without misgivings about whether it was living a good life. In the college there were men varied enough to delight anyone with a taste in human things: but none of them, except Roy Calvert in one of his fits of melancholy, ever doubted that it was a good thing to be a fellow. They took it for granted, felt they were envied, felt it was right they should be envied: enjoyed the jokes about dons, which to some, such as Chrystal, Brown, and Francis Getliffe, as they thought of their busy efficient lives, seemed peculiarly absurd: wanted to grow old in the college, and spend their last years as Gay and Pilbrow were doing now.

When I arrived in the college, I had already moved about a good deal among the layers of society; and I had not come to the end of my journey yet. I had the luck to live intimately among half a dozen different vocations. Of all those I had the chance to see, the college was the place where men lived the least anxious, the most comforting, the freest lives.