Category: postcards

  • Higher education postcard: University of Greater Manchester

    Higher education postcard: University of Greater Manchester

    Greetings from Bolton. Definitely Bolton.

    In 1824, a mechanics’ institute was established in Bolton. Mechanics’ institutes were a new phenomenon – the first was established in Scotland in 1821. They were, in essence, a subscription-based club which provided an opportunity for education, aimed at the better-off members of the working class.

    As the 1857 advert in the Bolton Chronicle shows, it was still going fifty years later.

    You can see the 1857 subscription fees in the advertisement. It’s hard to directly read across into today’s prices, because costs and wage structures change so much over the years. On a straightforward inflation calculation, using the Bank of England calculator, the annual fee would be about £50 today, which is a bit of a bargain. But comparing wages makes this feel different – for example, an average agricultural wage in 1857 was just shy of 11 shillings a week, so the subscription would be a quarter of a week’s wages. (And note also that the annual fee of ten shillings was just the quarterly fee multiplied by four. No discounts here for upfront payment.)

    The curriculum looks good, but elementary: school rather than higher education. And this makes sense – many people would have had minimal schooling. Only about 70 per cent of the population could read and write. And so a good basic education didn’t hurt.

    By the late 1880s there was a groundswell of opinion that Bolton needed better. As reported in the Bolton Evening News of 1 December 1886, the new chairman of the Mechanics’ Institute, Mr John Haywood MA, argued that:

    In Manchester, they are content with one well-equipped technical school; whereas in Bolton we must, forsooth, have three struggling institutions, with the result, as far as the Mechanics’ is concerned, that the progress made is in the direction of increased debt.

    The newspaper continued: “Mr Haywood thinks that Bolton has gone mad on sectarian and political distinctions when its young men cannot even sit on the same form to receive technical education.”

    And so in 1887 the committee of the Mechanics’ Institute agreed to establish a technical school. A committee was established, which raised funds, but found itself short; and an appeal was made to the county council. And in 1891 the Bolton Technical School opened.

    In 1926 Bolton Technical School became Bolton Technical College, and in 1941 a new building opened – that shown on the card – which enabled a broader range of courses to be offered. Engineering was, apparently, the most popular.

    In 1964 the college bifurcated, splitting the lower and higher level education. Bolton Technical College focused on FE, and the Bolton Institute of Technology focused on higher studies.

    A brief aside is now necessary, to introduce another institution, the Bolton Training College. This focused on training teachers for technical subjects and was one of three in the country doing this (the others being in Huddersfield and at Garnett College, in London). I’m afraid I can’t tell you when it was founded, but it is clear that there was a threat to close it in the 1950s, happily averted.

    And in 1982 the Bolton Institute of Technology merged with the Bolton Training College to form the Bolton Institute of Higher Education. This gained taught degree awarding powers in 1992, research degree awarding powers in 1996 and became a university in 2004.

    In December 2024 the university changed its name, becoming the University of Greater Manchester. And in what is becoming a bit of a busy year for the university, in governance terms, it was placed under enhanced OfS monitoring in February and suspended its vice chancellor in May. Let’s see what June and July bring for the university.

    The postcard was sent in October 1961 to Miss Medley in Andover.

    Dear Janet, Today I am going through to Blackpool to see “West Side Story”. The week has flown by, and tomorrow I shall have to return to the quiet South from the lively North. Love Jillian

    And here’s the customary jigsaw – hope you enjoy it. Comment below if you can identify the cars.

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  • Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Greetings from Cambridge – and unlike last week, this time we’re definitely in England.

    It is 1878, and the Cambridge Independent Press of 7 December reports that the university has taken steps to enable the training of teachers. The Teachers’ Training Syndicate (its Cambridge-ese for a committee or working group, I think) is to be established, to oversee programmes of training for students intending to become school teachers, and the colleges at which they train.

    Image: Shutterstock

    All of this took place in the context of increased state engagement with school education: the provision of schools for all children was becoming increasingly necessary, and local authorities of various kinds (it’s complicated!) were empowered to fund such schools.

    And it stands to reason that where you have schools, you need teachers. And by then the practice of teaching was becoming increasingly professionalised. Plus, it was one of the few professions open to women.

    And so in 1885 the Cambridge Training College for Women was opened. Initially based at Newnham College, there were fourteen students, under the guidance of the college’s first principal, Elizabeth Phillips Hughes. Hughes was the first woman to gain first class honours in moral sciences at Cambridge, having studied at Newnham. (She also helped to found the Barry Teachers Training College, which ultimately became part of the University of South Wales, and helped to draft the statutes of the University of Wales). She remained principal of the new college until 1899, steering it from its modest start to a new building – that shown on the card – in 1895.

    The driving forces behind the establishment of the college included Miss Frances Buss, champion of girls’ education, and one of the subjects of an anonymous verse of some fame:

    Miss Buss and Miss Beale

    Cupid’s darts do not feel.

    How different from us

    Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

    Miss Beale was Dorothea Beale, suffragist, headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and one of the founders of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. And it seems that the pioneers of women’s education had a lot to put up with.

    At this point Hughes Hall was not a college. (It wasn’t even Hughes Hall yet!) It was only after the university recognised women as full members (in 1947, less than a lifetime ago) that the college gained recognition as part of the university (albeit not yet a college) and was renamed Hughes Hall. This was in honour of Elizabeth Phillips Hughes, the first principal; its full name at that time was Elizabeth Phillips Hughes Hall.

    It began to admit male students in 1973: the first of Cambridge’s all-women institutions to do so. In 1985 Hughes Hall became an “approved foundation” of the university (it’s the step below being a full college) and in 2006 Hughes Hall became a college of the university, with a charter and everything. And a full name – for Sunday best or when it has been naughty – of The President and Fellows of Hughes Hall in the University of Cambridge.

    Hughes Hall admits only mature students (judged by age not attitude), to both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It still teaches education, both as an academic subject and as a PGCE, as well as programmes across other disciplines.

    This post owes its origins to the eagle-eyed Professor Chris Brooke of Homerton, Cambridge, who corrected me about wat was shown on the card. I’d shared the card as one of my daily posts on Bluesky thinking it was Homerton. But it definitely isn’t!

    Here’s a jigsaw of the card – hope you enjoy it.

    Backstory

    A couple of you have asked about the #HigherEducationPostcard backstory.

    It started about ten years ago when I was in a Cardiff antiques mall, sheltering from the rain. One of the stalls had books and old postcards, and when browsing the latter I found half a dozen showing universities. Which I thought was quite cute. So I bought them.

    Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic. The first few months were scary for lots of reasons, and if you were self-employed in the HE sector the question of how to do consulting without being on site was very much front and centre. And whilst sitting at my desk trying to solve this puzzle I noticed the small stack of postcards, and thought I’d share them on Twitter. They were really popular, so I thought I could carry on doing this. But where to get postcards? eBay, mostly. And so I started bidding. And then the collection sort of growed. Its at about 1200 cards now, in fifteen albums with a stack of a couple of hundred still to be scanned and filed.

    In the summer of 2020 I ran a #HigherEducationPostcard world cup on Twitter – 32 cards, paired off, the one with most votes went through to the next round. In the final, Swansea University beat van Mildert College, Durham; thousands of votes were cast, each institution getting its students, staff and alumni to join in. It was great fun!

    I’d been posting daily on Twitter, and when in summer 2021 Paul Greatrix retired from weekly Registrarism blogposts on Wonkhe, I suggested that I write a weekly higher education postcard blog. The good folk at Wonkhe towers said yes, and here we are, 170 posts later. My only rule is that I have to own the actual postcard; and I try to make them interesting and informative. And mostly true. I really enjoy writing and sharing them, and have no plans to stop just yet. I hope you like them too. Thanks for reading!

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  • Higher education postcard: Harvard University

    Higher education postcard: Harvard University

    Greetings from Cambridge! No, not that one.

    This is Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. Harvard is one of the world’s great universities; it’s the oldest university in the United States of America; and it is currently the target of attempted coercion by the executive of the USA. There’s quite a story to tell!

    April showers bring May flowers

    In the 1630s, the northeast of what would become the USA was a series of colonies from Britain: parties of settlers had landed, established small towns, fought and traded with the people who were already there (this was no terra incognita), and either died out or survived. The colonies were not independent states: they were British, and ultimately ruled from Britain. But local government was needed, and in the case of the Massachusetts Bay colony this was via the charter obtained by the Massachusetts Bay Company.

    The General Court of Massachusetts was the local government, and in 1636 it allocated £400 to establish a college to be located in Newetowne. In 1638, Newetowne was renamed Cambridge; this was coincident with a bequest by John Harvard, a graduate of the University of Cambridge in England, who left the college half of his estate, and his library of 400 books.

    John Harvard was born in Southwark in 1607; he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and gained a BA in 1632, and an MA in 1635. He moved to the Massachusetts colony in 1637 and was a puritan preacher, he died in 1638. The value of his estate was £1700, worth about 300,000 today. And the college got half of that. Not a huge amount, but enough to get the college going; and it was named for him in commemoration.

    Here’s two fun facts: the statue of Harvard at Harvard says on its plinth that he was the founder. Not true. Also, it isn’t an image of Harvard, but of an 1884 student who was descended from an early president of the university.

    The first students graduated in 1642. In 1650 the college was granted a charter – issued by the General Court, not the British monarch, for by 1650 Britain was temporarily a commonwealth not a monarchy. The charter created the Harvard Corporation, being the president and the fellows of Harvard College; and it is this corporation which continues to this day.

    Harvard College continued to grow and develop, as successful colleges do. Its curriculum was modelled on the Cambridge liberal arts approach; its theology was Puritan. It enrolled a native American student, John Sassemon, in 1653. When serving as interpreter to Metacom, the Wampanoag chief in 1675, he was murdered as an English informant, sparking the worst of the many wars between settlers and existing populations in New England.

    Independence day

    The late eighteenth century was momentous in America. Eight Harvard graduates (John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, William Ellery, William Williams, and William Hooper) signed the declaration of independence in 1776.

    In 1780, when Massachusetts as a state gained a constitution, it granted to Harvard the title of university. In 1781 a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa opened at Harvard – it is the oldest continually running chapter of the society. And in 1782 it opened a medical school – which, interestingly, the university’s own history regards as the start of it being a proper university.

    A side note on Phi Beta Kappa. This described itself as an academic honour society; such societies also might be known as fraternities. Frat houses cause no end of trouble on some American university campuses, as well as providing a location for some sometimes dubious comedy.

    You may recall in my blog on Purdue University that one of its presidents resigned having failed to ban fraternities from campus. There’s loads of them – the Wikipedia entry has too many for me to count – and there are accrediting bodies. I may have to find a postcard one day…

    Football crazy

    In the nineteenth century Harvard continued to grow, adding schools of divinity and law in the first couple of decades, a science school in the 1850s, a dental school in the 1860s, and a graduate school in 1872. In 1852 the first intercollegiate boat race – Harvard versus Yale – took place on Lake Winnipesaukee. And in 1875 the first intercollegiate football match (gridiron, not association, union or league) took place. Harvard won.

    Let’s at this point note Tom Lehrer, mathematician, satirist, Harvard alumnus and academic, who I regard as one of Harvard’s finest. An early song of his, Fight fiercely, Harvard, satirizes the football fight song. And the YouTube video linked above has some fabulous footage of Harvard v Yale games through the ages.

    Lehrer also wrote Bright College Days, a satire of college songs. Which includes the wonderful line, “ivy-covered professors, in ivy-covered halls”. A great Lehrer quote: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” And finally, Lehrer in 2022 gave all his songs to the public, making them available without copyright on a website: well done, sir.

    Establishment

    Harvard was by now a firm fixture in the US establishment. Eight US Presidents have been educated at Harvard (as was the most recent Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney). In 1886, at its 250th anniversary celebrations, President Grover Cleveland, not an alumnus, was in attendance.

    In 1908 the Harvard Business School opened, the first in the country restricting its intake to graduates. More schools were established; the Harvard University Press opened in 1913; the first Harvard Nobel laureate was crowned in 1914 (Theodore Richards, for determination of atomic weights).

    In 1947 General George C Marshall (pictured, when he himself was a student at the Virginia equivalent of Colonel Oates’ miliary academy), then Secretary of State, received an honorary degree. He used his speech to announce the Marshall Plan, via which the US supported the rebuilding of post-war Europe. To be fair this knocks most graduation speeches I have heard into a cocked hat.

    Opening the door a little wider…

    It would be fair to characterise Harvard as not having been, historically, at the forefront of change. One example is women’s education.

    Harvard was, like (I suspect but can’t demonstrate) nearly all universities previously, restricted to men only. In 1879 Arthur Gilman, a banker, and his wife Stella Scott Gilman, wished their daughter to have a university education. Harvard would not admit women, so they persuaded the president of Harvard to allow them to employ Harvard academics, part-time, to deliver courses to women in what became known as the Harvard Annex.

    They had hoped that Harvard might relax its stance and accept women to study for degrees, but the attitude of the university was summed up in 1869 by its President, Charles Eliot, who in his inaugural address said:

    The world knows next to nothing about the capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities…It is not the business of the University to decide this mooted point.

    And this in 1888 from Eliot to a potential new faculty member:

    There is no obligation to teach at The Annex. Those professors who on general grounds take an interest in the education of women…feel some obligation but there are many professors who think it their duty NOT to teach there, in which opinion some of the Corporation and Overseers agree.

    Nevertheless, the Harvard Annex thrived, with increasing numbers of women wishing to study there. In 1894 a compromise was reached: the annex became a degree-awarding college – Radcliffe College – with Harvard staff teaching and guaranteeing standards.

    In the 1930s a subsequent Harvard President – Lawrence Lowell – felt that Radcliffe was a distraction to Harvard’s academics, and a limit was placed on the number of students who could be admitted to Radcliffe: 750 undergraduates in total, 250 graduate students. These limits stayed in place until 1979, when Radcliffe was incorporated into Harvard, which finally became co-educational.

    It wasn’t only women with which Harvard, historically, had a problem. In the 1923, Lowell had sought to put a cap on the proportion of Jewish students at Harvard. He was unsuccessful. Harvard presidents don’t always get what they want.

    Lowell also enforced racial segregation where he could. In 1921 he refused to allow black students to reside in the university’s dormitories. Writing to the father of one such student, he said:

    We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man, but we do not owe to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.

    Do the right thing

    Faced with examples like these, you might be forgiven for thinking Harvard would always behave badly where it could. But they are currently taking a stand for academic autonomy.

    Threatened with withdrawal of funding and tax exempt status, the university has refused to accede to the US government’s demands which are, frankly, a full-on assault on academic autonomy. Here’s the letter of 11 April sent to the university; here’s the university’s response.

    It is worth taking a minute to read the demands made of Harvard. They relate to student discipline; the appointment and employment of faculty; the content of programmes; the admission of students. The US government cavilled that the letter was sent in error (and if you believe that I’d like to talk to you about a bridge I have for sale) but its my view that where a country’s government threatens universities, that country is in trouble.

    Harvard has an endowment of over $50 billion, so it has the financial resources to cushion the significant blow. But it didn’t have to resist, and we should all be glad that it is doing so.

    Missed opportunities

    With such a big university, such a famous university and such an old university, there’s a stack of things which I haven’t been able to write about. Another time, maybe.

    For now, here’s a jigsaw of the card, which was sent in November 1907 to Miss Adeline Tower at Rutgers Prep School, New Jersey. The message on the front – to save you straining you eyes – reads:

    Dear Ade: how are you? Eliza came home alright. I missed her very much. Hope to see you Xmas. Love Grandma

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  • Higher education postcard: Mason Science College

    Higher education postcard: Mason Science College

    Greetings from Birmingham!

    This is Mason Science College, founded in 1875 by Sir Josiah Mason. It was one of the institutions which formed the nucleus of the University of Birmingham in 1900 (the other was Queen’s College, founded in 1825 as the Birmingham Medical School). The buildings were used by the university until the 1960s but are now gone.

    Mason had made his fortune in manufacturing – mostly steel pens, but other products too.

    The card was posted on 17 April 1905 in Bournemouth to an address in Doncaster.

    Thanks for letter and will answer in a day or so. Went to hear Sousa’s band today. Have you heard him? I trust you are stronger dear. Love in haste …

    John Philip Sousa and his band were touring Britain in 1905, but I can’t pin down where they played on Monday 17 April.

    Here’s a jigsaw of the card.

    Apologies for the brevity of this post – I’m under the cosh this week, with work and other stuff, so the postcard blog is short and sweet. Hopefully back to normal next week!

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  • Higher education postcard: Grey College, Durham

    Higher education postcard: Grey College, Durham

    It’s 1959, and Durham University is still a federal university, with colleges in Durham and Newcastle. And expansion in Durham was underway. Elvet Hill, just south of the River Wear, had already seen St Mary’s College move in 1952 from its old site; and now a new college was being built.

    The college was to be named Grey College, after Charles Grey, Prime Minister when the university was founded (Grey may also have been the earl who inspired the eponymous tea). The name was subject to some controversy: the alternative was Cromwell College, after regicide and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell; Grey won by one vote.

    And then on 6 March, catastrophe. There’s lots of detail in the report in the Shields Evening News, but the long and short is that the building was burned out. Notwithstanding the reviving tea that the firefighters were able to get. It was due to admit its first students in the next academic year, just six months later. And it did!

    Clearly a get up and go spirit was needed, and that appears to be what happened. The college opened; the master paid from his own pocket for the hall to be panelled. Felix the Phoenix was adopted as a mascot.

    The college expanded rapidly – this is, of course, in line with the general growth in UK HE at that time. By 1964 it had over 350 students, all men – a sevenfold growth in five years. And in 1966 it became the base for the USSR football team during the world cup. Their group games were played at Ayresome Park in Middlesbrough and Roker Park in Sunderland, so staying in Durham made sense. This was the USSR’s most successful world cup: they made it to the semi-finals, where they lost to Germany. There’s a nice – if somewhat long – telling of the story here.

    Grey admitted its first women students in 1984. The title of its head changed from master to principal when Professor Sonia Virdee was appointed to the role in 2023. Heidi Alexander, at the time of writing Secretary of State for Transport, is an alumna; Nish Kumar, comedian, is also among its alumni.

    And here’s a jigsaw of the card for you.

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  • Higher education postcard: UWE Bristol

    Higher education postcard: UWE Bristol

    Medieval England was full of guilds – chartered bodies often relating to a particular trade – which gave members rights.

    One such was the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol: although chartered in 1552, it traces its lineage back to the thirteenth century with mention of a guild of merchants in the city. The society had some sort of monopoly on maritime trade “beyond the seas”, which was clearly advantageous to the society’s members, and the society and Bristol prospered.

    In 1595 the society established a school for mariners’ children. Over the years this would have developed; and in 1894 it was re-founded as the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, with very fine new buildings, including forced air heating and ventilation systems. The college burned down in October 1906 – “reduced to a mere shell”, in the words of the Western Daily Press.

    In 1909 University College Bristol received a royal charter, and became the University of Bristol. I’ll write about this another time, but for now, let’s note that the engineering section of the Merchant Venturers Technical College became part of the faculty of engineering of the university. This shows that it must have been of a reasonable standard; I wonder also if the fire, and the need to find new accommodation, played a part.

    After the second world war, responsibility for the college transferred to the local authority. The two sites it then occupied became two different colleges: the Bristol College of Commerce at Unity Street and the Bristol College of Technology at Ashley Down. On 31 August 1949, just above an article celebrating the possible return of clotted cream from Devon, the Western Daily Press noted that courses offered by the College of Commerce ranged “from shorthand to shipbroking, languages to librarianship, and export to general education.”

    Further change came in 1960, when the College of Technology split into two: the Bristol College of Science and Technology, and the Bristol Technical College. The former moved to Bath in 1965, becoming the University of Bath. And that is a story for another day.

    And now the era of the polytechnics was here, and Bristol Polytechnic was formed. The College of Commerce and the Technical College were joined in this by the West of England College of Art. And the technical college split one more time: the Brunel Technical College offered lower level programmes; the higher level activity became part of the polytechnic.

    As far as I can tell, this latter college had its roots in the Bristol Academy for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, which seemed to have admitted its first students in something like 1844, and was certainly involved in seeking tenders for a new building in 1855. It wasn’t one of the first government schools of design, although it appears to have been modelled on the same principles. In any event (and if I am wrong about this college, please do correct me in the comments!) it was by 1969 well established in Bower Ashton.

    The nascent polytechnic was spread over several sites in Bristol, and in 1970 plans were announced to develop a campus in Frenchay, at Coldharbour Lane. Over time much of the activity of the various campuses would move to Frenchay, but for now it was just plans: the campus opened in 1975.

    We now need to go down another historical byway: in 1976 two colleges of education were incorporated into the polytechnic. These were the Gloucester and Bristol Diocesan Training Institution for School Mistresses, founded in 1853 and latterly called St Matthias, and Redland College, an emergency teacher training college established in 1947. There’s an excellent brief history of St Matthias on the university’s website, including some great stories.

    In 1992 the polytechnic – along with all others – was given university status and became the University of the West of England. A familiar tale of rebuilding an campus consolidation took pace, with the St Matthias site ultimately closing; the aggregation of city centre sites into one city centre campus; the growth of activity at Frenchay, and the establishment of a campus in Swindon. In 2012 there was an ill-fated attempt to create a stadium to be used by Bristol Rovers and the university, but this came to nothing other than legal arguments with Sainsbury’s.

    UWE is now the thirteenth largest UK university by student numbers (2023–24 HESA data).

    And there we have the UWE story, or at least one telling of it. The Merchant Venturers Technical College is unique, I think, in having given rise to three different universities. And, as the Brunel Technical College still exists as part of the City of Bristol College, and as the City of Bristol College has a university centre, there’s always room for a fourth to be created.

    The card was sent in 1988, addressed to David, c/o Mrs Williams, at St Martin de Porres school in Luton. David was Mario Morby’s father; Mario had cancer and was collecting postcards to try to get a world record. The LA Times has a good write up; happily it seems that Mario survived the cancer, and got into the Guinness Book of World Records.

    Here’s a jigsaw of today’s card for you to enjoy. And a bonus jigsaw of the St Matthias campus which is, frankly, quite challenging.

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  • Higher education postcard: statuary | Wonkhe

    Higher education postcard: statuary | Wonkhe

    Greetings from Oxford!

    Many – perhaps even most – universities have a statue or two. But few have a statute which is as troublesome as one of those belonging to Oriel College, Oxford. You can see the statue in question in the alcove directly above the door in the postcard – the one on its own at the top; not one of those along the first floor. And I bet by now you’ve guessed the statue. It’s of Cecil Rhodes: plutocrat, imperialist and, crucially for this post, alumnus of, and donor to, Oriel College, Oxford.

    You can see the statue a little better in this close-up from anther postcard. The Latin reads something like “from the generosity of Cecil Rhodes.” (It is also, apparently, a chronogram – the outsize capitals giving the date of construction, 1911, in Roman numerals. And it does, if you ignore the order and just add up all of the Ls, Ms, Is, Cs, Ds and Vs. There’s a really good site here to help.)

    Rhodes made money – a lot of it – from diamonds, and become politically powerful within the British southern African colonies. I’m not going to attempt a biography in this post; you can read here what Britannica has to say about him. He studied at Oxford between 1873 and 1881, the extended length of time not being explained by his gaining higher and higher degrees, but by his interrupting study to return regularly to South Africa.

    Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (as it was then known), and played critical roles in the British wars against the Zulu and against the Boer (he fomented the incident which led to the war against the Transvaal). He was an ardent imperialist: writing about the English, he said:

    I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.

    Rhodes died young – aged 48 – and in his will left £100,000 to Oriel College (worth about £10.5 million today), a chunk of which was used for a new building on the High Street side of the college. Its the one in the postcard with the statutes. He also left money for other educational goals – for example, land in South Africa which became the campus for the University of Cape Town; and famously the Rhodes scholarships, which support students attending Oxford from the former British empire, and from Germany.

    In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town protested against a statue of Rhodes on campus. As this piece makes clear, the statue was the symbol, the protests had a broader target: the legacies of colonialism and racism within and beyond the university environment. The university’s council agreed with the protestors, and the statue was removed. Students 1, Rhodes 0. And a slogan – #RhodesMustFall – gained currency.

    In 2016, a focus of what had become a movement fell on Oxford. The Oxford Union debated and passed a motion in favour of the removal of the statue on Oriel college. In 2020 the matter surfaced again, with student protests in Oxford, and resolutions in favour of removing the statue from the undergraduate and postgraduate students of the college. Trickily for the college, the building – and hence the statues – were listed, so simply removing the statue was not possible. The college’s council agreed to hold an independent inquiry to make recommendations, and when the report was received in 2021, voted to seek to remove the statue. But, the environment was hostile, and it was clear that government, whose approval would be necessary, would not approve.

    The college has published a good explainer, which includes links to pieces by Professor William Beinart, Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, outlining Rhodes’s legacy; and by Professor Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, arguing that Beinart’s criticisms of Rhodes were overplayed.

    Now, the issue to me seems fairly simple. Did Rhodes’s actions lead to a state of affairs where if you have black or brown skin you were treated far worse than if you had white skin? The history of the twentieth century in southern Africa say clearly yes. Should we therefore be memorialising him? Reader, I invite you to answer this one for yourself.

    And that is how things currently sit. Whether under a different government permission to remove the statue might be given I do not know. Sculptor Antony Gormley suggested that the statue be turned to face the wall in shame – maybe that would be permitted? I do suspect, though, that we haven’t yet heard the last of this one.

    And here, as is customary, is a jigsaw of the postcard – enjoy!

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  • Higher education postcard: New College, Oxford

    Higher education postcard: New College, Oxford

    Greetings from Oxford!

    As I write this blog, the spring statement is two days away, and I have no idea (although I can make a guess!) how Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’ statement has gone down with people. Reeves studied for her first degree at New College Oxford, and so that’s where we’re going today.

    This being Oxford, New College is obviously a very old college. It was founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, the Bishop of Winchester. Formally – that is, when it’s in trouble with its mum – it’s called The College of St Mary of Winchester in Oxford. But even in 1379 this caused confusion. There was already another college dedicated to St Mary – the one snappily titled The Provost and Scholars of the House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the Foundation of Edward the Second of famous memory, sometime King of England.

    And so it became known as New College. Which name it retains to this day, despite (at the time of writing) there being thirty colleges of the university which are, by any reckoning, newer.

    Anyway, enough cavilling. The college was founded, and it had a name which at the time seemed reasonable. It’s founder, William of Wykeham, was a man of substance: as well as being Bishop of Winchester, he was Lord Chancellor to both King Edward III and Richard II. And he became thereby a rich man: by speculating on tax revenues, by income from the many church livings he had, and by the expropriation of the property of French religious houses looted during the Hundred Years’ War.

    He used these riches in part to fund education, and in the late 1370s was busy not only establishing an Oxford college, but also establishing Winchester School. (He’s the reason why Winchester old boys are called Wykehamists. I say old boys advisedly – Winchester School started admitting girls in 2022, so soon former pupils will be a more accurate description.)

    New College’s charter and statutes made it unusual. Admission was restricted to pupils from Winchester College – it formed a closed system. It also included provision for undergraduate students, one of the first at Oxford to do so. (And no, I’m not sure how you got to be a graduate student if you hadn’t been admitted somewhere to be an undergraduate first. My guess is that the medieval understandings of these terms is different to mine today.)

    The senior fellows (masters and above) taught the junior fellows (undergraduates). In this arrangement you can see the start of Oxford’s tutorial system; you can also see the practice of research students teaching undergraduate classes, which is common across the UK today, especially in research-focused universities.

    New College was also the first of the Oxford colleges to be built around a quadrangle, meaning that everything the fellows needed – places to sleep, eat, read and pray – were inside the college walls.

    The statutes and the physical constraints of the buildings kept New College small. The college’s history identifies two notable periods in the next few centuries. The first was the period of religious strife during the Tudor dynasty’s reign. New College was a hotbed of Catholic fervour, and its fellows staunch supporters of Queen Mary. And when Mary died, to be succeeded by the very protestant Elizabeth, many of its scholars fled to mainland Europe.

    In the civil war, Oxford was a significant place – the base of the King’s parliament for much of the war, it was also put under siege. The royalist defence of the city was, in part, organised by the then warden (head) of the college, Robert Pinke, who was acting vice chancellor at the time. When Oxford was threatened by parliamentarian forces, he went to parley with their commanders. One of whom, William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, was a New College man himself. But that didn’t stop him sending Pinke to London where he was arrested and held for a while. Alumni relations must have been tricky for a while after that.

    After the civil war, demand for higher education slowly grew, as the political settlement took hold, as the power of the monarch was slowly constrained by parliament, and as a middle class began to emerge. But New College was constrained by its statutes: it could only have 70 fellows, and they had to be Winchester College students. This meant that it went from being one of the larger colleges to being one of its smallest.

    Statute and ordinance changes in 1857 and 1883 did much to modernise the college. The requirement to be a Winchester school pupil was removed; the limit to the college’s size also. In 1868 fellows were permitted to marry, and the college introduced (with Balliol) the idea of intercollegiate lectures. The college grew, admitting more students, so that by 1900 nearly 300 undergraduates were registered.

    The 1900s also brought a couple of notable wardens. The first was William Archibald Spooner, for whom spoonerisms were named. Spooner, it is held, was prone to making amusing slips in his speech, such as asking “tell me, was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?” A particular meaning is swapping the first sounds of nearby words (“you have hissed my mystery lectures”). Dictionaries of quotations are full of spoonerisms. And, once you recognise that New College becomes cue, knowledge, it is possible to have some sympathy with the Reverend Spooner. The pen-portrait on the college website is certainly very fond of him, with good reason, I would say.

    The second notable warden was H A L Fisher. Fisher was President of the Board of Education in David Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet, from 1916 to 1922. He introduced legislation to require compulsory education for all children up to the age of 14, and also introduced enhanced pension arrangements for teachers. The Teachers’ Pension Scheme, rates for which currently cause headaches for more than a few university vice chancellors, is part of Fisher’s legacy. He retied from politics to take up the post of warden of New College, succeeding Spooner. Fisher died in 1940.

    There’s a fascinating, and slightly ghoulish, postscript to Fisher’s life. In 1943, as part of a wartime deception, British intelligence dressed up a corpse as a British marine, carrying apparently secret documents. Documents written to deceive. The body was left to wash ashore near Spain, the documents were shared by the then fascist Spanish government with nazi Germany. And the documents, which related to the site of allied landings in southern Europe, seem to have been believed. To make the deception more credible, the fictitious marine had to be dressed appropriately, and in wartime London good quality clothing was hard to find. And so Fisher’s woollen underwear was used.

    New College has an impressive list of alumni. As well as Rachel Reeves, the list includes politicians Tony Benn, Gyles Brandreth, and Hugh Gaitskell; academics Harold Laski and J B S Haldane; Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks; public intellectuals Neil MacGregor and Lucy Worsley. And, as the K-Tel hits compilation adverts used to say, many, many more.

    And here, as usual, is a jigsaw of the postcard for you.

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  • Higher education postcard: Purdue University

    Higher education postcard: Purdue University

    Greetings from Indiana!

    In 1862 the United States passed the first of a series of laws – known as the Morrill Land-Grant Acts – which allowed states to sell federally owned land to fund the creation of colleges. These colleges – known now as land-grant universities – form a large chunk of the US higher education system. And its important to note – as America tries to forget its history – that the land sold to fund them was often bought, granted by or stolen from Native American tribes.

    The state of Indiana decided in 1865 to take advantage of the act, and a process to decide where and how to spend the money began. The state could have chosen a couple of existing institutions, but in 1869 was swayed by proposals from Tippecanoe County which included pledges of $200,000 (about worth $4.6 million today) and 100 acres of land. And so Purdue University, named after the benefactor who had pledged the lion’s share of the $200,000, was established in West Lafayette, on the Wabash River.

    Purdue developed into a university focusing on engineering and agricultural subjects. This was under the guidance of Emerson E White, president of Purdue from 1876 to 1883. He sought to differentiate Purdue from the “classical” American universities, and the syllabus reflected this. Humanities and social sciences were not prohibited, but were not prioritised. He sought also to ban fraternities from campus, and when the Indiana state legislature required the university to allow fraternities, he resigned. But it was too late, and that year Purdue received no state grant.

    Purdue became a leading institution for research into steam traction on the railways. By the 1890s it owned several locomotives, and a railway dynamometer which enabled research. There was a local railroad – the Monon railroad – which operated works near Purdue. In 1891 the Purdue football team (gridiron, not association or union or league) beat neighbours Wabash College 44–0; there were suggestions that the team had included some ringers – boilermakers from the Monon works. Which led to the nickname Boilermakers, given to the university’s sports teams.

    (Its a bit of a tradition in American universities for their teams to have nicknames; a little like the now sometimes quaint nicknames used for football teams in Britain. A few still have local meaning, but other than journalists looking for copy, do many people still call their team by its nickname? Answers in the chat, please. But in America they are still used, it seems.)

    Purdue became the first US university to have its own airport, in 1934, and introduce credit bearing courses in learning to fly. Amelia Earhart was an instructor for those courses, and a career counsellor for women students. Her round-the-world flight attempt in 1937, in which she disappeared, used an aeroplane funded by Purdue’s research foundation.

    Purdue scientists discovered properties of the element germanium which enabled the invention of transistors. Transistors were fundamental to the development of electronics and computing. Transistors themselves were invented at Bell Laboratories but without germanium semiconducting crystals, which the Purdue team produced, transistors would not have operated quickly enough.

    In 2017 Purdue University bought Kaplan, the early online university, and transformed it into Purdue University Global.

    The card – here’s a jigsaw – shows the Boilermaker Special, Purdue’s official mascot. The Boilermaker was introduced in 1940, paid for by alumni and members of the Purdue Reamer Club, a student club formed as an alternative to the fraternity societies. The first vehicle comprised a body made by the Baldwin Locomotive Works, mounted on a Studebaker chassis. The card shows the third Boilermaker Special, which was in service from 1960 to 1993. It was made by General Motors, on a bus chassis. The current Boilermaker Special is the eighth; a ninth is expected to be in service from this summer.

    The card was posted in February 1973 to a couple in Washington DC:

    Came out here yesterday to let M.G. take a look at Purdue…

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  • Higher education postcard: Oxford Brookes University

    Higher education postcard: Oxford Brookes University

    Greetings from Oxford!

    As reported in the Oxford Times, on 21 March 1865 – which by my count is very nearly 160 years ago – a meeting was held in Oxford. This led to the establishment of the Oxford School of Art, which opened its doors to students on 22 May that year.

    The initial curriculum included freehand drawing, shading in chalk, perspective and model drawing, figure drawing and anatomy, and painting in oil and watercolour. There were separate classes for men, women, and children under 15. Men and children paid two shillings a month (with discounts for larger periods paid up front); women paid four shillings per month. It isn’t clear to me why the fees were different, but as L P Hartley says, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

    The school was initially housed on the ground floor of the Taylor Institute, a library for European languages within the University of Oxford. In 1868 or 1870 (sources differ) a school of science was added. But trouble was brewing. John Ruskin, who had recently been appointed as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the university, did not approve of the way drawing was taught at the Oxford School of Art, and established the Ruskin School of Drawing to address this. The Ruskin School needed space, and so the School of Art and Science was moved to the basement of the Taylor Institute. The Ruskin School of Drawing is now, by the way, the Ruskin School of Art, and is the University of Oxford’s department of fine art. This tells you who won that argument in the long run!

    The move to the basement proved short lived. In 1888 chemistry labs in the Wesleyan school, Witney, were used by the school of science. In 1891 the school was taken over by the city council, following legislative changes enabling local authorities to fund education and to act as trustees, and was renamed the Oxford City Technical School. And in 1894 a new site, at St Ebbe’s in Oxford, was acquired for the school.

    The new site enabled growth in activities – so rapid that in 1899 the government Department of Art and Science declared it inadequate. Needless to say, the school remained on that site for another fifty years, albeit it also occupied other sites across the city.

    We now need to fast forward to 1928 and introduce a new character: John Henry Brookes.

    Brookes had trained as a silversmith, and was a part-time teacher of sculpture at the school. In 1928 he was appointed vice principal of the school of art (the schools of art and science were technically separate organisations); and in 1934 when the schools of art and science were formally merged to form the Schools of Technology, Art and Commerce, Brookes was appointed its first principal, and was to remain in that post until 1956.

    A pressing issue was accommodation, and in 1949 a 25 acre site in Headington was secured for the school. Planning permission was not granted until 1952, having been initially rejected in 1950, and it wasn’t until 1955 that the foundation stone for the new suite was laid. In 1952 a new name was also given: the school became the College of Technology, Art and Commerce. The Headington site was not formally opened until 1963, fourteen years after the site was acquired.

    In 1956 Brookes retired. His impact on the institution was clearly great. The college was once again renamed as the Oxford College of Technology; this and Brookes’ retirement were not, I believe, related events.

    In 1970 the college became Oxford Polytechnic and, in line with national policy which encouraged the amalgamation of smaller specialist colleges into more generalist institutions, it started to expand by incorporation. First came the Lady Spencer-Churchill College – this had been an emergency teacher training college, established in 1947. The Oxford School of Nursing joined in 1988; and in 1992 the Dorset House School of Occupational Therapy also joined the polytechnic. And also in 1992, the polytechnic became a university.

    Oxford Brookes University was the chosen name, in honour of John Henry Brookes. A few of the polytechnics had chosen names to commemorate local people – for example, Liverpool John Moores, Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry – but I think Oxford Brookes is the only one named for a former principal. If you know different, please do say!

    In 1993 the university acquired Headington Hill Hall, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell, enabling an expansion of the Headington site. And in 2000 Westminster College, a methodist teacher training college, merged with the university.

    Being a university sharing a city with the University of Oxford can’t be easy: comparisons will mostly be tiresome. But here’s a surprising one: Oxford Brookes is arguably the best university in the UK at which to row (as in, propel a boat by oars, not argue) – see, for example, this report on the Henley regatta, 2023. Bet you didn’t know that!

    And here’s a jigsaw of the postcard, which I found more challenging than I expected.

    Happy 160th birthday, Oxford Brookes University!

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