Remembering 1720 in 2020

James Thornhill’s Drawing for the Oxford Almanack 1720 ([Colvin 522])

2020 is certainly a year we will not forget.  1720 was perhaps less memorable – although it was the year of the South Sea Bubble (see our blog post for July 2016)! – but the Library collections hold a remarkable object linked to that year: James Thornhill’s original drawing for the Oxford Almanack of 1720.

James Thornhill’s original drawing for the Oxford Almanack of 1720

Thornhill’s drawing, in ink and grey and brown wash with white highlights, measuring 366 x 447 mm, shows Apollo on a plinth surrounded by the Muses, with the Clarendon Building on Oxford’s Broad Street in the background.  Iconographically, this arrangement reflects two types of Oxford Almanack design: the allegorical subjects of the earliest almanacs and the architectural studies which began to feature in the 18^th century.  The Clarendon building, which stands in the background of this image, was designed by Hawksmoor and completed in 1713; Thornhill, though, was responsible for the figures of the Muses added to its roof in 1717 – for which drawings exist in Worcester College Library.  There is a clear link between his architectural additions and this image.

Thornhill’s drawings for three of the Muses on the Clarendon Building

Launched in 1674 and with a new design produced for every year since 1676 (note that there was no almanac for 1675), the Oxford Almanacks are the longest running almanac series.  Almanacs have a long history and were originally intended to serve as annual tables, with calendars, astronomical and ecclesiastical information.  In 1674 Oxford produced its first almanac, perhaps to advertise the quality of the rising Oxford University Press (see Petter, Oxford Almanacks, page 3).  Oxford Almanacks quickly developed to combine an image in the upper part of the sheet, with a calendar and informational tables in the lower (the Almanack of 1678 adopted this arrangement).  The 1720 almanac includes a calendar for that year (with, for example, the days of University terms marked),a Regal Table (showing the dates of English monarchs from the Norman Conquest), and a table of ‘The Chief Ports in or about England’, together with their high tide calculations.  Thornhill’s drawing has the engraved and printed calendar and tables stuck into this space to give a sense of what the finished product would look like.  Informational as these features are, the unique feature of the Oxford Almanacks is the large portion of the sheet taken up by a picture. 

The ‘brainchild’ of Dr John Fell (1625-1686), Dean of Christ Church and one of the first Delegates for Printing appointed by the University, responsibility for the Almanacks seems to have fallen on Henry Aldrich (1648-1710), who would also become Dean of Christ Church in 1689, and who from 1676 supervised their printing and design.  Aldrich was a friend of Dr George Clarke, the benefactor of Worcester College and designer of its Library, and on Aldrich’s death, Clarke also became involved in the production of the almanacs (Petter, Oxford Almanacks, page 9).  Correspondence in the Bodleian shows that it was Clarke who persuaded Sir James Thornhill (1675/6-1734), in the 1710s perhaps England’s leading baroque painter, to design 1720’s Almanack (see Bodl. MS. Ballard xi, f. 122; xx, f.107, quoted in Petters, Oxford Almanacks, page 11).  Certainly, it was through Clarke that the drawing came to Worcester, and it is Clarke’s handwriting at the bottom of our sheet which notes ’This is the Originall Drawing’. 

George Clarke’s note: ‘This is the Originall Drawing’

Clarke also collected printed versions of the Almanacks and his collection (left to Worcester College) includes both engravings of the 1720 print: that printed from the plate by Michael Burghers (shown here on the left, with a red duty stamp in the top left corner), and that by Claude du Bosc (shown here on the right).

In the early 18^th century, when about 9,000 copies of each almanac were printed (see Petter, Oxford Almanacks, pages 21-22), two plates were needed for practical reasons as the plates would become worn through the printing process.  The work of two engravers on the 1720 image reflects, however, Thornhill’s concern with the quality of the engraving.  By 1720 Burghers, Engraver to the University since 1692, had been engraving the Almanacks since 1676 (History of Oxford University Press, volume 1, page 526) and it appears that Thornhill ‘considered him a ‘bad graver’ who could not do justice to his drawing’ (Petter, Oxford Almanacks,page 11).  Claude Du Bosc (1682-c.1746) had already engraved Thornhill’s work and, although unsigned, the second plate is probably by him (see Petter, Oxford Almanacks, page 52).

These two copies of the finished 1720 print are from the collection left by George Clarke to Worcester College Library on his death in 1736.  His set is complete for the years 1674-1736, and indeed the run was continued uninterrupted until 1776; there is then a gap until 1835, after which point we again have a fairly full run until 1977, although with more gaps than in earlier years.  Interestingly, in Clarke’s own collection are two further drawings for Almanacks: one for 1688, and one for 1713.  Clarke’s ownership of these drawings is further proof for his involvement in the Almanack endeavour, although Thornhill’s drawing for 1720, with its architectural interest, perhaps most closely illustrates Clarke’s influence.

The original drawing for the 1688 Oxford Almanack

The original drawing for the 1713 Oxford Almanack

Mark Bainbridge

Librarian

Bibliography

Petter, H.M., The Oxford Almanacks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

Eliot, S. (ed), The history of Oxford University Press (Oxford: OUP, 2013-2017)

On the occasion of the Library’s 300th birthday

The College is empty.  Students study from home; tutors teach from their home offices and kitchen tables; the College’s staff work remotely to keep the essential business of the College running.   It is a very unusual Trinity Term.

Trinity is normally busy in the Library: the Lower Library in particular is full (we always have to put out extra desks) and there is an intangible energy in the air as students revise.  This June is very different: the Lower Library sits still, conserving its treasures, waiting for students to return.  It is an odd time to celebrate its 300^th birthday.

The Lower Library, Worcester College, Oxford

Yes, 300: on 8^th June 1720 the first stone of what would become the Library-Chapel-Hall complex was laid.  In honour of that 300^th birthday, and to remind readers who can’t be there and to show to those who have not (yet) seen Worcester College Library, for this month’s treasure we choose the Lower Library itself (from which so many of the items discussed in this blog come) and show pictures of a Library in lockdown.

First, though, a little history: the front block at Worcester College, the Library-Hall-Chapel complex, was designed by the amateur architect Dr George Clarke (1661-1736) in collaboration with his friend, the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (for a full discussion of the design process, see Pistis, ‘Dr George Clarke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Design of Worcester College’).  Building took 16 years and the Library was finished in 1736, when, after Clarke’s death in October, it received his foundational bequest of books, drawings and prints, which were moved from All Souls at a cost of £4.14s (Parker, ‘The evolution of the Library interior’, page 30).   The building completed in 1736 is, with very few alterations, the one planned in 1720 and represented by a print from that year by Michael Burghers of the west façade and plan.

Engraving of the west side of the Hall, Chapel, and Library block by Michael Burghers, 1720

The interior of the Lower Library, as it stands today, however, is not exactly the same as the 18^th-century original.  There have been face-lifts and costume changes over the centuries (described in detail by former Librarian Joanna Parker in her article ‘The evolution of the Library interior’) – although the arrangement of the bookshelves running flat along three walls with galleries above is very much an early 18^th-century feature and one that dates back to the initial room design.  Also original are the ‘room’s elongated and narrow proportions’ and ‘the three great central round-headed windows designed by Hawksmoor’ (Parker).

Three round-headed windows designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor

In 1825, a programme of refurbishment saw the addition of the Corinthian pillars to support the cantilevered gallery; at the same time the ceiling was replaced in whole or in part, and the three ceiling roses added. 

One can get a sense of the Library interior as it looked in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries from contemporary pictures: an undated watercolour by Bernard Cecil Gotch (1876-1963) and the 1924 Worcester College bookplate designed by Edmund Hort New.

‘Worcester College: interior of the Library’, Bernard Cecil Gotch

In contrast to today, much of the room’s furniture occupied the central aisle of the Library: extra freestanding bookcases, tall reading desks, and even some plaster casts of classical statuary.  The western (window) side of the room was bare of desks – unlike today.  Indeed, today’s desks with their distinctive red lamps were the result of a further refurbishment carried out in 1960 by the College Architect, Emil Godfrey.  Initial ideas and schemes for this are recorded in a series of architect’s drawings and sketches which currently adorn the walls of the Upper Library.

Emil Godfrey’s redesign produced the room so familiar to – and missed by – current members: the long narrow space, the desks arranged along the western wall and windows, allowing an uninterrupted vista of the full length of the room, its bookcases extending into the distance.

The ‘Reader’s View’ with one of the Lower Library’s distinctive red reading lamps.

As we celebrate the 300^th year since the foundation stone of this building was laid, I leave you with some further images of Worcester College Library, beginning with one that could be used as a background in your current video calls.

For use as your video call background: Lower Library Shelves, Worcester College, Oxford

A library is not just a room or a building, however – nor is it only books.  It is the readers who use it, the services it provides, even (perhaps) the ideas (and connections between ideas) it prompts.  But the space is important – an area of communal working which, in the College setting, provides the silent camaraderie of working with others, individually yet together.  We look forward to welcoming you back to this glorious space as soon as possible.

Mark Bainbridge (Librarian)

Bibliography

Parker, J. H., ‘The evolution of the library interior’, Worcester College Record 1999, pages 29-36

Pistis, E., ‘Dr George Clarke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and the design of Worcester College’, in J. Bate and J. Goodman (eds), Worcester: portrait of an Oxford College (London: Third Millennium, 2014), pages 38-45

Pirates and Highwaymen: True Crime in the Eighteenth Century

A General History of the Lives and Adventures Of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-robbers, &c. To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the most notorious Pyrates, &c. Interspers’d with several Diverting Histories of their Amours and Comical Adventures

By Capt. Charles Johnson

London: M.D.CC.XLII

This month’s treasure is an eighteenth-century collection of tales of robbery, murder, and piracy. Captain Johnson’s General History contains dozens of biographies of the most notable criminals of the day and is one of the major sources on the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ of the early eighteenth century, preserving for posterity the lives of figures such as Blackbeard and Anne Bonny (Arne Bialuschewski, ‘Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the “General History of the Pyrates”’, p. 21). A large folio volume, the General History is illustrated with ‘Twenty Curious Copper-Plates’.

Criminal biography as a genre grew in popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Accounts of trials at the Old Bailey, known as ‘sessions papers’, were published for the public, as were ‘ordinary’s accounts’ – the stories of prisoners’ last days (and, usually, rediscovery of religion) as told by the chaplain in Newgate Prison (Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe: a New Kind of Writing, pp. 4-5). In the early eighteenth century collections of criminals’ lives such as this one started to appear. Generally criminal biographies were divided into two broad categories. On one side were serious and moralistic stories, which sought to discourage a life of crime by describing the chain of poor decisions and immoral behaviour which had led to the criminal’s unfortunate end. On the other were more romantic and frivolous biographies (generally of thieves rather than murderers), which focused on entertaining anecdotes from criminals’ lives and works (Faller, Crime and Defoe, p. 6, p. 17). The extent to which these biographies were factual is debateable; while most of the people were historical figures and contemporary press accounts of their crimes would have been available to the authors, it seems likely that the authors embroidered the details of the lives rather heavily to serve their own purposes of instruction or entertainment (for more on authenticity in criminal biography, see Faller, Crime and Defoe, pp. 23-29; and on Johnson particularly, Frohock, ‘Satire and Civil Governance in A General History of the Pyrates (1724, 1726)’).

The General History contains a mixture of both serious and frivolous biographies. The account of Captain John Jaen, for example, who was convicted of beating his cabin boy to death, makes for grim reading. After his execution, Jaen’s body was displayed over the King’s Powder-House, as a

‘Warning to Others who serve in the same Station, how they abuse the great Power, with which ’tis necessary they should be invested while abroad… but of which ’tis the Privilege of those that serve under them to require an Account when they come home, that so no Subject of Great Britain may be oppressed, much less murder’d, by another entrusted with a greater Share of Authority.’ (Johnson, A General History (1734), p. 306)

The stories of pirates, such as Captain Avery and Blackbeard, often focus on their treacherous behaviour toward fellow pirates – pirates, it seems, were rather fond of marooning their co-conspirators on deserted islands and sailing away with the loot.

Capt Avery and his crew taking one of the Great Mogul’s ships.

Yet at the other end of the spectrum we have stories such as the life of Captain James Hind (d. 1652), who was ‘distinguished by his Pleasantry in all his Adventures ; for he never in his Life robb’d a Man, but at the same Time he either said or did something that was diverting’ (Johnson, A General History (1734), p. 86). The General History portrays Hind as a royalist thief with a heart of gold, who only stole from regicides and the rich, and was always most gentlemanly when robbing ladies. In the end he was executed for treason rather than robbery, following a spell in the Royalist army (Johnson, A General History (1734), p. 89). James Sharpe describes Hind as the ‘prototype cavalier highwayman’, a stereotype which gained popularity in the eighteenth century and appears in romantic fiction to this day (James A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750, p. 229).

Capt. Hind robbing Col. Harrison in Maidenhead-Thick.

The variations in tone throughout this collection may be in part because our edition is actually a combination of two works which were originally published separately: Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates (1724) and A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the most Notorious Highwaymen (1714) by Alexander Smith (H.R. Tedder/David Cordingly, ‘Johnson, Charles (fl. 1724-1734)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). There is an air of mystery to these collections as both Charles Johnson and Alexander Smith appear to have been pseudonyms, and their true identities have never been indisputably established. The identity of Captain Johnson has in fact been a topic of debate amongst literary scholars for the better part of a century.

In 1932 John Robert Moore, a prominent Daniel Defoe scholar, attributed Johnson’s work to Defoe. This attribution stood until the late 1980s, when P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens challenged it on the basis that the attribution was based solely on Moore’s ‘intuitive recognition’ of Defoe’s style, rather than on any documentary evidence (Bialuschewski, ‘Daniel Defoe’, p. 22). It is generally agreed that Johnson’s biographies of pirates show a familiarity with the sea and the West Indies, so it is likely that Captain Johnson was a seaman of some sort (Tedder/Cordingly, ‘Johnson, Charles’). In an article from 2004, Arne Bialuschewski argues convincingly for the work to be attributed to Nathaniel Mist (d. 1737), a sailor turned printer and journalist, whose Jacobite tendencies and borderline seditious press led to frequent skirmishes with the law and eventual exile in France (for more please see Bialuschewski, Arne, ‘Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the “General History of the Pyrates”’). However, the jury is still out on the question of Johnson’s true identity and it seems unlikely that the mystery will ever be indisputably solved.

Shepherd in the Stone Room in Newgate

*Note: although the images in this post have been taken from the 1742 edition in Worcester College Library, quotations are from the 1734 edition digitised by ECCO (reference below), as I was unable to access the print copy while writing.

Renée Prud’Homme (Assistant Librarian)

Bibliography

Bialuschewski, Arne, ‘Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the “General History of the Pyrates”’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 98 no. 1 (March 2004), pp. 21-38, JSTOR [Accessed online: 15 April 2020]

Faller, Lincoln B., Crime and Defoe: a New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: CUP 1993), ACLS Humanities [Accessed online: 26 March 2020]

Frohock, Richard, ‘Satire and Civil Governance in A General History of the Pyrates (1724, 1726)’, The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 56 No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 467-483, Project Muse [Accessed: 11 May 2020]

Johnson, Charles, A general history of the lives and adventures of the most famous highwaymen, murderers, street-robbers, &c. To which is added, a genuine account of the voyages and plunders of the most notorious pyrates. Interspersed with several diverting Tales, and pleasant Songs. And Adorned with the Heads of the most Remarkable Villains, Curiously Engraven on Copper. By Capt. Charles Johnson (London, M.DCC.XXXIV [1734]), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale [Accessed online: 7 May 2020]

Rogers, Pat, “Smith, Alexander (fl. 1714–1726), compiler of biographies”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004 [Accessed online: 8 May 2020]

Sharpe, James A., Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750 (2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 1999) [Accessed online: 9 April 2020]

Tedder, H. R. and David Cordingly, “Johnson, Charles (fl. 1724–1734), author”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004 [Accessed online: 8 May 2020]

‘With all best wishes and cordial regrets…’: turning down social invitations

2019/028 Letter from Samuel Beckett, 1967

WOR/JCR 4/2 Letter from T. S. Eliot, 1954

PDR 3/1 Letter from Robert Graves, 1961

Last summer, the College Archives received a donation from an old member: a letter from Samuel Beckett declining to visit in 1967, stating that he “was incapable of giving talks”. It joins two other letters in the Archives where invitations were rejected, and now seems a good time to look at these early adopters of social distancing.

[Unfortunately, I am unable to photograph the letter from Samuel Beckett as I am currently working from home.]

In 2009, shortly after joining Worcester College, I found a letter tucked into a minute book of The Buskins, the College drama society. There is no other surviving correspondence of The Buskins, but this letter had survived where others had not because it had been sent by T. S. Eliot. In 1954, Sir John Masterman, the Provost, had invited Eliot to a dramatic reading by The Buskins of his play The Murder in the Cathedral, about the murder of Thomas Becket. In response, Eliot sent a polite rejection, stating that he was under doctor’s orders not to leave London in the winter “for bronchial reasons”.

As indicated in the letter, T. S. Eliot had previously visited the College, and it may be that the memory of this occasion made him more reluctant to defy his doctor. In 1928, an undergraduate literary society, The Philistines, hosted Eliot for a reading of The Waste Land. The event was organised by the College Chaplain, William Force Stead, who had baptised Eliot into the Church of England the previous summer. Stead later wrote a description of the meeting which perhaps indicates that the Philistines lived up to their name:

“The poem was not widely appreciated at that time and called forth some very foolish remarks…A discussion dragged along for some time until a round-faced youth bounced up and said,

‘Mr Eliot, may I ask a question?’

‘Certainly’

‘Er-did you mean that poem seriously?’

Eliot looked non-plussed for a moment, and then said quietly, ‘Well if you think I did not mean it seriously, I have failed utterly.’”

Another report claims that after a period of silence an undergraduate, with nothing else to add to the discussion, asked Eliot where he had got his pipe.

Cartoon of William Force Stead by ‘Ush’: Ralph Usherwood (1911-2000), matriculated at Worcester in 1930.

It seems that no Worcester literary society was truly worthy of the title until they had a prominent letter of regret. The Lovelace Society was named after Richard Lovelace (1617-1657), a Civil War poet and army officer who had been an undergraduate at Gloucester Hall (the institution that preceded Worcester College on the same site). It was they who invited Robert Graves to the College in 1961 to give a talk, just as Graves was beginning his term as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, a position elected by members of Convocation (a group that includes Oxford graduates who have had their degree formally conferred, and members of staff who make up the University’s ‘parliament’, known as Congregation). Professors of Poetry are elected every four years, and are required to give a public lecture once a term and an oration at the honorary degree ceremony each year. The Lovelace Society must have written to Robert Graves shortly after his election but, as can be seen from the letter below, they approached him too early and he turned down the invitation claiming he had “too much work to clear off here”.

The Lovelace Society was sometimes greeted with more positive responses: they hosted J. R. R. Tolkien in 1938, when he read an early version of Farmer Giles of Ham (for more information see our blogpost from February 2016). Unfortunately, I am unable to check their other surviving minute books, currently safely stored in the College Archives, to see if the Society extended invitations to other Professors of Poetry.

Student societies sprang up across Oxford in the late-nineteenth century as a way to pass the time under curfews that saw undergraduates confined to their own college in the evenings. At Worcester they often focused on literature, with members taking it in turns to write essays for discussion, but there were also societies for drama, history, law and dining, in addition to the sports clubs and their social side.

It might seem slightly frivolous to draw parallels with the current world situation in this way. It is, however, a reminder that whereas once things had to happen in person, we are lucky that we can now meet in virtual spaces to continue enjoying the literary and cultural things we share – and to support each other.

The De Quincey Society in 1880

Emma Goodrum (College Archivist)

Bibliography

David Bradshaw, ‘The American Chaplain and the Modernist Poets: William Force Stead, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot’ in Worcester College Record 2011 at p. 128

Emma Goodrum, ‘Out of Hours’, in Jonathan Bate and Jessica Goodman, Worcester: Portrait of an Oxford College (2014), pp. 182-9

‘Professor of Poetry’ on the website of the University of Oxford, http://www.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-people/professor-of-poetry

In search of Rosalind Clay

Rosalind Clay gift label

In 2019-2020 Worcester College celebrates the admission of women as undergraduates to the College 40 years ago in 1979.  It seems a good time, therefore, finally to answer a question occasioned by a gift label found in c.200 history books in the College’s modern library collections: “the gift of Rosalind Clay, who taught history to Worcester men for many years”.  Who was Rosalind Clay, a woman who taught at Worcester long before women were themselves admitted?

The books she gave to the College provide a little information.  Not only do they show an interest in Tudor and Stuart history in particular, but some, such as a copy of Tanner’s Tudor constitutional documents, AD 1485-1603 boast her signature and her address: 121A Woodstock Road, Oxford.  It is searches in the College Record, the Archives, and then further afield, however, that have allowed us to add some detail to this intriguing gift inscription.

Rosalind Clay’s signature and address

An account by a former student, Alan MacFarlane, who himself became a historian, provided the first steps to discovering more.  In his online memoir he recalls:  ‘Lady Rosalind Clay, a doughty north Oxford historian, also became a friend after teaching me Tudor and Stuart history and through her I gained an entry into the world of Oxford gossip as her father had been Master of Balliol, one daughter was the historian Rosalind Mitchison, and her son-in-law the politician Peter Shore’ (MacFarlane, ‘1941-1963’).

Born Rosalind Smith, she was the daughter of the historian A L Smith (1850-1924), Master of Balliol College from 1916 until his death in 1924.  He must have been an early influence on her historical interests: Rosalind helped her father annotate and publish his 1906 Ford Lectures on ‘Church and State in the Middle Ages’ (Smith, Arthur Lionel Smith, page 171).  In 1915, she married Edward Murray Wrong (1889-1928), a Canadian-born historian who had been a pupil of her father (Arthur Lionel Smith, page 220) and with him she had six children, before his death in 1928.  In 1951, Rosalind married the economist (and second Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford) Sir Henry Clay (1883-1954) – he died in a car accident in 1954: Rosalind was widowed for a second time.

The above provides a biographical skeleton, but tells us nothing about her career at Worcester, ‘[teaching] history to Worcester men’; for that the records of the College Archives prove more useful.  Even there, though, the file only begins in 1963, with a letter from the Provost electing her to a Lectureship in Modern History – but her association extended back long before that.  The election, the Provost writes, is ‘in recognition of the great services which you have rendered to us for so many years’.  And it was a major step for the College, ‘[breaking] through old traditions’, as the Provost recognized: Lady Clay was the College’s first female lecturer.

Letter from Provost Franks to Rosalind Clay, 1st June 1963

Letters from College are archived with the replies of Rosalind Clay: and through her own words, which record her gratitude to the College, one gets a sense of her character.  Charming, modest, cultured, she once, comparing herself to her sisters, ‘half-identified [herself]’ with the dimmer of the Pleiades  –a self-deprecating remark, notable for its recondite reference!

Rosalind Clay Letter to F V Price, 14th November 1965

In particular, she shows great magnanimity in her reply concerning her long-withheld SCR dining rights (finally offered in 1965), relishing the opportunity to see more of her colleagues: ‘In the past my dealings with them have for weeks at a time been mainly by telephone or hasty notes’.  A letter of 29^th April 1972 thanks the Provost for ‘Thursday last… one of the great days of my life’, a tea party in the year of her 80^th birthday, perhaps celebrating the award of her Oxford MA (a fact I am currently unable to check).  Certainly, it was a celebration of her:  both of Rosalind Clay’s colleges, Worcester and Balliol (her adoptive and birth colleges), flew their flags.  And it is in this letter, looking back on her association with Worcester, that she recalls conversations with Mr Paul Roberts 25 years ago: ‘a series of careful vivas to see whether I was fitted to do some work’.  So it was in the late 1940s, when still Rosalind Wrong, that she started working for the College, ‘teaching history to Worcester men’.

Rosalind Clay retired in 1974, which was reported in the Record for 1977.  I can do no better than reproduce that notice here:

“In 1974, Lady Clay retired as a lecturer at the College.  She had taught Worcester historians Tudor and Stuart history from 1949.  No tutor could have been more admirably informed and conscientious.  More important still, after a longer experience of history and of undergraduates than any historian teaching in the University, she was and is very fond of both and tired of neither. To be attached on one subject for its own sake and to one’s pupils for theirs is to be a very good tutor, for it enables one to inspire enthusiasm and attract attention.  Lady Clay has done both; and many generations of Worcester historians owe her much.  It was a matter of great satisfaction to her friends when the University honoured her with an MA honoris causa.  Having read history in another place before the eligibility of women for degrees, she was, until then, innocent of any degree whatsoever.”

Rosalind, Lady Clay, who was born on 20^th September 1892, died on 16^th February 1984.  It was in that year when her books came to the Library.  Worcester College has no photos of Rosalind Clay, but one has kindly been provided by her niece Elizabeth Nussbaum, through the kind services of the Balliol College Archivist.  Quite why it should be, I don’t know, but it was good finally to put a face to a name previously only known from a gift label.

Rosalind Clay (by permission of Elizabeth Nussbaum)

Mark Bainbridge (Librarian)

Bibliography

MacFarlane, A., ‘1941-1963.  Childhood, adolescence and undergraduate life: learning what the questions are’, available online at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/1941_1963.pdf

Smith, M., Arthur Lionel Smith, Master of Balliol (1916-1924): a biography and some reminiscences (London, 1928)

Fashionable Fairies

A Collection of Novels and Tales of the Fairies. Written by that Celebrated Wit of France, the Countess D’Anois.

The Second Edition, London: Printed for J. Brotherton at the Bible, and W. Meadows at the Angel, in Cornhill; Tho. Edlin in the Strand, and at Story’s Passage, Westminster; and Tho. Astley, at the Rose in St. Paul’s Church-Yard. M. DCC. XXVIII. (1728)

Our treasure this month is a small, well-loved three volume set of fairy tales by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. Though something of a literary celebrity in her day, both in France and in England, Madame d’Aulnoy and her work were virtually forgotten by the twentieth century. Only in the last thirty years or so has there been a revival of interest in her work, led largely by the growing academic study of fairy tales.

The life of Marie-Catherine, Baronne or Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650/1-1705) is as fascinating and mysterious as one of her tales (for more details, please see her entry by Lewis Seifert in the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales). She was married young, aged 15 or 16, to the Baron d’Aulnoy, who was thirty years her senior. In 1669, after several years of mistreatment, she plotted with her mother and two men to have him arrested for treason, a capital offence. When the Baron was acquitted, he brought charges against his accusers which led to the execution of the male accomplices, exile for Madame d’Aulnoy’s mother, and brief imprisonment for Mme d’Aulnoy (Seifert, Companion to Fairy Tales). Exactly what became of Mme d’Aulnoy in the years 1670-1690 is unknown. It’s generally agreed that she probably travelled to Flanders, England, and Spain, and Warner goes so far to suggest that she may have been a spy for France during this time (Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 285). Upon her return to Paris in 1685, she established herself as part of literary polite society and began a prolific writing career (Seifert, Companion; Warner, Beast to Blonde, p. 285).

Mme d’Aulnoy wrote travelogues, novels, short stories, devotional works, and historical memoirs, but her lasting legacy has been her fairy tales (Seifert, Companion). Fairy tales were all the rage in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France and Mme d’Aulnoy was a significant force in the development of the genre. She is credited with coining the term conte de fée (fairy tale), as well as publishing the first one – ‘L’île de la félicité’ (‘The Isle of Happiness’) in the longer work L’histoire d’Hypolite in 1690 (Seifert, Companion; Thirard, The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature). She then published two more collections of just fairy tales; Les Contes des fées (The Fairy Tales) in 1697 and Contes nouveaux où les fées à mode (New Stories, or, Fashionable Fairies) in 1698 (Thirard, Encyclopaedia).

The fairy tales published by d’Aulnoy and her contemporaries, such as Charles Perrault and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, were not written for children – they originated in the Parisian salon and were intended for educated, upper class adults (Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, p.1, p. 8). They were usually set in ‘frame stories’ – narratives which provided a context for storytelling – some as simple as a salon where ladies are amusing each other with tales and others, such as d’Aulnoy’s Don Gabriel in Les Contes des fées, which are essentially novellas. Although they are often purported to be based on memories of stories told by nursemaids and similar figures, the extent to which the literary fairy tales of this era were derived from folkloric sources, earlier literary sources, or pure imagination is contested among literary scholars (see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: a new history). Though few of Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales are well-known today, the motifs are familiar. In ‘The story of Finetta the cinder-girl’, for example, we have a disinherited royal heroine who escapes abandonment in the woods by leaving a trail of ashes as she travels, defeats a giant by tricking him into climbing into his own oven, and then after being forced into the role of servant by her evil sisters, manages to sneak off to royal balls, where she wins the heart of the prince, who tracks her down through the classic lost shoe method.

Mme d’Aulnoy was also wildly popular in England in the eighteenth-century, initially for her writings on the Spanish court, and later for her fairy tales. By 1721 ten of her works had been published in England and by 1740 there had been 36 editions of her work in English (Palmer, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy in England’, p.237). Such was her name recognition that works were often falsely attributed to her, presumably to increase sales (Palmer, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy’, p. 239). Our English edition of her tales was published in 1728 and while the frame stories and eight of the tales in the first two volumes are by Mme d’Aulnoy, four of the stories are by Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat, a contemporary of d’Aulnoy. None of the stories in the third volume are hers – the majority were written by another contemporary, Louise Comtesse d’Auneuil (Palmer and Palmer, ‘English Editions of French “Contes de Fées” Attributed to Mme D’Aulnoy’, pp. 230-231).

This edition has no illustrations, but each story begins with a small printed ornament.

It was over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that fairy tales were repackaged as stories for children. Both in France and England popular fairy tales were reprinted in cheaper editions and often abridged and adapted for different audiences (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales, p. 103). Warner notes that Mme d’Aulnoy and other tale-tellers were frequent victims of bowdlerization in England; the sexuality and light-hearted brutality of some of Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales in particular were considered distasteful to English audiences (Warner, Beast to Blonde, p. 166, p. 284). As her tales were reprinted and rewritten in England, mythical figures also replaced her as author – first she became Queen Mab, then by the 1770s she had become ‘Mother Bunch’ (Jones, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy Charms the British’, p. 255). It was under the name of Mother Bunch that her stories were first marketed specifically to children, in a volume titled Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales. Published for the amusement of all those Little Masters and Misses who, by duty to their parents, and obedience to their superiors, aim at becoming Great Lords and Ladies, published by Francis Newbery in 1776 (Jones, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy Charms the British’, p. 253).

A small printer’s ornament gracing the final page of the third volume.

Our copy of Mme d’Aulnoy’s tales come from the collection of W.G. Waters, who was a Fellow Commoner of Worcester College (an undergraduate who paid an extra fee to eat in the Senior Common Room- he may have chosen to do this because at 27 he was much older than most undergraduates)* from 1869-1872. After his death in 1928, Waters’ son offered the College the bulk of his father’s book collection in 1936/37. A bust of W.G. Waters continues to watch over the collection in the entrance hall to the Lower Library.

Before Waters, the books were owned by Sir John Pollen (1731-1814), and perhaps by his father, also called John Pollen. One book has a bookplate for ‘John Pollen, Esquire’ and another for ‘Sir John Pollen, Baronet’ (Sir John was created a baronet in 1795 – Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage).

The condition of the books – worn leather, dented edges, and detached boards – suggests that they have been well-read and well-loved; a testament to the continuing appeal of fairy tales over the course of 300 years.

Renée Prud’Homme (Assistant Librarian)

 

*Thanks to our archivist Emma Goodrum for information about Fellow Commoners.

Bibliography

Bottigheimer, Ruth B., Fairy Tales: a New History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009)

Burke, Sir Bernard, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire (London, 1865)

Jones, Christine A., ‘Madame d’Aulnoy Charms the British’, Romantic Review 99:3/4 (May-Nov 2008), pp. 236-256, accessed online: https://search.proquest.com/docview/196423926?accountid=13042

Palmer, Melvin, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy in England’, Comparative Literature 27:3 (Summer 1975), pp. 237-253, accessed online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1769548

Palmer, Nancy and Melvin Palmer, ‘English Editions of French “Contes de Fées” Attributed to Mme D’Aulnoy’, Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974), pp. 227-232, accessed online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40371596

Seifert, Lewis C., ‘Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville Baronne d’ [or Comtesse] (1650/51-1705)’ in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (OUP 2005, accessed online: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199689828.001.0001/acref-9780199689828-e-43)

Seifert, Lewis C., Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge: CUP, 1996)

Thirard, Marie-Agnès, ‘Aulnoy, Marie Catherine, Comtesse d’’, The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes (OUP 2006, accessed online: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195146561.001.0001/acref-9780195146561-e-0160)

Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995)

The Garland of Rachel

In our January blog we acknowledge a wonderful gift the Library received last year: a selection of material relating to the Daniel Press from the estate of the late Penelope Tuerk, great-granddaughter of C H O Daniel (Provost of Worcester 1903-1919).  It is a treasure-trove of 37 items, comprising manuscripts, early proofs, fine printed volumes from the Daniel Press, and related archival material (letters, photographs, etc.).

Items from the Daniel Press Gift (gifted September 2019)

Although it might be inimical to select from such an interesting collection, two items in particular cry out for attention: Rachel Daniel’s own copy of The Garland of Rachel; and a manuscript book bound in embroidered boards with the cover title ‘List of Daniel Press books’.

We have written about the Daniel Press before (see “‘Beauty is truth’: Katherine Adams and the Daniel Press at Worcester College”).  Set up by the Rev C. H. O. Daniel, first at Frome in Somerset, and then from 1874 to 1906 in the grounds of Worcester College Oxford (see Madan, The Daniel Press, page 41), this much-admired private press published beautiful small volumes in limited print runs.  The texts were (from 1876) printed in Fell type, with printed floral ornaments, and beautiful miniation (red capital letters) painted by Daniel’s wife Emily.  Such delicate design can be found in the volume the Daniels crafted to celebrate the first birthday of their eldest child Rachel in 1881.

The dedication to Rachel Daniel

Inspired by a 17^th-century French manuscript, La Guirlande de Julie (see Peterson & Peterson, page 27), Henry Daniel sought poetic contributions from his literary friends, with the 17 contributors including: Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate 1913-1930; Charles L. Dodgson, i.e. “Lewis Carroll”; Sir Edmund W. Gosse, ‘perhaps the most eminent man of letters in late Victorian and Edwardian England’ (Peterson & Peterson, page 40); and the novelist and poet Margaret L. Woods.

Title-page of The Garland of Rachel

The Library already has a good collection of Daniel material, so it was wonderful to receive in September 2019, from Rachel’s granddaughter Penny Tuerk (1947-2018), Rachel’s very own copy of The Garland of Rachel (described in Peterson and Peterson’s census of the Garland as no 3.33).  Bound in vellum, a note loosely inserted in the handwriting of C H O Daniel argues for the provenance:

“To Rachel, setting out on her way through the world.  With the blessing and love of her father & mother.  Sept 27. 1901″

The date gives away the occasion: Rachel’s 21^st birthday.  Although the loose insertion means that there is ‘no irrefutable evidence that it has always been associated with this book’, there is ‘a very strong tradition in the family that this copy of the Garland was given to Rachel by her parents on her twenty-first birthday’ (Peterson and Peterson, page 103).  The family provenance of the book and the rest of the gift to Worcester can also be seen in the inclusion of two notes in Rachel’s childish hand to her parents – both of them with the theme of Rachel promising to be good!

A letter from Rachel Daniel to her mother

A letter from Rachel Daniel to her father, page 1

A letter from Rachel Daniel to her father, page 2

The coup of Rachel’s own copy is further enhanced by the inclusion of a green Morocco leather volume with spine title ‘MSS. OF GARLAND OF RACHEL’ (Peterson and Peterson, no. 3.36, the ‘Tuerk manuscript’): the contributors’ original manuscripts for their submissions; together with a volume containing an early proof of the finished text (Peterson and Peterson, no. 3.39, the ‘Tuerk proofs’).  That is, the nearly-finished text – for not all contributors escaped without an edit.  Most radically changed was the offering of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.  Verses beginning “Oh pudgy podgy pup!” were deemed far too frivolous and Carroll was impressed upon to produce a replacement, although not before someone had set the first poem in proof.

Carroll’s first submission in manuscript

Carroll’s first submission in proof

Carroll’s accepted submission in manuscript

Carroll’s poem as printed in the published Garland

So, within this gift, we have not only Rachel’s copy of the Garland but also the original manuscript and a rare proof copy.  The boxes delivered to Worcester back in September also included a copy of The Garland inherited by Rachel’s sister Ruth from their mother Emily (Peterson and Peterson, no. 3.34).  This gift means that Worcester College now owns three copies of The Garland of Rachel, of which only 36 copies were ever printed.  This print run is noted in the other item that begs attention within this treasure-trove: a manuscript book titled ‘List of Daniel Press Books’.

Details of the Garland from the manuscript list

This volume is bound in embroidered covers of green silk with floral motifs.  Indeed, its decoration captures something of the delicacy of the Daniel Press products it lists, the decoration extending even to the smallest details: the clasps on the covers have ‘CHD’ (for C H Daniel) and ‘1903’ (the year of compilation?) inscribed on them.

MS list: embroidered cover

Clasps

The book itself is not a Daniel production: a small note on the rear free endpaper records: ‘M.S. by E. C. Reynolds | worked and bound by her | at The Gables | Abingdon Berks | May 14. 1903.’ Edith Claudia Reynolds was the wife of Samuel Harvey Reynolds (1831-1897), a Fellow of Brasenose College and friend of Daniel.  Are we to assume this was a gift made by Mrs Reynolds for her friend the Daniels?  Certainly, the provenance through the Daniel family suggests this.  In creating the book, Mrs Reynolds has not just produced a beautiful object, but included useful information on the print runs and prices of Daniel Press books.  The Library hopes that this and other material in this collection will be useful to researchers, who are welcome to make appointments to consult it.

Mark Bainbridge (Librarian)

Bibliography

Madan, F., The Daniel Press: memorials of C.H.O. Daniel (Folkestone, 1974)

Peterson, W.S. and S.H. Peterson, The Daniel Press and The Garland of Rachel (New Castle, DE, 2016)

Season’s Greetings: Worcester College Christmas Cards

Detail from ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, stained glass window in Worcester College Chapel. College Christmas card c2010

At this time of year the proliferation of Christmas decorations and images can be overwhelming. Let this blogpost serve as a refreshing escape from that, as the Christmas cards produced by the College over the past century are surprisingly devoid of anything remotely festive (the recent example above, of the Adoration of the Magi, is the exception) but are beautiful nonetheless. (In this blog, click on the image for further information.)

The earliest Christmas cards in the Archives are simple, consisting only of the College coat of arms on a plain background. Without the Christmas wishes inside, it would be impossible to identify these as Christmas cards at all.

Worcester College Christmas Card, no date, early twentieth century

After the Second World War, pictures appear on the Christmas cards but they feature summer scenes, rather than the more traditional wintery or religious images. The first example in the Archives has a charming engraving showing undergraduates bowling in the Provost’s Garden, with the Library building in the background.

Worcester is fortunate in its beautiful buildings and grounds and it is understandable that the picturesque surroundings should feature in the majority of  the College Christmas cards. More surprising is that the trend for images of the College in summer continued throughout the twentieth century, perhaps indicating a longing for a different season to the one currently being celebrated.

Christmas card with drawing of the medieval ‘cottages’ in the Main Quad, signed “P. J. 40”

Christmas card with drawing of the ‘cottages’ from the Nuffield Lawn, by Charles Broadhurst

In the 1960s and 1970s, the College produced a series of Christmas cards featuring historic prints and drawings of College scenes, which naturally resulted in cards which again did not feature traditional Christmas imagery.

Worcester College during the building of Beaumont Street, G. Hollis, 1823

Front of Worcester College by Muirhead Bone, no date [early twentieth century]

Worcester College from the Gardens, 1839, by Joseph Murrary Ince

Garden Front of Worcester College, 1820, by William Turner of Oxford

College Christmas cards at this time were produced for College members to send (today they are available for anyone to purchase from the Lodge). In the Archives we have a card from the series above, sent by Sir John Masterman (Provost 1946 to 1961).

Other provosts chose to produce their own Christmas card as shown by the two examples below.

Personal Christmas card of F J Lys, Provost 1919 to 1946, Christmas 1933

Personal Christmas card of Asa Briggs, Provost 1976 to 1992, no date

Later College Christmas cards have maintained the focus on the gardens, but utilised more traditional winter imagery.

Photo of the Lake by Jack Wilding, c2000

Photo of the bridge over the Lake by Edward Wilson, 2008

Photo of the Lake by Edward Wilson, 2008

Season’s Greetings from Worcester College Archives!

Emma Goodrum

Archivist

Worcester College Christmas Card 2014 (photo by Sharmaine Sepehr, of fireworks at the Commemoration Ball 2014)

History of Science books from Worcester’s collections

Last month the Library was one of 12 college libraries taking part as points on a college walking trail exploring ‘History of Science Collections in Oxford Colleges’ (see Thinking 3D: history of science collections in Oxford colleges).  68 visitors came in 2 ½ hours to look at five books on the history of science from the College’s collections.  In this month’s blog, we seek to replicate the exhibition online.

Moving from the scientific renaissance of Italy to the scientific revolution of 17^th– and 18^th-century England, the books show how science and printing are deeply intertwined.  Combinations of text and images in the following books allowed information and knowledge to be transmitted more easily.

To illustrate the early history of science, the College is fortunate to own a copy of Vesalius’ De corporis humani fabrica (Basle, 1555).  Vesalius was the creator of modern anatomy and his book has been described as the first great modern work of science.  The magnificent plates by Jan van Calcar illustrate the union of science and art in the Renaissance.  Worcester owns the second edition; the first appeared in 1543.

Illustrated with c. 200 woodblock prints, the book’s most famous images are perhaps those of the 14 ‘muscle-men’ at the beginning of Book II.  As the pages progress, so does the state of dissection.  If all 14 plates were joined together, the backgrounds would form a panorama of the Euganean Hills near Padua, where Vesalius studied and wrote his magnum opus.

Muscle Man 1

Muscle Man 2

Muscle Man 3

From a work on the human body we move to a treatise on machines: the much lesser-known Giovanni Branca’s Le machine.  Published in Rome in 1629, this treatise reflects a time and place, seventeenth-century Italy, where the invention of machinery was very actively pursued.  Branca’s small octavo volume contains engravings with descriptions in Italian and Latin.  Figure 20 illustrates a hydraulic spinning-machine.

Although symbolic of 17^th-cenutry Italy’s ‘theatres of the machines’ (see Keller, ‘Renaissance theaters of machines’), it must be noted that Branca did not claim to be the creator of all the machines illustrated; in one instance he is unclear how the machine works.

From the relatively unknown Branca we move to the man called by Einstein ‘the father of modern physics – indeed of modern science’: Galileo Galilei.  His final book, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno due nuove scienze attenenti alla mecanica & i movimenti locali (Leiden: Elzevier Press, 1638) is commonly called in English The Two New Sciences.  A work on mechanics and moving bodies, it was written during Galileo’s house arrest, ‘bringing to fruition a body of influential work that had begun in the 1590s’ (Dear, Revolutionizing, page 108).  Galileo was forbidden to publish the text in Italy by the Congregation of the Index (i.e. the Index of Prohibited Books), but managed to have a manuscript copy smuggled to the Elzeviers in Holland.

Such impediments to science mean that as we move into the second half of the seventeenth century, our books are no longer the products of Italian scientists, but are English publications.  These are the products of post-Civil War England, ‘a stable society…, more or less democratic, increasingly prosperous, and tolerant, if not of all free-thinkers, at least of the kind of free-thinking involved in science’ (Gribbin, The Fellowship, page xiv).

Robert Boyle (1627-1691), a founder member of the Royal Society (founded 1660), was one such free-thinker and from Worcester’s collections we present The sceptical chymist (London, 1661).  Although some have called this book the work which created the science of modern chemistry, it is perhaps truer to say that it stands on the border between alchemy and chemistry.

Boyle had followed traditional alchemists’ pursuits such as the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, but used this dialogue to attack the classical doctrine of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), also dismissing the Paracelsan view of three fundamental elements.  In the sixth part, Boyle defined ‘chemical elements’ as ‘perfectly unmingled bodies’ – a statement approaching the modern concept.  Boyle denied, however, that any known substance satisfied this definition, taking the view that all known materials were compounds.

Boyle was an experimental scientist and it is with another famous ‘experimenter’ that we end: Isaac Newton (1642-1727).  His Opticks (London, 1704), of which the Library owns a first edition, described Newton’s discoveries and theories concerning light and colour, based on experiments conducted in the later 1660s and early 1670s.  Famously, the work documents his experiments passing light through a prism.

The volume ends with a section of ‘Queries’ which ‘helped to guide the experimental philosophy of the eighteenth century’ (Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, page 574).

All of these books were published before the foundation of Worcester College (in 1714) and certainly before science was a part of the College’s teaching.  Indeed, although the College had Fellows with scientific interests in the 19^th century – for example, William Odling, the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry (Fellow 1872-1912), and Andrew Bloxam (1801-1878), the naturalist on the Blonde’s voyage to Hawaii in 1824 – it was not until the mid-20^th century that the sciences really became a part of College (see Parker, ‘Fellows and Tutors’, page 136).  These items from Worcester’s old library, therefore, in part reflect the collections of earlier donors: both the Branca and Newton belonged to George Clarke (his customary monogram can be seen on the title page).

The Vesalius was a wonderful donation in 1924 from Lionel Muirhead in memory of Provost Daniel and his wife Emily.

Neither Daniel nor his wife were medics, but as printers themselves, they would surely have appreciated the volume of Vesalius, a book which so successfully used printed text and images to convey new knowledge.

Mark Bainbridge

(Librarian)

Bibliography

Keller, A., “Renaissance theaters of machines”, Technology and culture 19:3 (July 1978), pages 495-508

Dear, P., Revolutionizing the sciences: European knowledge and its ambitions, 1500-1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Gribbin, J., The fellowship: the story of a revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2005)

Heilbron, J. L. (ed), The Oxford companion to the history of modern science (Oxford: OUP, 2003)

Parker, J., “Fellows and tutors”, in J. Bate and J. Goodman (eds), Worcester: portrait of an Oxford college (London: Third Millennium, 2014), pages 124-137

Women at Worcester College: the First Admission of Women in 1979

Our October 2018 blog post looked at the ceremony during which an undergraduate officially enters the University, matriculation. Its focus was a diary from 1911, which described a ceremony that would be recognisable to students today, but there was one major difference, as it described a College that was entirely male. Women were not able to study at Worcester until 1979, making this year the 40^th anniversary of the admission of women to the College, an event more than momentous enough to warrant a celebratory blogpost.

1979 Matriculation Photograph

On 11 October 1979, 41 women crossed Worcester’s threshold as undergraduates and graduates, the first time that women had been admitted as students of the College. Worcester’s doors were fully opened after 265 years, but only after considerable debate among the College community.

In 1963, the Robbins Report called for more university places for women nationally and there were discussions across Oxford as to how that might be achieved, generally focusing on the creation of a new women’s college. Worcester’s Governing Body rejected a proposal to discuss admitting women to the College in February 1963, and remained opposed to a mixed college throughout the 1960s. Opposition to men’s colleges going mixed was also strong among the women’s colleges, who feared their applications would drop.

In 1971, the Queen’s College organised a meeting of colleges to discuss the admission of women to the men’s colleges, which the Worcester College Chaplain attended. Opinion had undergone something of a reversal since 1963, and the Worcester Governing Body were now, in principle, supportive of a mixed college (a straw poll found 15 to 5 in favour). The JCR conducted a referendum on the issue in June 1971, with 75% of voters in favour of admitting women to the College.

Cartoon from satirical JCR magazine Wuggins; the magazine published two articles in favour of the admission of women to the College.

Cautious in the face of change, and mindful that a small but vocal proportion of the Governing Body were against the admission of women, the College chose not to participate in the initial experimental group of five colleges that went mixed in 1974. The University imposed a restriction that no other college could change their statutes on this matter for five years, but by 1977 there was an increasing feeling among the College’s Governing Body that the experiment had been successful, that the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 had made the defence of single-sex colleges more difficult, and that Worcester was in danger of being left behind by the more proactive men’s colleges pushing for the admission of women.

At a Special College Meeting on 9 March 1977, the Worcester College Governing Body voted 22 to 8 in favour of the deletion of clause I.3: “No woman shall be a member of the College”. The vote to admit women as undergraduates and graduates was held in June 1977, when the result was 20 in favour to 3 against, with 3 abstentions, and the College formally signalled its intention to the University that it would admit women from October 1979.

Governing Body minutes, Appendix B, containing the request for a change to the College statutes removing the restriction that no woman shall be a member of the College, 1977.

By 1982 the editor of the Worcester College Record could report to old members that women “are now so much an element of our society that many of us find it hard to recollect what it was like before they came”, but whether the women felt less conspicuous is debateable. It was not until 2011 that the number of women undergraduates equalled that of the men, and parity on the Governing Body is still far from achieved.

However, women had played many roles at Worcester College before 1979, and it is important not to erase the employees, benefactors, family members and even “[women] of ill-fame” who shaped Worcester history in the centuries before co-education.

Depictions of important eighteenth century benefactors Margaret Alchorne and Sarah Eaton on the far left of this image, from the Oxford University Almanack for 1741.

Female benefactors have been literally shaping the College since the early-eighteenth century, as funds from Margaret Alchorne (d. 1717) and Sarah Eaton (d. 1736) were used in the construction of the Library/Hall/Chapel block, staircases 5 and 6, and the Provost’s Lodgings. Women were also present in the daily life of the College, from the kitchen woman “scouring the plates” in the eighteenth century, through to the scouts and housekeepers who provided support to undergraduates and fellows.

The first female employees of the College, the kitchen women, were almost certainly illiterate, and signed for their salary with a mark. This wave-shaped mark, made by Eleanor Cradock in 1717, is the first entry in the College Archives made by a woman.

Undergraduates from the women’s colleges were increasingly a part of Worcester life after the Second World War. In addition to social and academic interactions they took female roles in College plays and the Worcester-Somerville Musical Society gave concerts throughout the year and also held “tea meetings and gramophone recitals”.

Programme for the Worcester-Somerville Christmas Dance 1971

Women were present in administrative and academic-related roles too from the mid-twentieth century. One such trailblazer was Lesley Le Claire, who was promoted to the position of College Librarian in 1977, a role which included membership of the SCR. The last exclusively male space in the College was breached, and two years later Worcester opened its doors to women students for the first time.

Emma Goodrum (Archivist)

 

*The 1979 matriculation photograph has been reproduced by kind permission of Gillman & Soame photographers and can be ordered online at https://www.gsimagebank.co.uk/worc/t/yree2p2019