The Cambridge moment
Once a year, millions of people around the world – almost two hundred million by one count – focus their attention for an hour or so on an East Anglian market town at the edge of the Fens. There, in an iconic building which has come to represent the place itself, the silence of expectation is magically broken by the soaring voice of a boy soprano proclaiming Once in Royal David’s City. Thus begins, every Christmas Eve, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where the singing and the setting combine in excellence and resonance to create in the mind’s eye a scene of solemn joy.
The Festival is, in fact, a rather recent tradition, dating only from 1918. It was the creation of the Dean of King’s College, Eric Milner-White, DSO, a battlefront padre, who adapted an existing format some 40 years old, devised by a bishop of Truro. Once in Royal David’s City was not even in the first service but was added in 1919. The Festival was first broadcast in 1928 and has been every year since – except for 1930 – even during the Second World War, when the chapel was unheated and the glorious stained-glass windows had been removed and secreted away, safe from bombing, to an undisclosed location.
The Christmas carol service at King’s is not, however, ‘typical’ Cambridge. Nor is mid-winter the most choice time to contemplate the city, which is then notoriously chilly, damp and windswept. At Christmas the city is almost empty of students, undergraduates at least. Nostalgic reminiscences of Cambridge, by contrast, bathe it in perpetual summer sunlight, as the American novelist Henry James did in 1883 in English Hours:
Six or eight of the colleges stand in a row, turning their backs to the river; and hereupon ensues the loveliest confusion of Gothic windows and ancient trees, of grassy banks and mossy balustrades, of sun-chequered avenues and groves, of lawns and gardens and terraces, of single-arched bridges spanning the little stream, which is small and shallow and looks as if it had been turned on for ornamental purposes. The scantily-flowing Cam appears to exist simply as an occasion for these brave little bridges – the beautiful covered gallery of St John’s or the slightly-collapsing arch of Clare.
He went on to rhapsodise about the city at large:
In the way of College-courts and quiet scholastic porticoes, of grey-walled gardens and ivied nooks of study, in all the pictorial accidents of a great English university, Cambridge is delightfully and inexhaustibly rich. I looked at these one by one and said to myself always that the last was the best.
The year after celebrating its 800th anniversary, Cambridge was voted the best university in the world; the year after that it was voted to the first rank again. But whether or not it remains Number One, the university will continue to command the affectionate reverence of a faithful global gathering, who honour not only its intellectual eminence, but also its power to evoke a moment of transcendence.
What is Cambridge for?
In the words of a former editor of the Cambridge Evening News, Cambridge is both ‘a relatively small East Anglian town’ and ‘a world city’. The German travel writer Peter Sager opines that ‘even more so than with Oxford, the history of Cambridge is the history of its university’. Not quite; Cambridge as a town had existed for more than a millennium before the university began to take it over, like a clerical cuckoo in a thriving commercial nest.
When the university emerged eight centuries ago, its fundamental purpose was to produce literate servants for the church and state. It has never ceased to do this, but later acquired the additional function of preserving a heritage of learning. Later still it served to mould the outlook not just of the governing elite but of the influential classes as a whole. In his Letters from England (1807) the poet Robert Southey, adopting the literary persona of a foreign traveller, explains in ‘Letter 45’ that Cambridge is there to impart not so much general knowledge as ‘a knowledge of the world’; that it is essentially a place of acculturation rather than of culture. Perhaps that is what the historian G M Trevelyan meant a century later when he declared breezily, ‘As far as I can make out the Cambridge people are intellectual but not serious’. Nowadays most Cambridge types would regard it as a serious place, teaching cutting-edge, serious subjects that make a difference in the world. Even the members of Footlights want to be seriously good entertainers.
One way to illustrate the significance of Cambridge might be to look at the people it has produced, starting with what one might call ‘The Westminster Abbey Test’. In Scientists’ Corner there are memorials to Newton, Darwin, Clerk Maxwell and Dirac, in Poets’ Corner to Spenser, Milton, Gray, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Housman and Sassoon, and in Musicians Aisle to Orlando Gibbons and Ralph Vaughan Williams. F W Maitland has the distinction of being the first historian to be honoured with an Abbey memorial, and looming over all is the statue of Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister, William Pitt.
A more contemporary version might be ‘The Television Test’, yielding such public members of the Clever Club as Bamber Gascoigne, Stephen Fry, Jeremy Paxman, Sebastian Faulks, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Andrew Roberts, Simon Schama, David Frost, Neal Ascherson, John Simpson, Roger Scruton, Claire Tomalin and David Starkey. ‘The Top Job Test’ gives a dozen British Prime Ministers, two Prime Ministers of India; Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi, Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew and Fernando Cardoso, President of Brazil. For a wider perspective one might look over the pages of the Dictionary of National Biography to register the interlocking Cambridge dynasties bearing such names as Arnold, Adrian, Butler, Huxley, Stephen, Macaulay, Trevelyan, Darwin, Gurney, Fry, Gaskell and Hodgkin.
For the quintessential Cambridge character it would be difficult to surpass John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Born in Cambridge, the son of academics, he was an undergraduate at King’s, where he rowed, played golf, won an English essay prize and served as President of the Union. He was initially anything but overwhelmed by the university – ‘I’ve had a good look round the place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient’. As an undergraduate, Keynes bought an original copy of Newton’s Principia, then went on to write a book that revolutionised the discipline (and practice) of economics, serve as a brilliant bursar of King’s, make a personal fortune out of shrewd speculations, marry a Russian ballerina, organise the financing of Britain’s war effort in World War Two, create the Arts Council, and design the monetary institutions of the post-war world. Significantly, the plaque commemorating his life-long commitment to Cambridge is to be found, not at the faculty of economics, but above the entrance to the Arts Theatre, which he founded and funded. The last word, however, goes to Roy Jenkins, Chancellor of Oxford, who observed sardonically of Keynes that ‘he soon became too fond of the trains to London to be a strict Cambridge man’.
Some were destined never to live out their promise as Keynes did. Frank Ramsey (1903–1930), son of a Magdalene don and a protégé of Keynes, translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus at 19 and made distinguished contributions to economics, logic, the philosophy of language and probability theory. He only ever published eight pages in his official discipline, mathematics, but these pages nevertheless spawned a whole new field – ‘Ramsey theory’. Ramsey died at the age of 26 of jaundice; a militant atheist, he was spared seeing his brother become Archbishop of Canterbury.
Part of the charm of the Cambridge story is, however, its capacity not just to throw up the occasional genius but also to tolerate the spectacularly eccentric. A E Housman knowingly called Cambridge ‘an asylum in more senses than one’. R V Laurence, a bachelor tutor at Trinity, complained that living in college left him ‘always exposed, weekdays and Sundays alike, to pupils and their parents’; his solution was ‘to take the train to London, simply to have a little snooze at the club’. Habitually swathed in his dressing-gown, the medieval historian G G Coulton inhabited rooms of medieval inconvenience at St John’s, using a wash-stand as a writing desk and subsisting on specially imported cocoa which took ten hours to prepare. The gastronome and world-class name-dropper Oscar Browning habitually pronounced ‘very interesting’ as ‘veynsing’. J E Nixon was similarly given to such compressed elisions, ‘temmince’ meaning ten minutes, ‘hairpin’ for ‘high opinion’ and ‘official sources’ coming out as ‘fish sauce’. Economist A C Pigou affected ‘an extraordinary burlesque jargon, part Victorian, part home-made … often accompanied by an indefinable foreign accent’.
Walter Headlam, ‘one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language’,
seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Travelling was difficult because he could not take the right train … Letters were difficult because he chose his stamps only for the beauty of the colours … pupils’ work was usually lost …
Mathematician G H Hardy, who was ‘meticulously orderly in everything but dress’, refused ever to use either a watch or a fountain pen and loathed the telephone so much that he habitually communicated by telegram or pre-paid postcard. Violently anti-clerical, but with many clerical friends, Hardy also conceived of God as a personal enemy with a particularly malevolent interest in the vagaries of the weather during the cricket season. Philosopher John McTaggart was an atheist who nevertheless supported the Church of England and believed in immortality but devoted a lengthy treatise to the argument that time itself was a delusion. His pupil and successor C D Broad, living in Newton’s former rooms at Trinity, rejected McTaggart’s philosophy but spent most of the 1930s on a two volume analysis of it.
Frederick Arthur Simpson was the archetype of the eccentric bachelor don. The first of four projected volumes on Napoleon III gained him a fellowship at Trinity (1909). The long-delayed second volume (1923), was so brutally trashed in reviews that Simpson effectively gave up and devoted his life to pruning. Roaming through college gardens, stooped and shuffling, ‘Snipper Simpson’ would create a trail of branches and leaves by which he could be tracked back to his rooms in Great Court. A sore trial to generations of college gardeners, Simpson hung onto his fellowship for 62 years, dying aged 90. Simpson’s Latin memorial in Trinity’s chapel tactfully refers to his magnum opus as ‘happily begun’ but not completed and notes that ‘he took assiduous care of the shrubs around the college gardens.’ You couldn’t make it up.
The University and the Colleges
Cambridge is not a ‘campus’ university, although it has begun to acquire a campus of sorts. The buildings of the university and its constituent colleges are dispersed throughout the city, and the relationship between the university and the colleges is similarly diffuse. It can be described as a sort of semi-federal system of shared and divided powers and functions, though doubtless Cambridge insiders might regard any attempt to reduce it to a concise formulation as hopelessly naïve or misleading.
Suffice to say that a college provides its undergraduates with accommodation, food, individual tuition, pastoral care, entertainments and a framework for taking part in team sports. Colleges also have their own libraries and sports facilities. University departments organise lectures, seminars and ‘practicals’ and are grouped into faculties, which co-ordinate the curriculum, set examinations and monitor research submitted for higher degrees.
Degrees are granted by the University rather than the colleges and awarded at a ceremony held in the Senate House. The standard undergraduate degree is the BA, Bachelor of Arts – even for non-humanities degrees.
Each college has – and certainly believes it has – a distinctive character, the complex product of its history and heritage, size and location, wealth and connections. Trinity College is far richer than any other, allegedly Britain’s third greatest landowner after the Crown and the Church of England, hence a pacemaker of change in many ways. St John’s comes second, but a long way second, with perhaps a quarter of Trinity’s estimated wealth. Except for the theological institutions like Ridley Hall, individual colleges are not usually associated with individual disciplines, although Trinity Hall has long been associated with lawyers and its neighbour Caius with medicine.
The look of the place
Cambridgeshire has abundant clays for brick-making but, unlike Oxford, no good building stone. The gault clay from the west bank of the Cam yields a yellow-grey brick, the Jurassic clays of the north of the county a rich red. The soft local limestone, known as ‘clunch’ is, however, good for carving and local craftsmen have made abundant use of it for decorative purposes. The nearest good building-stone comes from Ketton in Northamptonshire, to the north-west. Importing its stone from various locations has given Cambridge a visual variety of greys, creams, golds, browns and reds, in contrast to the honey colours prevalent at Oxford, which is well supplied locally. Lacking ready supplies of good stone nearby, Cambridge turned to brick far earlier than Oxford. Thus the Old Court of Queens’ College was economically built of Flemish red brick around an inner core of clunch rubble (1448–9). When the Classical Revival of the 18th century made Gothic brick look ‘barbarick’ many colleges undertook a cosmetic process of ‘ashlaring’, re-facing facades, particularly those facing onto streets, with stone, as at Christ’s on St Andrew’s Street and Pembroke on Trumpington Street. Another by-product of the local shortage of stone has been a recurrent impetus to recycle materials from redundant or demolished buildings.
Connoisseurs of architecture can find in Cambridge Sir Christopher Wren’s earliest completed work, the chapel of Pembroke College, plus work by James Gibbs, Sir George Gilbert Scott, Alfred Waterhouse, G F Bodley, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Basil Spence, Denys Lasdun, James Stirling and Norman Foster. The city has probably the finest collection of sculpture outside the capital, with works by Michael Rysbrack, Louis-François Roubiliac, Joseph Nollekens, Sir Francis Chantrey, Sir Richard Westmacott, Dame Barbara Hepworth, Oscar Nemon and Maggi Hambling. College chapels and halls offer a panorama of five centuries of the art of making stained glass. In the city’s 120-odd libraries there are more than 3,000 illuminated manuscripts, a treasure trove only surpassed by the collections of the Vatican.
And everywhere there are inscriptions, on gateways and gravestones, on libraries and laboratories, from the World War Two graffiti on the ceiling of the back bar of the Eagle pub in Bene’t Street to the lettering of the supreme master of the art, Eric Gill, whose work can be seen around the pond at Newnham’s Sidgwick Hall, at the entrance to the Pitt Building on Trumpington Street and around the war memorial at Trumpington. Gill’s legacy was continued by his former apprentice David Kindersley (1915–1995) through the workshop he established in 1945. Kindersley’s projects included the World War Two memorial in the ante-chapel at Trinity where an entire wall of 382 names was carved in situ, the Churchill College Archives Centre, where a list of benefactors runs for 13 ½ metres along an exterior wall, and the foundation stone of Darwin College. Kindersley, like Gill, was also a typographer and devised the letters used on modern Cambridge street signs. Recent rarities from the workshop now run by his widow include a four-panel glass window with quotations in three languages in Corpus Christi’s Taylor Library, and at Girton the only example of a Kindersley painted sign, marking the site of the last College laboratory to remain in use.
The plethora of Cambridge inscriptions is a reminder of how densely textured the past has become. The bollards outside Magdalene are shaped liked fountain pens in tribute to the literary tradition of that college. At Newnham the shape of the Rare Books Library recalls that of a medieval book chest. Nevile’s Court at Trinity may stand as an extended examplar. Named after its scholarly builder, it was completed at the same time as Wren’s local masterpiece, the college library. Isaac Newton experimented in the north cloister of Nevile’s Court by stamping his foot and using gunshots to produce echoes in a failed attempt to measure the speed of sound. In 1712, in his room adjacent to the library, Henry Sike, a brilliant German orientalist who had been head-hunted for the college, gave way to depression and hanged himself with the cord of his dressing-gown. Lord Byron had splendidly furnished rooms here when he was an undergraduate and kept a bear as a pet. In 1864, on the occasion of a visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, a grand ball was given in a marquee. The guests of honour stayed for five hours and ‘during the whole of that time, the Prince, who is an indefatigable dancer, never sat down, except at the supper table’ – which he was also quite capable of occupying for five hours. Leonard Woolf, future husband of Virginia, reminisced how at the turn of the century he, her brother Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and other future members of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of metropolitan intelligentsia, would, after a meeting of the ‘Apostles’, late on a summer’s night ‘sometimes walk through the Cloisters of Nevile’s Court and looking out through the bars at the end on to the willows and water of the Backs, ghostly in the moonlight, listen to the soaring song of innumerable nightingales’ and then ‘sometimes as we walked back through the majestic Cloisters we chanted poetry. More often than not it would be Swinburne’.
During the First World War the cloisters became a temporary field hospital for wounded soldiers. In Virginia Woolf’s experimental third novel Jacob’s Room (1922) Jacob Flanders lives in Nevile’s Court. Philosopher Bertrand Russell and Nobel Laureate and scientist Lord Adrian really did.
And then there’s the ‘lost’ Cambridge beneath. There was once an iron foundry where the Master’s Lodge of St John’s College now stands and another on the site of Marks & Spencer’s. There were breweries in Magdalene Street and in Trinity Street; but then, in the 1880s, there were 40 more scattered throughout the town. Where Murray Edwards College now stands there was once a coprolite mine. The superb lawn stretching between the Gibbs’ Building at King’s College and the Cam covers the main commercial quarter of medieval Cambridge, entirely razed to the ground on the orders of a demented monarch.
The other place
There are also in this Island two famous Universities … excelling all the Universities in Christendom … let this suffice, not to enquire which of them is superior, but that neither of them have their equal; neither to ask which of them is the most ancient, but whether any other be so famous.
– John Lyly, Euphues and his England (1579)
The medieval historian F W Maitland once observed that the oldest inter-varsity contest between Oxford and Cambridge universities was lying about their origins. Oxford’s famous antiquary, Anthony Wood, didn’t even bother with evidence, simply stating in 1674 that Oxford was ‘a famous place before this present town of Cambridge in all probability was built’. The most distant claim – both in terms of time and plausibility – was that Cambridge had been established by Athenian philosophers under the patronage of Prince Cantaber, the Spanish son-in-law of Gurguntius Brabtruc, King of the Britons, in 375 BC. Oxford merely claimed to have been founded by King Alfred the Great of Wessex (died 899), so that put them in their place. Prince Cantaber’s initiative, endorsed by charters supposedly issued by King Arthur, the Saxon king Edward the Elder and the Welsh warrior Cadwallader, was invoked by Robert Hare in his Privileges of the University of Cambridge in 1590 and repeated by Francis Brackyn, Recorder of Cambridge, in a speech delivered before James I when he visited in 1615, noting that the town ‘was builded before Christ’s incarnation with a castle, towers and walls of defence’. The Athenian philosophers were ‘lovinglie lodged’ by local citizens in their own homes until ostles (hostels) were built for them and then the ‘materials of the castle, towers and walls’ were recycled into Colleges, ‘beautifying this famous university’. None of these preposterous claims was, of course, true but a strict adherence to verifiable evidence and to consistent chronology were no part of the antiquarian’s skills set. What would one day be called ‘Oxford history’ – getting the dates right – would come later.
The monk and poet John Lydgate (c.1370–1451), not even a Cambridge man, though admittedly from neighbouring Suffolk, claimed that Julius Caesar
Tooke with him clarks of famouse renowne
Fro Cambridg and ledd theim to rome towne,
Thus by procese remembred here to forne
Cambridg was founded longe or Chryst was borne.
Dr John Caius also believed that Cambridge existed before the Romans, attributing its foundation to the ancient priestly caste of Druids. Writing in 1694, James Brome, a Kentish vicar, argued that, as one of 28 cities in Britain founded by the Romans, Cambridge inevitably had its ‘Schools of Learning, wherein the several Professors of Arts and Sciences did instruct both the Roman and British youth’. Forged papal bulls were used in the 15th century to claim that the 7th century popes Honorius I and Sergius I had granted the university autonomy from ecclesiastical supervision. Sigeberht, a 7th century King of the Angles, with the support of St Felix, was another candidate for the Founding Fathers, commended in the university’s annual Commemoration of Benefactors until 1914.
The poet Matthew Arnold experienced a mild sense of disorientation visiting Cambridge, writing to his wife in February 1853 ‘it seems so strange to be in a place of colleges that is not Oxford’. William Morris, another Oxford man, was similarly brusque: ‘rather a hole of a place and can’t compare for a moment with Oxford’. The 1887 edition of Karl Baedeker’s celebrated guide book to Britain, a bible for Continental tourists, was equally dismissive in its advice: ‘Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.’ It is doubtful if such a well-seasoned travel trade professional would make that judgment nowadays. Oxford attracts more than five million visitors a year, Cambridge almost four. But many Oxford visitors will be day-trippers dashing through – via Stonehenge or Salisbury – to Blenheim or Stratford. Visitors to Cambridge have come to visit Cambridge; in terms of tourism it isn’t perceived as being on the way to anywhere else, though the Visits outlined at the end of this book may change your mind about that. As far as looks go, let the last word go to the scholarly Lord Norwich: ‘Cambridge … in its ensemble is even lovelier than Oxford, thanks in large measure to the way it uses its river, an invaluable asset which Oxford seems virtually to ignore.’
As for intellect, the verdict of the diarist, diplomat and dilettante Harold Nicolson is irresistible: ‘I am reading Roy Harrod’s book on Keynes which I find entrancing. Really that Cambridge set were more gifted than anything we have seen since. They make Balliol look like an old cart-horse.’
By the book
The estimable Herr Sager asserts that ‘in the literary Boat Race Cambridge is several shelf lengths ahead of its rival’ – a bold claim, even an arrogant one, but consider, ‘Dear Reader’, some of the titles which have issued from the pen of Cambridge authors – The Book of Common Prayer, John Foxe’s Martyrs, Principia Mathematica, Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair, On the Origin of Species, A Passage to India, Lolita, Under the Volcano, The Cruel Sea, Empire of the Sun, Birdsong and Midnight’s Children, not to mention Winnie-the-Pooh, The Sword in the Stone, The Female Eunuch and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time became a global publishing phenomenon, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a week and on The Sunday Times list for more than four years, as well as being reinterpreted as a film and an opera, and selling over 10 million copies in 40 languages. Other bestselling contemporary Cambridge authors include Robert Harris, Nick Hornby, Howard Jacobson, Peter Ackroyd, Alain de Botton, A S Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith.
Name games
Discussing the origins of the name of Cambridge as a town, Recorder Brackyn in 1615 argued that
… the Towne being situated and united with a bridge upon the river then called Canta, was denominated Cantabridge; and in tract of tyme the name of the River being altered to Granta, the town likewise to Grantabridge; and after it was called Cam, and the Towne Cambridge, which yet remaineth.
Pioneering architectural historian John Willis Clark (1833–1910) offered a contrary chronology:
The river was originally called the Granta … The earliest form of the town’s name was Grantabrycge or Grentebrige, which in process of time became Cantbrigge and Caumbrege. Lastly, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, when it became necessary to find a name for the river, the old name of the town having been forgotten, Cam was adopted from Cam-bridge, the shortened form of Caumbridge. Thus the river derived its name from the town, and not the town from the river, as was formerly supposed.
In Brackyn’s day, the Cam, as he well knew, was not the endlessly photographed picture postcard ‘landscape feature’ of today but a vital economic artery – ‘this river is current through the heart of the Shire, with navigation to the Sea, and is the life of the trafficke of this Towne and countie; and no bridge is over the same but at Cambridge’. Frederic William Maitland asserted in 1898 that what is now Magdalene Bridge was nothing less than ‘the most famous bridge in England: the one bridge that gives its name to a county’.
Both Cambridge and Oxford universities have colleges called Trinity, St John’s, Jesus and Pembroke. But at Oxford one talks about (strictly speaking The) Queen’s College, whereas at Cambridge it’s Queens’ – note the respective positioning of the apostrophes, indicating that the Oxford institution is associated with a single queen, and its Cambridge counterpart with a plurality. There is also a Magdalen College at Oxford – its Cambridge equivalent is spelt Magdalene, with an ‘e’ on the end – though both cling to the medieval pronunciation ‘Maudlin’. And at Oxford it’s St Catherine’s College, at Cambridge St Catharine’s. At Oxford, moreover, it is more customary to say ‘College’ after the name of a specific institution, whereas at Cambridge this is often omitted.
A few more linguistic distinctions: Cambridge colleges are built around Courts, Oxford colleges around Quadrangles or ‘Quads’. At Cambridge the traditional male student servant/bed-maker was a ‘gyp’, at Oxford a ‘scout’. Both have been superseded by female ‘bedders’.
At Cambridge an undergraduates’ weekly one-to-one teaching session is a ‘supervision’, at Oxford a ‘tutorial’. Heads of Oxford colleges have many different titles. Heads of Cambridge colleges are usually called the Master except for King’s (Provost); Queens’, Murray Edwards, Wolfson, Lucy Cavendish and Clare Hall (Presidents); Girton (Mistress); Newnham (Principal) and Robinson (Warden).
Verdicts
The distinguished English literary historian Professor Sir Frank Kermode once wrote that ‘the thing I remember with greatest pleasure of my time at Cambridge is the year I spent at Harvard.’ Mary Lamb, co-author of the famous children’s Tales from Shakespeare, wrote in 1815 ‘in my life I never spent so many pleasant hours together as I did at Cambridge. We were walking the whole time – out of one College into the other … I liked them all best.’ The intention of this book is to put you in the Lamb camp.