Christ Church, noted the artist and architect Hugh Casson, “has had all the advantages plus the adjectives to go with them.”
The largest and grandest of Oxford’s colleges, it was founded first by Cardinal Wolsey, then, following the prelate’s fall, refounded by Henry VIII. Its Latin title, Ædes Christi, means “House of Christ,” hence its sobriquet, “The House.” Its chapel is the city’s cathedral. Its tower was designed by England’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, its Palladian student accommodation by Henry Aldrich. It has educated 13 British prime ministers and 11 viceroys of India, as well as the philosopher John Locke, the children’s author and mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), and the poet W. H. Auden. Its patron is the reigning sovereign.
The House has not always been known for its academic prowess. As the finishing school for the British aristocracy, it was once joked that the only texts an undergraduate need be conversant in were the Stud Book and the Racing Calendar.
One of a trove of delicious vignettes served up by Richard Davenport-Hines in his new book, History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character, and Statecraft, has the aspirant historian J. C. Masterman being interviewed for a lectureship in 1913. The dean asked only one question: “Mr. Masterman, are you a candidate for this lectureship?” Masterman confirmed that he was. “Mr. Masterman, are you married?” inquired the classicist Herbert Blunt. (Until 1882, dons were forbidden from wedlock.) Masterman declared that he was not. “Aye,” interjected a lecturer in Roman epigraphy with a broad Scottish accent, “but have ye perhaps any entanglement?” Masterman responded that he did not. The final question came from the college’s senior fellow and administrator: “Mr. Masterman, what do you do in the afternoons?” Fearful that he was being invited to incriminate himself, Masterman replied cautiously: “It depends on the weather.” The post was his.
History in the House is about much more than eight largely forgotten 19th- and 20th-century Christ Church historians. Erudite, opinionated, and frequently amusing, it amounts to a paean to academic excellence, to the teaching of history, to the importance of institutions, and to the link between private education and public morals.
For centuries, classics—Literae Humaniores, or “Greats,” in Oxford parlance—reigned supreme in Britain’s two medieval universities. Then, gradually, from the late 18th century onward, the study of history gained in popularity and stature, so that by the late 19th century it had replaced Greek and Latin as the preferred subject for aspiring public servants.
“Modern History, in scope and variety, in the volume of reading, in the mental discipline and the practical benefit of knowledge and perspective, excels even the final school of Literae Humaniores,” rhapsodized the Christ Church undergraduate and future novelist Stephen McKenna in 1906. “Touching the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other, interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and modern languages, it does indeed exclude natural science and Asiatic languages [no longer], but it excludes little else.”
The Victorian constitutional historian A. V. Dicey thought it better “to be charged with heresy, or even to be found guilty of petty larceny, than to fall under the suspicion of lacking historical-mindedness,” while, in 1952, Hugh Trevor-Roper (one of Davenport-Hines’s octet of Christ Church historians) argued that the study of history had become the indispensable “intellectual training of our century.”
Some of Davenport-Hines’s dons are delightfully eccentric. Frederick York Powell, “an avowed Darwinian and anti-clerical” who “abhorred the waffle about the perfectibility of human nature as much as he did the bleating of philanthropic Christianity,” preferred “gipsies, prize fighters and old salts to pen-pushers,” we are told. Later, when this burly, bearded, ramshackle academic received a letter from Prime Minister Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, inviting him to accept the prestigious post of Regius Professor of History, he mistook the missive for an income-tax demand and filed it, unopened, in a boot.
Yet they took their subject as well as their duty as educators of the nation’s future rulers seriously. It was the tutor’s responsibility, wrote Locke in his 1695 treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, to show his pupil “the Ways, the Humours, the Follies, the Cheats, the Faults of the Age he is fallen into.” The historian’s task was—and still should be—to warn against unbridled enthusiasms and simplistic solutions; to emphasize nuance, discrepancy, fallibility, and contingency; and to help protect the citizenry from charlatans and despotic populism. “The greatest enemy of the democracy,” wrote York Powell, in words that should be recited daily in classrooms across Britain and America, “is the lie-maker, the flatterer, the person who tries to persuade the voter that dishonesty is not always the worst policy and that a bit of boodle for himself cannot hurt him or anyone else.”
Davenport-Hines’s historians were politically diverse. Two of them, Trevor-Roper and Robert Blake, would take the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, while Patrick Gordon-Walker left Christ Church to become a Labour M.P. Yet they shared a common skepticism, a respect for institutions, and a reverence for rational thought irrespective of passing prejudices or intolerant dogmas.
Alas, their days are long gone. Despite the work of some extremely fine scholars and teachers, Britain’s universities—like those in America—have become increasingly political, and not in a good way. Underfunded and undervalued, Oxford and Cambridge have made sacrifices on standards for the sake of political correctness, while politicians of both left and right have found it easier to attack these still august, globally admired institutions than to improve the quality of primary and secondary education.
“Elitism” is now a dirty word. (It’s curious that those who decry it have no problem with elite athletes, elite doctors, or elite presidents.) But it is fundamental to education. “Democracy,” argues Davenport-Hines, is “doubtless the most palatable political system, but it should have traction over only a limited ground.” Indeed, he cites Simon Leys, the Belgian commentator on totalitarianism, who contended that democracy, when applied anywhere outside the political sphere, “is death … for truth is not democratic, intelligence and talent are not democratic, nor is beauty, nor love.... A truly democratic education is an education that equips people intellectually to defend and promote democracy within the political world; but in its own field, education must be ruthlessly aristocratic and … shamelessly geared towards excellence.”
Universities should not be ideological, nor, as institutions, political. Rather, as Bertrand Russell put it, they should be repositories of “all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius.”
Tim Bouverie is the author of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War. His new book, Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World, will be published in June
