Portraits and Miniatures (29 page)

This was an article in
Oxford,
the dons' periodical, written shortly after the Bologna celebrations.

The University of Bologna, which has a well-authenticated claim to be the oldest in the world, celebrated its 900th anniversary in the autumn of 1988. The festivities, while not perhaps quite up to the 800th when Giuseppe Verdi was chairman of the organizing committee and Giosuè Carducci delivered the principal oration, were none the less splendid. Nearly four hundred
rettori,
which was the generic term under which all of us, chancellors, vice-chancellors, presidents, principals, and genuine rectors, were lumped, were assembled for the main open-air ceremony in the Piazza Maggiore in front of the great basilica of San Petronio in which the Emperor Charles V was crowned in 1530 and Rossini's
Stabat Mater
was first performed in 1839.

A wide variety of academic dress was favoured by this throng. Some, mainly from Eastern Europe and down through the Caucasus to the borders of India, looked more like judges than academics, and judges of a tribunal which had been engaged for many centuries in handing out cruel and unusual punishments to students and teachers alike. One British chancellor was bedecked in his gold regalia and the vice-chancellor of Cambridge was impressive in fur. I decided, however, influenced by the combination of the reluctance of the Oxford authorities ever to allow the cancellarian robe to go more than half a mile from Carfax, the problems of luggage, and the likely heat of an Italian September sun, that the University of Oxford could afford to dress down. I made do with white tie, bands and the cool silk of a DCL black gown, and felt rather like a notary in an elaborately costumed Mozart opera. The status of Oxford was however preserved, and Cinderella asked to the ball (to vary the operatic
metaphor), when the President of the Italian Republic arrived and paused in his procession across the square to exclaim to me ‘
il mio cancellario',
thereby illustrating the value which those in authority abroad place upon having been honoured in the Sheldonian.

In general, however, I had the rare experience for a representative of Oxford of not being pre-eminent at a festival of age. ‘The University of Oxford is not used', I began my short speech, ‘to saluting institutions of greater venerability than itself, but when it has to recognize an indisputable claim does so with the greater enthusiasm and respect.' Having made that obeisance I then felt able to point out that we had far more remaining mediaeval academic buildings than either Bologna, although they are very splendid from about 1550, or the Sorbonne, which achieved second place to our third, and that in Merton we have the fount of collegiate living, where people had slept, eaten, read, taught, and prayed together in an entity with clear continuity since the very early fourteenth century.

There had to be a certain finessing to enable me to make that speech at all. Obviously all four hundred could not speak without the proceedings lasting some considerable way towards the millennial celebrations. So it was decided that there should be an oration of greeting from the head of the senior university in each continent. This was interpreted sufficiently rigidly that the Americas were not split and Harvard was relegated to a silent role behind Lima.

It should also have had the effect of leaving Oxford to be represented by Paris and hearing Sydney speak as the representative of the venerability of Australian academic life. Oxford's reputation as a talking rather than a listening university was judged by the Bolognese authorities to be too strong for this to be possible and my European position (which Bologna was anxious to stress because of their leading role in the Erasmus scheme and consequent close relationship with the European Commission) was amalgamated with our semi-seniority to create a special slot. This sleight of hand passed off without hostile demonstrations from Paris, Coimbra, Salamanca, Prague, Cambridge and St Andrews and other near competitors. Cambridge and St Andrews
had more reason to complain the next morning when Paris and Oxford headed a column of twenty European ‘
venerabili'
and they were relegated to the kindergarten, although the 1592 upstart of Trinity College, Dublin, got in because it was from a separate and sovereign state.

As with all grand celebrations there were elements of theatre about the occasion. But it was also a moving and genuinely splendid event. The notes of the slaves' chorus from
Nabucco
swelling into the great square was a suitable accompaniment to the signing by us all (including the Rector of Leningrad) of a ringing declaration of the independence of universities which had certainly not been drafted in the Department of Education and Science - nor even in Mr Gorbachev's Kremlin, for that matter.

There are also always experiences and problems in common between universities. As the large, ebullient, and resplendently besashed Communist Mayor of Bologna, a serious commercial (and gastronomic) city which looks after its art treasures but does not allow itself to be dominated by tourism, said to me as he drove me back to my hotel from the Prefect's lunch for President Cossiga: ‘There is a tradition of hostility between town and university here, but we have recently decided that, as a substantial part of our reputation seems to come from the university, we had better strengthen our links with it.' I have noted with pleasure that, in my short experience, the Lord Mayor of Oxford has never missed an Encaenia. I doubt, however, if he (or recently more frequently she) would have emulated the Bolognese Sindaco's feat of responding with pride to my remark that his city was famous for its large pedestrian zones by proceeding to drive me through them at approximately 60 m.p.h.

This essay is based on parts of two talks: one a lecture given in 1986 for the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Reform Club and the other a dinner speech in 1992 for the twentieth anniversary of the amalgamation of the Oxford and Cambridge and the United Universities Clubs.

The Pall Mall clubs were born in a different century from the St James's Street ones and were to some extent a reaction against them. Those who founded them saw themselves as part of an age of improvement and not of imitation. They were unimpressed by the fashionable rakishness of Brooks's, White's and Boodle's, and wanted to create something newer, grander, more wholesome, with less gambling, less debauchery, and perhaps fewer cockroaches as well. The bourgeois palaces of Pall Mall were to outshine the louche if aristocratic stews of St James's Street. To paraphrase what W. S. Gilbert was to write in
Iolanthe
half a century later:

Hearts for more pure and fair
May beat down Pall Mall way
Than in the squalid air
Of rich St James's.

The origins of the Reform Club, which eventually achieved the greatest of all the palaces, epitomized this approach. The first Reform Bill and the new politics that flowed from it obviously provided the first strand of inspiration. Paradoxically, however, it was the Tories who reacted first to the new need for political organization and in 1832 established the Carlton Club only a few yards from what became the site of the Reform Club. There it remained until it was severely bombed in December 1940.

The Liberals were three and a half years behind. This was partly due to the Radical/Whig dichotomy, and partly due to the complication of relations with Brooks's. The Whigs did not much want the Radicals in Brooks's, but were even less keen on their forming a club of their own. The Radicals, notably Molesworth, Parkes and Hume, determinedly wanted a club and did not want to be in Brooks's anyway, despite or maybe because of the fact that it provided every single member of Melbourne's 1834 Cabinet. They were in a semi-Groucho Marx position. Eventually the Whigs, notably Edward Ellice, Lord Grey's brother-in-law and his Chief Whip at the time of the Reform Bill, later Secretary of State for War, decided that unless they wished the Radicals to go off on their own, they had little choice but to join with them in forming a new model club. And out of that decision the Reform Club emerged, as an entity in 1836, as a complete and splendid edifice by 1843.

The ‘reformers', however, although they did not want to imitate the old, aristocratic, proprietary gaming clubs, were not looking for the simple life. ‘The family motto is service,' said a recent Lord Rothschild, ‘and by God we get it.' The ‘reformers' were looking for the best, and by God they got it. The names most naturally associated with the first twenty years of the Club are neither Ellice nor Molesworth, nor even Russell or Palmerston, but Charles Barry, the architect, and Alexis Soyer, the cook. And what remarkable jobs they both made of their confections, Barry's happily the longer lasting. It makes his neighbouring creations, the Travellers Club and Bridgewater House, look inferior, the first too cautious, the second too imitative, and his most massive monument the Palace of Westminster too undisciplined.

Soyer could not create quite so permanently, although he did pretty well by chef-ly standards. It is interesting to note that the financial relations of neither with the Club were wholly smooth. The ‘reformers' believed in the best, but they did not believe in paying more for it than the going rate. Barry and the General Committee went to arbitration before his total fee of £3934 (I suppose about the equivalent of £150,000 today) was agreed.
Soyer had many disputes on issues from butchers' bills to insolence to members before he finally resigned in 1850.

In architecture, gastronomy, membership and purpose, the Reform Club was very much a creation of its age. It would be impossible to imagine its foundation twenty or thirty years earlier. Even its name is, I suppose, the most contemporary - and the most ideological - ever given to a major and lasting London club. The early membership was also symbolic of the period. The franchise had been significantly extended and made more rational in 1832, but it had certainly not been democratized. The Reform Club matched the franchise. It did not turn its back on the landed aristocracy any more than did the Liberal Party of Russell, Palmerston or Hartington. But it was in no way based upon aristocratic connection. Its members were prosperous, established, confident. There were few poor men amongst them. But its doors were more open to new men and to new categories - merchants, solicitors, surgeons, architects, professional men of letters and journalists, all categories alleged to be excluded from the generality of the clubs of the period. The position of the Club was thus assured throughout the three decades and a little more between the first and the second Reform Bills.

During its first half century the Reform Club was intensely political. The stated qualification for membership - or even for being introduced as a guest - was that of being a ‘reformer', which may be thought not to be a very precise category. But it was interpreted sufficiently rigidly, and partisanly, that as late as the general election of 1880 a member was expelled for the offence of having publicly voted for a Conservative candidate.

Throughout this period the Club was essentially parliamentary as well as political. This did not mean that anything like a majority of its members were MPs. Despite a more ‘serious' approach, it never rivalled Brooks's record of having as a good half of its early members men who at some time in their lives were members of one House or the other (or both). But the nineteenth-century Reform Club probably contained more members who
wanted
to be MPs and were therefore happy that the tone should be taken from the Liberal benches at Westminster.

This showed itself in the library with its remarkable collection of parliamentary papers. It showed itself in the fact that Members of Parliament were admitted as members outside the quota and almost without question, provided they did not sit on the wrong side of the House. And, most clearly of all, it showed itself in the gearing of club hours to parliamentary habits. The hours were generous enough in any event. There was no question of weekend closing and refuge having to be sought in lesser establishments. On each day of the seven the clubhouse was open from eight in the morning until two the following morning, unless either House of Parliament should sit later, in which case the club was to remain open until an hour after the adjournment. To some substantial extent the clubhouse was run as an annexe to the Palace of Westminster, which I suppose their common architect, even though he gave them no common architectural style, made appropriate. Whether or not supper was laid out in the Coffee Room depended upon whether the House was sitting after 10 p.m.

The political if not the parliamentary emphasis was brought to an end by the Liberal Unionist Home Rule split of 1886. It was not as visceral for the Reform Club as for Brooks's which was based more on family tradition and where there followed a fine outbreak of mutual blackballing of the sons of prominent members. In the Reform, perhaps because it was less tightly knit, there was less bitterness. If the Club was not to be destroyed they had to live together in an approach to mutual tolerance, as is epitomized in the 1890 drawing of members which now hangs in the Audience Room. Of the nine most visible, seated in unnatural proximity, three were Unionists, six were Gladstonians. It was like the Opposition front bench in the House of Commons, where they also sat cheek by jowl, one occasionally advancing to the despatch box to excoriate half the others.

However, there could no longer be any question of the Club applying Liberal political tests. By 1898, three of the five trustees were serving in a predominantly Conservative government. In the following year, nevertheless, the meeting to confirm the choice of Campbell-Bannerman as Liberal leader was held in the Club, the new leader himself having resisted abandoning ‘our hold on so
excellent a property'. Asquith was also elected there in 1908, and eight and three-quarter years after that summoned the last general Liberal Party meeting ever to be held in the Club in order to explain why he could not serve in the Lloyd George coalition. It was an appropriate
terminus ad quem.
For thirty years, by that time, the Reform as a Liberal club had been a chicken running round with its head cut off. As a general club, however, it had a secure hold on life, which it has more than since maintained. It has continued to be in many ways a club of government, much involved with the public affairs of the nation, but not one to which even the loosest sort of political test could be applied. Its 1880 rule, exercised at either of the 1980s general elections, would probably have halved the membership.