One could meet any day in Society
Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse:
May there always, to add their variety,
Be some rather Odd Fish at The House.
Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot of such fish in living memory, not least in the Senior Common Room. In my time there was Robin Dundas, with his prurient interest in undergraduates’ sex lives; there was a law don who gave his tutorials in the small hours because he was too busy teaching elsewhere during the day; a sad philosopher whose cosmic misery led him to kill himself; Lord Cherwell, a gloomy figure whose peculiar dietary requirements had cast a blight over even Winston Churchill’s dinner table; and of course that oddest fish of all, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who gave undergraduates such time as he could spare from the hunting field and fashionable drawing rooms.. I hope that there have been many such since.
But Christ Church itself has always been an odd fish in the Oxford pond: large, rich, something of a law unto itself. For one thing, it is not one institution but two: a cathedral with its own Dean and Chapter, and a distinct but not separate college. They are collectively known as Aedis Christi, the House of Christ, hence ‘The House’; and never, but never, Christ Church College.
The original college, founded and laid out with renaissance magnificence in 1525 by Cardinal Wolsey, was still-born when its founder was disgraced. It was resuscitated by Henry VIII in 1547 to provide a home for a cathedral in the newly established Oxford diocese: two for the price of one, enabling that dissolute monarch to save money for his wars. The Dean and Chapter of the cathedral governed both establishments. There were no ‘fellows’ as there would be in a normal college, only stipendiary students who were ruled by their ecclesiastical masters and had no authority over their own pupils. Not till the mid-19th century did the students emancipate themselves, set up their own governing body, and create a college like all the others.
But they still did not call themselves ‘fellows’. They proudly remained students of Christ Church and have been so ever since.
All this is explained with admirable clarity by Judith Curthoys in this lucid and comprehensive history of the college (sorry, the House) that is a model of its kind. She makes almost intelligible the fantastic complexity of the original foundation, and the laborious process by which it was converted into a rational (or two rational) structures in the 1850s. She describes how over five centuries the House was governed, staffed and administered; how its members were lodged and what they ate; how, why and by whom its buildings were erected, lit, heated and drained; and how and what its pupils were taught, disciplined and kept in order.
For most of its history the academic standard of the House has been very high — indeed it pioneered the study of science and mathematics and was always pre-eminent in law — but from the very outset what it has been best known for is being very grand. The scale of the buildings laid out by Wolsey, vastly exceeding as it did that of any rival college, made it almost a prerequisite.
It was the natural home for Charles I and his court during the civil wars. But only when the Restoration had created the necessary political and social stability could its deans set about wooing the great country families by providing, in Peckwater Quad, the splendid accommodation in which their sons could feel at home, and the privileges that set them apart from their common contemporaries.
By the 19th century Christ Church had become the natural home for the ruling classes (by the end of the century it had produced 11 prime ministers) and as the ruling classes grew to include the cotton kings and railway tycoons of the north, the House expanded to accommodate them as well. But it also reached out to boys (and in due course girls) of the respectable grammar (and later state) schools who would do it credit academically. Now the fish, if no longer so odd as they were in Auden’s day, are certainly a great deal more variegated.
Like the ruling classes themselves, the House has always had an instinct for survival. Auden concluded his gaudy address with the hope
that all the investments on which her
Income depends may be wows.
May she ever grow richer and richer
And the gravy abound at the House.
Somehow I think that it always will.
Comments