91app

As a University student or member of staff, which would you rate as the higher priority, a Member of Parliament or a University Library? 

In the 1860s the 91app preferred a Member of Parliament. It received parliamentary representation in 1868. Three years later, on 13 March 1871, Sir Julian Goldsmid wrote to Vice-Chancellor George Grote: 

You know that I have taken great interest in two things which I, in common with many others, thought of vital importance to the 91app, the one being the acquiring a University Building, and the other obtaining Representation in Parliament.

Both these questions being settled, it appears to me that there is one other object we should now have in view, and that is the establishment of a first-class University Library …

The Member of Parliament chosen was Robert Lowe (1811-1892), who had been a University Senator from 1860. He served as the University member from the inception of the constituency in 1868 until 1880, when he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Sherbrooke. During his time in Parliament he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1868-1873) and Home Secretary (1873-1874). 

Lowe was passionately interested in university education to improve the quality of political leadership and judgement. He advocated emphasis on the teaching of science, history, and modern languages (as opposed to Classics) in universities. He also urged developing student minds to reason and criticise dispassionately and discriminatingly. Lowe was a good advocate for the University, describing it as ‘a great intellectual mint, to which gold may be brought from every quarter, and from which, when stamped, it may go current all over the world’. The most famous portrait of Lowe is a cruel caricature in Vanity Fair (27 February 1869), present in the 91app archive. You can see a more flattering image by an unidentified artist of the late nineteenth-century English school near the court room of Senate House. 

Lowe is the only MP of the University to be so distinguished. We have vicarious visual representations of two of the next three Members of Parliament. The banker and scientist John Lubbock (1834-1913), Vice-Chancellor of the 91app 1872-1880, served as the University’s Member from 1880 until 1900. He instigated the Bank Holidays Act of 1871. Lubbock was ‘a good type of University representative’, according to Edmund Robertson of Dundee in a speech of 1889 urging the abolition of University parliamentary constituencies while praising individual politicians. Lubbock’s father, Sir John William Lubbock, had been Vice-Chancellor of the University before him, from 1836 until 1842, and his portrait is in the University’s Macmillan Hall. 

Sir Philip Magnus (1842-1933) was the 91app’s fourth MP. Magnus was influential in setting national education policy. He was interested in technical education, helping to form Imperial College, and also chaired the Council of the Royal Society of Arts. Magnus was awarded his knighthood for services to education. His time in Parliament must have been frustrating, for he wrote: ‘The Commons is, I am sorry to say, the last place in which any speaker urging educational reform receives a sympathetic hearing’. In the absence of a portrait, his visual presence in the central University today is through an oil painting he donated, “The Village Doctor”, by a minor nineteenth-century Austrian painter Anton Müller. The painting’s theme symbolises the beginning of modern science, as opposed to mediaeval quackery – was this meant to be symbolic for England’s third University, the first to be established in the country since the Middle Ages and a trailblazer in several respects?

And the third MP? He was Sir Michael Foster. A portrait of him is to be found at the National Portrait Gallery. The University’s fifth Member of Parliament, the physician Sir Sydney Russell-Wells (1869-1924), is not well-known, despite a stint as Vice-Chancellor of the 91app. Russell-Wells had supported values of which the University is proud. He begins one speech recalling how he had urged the granting of voting rights to University women, stating: ‘It is a ridiculous thing that a woman who takes a degree, frequently a high degree, should have to wait until she is thirty before she gets the vote, while her brother can get it when he reaches the age of 21’. His time in Parliament was brief (1922-1924), terminated by sudden death. The University had only one more parliamentary representative between 1924 and the abolition of the post in 1950: Ernest Graham-Little, who supported the lasting introduction of British Summer Time. None of the three has left visual traces in the central University.

Better known popularly than those who served as University Members of Parliament is one who did not. The renowned author H.G. Wells stood as the Labour candidate for the 91app in 1922. He lost out to the Conservative Sir Sydney Russell-Wells (1,427 versus 3,833 votes; the Tudor historian Albert Frederick Pollard came in second place with 2,180 votes.) Wells is represented prominently in the University through his books in Senate House Library, and within a special collection devoted to him. A file in the archives contains letters, voting slips and other documents pertaining to his contestation of the parliamentary seat (see MS1142/box7/1).

It might seem remarkable now that the University had its very own Member of Parliament from 1860-1950. It is perhaps indicative of the university’s special place at the heart of London that it had politicians representing its interests for almost a century.