The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses - Noel Annan

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a number of dons who were determined to bring about change. The impetus came from Trinity and St John’s. The reforming dons disliked the coaches because so long as they reigned supreme it was difficult to reform the tripos and bring into the classical curriculum philosophy, history and philology, or establish science as a separate tripos. The reformers finally undermined the coaches – though it took years to do so – not only by extending the curriculum but by abolishing the tradition of ranking candidates in the tripos results. The narrowness of the curriculum and the premium it put on memory as distinct from critical intelligence had been criticised outside more than inside the university. The Prince Consort let it be known where his sympathies lay, though he was careful not to suggest that German universities were superior to Cambridge in scholarship. When John Seeley gave his inaugural lecture, succeeding Charles Kingsley as Regius professor of history, he used the opportunity to criticise the narrowness of the classical curriculum and the pedantry of the great coach Richard Shilleto. It was this that drew from Hepworth Thompson, who had succeeded Whewell as Master of Trinity, the remark, ‘I never could have supposed that we should so soon regret the departure of poor Kingsley.’

      Yet Thompson was one of those who did his share in reform. The statutes of all colleges were archaic, and when Lord John Russell’s commissioners appeared and numbers of colleges at first refused to cooperate, Whewell – despite reservations – was helpful. Twenty years later the junior fellows of Trinity again determined to revise the statutes and found themselves supported by Hepworth Thompson. Thompson had to keep reminding the fellows that the question was not how the statutes were to be reformed but how they were to be altered, that is to say redrafted to give effect to the changes the reformers wanted. It was at one of these interminable meetings that Thompson made his immortal dictum: ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest.’ The revised statutes were passed to the Privy Council – which under Gladstone’s influence rejected them. Gladstone had a more comprehensive plan. He wanted to set up another Commission on Oxford and Cambridge, and the commissioners incorporated Thompson’s work into their recommendations.

      Thompson was helped by three fellows in particular – Henry Jackson, Coutts Trotter and Henry Sidgwick. Coutts Trotter got the college to accept that candidates for fellowships should submit a dissertation; and that the tripos should not be considered as the sole guide to their intellectual promise. Henry Jackson became renowned as a great teacher and threw open his classes on Plato to the whole university. He was behind the removal of religious tests, the abolition of Greek as a requirement to enter the university, and he and Sidgwick supported the foundation of colleges for women. The third, Henry Sidgwick, was the outstanding utilitarian philosopher in the tradition of Mill. It was he who invited Michael Foster to teach physiology and become the first professor in the subject; and it was he who taught Frederic Maitland, who won a first in philosophy.

      Trinity was the nest of Cambridge’s philosophers: of the Idealist M’Taggart, then of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of Wittgenstein – and also of the notably less original C. D. Broad. In history both G. M. Trevelyan and Steven Runciman* were able as men with independent means to retire from Trinity when young to devote themselves to research and writing. But Trevelyan returned in 1926 as Regius professor of modern history and in 1940 accepted at Churchill’s insistence another Crown appointment, the mastership of Trinity.

      The most famous scholar in classics was a Trinity don: Housman believed that the first duty of a classicist was to apply himself to textual criticism. He despised those who tried to explain why Greek and Latin poetry were so moving. Yet he was profoundly moved by poetry; and on one occasion he let the mask of rigid fidelity to textual criticism slip and at the end of a lecture on Horace he read his translation of what he considered the most poignant of all the odes, ‘Diffugere nives’. He refused to allow his name to go forward for a higher degree of Doctor of Letters on the grounds that he was not the equal in textual criticism of those Trinity scholars, Bentley and Porson. (As a result no other classical don dared put in for the degree.) His austerity, his determination to nil admirari became a tradition in Trinity. Andrew Gow, a classical scholar in the Housman tradition, was a friend to numbers of undergraduates, particularly if they were interested in painting. His colleague Gaillard Lapsley, the American-born medieval historian, asked Gow to look at a painting by Allan Ramsay he had bought and waited on tenterhooks for the connoisseur’s judgement. ‘Not a very good Allan Ramsay, is it?’ Pause. ‘But then Allan Ramsay wasn’t a very good painter, was he?’ When Housman deigned to review a fellow of Trinity’s history of Louis Napoleon and admitted that some of the epigrams hit the nail on the head, he could not resist adding, ‘the slang with which Mr Simpson now and then defiles his pen is probably slang he learnt in his cradle and believed in his innocence to be English: “a settlement of sorts for example …”’

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