2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

TWO 19 TH CENTURY MASTERS I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 57
maintenance of an equal number of Fellows
from counties north and south of the Trent.
Corrie was Vice-Chancellor only once,
making something of a fool of himself in
refusing, both as Vice-Chancellor and
Master, to co-operate with the Royal
Commission – composed entirely of
Cambridge men – that had, after more than
twenty years of intermittent campaigning,
been appointed in 1850 to consider changes
in University and College statutes and
courses of study so as to make Cambridge
better able to meet national demands for
higher education. He suffered the
humiliation of being reversed by the Senate. 7
A poor public speaker and an inaudible
preacher, 8 he treated both the
Commissioners and his fellow Heads of
colleges, and even Prince Albert, the
Chancellor, with pettish discourtesy – not to
mention the directors of a railway company
which threatened to disturb the quiet of
Cambridge Sundays by bringing passengers
in on excursion trains. 9 In the view of Adam
Sedgwick, a Fellow of Trinity, pioneering
geologist, and one of the Commissioners,
Corrie was “timid and shy . . . singularly
narrow minded and . . . obstinate as a mule
. . . No one . . . could have been less fitted to
cope with the crisis confronting him”. 10
Twenty-seven years later he was unchanged:
he treated the 1878 University
Commissioners in the same way as their
predecessors, to their chairman’s (Lord Chief
Justice Cockburn’s) great amusement. Corrie
had now become a joke. A letter from Mr
Gladstone about fellowships to be held by
married men was put into the waste-paper
basket unanswered. 11 It is tempting to see in
him the original of Tom Staple, Tutor of
Lazarus College, in Barchester Towers (chap.
xxxiv) in which opposition to Sunday trains
also figures (chaps. v and x). There is no
gainsaying the damning verdict of one of the
University’s historians: “the last ditch was his
spiritual home”. 12
* * *
Throughout French’s Mastership, under
four long-serving Tutors – Hustler (1816-
25), Skinner (1825-36), Gaskin (1831-42) and
Birkett (1845-53) – student admissions to the
College were higher, averaging 14 a year, than
at any time since the death of Queen Anne,
save for what was, for Jesus as for most
colleges, the exceptional decade 1812-21, the
heyday of the Fellow Commoners. These
were the final years of the Napoleonic wars
when it was difficult for gilded youths to tour
the Continent in the care of private tutors,
and the first of the ensuing peace, when naval
and military officers, forced to contemplate
career change, sought to qualify themselves
for enrolment in the ordained ranks of the
church militant. 13 One of these four Tutors,
Thomas Gaskin, though a Johnian, had been
elected a Fellow to strengthen the College’s
teaching in Mathematics – he was second
Wrangler in 1831 – the Fellowship having,
with the bishop’s consent, been left vacant
for two years until the right man appeared.
This was the first and only time since 1781 –
though with happier consequences than in
the case of William Frend – that an exception
had been made to the otherwise invariable,
but unwritten, rule that persisted to the end
of Corrie’s mastership, that Jesus
Fellowships were for Jesus men. They were
seen not as jobs but as prizes for those who
had done well in the Tripos and so a way of
attracting able students to the College.
Gaskin was a remarkable man. While
working as a shoemaker’s apprentice in
Penrith, he had come to the notice of Henry
Brougham, the future Lord Chancellor, who
owned a small estate nearby. Brougham
arranged for Gaskin to go to school at
Sedbergh, and then to come to St John’s. He
was to be a main-stay of mathematics
teaching and examining in Cambridge for
more than twenty years. 14 French took a close
interest in the choices made by the Tutors of
young Fellows and other graduates as the
College’s mathematical and classical
lecturers to help them with the teaching of
the undergraduates – the only teaching that
Cambridge provided, apart from that offered
by private tutors (essential for candidates for
Honours’ degrees) and, in the case of the
LL.B (widely regarded as a soft option), by the
two Law professors.
But after Birkett’s marriage and
consequent departure in 1853, and as news of
Corrie’s reactionary attitudes spread, the