2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

58 TWO 19 TH CENTURY MASTERS I Jesus College Annual Report 2013
George Elwes Corrie
numbers of undergraduates in the College
halved, a process exacerbated by his
appointment of a Tutor (Peter) who had spent
the previous nine years as a parochial
clergyman in Canterbury and was, according
to ‘Black’ Morgan, “eccentric in the
extreme”; a recent writer has dubbed him
“The Clever Fool”. He published a Manual of
Prayer for Students, which was “highly
derivative, being based on a collection of
prayers originally intended for boys at
Winchester,” and was to be Corrie’s ally in
the protection of evangelical orthodoxy. 15 In
1859 only five students were admitted to the
College, and two of them did not stay long
enough to get a degree. The 1850s were a
difficult decade for all the small colleges, but
at Jesus admissions only returned to (and
then rose above) former levels when Peter left
for the College’s best living, to be succeeded
first by Cleave (soon to be Principal of
Victoria College, Jersey) and then, at last and,
one suspects, through Corrie’s gritted teeth,
by ‘Black’ Morgan. 16
Morgan had, as the College’s Sadleirian
Lecturer been teaching Mathematics at Jesus
since 1855, had published A Collection of
Problems and Examples in Mathematics 17 designed
to reduce dependence on private tutors, and
been a Bye-Fellow since 1858. Yet in February
1859 the bishop had been asked to allow the
College to defer nominating new Fellows on
the ground that there were too few qualified
candidates. When it did its first choice had
been a new graduate (Robertson), a man five
years Morgan’s junior, albeit that he had
come second in the Classical Tripos and so
deserved the prize of a Fellowship which
Morgan’s low ranking as 24th Wrangler,
though unexpected and attributed to overwork,
may have seemed not to merit. Morgan
was at last elected to a Fellowship in 1860, but
when in 1863 Cleave was leaving it was to
Robertson, rather than to Morgan, that
Corrie first offered the Tutorship. He
declined it, saying that he would be better off
remaining a schoolmaster: after teaching at
Rugby and Harrow, he became Headmaster
of Haileybury the year before Morgan became
Master of Jesus. 18 Morgan’s passion for the
river would not have endeared him to Corrie,
who disapproved of boat races, with which
“so much evil was connected”, not least on
account of the spectators – “the bedizened
women on the bank” – they attracted. 19 But
the Master had now exhausted his options.
This probably also explains the election to a
Fellowship the same year of E.H. ‘Red’
Morgan, another keen sportsman who,
though again only a 24th Wrangler and so not
obviously deserving a prize, was brought
back from teaching at Lancing to become
Dean, relieving the new Tutor of that
responsibility.
“In his College” French was, an obituarist
noted, “singularly happy”. His relations with
his Fellows were always cordial; Corrie’s were
“unfailingly courteous”. 20 French was an
efficient and diligent man of business who
worked hard to increase the returns from the
College’s estates, and so his and the Fellows’
dividends. 21 The College’s sixteenth-century
statutes did not provide for a Bursar: business
affairs were the Master’s responsibility,
though in practice Masters came to delegate
much of the routine work to a Fellow who
might be spoken of as the Bursar, though
how much was delegated varied from Master