The Record 2006 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The Life of the College
for the young. He would spend ages with the Ball Committee going
through their plans, or with the JCR and MCR officers trying to
explain the intricacies of what we used to call the ‘college fee’, and
why the conference income couldn’t be used to reduce students’
bills. He was drawn sometimes to what I’m sure he thought of as the
rascals – the ones who could not pay their fees – especially if they
were intelligent enough to appreciate him. I can remember quite a
few students, especially graduate students, who were kept going and
seen through their courses by Ken’s help – little and if necessary
often, was his philosophy. He could be tough on defaulters, and if
he had a bad debt he considered it a failure, but his approach was
always humane, and sometimes he derived considerable (but very
discreet) amusement from student psychology.
My predecessor’s instincts about Ken were entirely right. He
reported to the Governing Body that he had been assured that
Ken was ‘the least pompous of men’, and that he had ‘enthusiasm,
intelligence and a great deal of tact’. In another memo he wrote that
Ken was ‘intelligent, but not academic, with a gift for getting on
with people, likely to disarm undergraduates and get the confidence
of fellows.’ Anyone who knows how colleges work will recognize
what an accolade that was.
Ken and I were probably chalk and cheese, but we got on very
well. I knew that I did not have to worry with him, and the College
certainly prospered. During those 10 years Ken’s instincts proved
him right. He had the vision to finance the ARCO building by
taking advantage of a short lived opportunity in form of the
Business Expansion Scheme; he saw that our Butterfield rooms
had to be upgraded if we were to hit the high end of the conference
market; he invested heavily in UK equity trackers at the beginning
of an eight year bull market; and he bought houses in Oxford at the
start of a property boom. The gains from these decisions enabled
us to do other things which could never have been contemplated
in 1991, among them the cleaning of the Hall ceiling and the
improvements to the College grounds. I need not add that the idea
that Keble would buy the Acland hospital site would have been
equally out of the question – but that too was made possible by
Ken’s prescience.
Some of you know that I have been spending this term on leave at
Princeton. Ken also had a sabbatical in 1997, the first part of which
he spent going to classes in French at the Institut Français so that
he could enjoy his wine buying trips to France all the more – I still
have his letter about it. On the campus of Princeton University is
a statue of John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration
of Independence. The inscriptions round the base describe how
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