Univ Record 2018

SIR MAURICE SHOCK died on
7 July 2018 aged 92. Sir Maurice
had been our Politics Fellow from
1956-77, and our Estates Bursar
from 1958-73. He was elected an
Honorary Fellow in 1985.
After serving with the
Intelligence Corps after 1945,
Sir Maurice read PPE at Balliol,
getting a First in PPE, and
then did postgraduate work at
St Antony’s. He was briefly a
Lecturer at Christ Church and
Trinity, before being elected
Fellow and Praelector in Politics
at Univ in 1956.
As a tutor, Sir Maurice helped
strengthen Univ’s fine reputation
for the study of PPE, but as
Estates Bursar, he transformed
the appearance of the College.
On our central site, Helen’s
Court, the Goodhart Building
and the Mitchell Building were
all created on his watch. He
once reminisced to the Archivist
about the origins of the Goodhart Building. The back of the Examination Schools was
rather grim, and needed covering, and in front of it stood an antiques gallery, with a
workshop on the top. At a time when Arthur Goodhart was becoming frustrated at the
slow progress in the plans to create Helen’s Court, Sir Maurice remembered taking him
to the top of the workshops, showing him the view from there, and suggesting that this
could be a good site for a new building. The Master’s imagination was caught, and that
moment, Sir Maurice thought, was the germ of
the Goodhart Building.
Elsewhere in Oxford, he took the difficult
decision to sell the College’s property to the north
of the Old Parsonage Hotel (now the University’s
IT centre), and invest instead in some properties
in north Oxford on which he oversaw the start of
the building of Stavertonia. Now that the Univ
North project is starting to take shape, we can be
grateful to Sir Maurice for laying the foundations
of the College’s north Oxford estate.
Sir Maurice retained a lifelong affection for
Master Goodhart, once describing him as a
With his wife and daughter, and
George and Pat Cawkwell to the left
second father to him. When the Goodharts were
living in the penthouse suite on the Goodhart
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© Bryan Organ & the Redfern Gallery, London