2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

CREATOR OF THE MODERN COLLEGE I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 49
Creator of the Modern College –
Henry Arthur Morgan 1830-1912
Peter Glazebrook
In all weathers and in all seasons countless
Jesuans have rowed to and fro past The
Paddock at Fen Ditton, and in May Weeks still
others have been there watching them. But
only a few have walked the couple of hundred
yards up the lane and into the churchyard
where, in the corner nearest to his beloved
river, Henry Arthur Morgan – ‘Black Morgan’
– the creator of their modern College and its
first Fellow to make being a don a profession,
is buried. The inscription on his gravestone
tells the basic story:
HENRY ARTHUR MORGAN D.D.
BORN AT GOTHENBURG JULY 1ST 1830
DIED AT JESUS LODGE SEPT 3RD 1912
FOR 22 YEARS TUTOR AND FOR 27 YEARS
MASTER OF JESUS COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
FAITHFUL TO DUTY, WISE IN
COUNSEL, READY OF WIT,
ABOVE ALL DAUNTLESS IN SUFFERING
AND TENDERLY SYMPATHETIC
MEN FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT
BECAUSE OF HIM
AND LOVING DEEPLY, HE WAS DEEPLY
LOVED
Unlike many epitaphs, this one rings true,
and in this, the centenary year of his death, it
deserves enlarging on. 1 In 1902, when Arthur
Gray, whom Morgan had admitted to the
College in 1870, and whose election in 1876
to a Fellowship, and appointment in 1895 as
Senior Tutor, Morgan had instigated, and
who in 1912 was to succeed him as Master,
published his fine History of the College,
Morgan was still presiding over it. Gray paid
him a charming tribute, and went on to say,
“What the College owes him no Jesus man
needs to be told”. 2 Fifty-eight years later,
when Brittain sought to bring Gray’s History
up-to-date, he both omitted the tribute and
neglected the hint, content to afford Morgan
one desultory paragraph. 3 (He underestimated
Gray, too.) So there is a gap to be
filled.
I n 1830, the year of ‘Black’ Morgan’s
birth, his father, Morgan Morgan, who
came from a long-established family of
Cardigan farmers, was the chaplain to the
British merchants at Gothenburg in southwest
Sweden, where he had met and
married Fanny Nonnen, whose Angl0-
Huguenot family had settled there. Henry
Arthur was their fourth child (of five), and
third son. The first became a Fellow of
University College, Oxford, and then a
lawyer and a politician, and a minister in
Gladstone’s second and third
administrations; the second, Professor of
Medicine at Manchester. Morgan Morgan
returned to his native Wales to be Vicar of
Conwy, and his youngest son who
remembered that when the bishop came
for confirmations there were two sermons
– one in English by the bishop, and one in
Welsh by his chaplain – himself became a
Welsh speaker and remained proud of his
Welsh roots and concerned about Welsh
affairs. He was an early supporter of the
National Eistedfodd, becoming a Bard, and
could always be relied on to enliven a party
with the spirited singing of Welsh songs.
But when, later in life, he published a
pamphlet arguing that the best way to take
the wind out of the sails of the campaign
for the disestablishment of the Welsh
Church was to provide scholarships for the
ablest (and most radical) candidates for the
non-conformist ministry so they could
study at Cambridge and Oxford, where
they would mingle with cultivated English
gentlemen and be tamed, it was apparent
that he had been too long away from
Wales. 4
The Morgan boys spent three years at
Shrewsbury School, then ruled by the
redoubtable Dr Kennedy of Latin Primer fame