2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

CREATOR OF THE MODERN COLLEGE I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 51
unmarried, but in practice they were almost
always filled from among its own recent
graduates, one of them (like the Mastership)
by the bishop of Ely in his absolute
discretion. There being no time limit on
tenure, vacancies arose irregularly. Only three
or four Fellows were needed to run the place
and do the basic teaching in Mathematics and
Classics, along with a little Divinity, of those
of its 70 students who were not seeking an
Honours degree. This was all that was
offered. So almost all the other Fellows were
non-resident – their rooms were sub-let –
appearing in the College only occasionally,
though usually for the Audit each December
when they learnt how much their fellowships
had brought them. At Jesus only six of the
Fellows were required to be in Holy Orders,
It was, however, unthinkable that the Tutor,
the College’s main teaching officer, should
not be a clergyman – for he stood in loco
parentis, responsible not only for the students’
studies, but for their finances, their personal
behaviour, and their religious guidance. But
unless a Fellow was in Orders, and so in the
longer run eligible for any of the fifteen
livings in the College’s gift that happened to
fall vacant, there was not much to be gained
from a fellowship beyond some intellectual
kudos, and the maintenance (so long as the
holder remained unmarried) of a pleasant
connection with his student days.
Having performed creditably, if without
great distinction, in the Mathematical Tripos
and fallen hopelessly in love with the river (he
was Captain of Boats in 1851), Morgan did
not at once seek ordination, but remained
living in College as its Sadleirian Lecturer in
Mathematics (an early eighteenth century
benefactress had founded one in each
college: stipend £20 p.a.), and then as a
College Lecturer, helping with the teaching
of the Ordinary degree students. After five
years he was elected (1858) to a Ley Bye-
Fellowship (an early nineteenth century
endowment). He was to be the last Sadleir’s
Lecturer and the last of the Bye-Fellows: all
the lectureships were abolished and the
endowment used for a professorship, while
the bye-fellowships were converted into
entrance scholarships. In 1858 Morgan set
out his (and the College’s) stall with the
publication (by the then local firm of
Macmillan) of A Collection of Problems and
Examples in Mathematics Selected from the Jesus
College Examination Papers. His fellowship
came, eventually and hesitantly, in 1860. 6 His
own teacher (to whom the book was
dedicated) having left Jesus for King’s,
Morgan had become the mainstay of the
College’s Mathematics teaching. Having
been ordained in 1859 on his bye-fellowship,
without serveing a curacy, he was in 1862
elected Dean, and in the following year
appointed Tutor. His predecessor had
married and become the incumbent of a local
parish – the last Tutor of Jesus for whom the
office was but a temporary staging-post in a
clerical career. Morgan was to make it his
life-time’s work.
In 1863 the College was at a low ebb. Over
the last twelve years student numbers
had shrank from 70 to 40: in 1859 there
had been only five freshmen. Whereas in
1851 there had been nine colleges with
fewer students than Jesus, now there were
only five, and since 1860 no Jesuan had
been successful in any Honours
examination.
It is difficult to be sure of the reasons for
this decline. The College, although
previously seen as a place of some interest,
appears now to have been widely regarded as
one of Cambridge’s backwaters. Two of the
moving spirits behind the Chapel’s
restoration – John Gibson, and the
pioneering geophysicist, Osmund Fisher –
had long left their fellowships for College
livings, and their enthusiastic and generous
supporter, Sir John Sutton, the musicologist,
had surrendered his fellow commonership
and charge of the choir school he had
founded and run, on becoming a Roman
Catholic. The restoration programme had
ground to a halt: the outer Chapel still lay as
dreary and desolate as it had been since the
Civil War. To everything those men had stood
for, French’s successor as Master, G.E.
Corrie, was strongly antipathetic. And to
much else too. Both as Master and as Vice-
Chancellor he had refused to have anything
to do with the Royal Commission inquiring
into the University and its colleges, declining