2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

52 CREATOR OF THE MODERN COLLEGE I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
both the Commission’s requests for
information and its invitations to submit
proposals for making Cambridge more
attractive and accessible to more students,
and for widening its curriculum and putting
its endowments to better use. (His successor
as Vice-Chancellor was more co-operative,
but only one Jesuan broke ranks: Thomas
Gaskin, a former Tutor who, safe in a local
parish, was still teaching Mathematics in
Cambridge). The Commissioners’
recommendation for allowing some
fellowships to be held by married men –
generally considered an essential
precondition for improving the quality of
university teaching by allowing it to become a
life-time career – was spurned by the Master
and Fellows of Jesus, which was one of only
three colleges to remain completely under
this handicap. 7 Nothing, if Corrie could
prevent it, was going to change. While
Norrisian Professor of Divinity (1838-54) he
had declined – claiming to be over-worked –
to participate in the “voluntary” theological
teaching and examining of intending
ordinands on which nearly all diocesan
bishops, hoping for a more theologically
literate clergy, were keen. It was an odd
stance for the Head of a college, the bulk of
whose students were destined for the
Church, and not one calculated to attract the
more serious minded (or their parents) to it,
or offset by the announcement that each Lent
term the Master gave a course of divinity
lectures.
Corrie was, when he appointed Morgan
Tutor, seventy and tired – probably more tired
than when, thirteen years earlier, he had
come to the College from St Catharine’s (even
smaller and poorer than Jesus) where he had
been a Fellow since graduating (as 18th
Wrangler), Dean for 31 years, and Tutor for
28 (eleven of them during his sixteen-year
term as Norrisian Professor). By 1863 he had
settled into the routine of spending the six
summer months at his parish of Newton-inthe-Isle,
on the northern edge of the
Cambridgeshire fens, a living given to him by
his former Tutor at St Catharine’s, and
predecessor as Norrisian Professor, Bishop
Turton. Having appointed his former pupil to
the Mastership he sought to compensate for
its inadequate stipend by presenting him to
“the best living in my gift”. The College was,
while the Master was away, left in the care of
its President, Arthur Westmorland, who also
acted, in effect, as Bursar. Like Morgan he
had come to Cambridge via King’s College
London. 8 A layman, a barrister and a man of
some means, he was prominent in the town’s
political life – in the Conservative interest, of
course – but little involved in academic affairs
or with students. They were Morgan’s
responsibility and though Corrie was, like
many said to suffer from poor health, to live
to a ripe old age (92), he neither opposed nor
interfered with Morgan’s ideas for the
College, little though they can have appealed
to him.
M organ, now 33, was, by contrast, the
very embodiment of the vigorous
masculine Victorian clergyman. He had
rowed in more than a hundred intercollegiate
races, stopping only when rules
about standing were introduced, but then,
with other energetic dons, founding their
own boat club whose name, “The Ancient
Mariners”, revealed its close association
with Coleridge’s old college. 9 In the
previous year he and Leslie Stephen had
been the first climbers to traverse Jungfrau
Joch, and he had toured Sweden, Finland
and Russia, publishing a book about his
trip. 10 He was, too, a keen cyclist. Crucially
for him and the College, he was able,
within two years, to secure the election as
Fellow and Dean (thereby freeing himself
from that office) of another Morgan –
Edmund Henry – but no relation, 24th
Wrangler, and every bit as energetic and
enthusiastic a sportsman, though
preferring land to water, a rougher and less
sophisticated man: to be known as ‘Red’
Morgan, so as to distinguish Dean from
Tutor.
A muscular Christian if ever there was one,
‘Red’ Morgan was a practical, business-like
man, with a sound financial sense – it was he,
not Westmorland, who worked out how the
new buildings that ‘Black’ Morgan wanted
could be paid for, and it was he who oversaw
the builders and saw that the College got