25 - Confusion Worse Confounded

Summary

The long vacations of 1889 and 1890 must have been welcome breaks for the participants in the tortuous negotiations which went on relentlessly during the two academic sessions which followed each of them. No attempt is made here to describe and analyse every move: Allchin, who was, throughout this and later periods, Secretary of the Committee of the Royal College of Physicians which took part in the negotiations, gives a detailed account. What follows illustrates the experience of Senate and Convocation in a period of particularly significant shifts of attitude, notable decisions, and signs of hardening opposition to a general settlement.

The immediate reaction of UCL and KCL to the Commissioners’ Report, and to the Government’s decision that the University should have another try to find an acceptable way of turning itself into both a teaching and an examining institution, was bitter disappointment. But that was followed, almost at once, by a determination to try to persuade Ministers to abandon their acceptance of the Report and to proceed with the granting of a new Charter for the Albert University. They sent a deputation to Lord Cranbrook to argue their case, led by a particularly indignant Bishop of London, whose petition to the Commissioners had apparently been ignored. But, on 25 July 1889, the Lord President indicated firmly that he thought a year was a reasonable time to allow for the further exercise in search of a compromise, and insisted that he was in no position to take any earlier position on the outcome. However, though Cranbrook was scrupulous in his firm treatment of the deputation, on the following day he wrote in his diary, of their plea for a separate Teaching University, that ‘I am rather favourably inclined and doubt the London University meeting the need.’

But Cranbrook’s ‘reasonable expectation’ that a year would be enough for the Senate and Convocation to produce a new Scheme was not fulfilled. The Senate committee’s first draft, approved for discussion with other parties, was produced in November, 1889, and two revised versions were put forward in June, 1890. But, at least before the revisions, there were misgivings at the highest levels. Granville admitted to Lubbock that he was ‘not sure of the success of the new plan . . . but we are bound to give it every chance’.