28 - Neither Albert nor Gresham

Summary

Gresham College, and its seven lecturers in the liberal arts, which is sometimes thought of as the very first London University, was established by the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, who died in 1579. By the middle of the nineteenthth century it had a relatively small endowment, and a modest building in the City, which was the venue for popular lectures, rather in the fashion of University Extension exercises. They were delivered by what one of the ‘Gresham Professors’ described – rather too sweepingly – as ‘the best men that could be got for the money’, who would ‘make no pretence to being men of light and leading in science and literature’.

In the course of the great wave of concern over the condition of Charities, and a few years after the creation of the Charity Commission in 1853, one of its Inspectors, Francis Offley Martin, produced Notes, Evidences and Suggestions relating to Gresham College. He wrote:

It is by no means improbable, were the Trustees required to furnish a Plan for re-modelling the College, that a Committee of practical men might be found possessing the confidence of the City, and that the friends of education there would then come forward, and, by judicious changes and additions, raise the Institution to the rank of an affiliated Member of the University of London.

The then Gresham lecturer in Law, William Palmer, responded:

I hardly know what he means when he talks of raising it to the ‘rank of an affiliated Member of the University of London’. But if, without detriment to the old foundation or prejudice to the present Professors, it can be erected into a College like King’s College, forming an integral part of the University, I think that a Scheme with such object would be well worth consideration.

Another lecturer took this further, and suggested that the College should have a Charter of incorporation, authorising the ‘President and Fellows of Gresham College in the University of London’,

. . . to open Classes, deliver Lectures, and generally prepare the Undergraduate Members of the College, who were matriculated Members of the University for the Examinations for Degrees in Arts and other Faculties.