Birth of a university

This first university in the North had been a very long time in the planning.

SINCE the 13th Century, the bishops of Durham had been sending able young men to Oxford University’s Durham Hall, later renamed Trinity College.

When Henry VIII was in the process of dissolving the monastery at Durham, there were unsuccessful moves made to channel some of its vast revenues into the foundation of a college in Durham for the education of young men.

The links with Trinity College were severed in 1536.

Little more was done until 1657 when, Charles I having been beheaded, England was ruled by Parliament.

When three petitions seeking the establishment of a university at Durham had brought no concrete response, Oliver Cromwell approached the Speaker of the House of Commons advocating that several of the old chapter houses at Durham Cathedral should be turned into a college.

His argument was that such an action would do much to promote “learning and piety in these poore, rude and ignorant parts”.

Cromwell’s scheme required the establishment of a provost, two senior fellows, four professors, four tutors and four schoolmasters to oversee the education of 24 scholars and 12 exhibitioners.

Perceiving the creation of such a college to be a threat to his university, Oxford’s vicechancellor objected strongly to the plan.

With Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the restoration of King Charles II two years later, he need not have worried.

Cromwell had been otherwise distracted and the new king was hardly going to put in place one of the Lord Protector’s schemes.

The next attempt to create Durham’s university came almost two centuries later and was not simply the result of concern about the dire state of education in England.

Rather, it was only one element of the widespread illfeeling about inadequate representation of the people across the whole country and about the power and wealth of the clergy – the Durham clergy in particular, who were wealthier than most of their counterparts in other areas of the country.

A new Government led by Earl Grey had come to power in 1830 on its promise to instigate wide-ranging reforms, and the new king, William IV, was ready to back the reform of Parliament if necessary.

While many of the Durham clergy, well-aware of the storm about to break over them, were content to wait for it to pass over, others decided action needed to be taken immediately to retain at least some Church funds within the county and to put them to good use.

One such visionary was William van Mildert, who had been bishop of Durham since 1826.

In July 1831, he conceived the idea of diverting Church funds into the creation of a university at Durham.

Although it was later claimed that few of the clergy backed van Mildert’s scheme, so great was the general and widespread support for it that they were easily outnumbered.

When van Mildert was asked to lower his academic ambitions for Durham, he retaliated stoutly that nothing less than “a university with the power of granting degrees would answer the expectations of the public”.

So it was that William IV supported a measure “to enable the dean and chapter of Durham to appropriate part of the property of their church to the establishment of a university in connexion therewith for the advancement of learning”.

Like Oxford and Cambridge, the new university would award degrees only to those students who recognised the supreme authority of the king and worshipped according to the Book of Common Prayer.

Dissenters, such as Methodists, could attend lectures at the university, but could progress no farther academically.

Durham was, after all, administered and controlled by the dean and chapter, which had no intention of allowing anyone to undermine the Church of England in any way.

On the other hand, nor would they allow Durham to become nothing more than a northern training ground for Anglican priests.

Students would be allowed to study subjects other than divinity, including, as one cleric put it, “the numerous tribes of medical sciences with names terminating in ogy”.

To ensure the Church of England kept a keen eye on those who professed to be active followers of their way, compulsory attendance at church on Sundays was not abolished until 1908, while the dean and chapter did not relinquish control of the university until 1910.

Before the university was established, it had been expected that some of the funds for its maintenance would come from outside the Church of England, but this proved not to be the case.

Bishop van Mildert had given Durham Castle and several thousand pounds as his contribution to the new venture, but in 1836 there was still a financial shortfall, a situation not helped by the cost of the many repairs needed to the old fortress. By 1857, serious thought was being given to the abandoning of the entire university project.

This was despite the fact that the expenses met by Durham students were as great as those incurred by their fellows at Oxford and Cambridge.

When Newcastle-upon- Tyne had been refused permission to set up a university, it was pacified by being allowed to create a college of medicine there in connection with Durham University.

One of the most radical actions of Durham University was the establishment there in 1837 of a school of civil engineering, probably the first in the country, but it failed because funds were not forthcoming either to provide scholarships for potential students or to create a chair in the subject.

From the outset, Durham was a collegiate university where most students are resident in one of the constituent colleges while receiving their education in the various university schools.

University College, based in and around the castle, is the oldest college, established along with the university itself in 1832.

It was home to only men until 1987, when it admitted its first female students.

Taking its name from a 14th Century bishop of Durham, Hatfield College was founded in 1846 in the North Bailey, initially in the famous old Red Lion coaching inn only a few hundred yards from Palace Green.

The success of Hatfield, where student fees were considerably lower than those paid by occupants of the castle, led to the reopening in 1851 of the Archdeacon’s Inn, one of the original 1830s halls of residence, which was renamed Bishop Cosin’s Hall but closed 13 years later.

Although the combined college of St Bede and St Hild, on Gilesgate Bank, became a full member of the university only in 1979, at which point it also ceased to be a college of education, its constituent entities each had a long and distinguished history.

The first of these, which took its name from one of England’s greatest early scholars, the College of the Venerable Bede, was founded at Durham in 1839 as a Church of England college to train young men as schoolteachers.

St Hild’s College, “for intending teachers”, followed in 1858.

Bede students could study for Durham degrees from 1892 while the ladies of St Hild had to wait until 1896, a year after the university began to grant degrees to women.

As Durham University continued to expand during the 19th Century, it was decided that not all of its students needed to be members of a college and such unattached students were admitted from 1871, some of them eventually forming themselves into such groups as St Cuthbert’s Society, which dates from 1888.

The first hostel for female students, Abbey House, was established in 1899 and became, 20 years later, St Mary’s College, housed since 1952 in its virtual French chateau on Elvet Hill.

St Aidan’s, sited on Windmill Hill since 1964 in a building designed by Sir Basil Spence, had also been created originally as another hostel for female students.

St Chad’s, dating from 1904, and St John’s, 1909, both in the Bailey on the east side of the cathedral, started as theological halls.

The parliamentary reformer Earl Grey, who had been prime minister when Durham University was created in 1832, is commemorated in Grey College (1959), while Van Mildert (1965) acknowledges the work done by the university’s principal founder bishop.

Trevelyan College (1967) is named after the historian and former chancellor of the university, GM Trevelyan, and Collingwood (1972) the university’s first college to be conceived and constructed as a fully co-educational facility, honours the distinguished Cambridge mathematician Sir Edward Collingwood.

Teikyo University of Japan in Durham, to be featured here in the near future, was established in April 1990 to give Japanese undergraduate students the opportunity of spending a year studying in an English academic environment alongside the students of Durham University.

Of Durham’s two newest colleges, Ustinov, originally known as the Graduate Society, dates from 2003 and was named after Sir Peter Ustinov, the great humanitarian, actor and former chancellor of Durham University, while a 19th Century social reformer is celebrated in Josephine Butler College of 2006.

Durham University now also has a significant presence in Stockton.