University of Bristol

A University for the Great Towns

The University of Bristol grew, as the great civic universities of England nearly all did, out of a Victorian conviction that learning ought not to be the private property of two ancient towns. Its prime mover was John Percival, the reforming headmaster of Clifton College, who in 1873 produced a pamphlet titled The Connection of the Universities and the Great Towns, arguing that the industrial cities of the provinces were starved of the university culture that Oxford and Cambridge hoarded between them. The argument found a powerful friend in Benjamin Jowett, the formidable Master of Balliol College, Oxford, who lent it both his philosophy and his purse, and out of that alliance of a Bristol schoolmaster and an Oxford grandee came the institution's true beginning.

University College, Bristol, opened its doors on the 10th of October 1876 in modest premises on Park Street, with a bare handful of professors and a few dozen students, founded by public subscription and animated by the Quaker, Liberal and Nonconformist conscience that ran so strong in the city's merchant families. From its very first day it did something quietly revolutionary: it admitted men and women alike, on equal terms, the first institution of its kind in the country to do so. It was a principle the College held to with only one shameful exception — the Medical School long refused to let women sit its examinations, a bar that did not fall until 1906 — but the principle itself, in an England that still locked women out of its oldest universities, marked the place from the outset as something new.

For its first three decades the College led a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence, perpetually short of money and forever appealing to the city's conscience to keep it alive. Government support arrived in 1889, and a measure of stability followed in 1893, when the Bristol Medical School, in existence since 1833, was formally incorporated into the College and gave it the beginnings of a serious scientific reputation. But survival, in those years, was never to be taken for granted, and more than once the whole brave experiment came close to folding for want of funds.

The Merchants' Inheritance

What rescued it, and what would in time build it into a university, was the wealth of Bristol's great commercial dynasties — and that wealth carried a history the institution had never been able to wash entirely clean. The deepest of its roots reached back to 1595 and the school founded by the Society of Merchant Venturers, the ancient guild that had governed Bristol's trade for centuries; the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, descended from that foundation, would supply the new university's engineering faculty and much of its practical spine. But the Merchant Venturers, like the city itself, had grown rich in no small part on the Atlantic slave economy, and the fortunes that later endowed the university told the same uncomfortable story.

The money came chiefly from tobacco and chocolate — from the Wills family, whose firm of W. D. & H. O. Wills had made one of the great fortunes of the age manufacturing cigarettes from leaf grown, for generations, by enslaved and then exploited labour across the Atlantic; and from the Frys, the Quaker chocolate dynasty whose cocoa and sugar came down the same colonial supply lines. Among the College's earliest and most influential patrons, too, was the University College Colston Society, founded in 1899 and named for Edward Colston, the Bristol merchant and slave trader whose philanthropy the city would celebrate for two centuries before it learned to be ashamed of the source. The university that rose on these foundations was a genuine public good, built to widen opportunity and open knowledge to the unprivileged — and it was paid for, in part, with money drawn from the cruellest commerce in the city's history. Both things were true, and the institution would eventually have to learn to say so.

The Charter

The campaign to turn the struggling College into a full university gathered force after 1904, when the energetic chemist Morris Travers arrived as Professor of Chemistry and set about marshalling money and influence with the decisiveness of a man who expected to win. He found allies in Lewis Fry, the chairman of the College Council, in the statesman R. B. Haldane, and above all in the Wills family. In 1908 the decisive gift was made: Henry Overton Wills III, the tobacco magnate, pledged the enormous sum of £100,000 to endow a university for Bristol and the West of England, on the single condition that a royal charter be obtained within two years. Fresh donations followed, the city council added its annual support, and the petition went up to the Privy Council.

It met with royal favour. On the 24th of May 1909, the charter approved by King Edward VII came into effect, dissolving the old College structure and erecting in its place the University of Bristol, with the power to grant its own degrees. It was a day of genuine celebration across the city, the culmination of thirty-three years of struggle since University College had first opened. Bristol took its place among the new "redbrick" civic universities then rising across industrial England, the proud institutions of the great manufacturing towns that Percival had championed a generation before. Henry Overton Wills III became the university's first Chancellor — he would die only two years later, in 1911 — and the philosopher and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan, last principal of the old College, became its first Vice-Chancellor.

The Tower on the Hill

When Henry Wills died, his sons George and Harry resolved to commemorate their father in a manner the whole city could see, and the result became the university's enduring symbol. The Wills Memorial Building, a soaring tower of pinnacled neo-Gothic stone raised at the top of Park Street and opened in 1925, dominated the skyline of the university quarter and announced, in the most emphatic architecture available, that Bristol now possessed a university to rival any in the land. It rose on the leafy heights of Tyndall's Park, in the same gathering of grand institutions on the same hill where the city's ancient grammar school had stood since 1879, so that the academic and the scholastic life of Bristol came to share a single quarter of handsome stone above the working city below. The tower very nearly did not outlast its first generation: on the night of the 24th of November 1940, in the same great raid that gutted so much of the city centre, German incendiaries set the building's Great Hall ablaze and left it a fire-blackened shell, and it was not until well after the war that the hall was painstakingly restored to its former grandeur.

The university took for its motto a line adapted from the Roman poet Horace — Vim promovet insitam, "learning promotes one's innate power" — a phrase that captured something essential about the civic-university creed: the faith that education did not merely furnish a mind but drew out a capacity already latent within it, and that such a capacity was to be found in the children of tradesmen and clerks as readily as in the sons of the gentry. It was a democratic idea dressed in a dead language, and the university spent the following century trying, with the usual mixture of success and shortfall, to live up to it.

Laboratories and Lecture Halls

Through the twentieth century the university grew from a hopeful provincial foundation into one of the country's serious centres of research and teaching, strongest where its origins had pointed it — in medicine, descended from the old Bristol Medical School, and in engineering and the physical sciences, descended from the Merchant Venturers' technical tradition. Its laboratories earned it a scientific reputation out of proportion to its size; among the minds it helped to form was the Bristol-born physicist Paul Dirac, who studied engineering and then mathematics within the university before going on to Cambridge and to a share of the Nobel Prize, and who remained one of the most luminous names the city ever produced. For thirty-six years, from 1929, the university's chancellor was Winston Churchill, who held the largely ceremonial office through the whole long span of the nation's most dangerous century.

The two world wars marked it as they marked every such institution — the first carving names into its rolls of the dead, the second bringing the bombers over the city and the fire into the Wills tower itself. But the decades that followed brought the greatest expansion in its history. In the post-war widening of British higher education, and the surge of new universities and new students that came with the 1960s, Bristol grew at a pace its founders could scarcely have imagined: new faculties and research institutes multiplied, a veterinary school took root in the countryside south of the city, great halls of residence rose among the trees at Stoke Bishop, and the precinct of academic buildings spread outward from the Wills tower until the university had woven itself thoroughly into the fabric of the city's western heights. The student body swelled from a few hundred hopeful pioneers into a population of many thousands drawn from across the country and, increasingly, the world.

It became, in time, a large civic research university of many faculties and many thousands of students, drawing them from across the country and the world to the stone halls of Tyndall's Park, and numbering itself among the front rank of British universities. Its engineering school, in particular, sent generations of graduates out into the practical work of building and maintaining the modern world — among them, in an unremarkable cohort of the early 1980s, a quietly capable civil engineer named Graham Porter, one undistinguished name among the tens of thousands the university quietly equipped and forgot.

The Reckoning and the Long Work

The harder inheritance did not go away, and in the early twenty-first century the university was finally compelled to confront it. As Bristol underwent a wider and overdue public reckoning with its slave-trading past — a reckoning that turned, at moments, to open confrontation in the city's streets — the institution was forced to examine the names carved into its grandest buildings and the fortunes that had paid for them, to acknowledge openly that its tobacco and merchant benefactors had drawn their wealth from human bondage, and to argue, often bitterly and never to everyone's satisfaction, about what honesty about the past required of it in the present. It was the same argument the city was having with itself, conducted in the particular accent of an institution that prided itself on telling the truth.

That unfinished reckoning was, in its way, of a piece with the university's whole character — an institution founded on a genuinely noble idea and on genuinely tainted money, committed to the widening of opportunity and built by the narrowing cruelties of empire, forever a little better and a little worse than its own account of itself. What endured through all of it was the plain conviction stamped into its motto and its founding: that learning drew out the innate power of ordinary minds, that a great manufacturing city deserved a great university of its own, and that knowledge was too valuable a thing to be left to the privileged few. It had spent more than a century proving the idea, imperfectly and at no small moral cost, and the proving had been worth the doing.