If, as some people fondly imagine and like to insist, there is a difference between the Oxford and Cambridge type of man and cast of mind, Hughes and Llewelyn Davies may be taken as excellent representatives of their respective Universities. Oxford gave to the Working Men’s College the more emotional Hughes, with his all-round views and interests. Davies contributed the thoroughness and accuracy of Cambridge thought and methods. On the other hand, Charles Kingsley, another Cambridge man, would certainly be classed with Tom Hughes rather than with Llewelyn Davies. The author of ‘Westward Ho!’ might well have written ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays,’ or vice versa; but it is impossible to picture Llewelyn Davies as the author of ‘Tom Brown,’ or Hughes as the translator of Plato’s ‘Republic.’ In a later generation at the College, the counterpart of Hughes, with less genius but greater practical ability, was again a Cambridge man, the dearly loved Alfred Lyttelton, to whom I have already referred. The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. Year after year Oxford and Cambridge have welcomed parties of Working Men’s College students; and year after year, without any intermission, a constant stream of new teachers has flowed in from the two Universities—sometimes in greater volume from the one, sometimes from the other. It would be impossible to decide to which University we owe the greater debt. Maurice himself can be claimed by both, though Cambridge has the prior and, I think, the stronger claim to him. Of four past Principals, Maurice is in the balance, Lord Avebury belonged to neither University, and the other two, Tom Hughes, and Professor Dicey most admirable and effective of Principals, must be credited to Oxford. On the whole, perhaps, I must, as an Oxford man, reluctantly but gratefully acknowledge that Trinity College, Cambridge, stands out in our annals as having been from first to last our greatest benefactor. The two latest survivors of the founders, Westlake and Llewelyn Davies, had both been Fellows of Trinity.
I have spoken of Davies’ strong sense of civic duty. To compare him again with Hughes, there was as great devotion to duty in the latter, but with a somewhat different colouring. In Hughes’ case the sense of duty was not so sharply defined, or clearly thought out, nor so much a matter of reason. With him it was rather a feeling, an instinct, part of his nature, such a sense of duty as comes into being at a great public school, in the form of esprit de corps, loyalty to a community of comrades and friends. All these men had this sense of obligation in different shades and forms; all heard the call of duty, each in his own way—the clergyman, the scholar, the public official, the merchant, the lawyer, the artist—and all obeyed the call by giving of their own particular store of knowledge.
To the Greeks of old duty and goodness presented themselves in the guise of the beautiful, and this may be one reason why so many artists of fame gave their help to the College. In the list of art teachers of the past are the names of Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne Jones, Thomas Woolner, Stacy Marks, and others. One of the longest lived and best loved of the founders was Lowes Dickinson, who taught in the art class for many years, and, as all who knew him will testify, never lost sight of the connection between goodness and beauty. But it was not to be expected that the students, or would-be students, would be all of this type, until they had been duly inoculated. For instance, in the account of art teaching at the College in early days, which is given in the Jubilee volume, there is a story of a man coming to Ruskin’s class with a request to be taught how to draw a cart-wheel. He explained that he was a wheelwright, and that it would pay him in his business if he could draw a wheel as it looked lying on the ground. He wanted no art or anything of the kind, but simply to learn how to draw a wheel. This limited aspiration was not at all to Ruskin’s mind, and the wheelwright appears to have gone away sorrowing. The man came, quite naturally and laudably, in order to obtain some technical instruction, which would bring him in more money. No set of men were ever more anxious than the Founders of the College that their poorer brethren should rise and prosper, hence their staunch support of the Co-operative Movement. But they did not found it to give technical instruction; they founded it to teach the ‘humanities’ in the widest sense (including boxing), to give to poor men more human lives, to widen and multiply their interests, to open their understanding, to make them better citizens. They were democrats, but not democrats of the utilitarian type. They taught duty, the faith that was in them, more than rights or claims. They never taught the working man to try everything by the test question, What am I going to get by it in pounds, shillings, and pence? nor did they for one moment appeal to the manual workers as a class with interests distinct from those of the community. The spirit of class was to them anathema, the negation of brotherhood and of true citizenship, the enemy of the State. They taught that men should have their full living wage, if they earned it; that true citizen life implied conditions under which honest labour would always ensure to the labourer sufficiency of good food and a decent home; but they taught also that pounds, shillings, and pence are not the one thing needful; that possessions mean something more and something better than lands or wealth; that knowledge and wisdom, the manifold interests which come from knowledge, the intelligent appreciation of the world around, of men and things, are what life has to give, and are available to poor as well as to rich; that, if a man has knowledge, with bread to eat and a human home, it is a matter of indifference whether he is rich or whether he is poor: he is an equal among equals. So they taught, and so the students learnt and lived their lives accordingly.
These men founded a college. Here is Maurice’s conception of a college, as given by Llewelyn Davies: ‘The name College had a significance on which Maurice loved to dwell.... A college was an association of teachers and learners; and that was what Maurice desired the Working Men’s College to be. It was not to be an institution to which the uneducated might resort, to pick up knowledge which might be of pecuniary benefit to them. The idea of fellowship was to run through all its work; every teacher was to assume that he might learn as well as teach; every student was to be made to feel that, in coming to the College, he was entering into a society in which he might hope to become more of a citizen and more of a man.’ This was no conception of a visionary, which ended in a dream. These were the lines laid down for practical guidance and application, and on these lines to this day the College lives and moves and has its being. My experience of the world at large has been that the rich man is apt to patronise the poor, and that working men in their turn are somewhat inclined to look askance upon would-be benefactors with good intent. But when I first went to the College a great many years ago, I found no signs of patronising, or being patronised. Nothing of the kind was in the minds of students or teachers: it was all natural. They were not troubling their heads as to social standing or worldly equipment; nor, on the other hand, was there the slightest affectation of studied equality or absence of the ordinary courtesies of life. There they were in their own College, friends among friends, all engaged in the same pursuit, the pursuit of knowledge, all ready to help and grateful for being helped. I found that a large proportion of the teachers were, as is still the case, student teachers; men who, having owed to the College all their store of knowledge, and much more also, had come back to repay the debt in kind, taking classes for years together, usually after a heavy day’s work in their trade or profession; and I found, again, that there was an attachment to the place, an animus revertendi—at least as strong as in the case of the old Public Schools or Universities. To put it bluntly, the Working Men’s College was founded to turn out gentlemen in the truest and best sense of the term, and it is turning them out, according to the original sample, to the present time.
To take one among numberless examples which might be given of the College spirit, I call to mind an old student who was a very great favourite with us all and a constant attendant at the College, until age and infirmity limited the number of his visits. He was a wood-turner by trade; always a poor man, but the happiest, as he was the friendliest, of men, for he was master of a science which he needed no riches to follow up: he was a most expert botanist, and when not earning his bread, he was studying his subject or collecting new specimens on country walks. What did he care about class distinctions or political parties or social upheavals? Nothing at all. On the other hand, he illustrated the truth that a live and wholesome community, which is at unity with itself, is a most fruitful field for good stories and humorous sayings. He had the most delightful gift of dry humour. A man of portly carriage, he had been listening at one of our festive gatherings to a speaker who enlarged on the subject of all-round men—I forget in what connection, but presumably on the product which was to be expected from the College. Speaking later, my old friend described himself as not an all-round man but bulging out on one side. On another occasion the Lubbock Field Club—the natural history club of the College—gathered to do him honour, and the speakers indulged in exuberance of sentiment. In acknowledging his reception, the honoured guest botanically remarked, ‘The Field Club is all heart, like winter cabbages.’
Ever setting duty and citizenship before their own eyes, and the eyes of those whom they guided and taught, the Founders of the College were intensely good Englishmen and whole-hearted lovers of their country without any reservations. That the claims of class should ever compete with duty to the State would have been abhorrent to them. Nor were they scared by any bogey of militarism. The members of the College entered heart and soul into the Volunteer movement of 1859, and a corps was formed, one of the earliest of all the volunteer corps, which became the 19th Middlesex. As might be expected, Tom Hughes was the commandant; prominent among the officers were John Martineau, pupil and intimate friend of Charles Kingsley, and the Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr. Furnivall, most bellicose of men; while Maurice himself became chaplain of the regiment. In these days of conscientious objectors, many might with advantage read a letter which Maurice wrote to his soldier son, afterwards the distinguished military writer, Sir Frederick Maurice, and in which the nobility of the soldier’s calling is set forth by one who had been brought up in tenets of a widely different kind, but had renounced them on the principles which governed his whole life—duty to man and fear of God. The letter is published in the memoir of Sir Frederick Maurice by his son, now also General Maurice, who in the third generation is adding new distinction to a great and honoured name.
During his thirty-six years of parish work in London, Llewelyn Davies had little time to give to the teaching or management of the College; and for the nineteen years when he held the living of Kirkby Lonsdale, he was necessarily cut off from it, save for occasional visits, as was Tom Hughes in his County Court Judgeship at Chester. He had taken a Bible class in early days, in 1866; and after he came back from Westmorland to end his days in retirement in London, again, a very old but still vigorous man, he took the Bible class for a short time. His last words spoken at the College were at our annual supper in the Maurice Hall, in December 1910. He testified that ‘the College had always opened its arms to those who came to it with the idea of not merely getting personal advantage, but of becoming better citizens of their country, and better members of the great human family, and who desired to serve their country and kind to the best of their power’; and he claimed that ‘every one who had been associated with the College, either as teacher or as student, had felt in some degree that they were honoured by their connection with it.’ It probably never entered into his head that the College was honoured by association with him. His speech ended with what he said and felt might be a parting benediction, ‘God bless the Working Men’s College.’ He was never able to come among us again, but as each Founder’s Day came round we remembered him, and he remembered us. And we shall ever remember him and his work. He lies in Hampstead Churchyard, as his master, Maurice, at Highgate. The line of founders has now died out, but their memorial is a living memorial—better and nobler lives of men.