Hertford’s Library has gradually grown over the past two centuries. As the college prepares for a major library rebuild project to create a library fit for the 21st century we look back over some of the key developments in its history.
1820: Magdalen Hall’s dreadful fire
Magdalen Hall was based in a site adjacent to Magdalen College on Oxford’s High Street from its foundation in the late 15th century to the early 19th century. A fire in their buildings on the High Street proved the catalyst for its move to Catte Street.
‘I have just time to inform you, that a dreadful fire broke out in Magdalen Hall…this morning, about three o’clock, which totally consumed the whole range of buildings, consisting of about eighteen sets of rooms, in three hours… No lives were lost. All the furniture, books, &c. destroyed. It is supposed to have originated in the room of a young man over the common rooms…’
Source: Morning Chronicle, 11 Jan 1820
Following this fire, which was caused by a student who left a candle burning and fell asleep, Magdalen Hall moved onto the crumbling Catte Street site of Hertford College (previously Hart Hall). In 1874 Magdalen Hall legally became a college of Oxford University and revived the name Hertford College. In the subsequent 200 years the library collections have moved around the sites as storage requirements and members’ needs have changed. The library has never had a purpose built space on the Catte Street site.
Source: Skelton, Oxonia Antiqua Restaurata (1843)
1908: A new chapel
Architect T.G. Jackson designed the new chapel, bridge, dining hall and spiral staircase at Hertford in the early 20th century.
On these plans you can see the new chapel design on the right and the small old chapel on the left, which is now the library. Behind the original chapel is a toilet block (now the site of the library staff office)! Initially the old chapel remained as a single large library room, which would have been a very well lit space.
T.G. Jackson’s architectural drawing for the new Chapel.
‘…Chapel is becoming so famous that the local guides, who used to dismiss Hertford in a single sentence, have found it necessary to add a new speech to their repertoire and to extend their itinerary. This is a mixed blessing, but we may set against it the great though very secular advantages which have resulted from the evacuation of the Old Chapel, which, by the abolition of the ‘horse box’ and the addition of a gallery, has been converted into a very serviceable Library. There is room in it for a surprisingly large number of books, and tables have been provided for the accommodation of readers, who are now admitted at most hours of the day.’
Hertford College Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1910)
Jackson plan of the original chapel before conversion into the libraryInterior of original Hertford Chapel before it became the library building19th century view of Old Buildings Quad before the building of the new chapel and dining hall
The Library keeps on growing
Demand for study space and bookshelves continued right through the 20th century (and still does today). In the 1960s a library extension was built onto the old building. The space, including the old building, was split into two floors, creating a light-filled first floor and a very dark ground floor. Further extensions were added in the basement levels in the nineties and noughties to meet the continued demand for more space.
Hertford is planning a library rebuild to support many future generations in their academic studies. This project will create additional accessible individual and group study areas, space for the modern book collections, and specialist storage and consultation space for the special collections.
Just a month after Britain had declared war on Germany in September 1939, a group of young men assembled for their freshmen photograph in the quad of Hertford College. In the middle of the group was Thomas John Foster Roberts who had come up from Carmarthenshire to read Engineering. On that autumn day, his carefree smile was matched by the unruly lock of hair which had escaped from his neat side parting.
Close-up of Tom Roberts (L) and Dom Mintoff (R) on the second to back row in the 1939 freshman photograph
Whatever hopes Tom had for his university education were cut short by the war. In 1940, aged 19, he enlisted with the Royal Engineers 20 Field Company, a unit which worked with infantry divisions on the ground in occupied Europe. He would have worked with his fellow “sappers” – from the French to undermine – on bridging, demolition, semi-permanent defences, roadblocks and the disposal of unexploded bombs.
Although military service took him far away from Oxford and he had had barely a year as a student, Tom remembered his experiences at Hertford fondly. Whether exploring the ancient city and its buildings or whiling away happy hours on the river, the young engineer always had his camera with him.
Dom Mintoff, the future Prime Minister of Malta and the freshman pictured to the right of Tom in the 1939 photograph, recalled their shared passion for photography.
“Roberts invited me to his rooms and […] opened his treasured album of waterfalls and mountain peaks, blossoming trees in country lanes, his father’s garden and mansions peopled with all the persons dearest to him. They were all stills, yet he imparted to every photo an artistic touch that evoked living reality.”
Mintoff, Malta, Mediterra : My Youth, Dom Mintoff (2018)
The small square prints capture an Oxford which, in 1940, must have seemed a million miles away from the war in Europe. Leaning out from the window of his college room, Tom photographed the famous Hertford bridge – less than 20 years old at the time – and the dazzlingly new edifice of Giles Gilbert Scott’s New Bodleian Library.
He also captured the luxury of leisure time which he wasn’t to have as a Royal Engineer: afternoons spent punting on the Cherwell or watching the rowers from the college barges which, in the 1940s, were still moored on the Thames.
Tom Roberts, 1940
These were happy memories which Tom took with him to the battlefield. After a day of gruelling work, we can imagine that he would take out the Oxford prints and dream of some future in which he’d be able to return to Hertford and finish his studies.
Like so many others, Tom never made it home. He was killed in action during the Normandy landings on 27th June 1944, aged just 23. He was buried at the St. Manvieu War Cemetery in Cheux.
Tom’s photographs of Oxford were returned to his family along with the rest of his personal possessions. The war had put an end to the “undeclared ambition” of “the gentlest and the merriest” of the 1939 freshmen – in the words of his friend Mintoff – “to see the name Roberts writ large on the silver screen as the cameraman of a film performed by famous stars.”
Evelyn Waugh is one of Hertford College’s most famous — and occasionally infamous — alumni. Waugh had originally hoped to go to New College in Oxford, but was offered a place as a History Scholar at Hertford College, where he matriculated in January 1922.
Hertford College in the early 20th Century
Waugh arrived prepared to love Oxford and was full of good intentions, but by his own later admission did very little academic work whilst at Hertford and took only a casual interest in college activities. Sadly for biographers and Waugh enthusiasts this means that the college archives contain only glimpses of Waugh during his time as an undergraduate at Oxford.
College life
Waugh arrived partway through the academic year. In A Little Learning he describes Hertford as ‘a respectable but rather dreary little college’; and it was certainly still recovering from the ravages of the First World War. Student numbers were small, buildings dilipidated and accommodation cramped.
Dinners were less elaborate and breakfast was served in hall as a common meal — in 1921 the college magazine noted with sadness that it was ‘no longer customary to entertain to three-course breakfasts’, although lunch was still ‘consumed decently in private’. Hertford had the advantage of cheaper living costs than many of the Oxford colleges and for his first two terms at Hertford Waugh occupied relatively inexpensive ground floor rooms (Staircase III room 30) in the Old Buildings Quad.
In the autumn term of 1922, however, he moved to a rather grander and more expensive set of rooms in Staircase II (now the Bursary Staircase) of the Old Buildings Quad. He was to occupy these rooms for the following four terms.The other sets in Staircase II were occupied by a fellow student, Anthony Disney, and three Fellows (Denniston, Murphy & Campbell). Perhaps for reasons of economy, Waugh moved for his final two terms in 1924 to a less grand set of rooms in Staircase V of the Old Buildings Quad, known as ‘The Cottage’.
Waugh appears in only two official photographs in Hertford College Archives. He arrived too late to be included in the Freshmen photograph for 1922 but a Gilman & Soame college group photograph taken in 1923 shows a youthful Evelyn on the front row, rather too close for comfort to his history tutor and arch enemy, CRMF Cruttwell. Close by we can tentatively identify his friends Terence Greenidge and Anthony Bushell.
Waugh seems to have taken very little part in college activities as he quickly became involved in the Oxford Union and outside societies such as the Hypocrites’ Club. He was, however, a member of the college’s idiosyncratic Fox Society, for which he became the Secretary shortly after matriculating. Waugh and his friends obviously took great pleasure in debating, as these extracts from a Fox Society Minute Book demonstrate.
In November 1923 the Society held a joint debate with Trinity College, the motion being ‘This House wishes It was still at School’.
“Mr Waugh (Hertf.) complained of the self-righteousness of the House: the first speaker had stood for Freedom, the second for Faith, and the third for Virtue. He himself stood for a reasonable standard of personal comfort. At this point several visitors had to depart as their efforts to secure this ideal had involved them with the Proctors.”
C R M F Cruttwell was a distinguished historian and Lecturer in History at Hertford College from 1912. Although he eventually became Principal of Hertford he had never really recovered from wounds and shell shock sustained in the First World War and this may account for reports of his idiosyncratic behaviour. Waugh came to Hertford as a History Scholar and was therefore tutored by Cruttwell, but Waugh’s lack of interest in the subject meant that their relationship quickly deteriorated. Waugh wrote numerous unflattering depictions of Cruttwell in University publications and his own subsequent novels and memoirs — a persistent feud which he maintained until Cruttwell’s early death in 1941.
Records in Hertford College Archives point to a different interpretation of the relationship between Waugh and Cruttwell. Felix Markham, who succeeded Cruttwell as Modern History Tutor in 1931, considered Waugh’s descriptions of Cruttwell to be a caricature and travesty of the truth and that Cruttwell had rightly considered Waugh to be a thoroughly lazy and often drunken undergraduate. The actor and theatre director Frith Banbury matriculated at Hertford eight years after Waugh in 1930, and he later wrote a brief memoir for the archives of his time at the college. In it he notes: ‘Incidentally I do not have a vivid memory of ‘Crutters’, which leads me to the conclusion that Evelyn Waugh’s demonisation of him had more to do with Waugh than with Cruttwell’.
Waugh sat his Schools exams in the summer of 1924 and achieved only a third class. As he had arrived part way through the academic year in 1922, he had intended to complete a further terms residence in order fulfil the requirements for his degree to be awarded. However his lack of academic progress meant that his father was unwilling to allow him to stay on, and this led to him leaving without having completed his terms, and so with no degree awarded.
From Hertford Waugh spent a short time studying at art school in London, and then took up a teaching post at a school in Wales. Recorded here as ‘Denbigh School’, it was in fact Arnold House in North Wales, which became the inspiration for his first novel Decline and Fall.
In later life Waugh was not a particularly devoted alumnus, but he did make occasional returns to Hertford, mainly to speak at meetings of the Tyndale Society. The Minutes Book of the Tyndale Debating Society from May 1948 record the text of a paper given by Waugh entitled ‘Monsignor Ronald Knox as a Man of Letters’; and he returned in 1954 to give a talk on the wines of Burgundy, ‘with five sample bottles which he distributed among members’. In a letter written in 1952 to the Bursar W L Ferrar, however, he declined an invitation to a college dinner, on the grounds that as the journey from Somerset to Oxford was more laborious than travelling to the Amazon.
