Prime Ministers are the most obvious piece of litmus paper but also provide only a narrowly based test. However, if Lord Chancellors or Viceroys of India are put through the same sieve, roughly the same result is produced. In the past hundred years there have been thirteen Oxford Lord Chancellors to four Cambridge ones. In the ninety-year history of the viceroyalty there were fifteen Oxonians and five Cantabrigians.
Something the same has been true at the less elevated ranks both of politics and of administration, particularly overseas in the heyday of empire. Despite the tradition of the Butler family amongst a number of other Cambridge examples, Oxford was always twice as strong in the Indian Civil Service and in the Sudan Political Service. In the words of Richard Symonds, historian of Oxford and Empire: ‘No other university had a college such as [was] Balliol between 1870 and 1914, devoted to selecting and preparing young men for high office and then, through the network of old Balliol men, ensuring that they secured it. Nor elsewhere was there an institution comparable to All Souls … [which] appointed as its fellows the most brilliant graduates of each year who, as one commentator said in the 1930s, thus joined a committee which took upon itself no less a task than running the British Empire.’ It is tempting to comment that the main direction in which they ran it was into the ground.
This Oxford approach was as much a matter of attitude of mind as of the statistics of jobs procured. Its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit and interest, as I have said, were more worldly, more metaphysical and less empirically enquiring than those of Cambridge. Nor, surprisingly, was the attachment to ‘cool, clear Cambridge English’ quite so strong. Oxford sometimes preferred obfuscating a question with an epigram to clarifying it with quiet diligence. The Franks Report - the 1966 result of a seven-strong internal enquiry into the affairs of the university - proclaimed its determination that ‘reading and writing, rather than listening, should continue to be the salient characteristics of that Oxford system’. This was an illuminating comment and sensible declaration of intent, but it did not reveal the whole truth, which is that Oxford has now long been a university based hardly at all on listening, substantially on reading and writing, but above all on talking. The taciturnity of Whewell or the simple certainties of G. E. Moore would have sat ill with the unending and kaleidoscopic talk of Whateley or Bowra or Berlin.
Oxford at its worst has been glib and flippant: at its best it has constantly burnished with a new sparkle the store of humanistic learning of which it has been a crucial guardian; and in its median performance it has kept Britain well supplied with those good at the chattering occupations, such as defending the criminal classes, conducting television panels, and governing the country. But it cannot be denied that for nearly a hundred years after the important watershed of 1870 in the universities it unashamedly preferred the soft climate and lush meadows of a river valley leading smoothly to London, while being happy for Cambridge to live more robustly in the harsher East Anglian countryside and closer to the rugged frontiers of knowledge.
Cambridge had followed up the eighteenth-century birth of the mathematical tripos with the creation of the natural sciences tripos in 1849, but although this came after a period of very strong increase in numbers (substantially greater than any decline in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and much concentrated in Trinity and St John’s, which were between them responsible for half the admissions) it was not immediately followed by any significant provision of natural science facilities. In 1871, however, the lesser known of the two Dukes of Devonshire who between them occupied the Cambridge Chancellorship from 1861 to 1908 performed what turned out to be one of the rare significant acts of any Chancellor of either university for several centuries and made the gift that led to the creation of the Cavendish Laboratory. There was a good deal of scientific ferment in Cambridge before that. Darwin had come and gone at the end of the 1820s and the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Adam Sedgwick had completed his long but active period as professor of botany in 1861. F. D. Maurice and then Henry Sidgwick dominated successive generations of the Apostles, which society was already nearly fifty years old. And the great interlocking dynasties of Cambridge families were already setting up their encampments west of the Cam.
Nevertheless, it required the foundation of the Cavendish, as both a cause and a symbol of a line of Cambridge development, to set this university’s first half of the twentieth-century style in a mould markedly different from Oxford. If in the 1920s or 1930s one had heard that a breakthrough in the natural or applied sciences, or in mathematics, or in economics, had occurred in a British university it would have been far more likely to have happened on the banks of the Cam than of the Isis. It would have been difficult for Oxford to have produced contemporary names that could stand in rivalry to Rutherford, Hardy, Russell, Keynes, Blackett, Dirac, Adrian, Chadwick or Aston. It could I think have been then fairly said that the baton not merely of British but of world pre-eminence on the frontiers of knowledge was in the hands of Cambridge.