Bristol had a university college from 1876 and became a university in 1909. It was intellectually more widely based and pre-1914 had rather more students than Birmingham. Sheffield evolved from Firth College, founded in 1879, to a university in 1905. The University of Wales was created in 1902, a federation of the University Colleges of Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883) and Bangor (1885); Swansea was added in 1920. Lampeter, although an Anglican seminary from 1822, and UWIST, which is the only university institution to have brought off a take-over bid for another, came after the last war. The pattern of dates is a remarkably regular one: a college created by local endeavour and subscription in the high period of civic pride and industrial prosperity which burgeoned forth in the brighter plumage of a university when Victorian self-help gave way to more opulent Edwardian display. But of course the numerical impact of this string of seven new universities was very limited. Their total intake in 1914 was barely more than 2000 a year - perhaps a quarter of 1 per cent of the population of relevant age.
There was a second wave of civic universities, which mostly remained as university colleges under the aegis of London University until after World War II: Southampton (which grew out of the Hartley Institute and became a University in 1952), Nottingham, Leicester, Exeter, Hull. Reading was half in this category, but a double exception because it was sponsored by Oxford not London, and because it became a full university in 1929, the only institution to receive such a charter between the wars. Newcastle, whose Armstrong College had been part of the University of Durham following its foundation in 1871, split from its older (but not ancient, contrary to frequent popular supposition) parent in 1963 and became an independent university, as did Dundee from St Andrews in 1966. By this time, however, the second wave of civic universities, and the fifth wave of British universities as a whole (the first wave being Oxford and Cambridge, the second the four old Scottish universities, the third Durham and London, and the fourth the Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol group plus Wales) was being overtaken by the sixth and post-the 1963 Robbins Report wave, which was half made up of Colleges of Advanced Technology turned from pumpkins into coaches by a touch of the Secretary of State’s wand and half of ‘green field’ universities mostly established outside historic cities.
To recapitulate the late pre-Robbins position, however, there were then twenty-two universities in Great Britain (or twenty-three with Northern Ireland), of which the only one not so far mentioned is Keele, which was set up as an Oxford-inspired liberal arts college in North Staffordshire in 1947, with the then Master of Balliol becoming the first Principal, and which became a university on the eve of Robbins in 1962.
The 1960s took the number of universities up from twenty-three to forty-six, the proportion of admissions to 7.5 per cent of the population of relevant age, and provided a decade and more of vastly expanding employment and promotion prospects for the university teacher. This period now seems almost infinitely remote from the restrictive financial climate in which all British universities have lived for the past ten years.
Apart from the major broadening of the gate of entry to which this period of expansion led, it also produced a desirable loosening of the British university hierarchy. Oxford and Cambridge in their differing ways maintained their near duopoly of assumed English excellence for the first half of this century. There was of course major work done elsewhere, particularly perhaps in London, with its specialized schools of which the London School of Economics on the arts side was matched by a number of others in science and medicine. But, broadly speaking, the civic, provincial or red-brick universities were then seen by themselves and others alike as no more than subsidiary hills in a mountain complex of which the twin peaks were Oxford and Cambridge. Most undergraduates, certainly on the arts side, would have preferred to go to these latter two had not lack of money, or connection, or confidence, without exceptional scholarship-winning ability, put these institutions just outside their reach. And there followed from this limitation of reach a subsequent exclusion, with very few exceptions, from the highest ranks in the law, the public service, the Church, and perhaps less strongly a range of other occupations. There were notable professorial spans at Manchester, at Birmingham, in London and elsewhere. But a high proportion of those who achieved them either came from Oxford or Cambridge and went back to them, or went on to them, or both.
The American position (admittedly in a much bigger country) where the general pre-eminence of a few great universities existed alongside a patchwork made up of differing clusters of particular quality, seemed to me to be much better balanced. Over the twenty-five years, from, say, 1955, the English experience moved to some quite considerable extent in this direction, with apart from the continuing independent tradition of the Scottish constellation, universities like Manchester and Bristol, Warwick and Newcastle achieving very distinct styles, qualities, and pulls of their own, with no degradation of Oxford and Cambridge but a consequent and healthy dilution of their monopoly. But that era is, I fear, over. I at once accept and half regret that the beginning of my Chancellorship should have coincided almost exactly with the return of Oxford to major fund-raising. I accept it because there is no other way in which we can keep Oxford as one of the handful of world-class universities. Neither the present government (and maybe no future government) is going to enable us to compete with the vast and continuing endowments of Harvard and Stanford. And in our case we have the additional burden of keeping up matchless collections of books and manuscripts as well as expensive but irreplaceable buildings.