THE WORLD OF UCL NEGLEY HARTE, JOHN NORTH AND GEORGINA BREWIS THE WORLD OF UCL REVISED AND UPDATED From its foundation in 1826, UCL embraced a progressive and pioneering spirit. It was the first university in England to admit students regardless of religion and made higher education affordable and accessible to a much broader section of society. It was also effectively the first university to welcome women on equal terms with men. From the outset UCL showed a commitment to innovative ideas and new methods of teaching and research. This book charts the history of UCL from 1826 through to the present day, highlighting its many contributions to society in Britain and around the world. It covers the expansion of the university through the growth in student numbers and institutional mergers. It documents shifts in governance throughout the years and the changing social and economic context in which UCL operated, including challenging periods of reconstruction after two World Wars. Today UCL is one of the powerhouses of research and teaching, and a truly global university. It is currently seventh in the QS World University Rankings. This completely revised and updated edition features a new chapter based on interviews with key individuals at UCL. It comes at a time of ambitious development for UCL with the establishment of an entirely new campus in East London, UCL East, and Provost Michael Arthur’s ‘UCL 2034’ strategy, which aims to secure the university’s long-term future and commits UCL to delivering global impact. THE WORLD OF UCL NEGLEY HARTE, JOHN NORTH AND GEORGINA BREWIS REVISED AND UPDATED THE WORLD OF UCL Contents Foreword 6 Author’s note to the fourth edition 8 Chapter 1 The Foundation: 1825–28 10 Chapter 2 The University of London: 1828–36 32 Chapter 3 University College: 1836–78 62 Chapter 4 The Admission of Women: 1878–1904 86 Chapter 5 The Gregory Foster Years: 1904–29 136 Chapter 6 UCL in War and Peace: 1929–51 180 Chapter 7 The Evans and Annan Years: 1951–78 220 Chapter 8 The Years of Expansion: 1978–2003 248 Chapter 9 London’s Global University: UCL in the twenty- rst century 290 Appendix 336 Further reading 340 Notes 341 Picture credits 342 Index 344 First edition published in 1978 Second edition published in 1991 Third edition published in 2004 This edition published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Authors, 2018 Images © Authors and copyright holders named in the Picture credits, 2018 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identi ed as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Harte N., North J. & Brewis G. 2018. The World of UCL . London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352933 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978-1-78735-294-0 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-293-3 (PDF) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352933 Designed by Bobby Birchall, Bobby&Co Printed in Belgium by Albe De Coker Front cover image: View of UCL Portico (UCL Digital Media) Back cover image: A view of the scene in the Front Quad during the Bazaar and Fête in July 1909 (UCL Library, College Collection) Foreword From its foundation in 1826, UCL has embraced an innovative, progressive and critical spirit of which we are the proud inheritors today. We were the rst university to make higher education affordable and accessible to a much broader section of society and the rst to introduce university level teaching in many subjects. Our commitment to pioneering methods of teaching continues today through an intense focus and absolute commitment to excellence in research-based education. Our 20-year strategy, UCL 2034, provides a framework for the next few decades that is rmly grounded in UCL’s founding principles of academic excellence and research aimed at addressing real-world problems. For almost two centuries our staff, students and alumni have endeavoured to shape the modern world. To date no fewer than 28 Nobel Prizes have been earned by people who are, or were, students or academics at UCL. The university’s leadership over these 190 years has bene ted from a tradition of independent academic critique that is alive and well at UCL today. In the twenty- rst century UCL is truly London’s global university, but from its very foundation UCL has been international in outlook. The very word ‘global’ was coined by our spiritual guide, and oldest resident, Jeremy Bentham. UCL has never chosen to rest on its laurels: this edition comes at a time of both ambitious redevelopment on the Bloomsbury campus and the establishment of an entirely new campus on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. Such vision would not seem out of place to UCL’s founders, whose bold decision to commission a grand, neoclassical design for the new university was roundly derided at the time. I am delighted to introduce this thoroughly revised and updated edition of The World of UCL . I particularly welcome the greater attention paid in this volume to women’s contributions to life at UCL over the past 190 years. UCL was the rst university in England to admit women on equal terms to men. Equality and diversity are enshrined in our Benthamite origins, and promoting these values has been central to my period in of ce. I am also pleased to note that through UCL Press’s innovative open access publishing programme, this edition will be available to a much wider audience than ever before. Professor Michael Arthur President and Provost April 2018 FOREWORD 7 THE WORLD OF UCL 8 AUTHOR’S NOTE 9 Author’s note to the fourth edition This is a completely revised and updated edition of a book rst published in 1978 at the time of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of UCL’s foundation, when the College was home to barely 6,000 students. The second edition was undertaken in 1991 at the prompting of Professor John White, the then Pro-Provost, and Dr Stephen Montgomery, then the Director of External Affairs. The third edition was completed in 2004 at the behest of Dr Alisdaire Lockhart, the Director of Development & Corporate Communications, and Professor Malcolm Grant, the President and Provost. UCL today is home to 40,000 students and counting. It is embarked on some of the most ambitious developments in its 190-year history, including the establishment of an entirely new campus in East London. This new book was undertaken at the suggestions of Professor David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) and Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services). Credit for the bulk of the research must lie with the book’s original authors, Negley Harte and John North. As they have acknowledged in past editions, the book owes a strong debt to previous historians of the College, above all to Hale Bellot’s University College London, 1826 – 1926 , published in 1929. My task has been to draft an entirely new nal chapter and to restructure the penultimate chapter, as well as to attempt to correct inaccuracies and revise certain earlier sections in the light of changed interpretations and understandings of past episodes and individuals. I have derived much satisfaction from adding new material on the role of women at UCL, as well as additional information on the considerable impact of the First and Second World Wars. I have also been pleased to elevate the place of students – a group that is curiously often omitted from such institutional histories – in the book. For this new edition, which has been completely redesigned, we took the decision to reduce the number of illustrations signi cantly in order to give more prominence to those selected. The new chapter is based on documentary research and interviews with a number of key individuals at UCL. My thanks are due to: Michael Arthur, Tim Beasley Murray, Jonathan Bell, Cathy Brown, Celia Caulcott, Helen Chatterjee, David Colquhoun, Subhadra Das, Becky Francis, Mary Fulbrook, Marilyn Gallyer, Hazel Genn, Deborah Gill, Malcolm Grant, Lori Houlihan, Rex Knight, Paola Lettieri, David Lomas, John Mitchell, Alan Penn, David Price, Geraint Rees, Rebecca Reiner, Anthony Smith, Cengiz Tarhan and Mark West. My particular thanks go to colleagues at UCL Press, especially Lara Speicher and Jaimee Biggins, as well as designer Bobby Birchall and editor Catherine Bradley; Colin Penman and Robert Winkworth of UCL Special Collections; John North, Gary McCulloch, Paul Ayris, David Price, Rebecca Reiner, Nicola Brewer, Subhadra Das, Liz Bruchet and Helen Downes for helpful comments on the draft; Mary Hinkley, Pauline Hubner, Amy Smith, Charles Harrowell, Peter Guillery, Faria Alam, Rebecca Spaven, Kristina Clackson Bonnington and Oliver O’Brien for their help with the illustrations, and Sarah Hellawell, Nina Pearlman, Natasha Walsh and Rachna Kayastha for other assistance. Georgina Brewis April 2018 C H A P T E R 1 The Foundation 1 8 2 5 – 2 8 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 13 Unlike the modern civic universities which grew from some local patriotism, University College London grew from an idea. Originally that idea was based upon a belief in freedom of investigation without any distinction of creed or race or sex. That quest, which made University College the pioneer in modern university development in England, also led the founders to find a place in the College for studies which had previously been outside the university curriculum. The freedom to investigate was not an idle phrase: it meant breaking into new fields. This is still the central tradition of the College. Sir Ifor Evans in UCL: A Survey, 1950–55 (1955) What we know today as University College London (UCL) was founded in 1826 and rst opened its doors to students as the self-styled ‘University of London’ in October 1828. London at that date was the largest city in Europe and almost the only capital without a university. The new institution was intended from the beginning to open higher education to people excluded from the ancient seats of learning in Oxford and Cambridge. Its rst students included nonconformists, Jews, Catholics and others. Notoriously described by Thomas Arnold as that ‘godless institution in Gower Street’, England’s third university prompted anxiety, contempt and curiosity among the early nineteenth-century establishment. It is generally but incorrectly believed that Jeremy Bentham was the founder of UCL. This myth is sustained in a bizarre manner by the display of the body of the great philosopher of ethics, jurisprudence and government, ‘in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought’, as he instructed before his death in 1832. Besides the box with Bentham in it, UCL possesses over 200 more boxes full of his writings, a collection that has been called ‘one of the most remarkable monuments to the mind of a single man in all its aspects to be found anywhere’. Prominently displayed in the Flaxman Gallery is the huge painting undertaken in 1922 by Henry Tonks, the then Slade Professor of Fine Art, portraying William Wilkins, the architect, offering the original College plans up to Bentham for his approval, while Henry Brougham, Thomas Campbell and Henry Crabb Robinson look on (Fig. 1.1). The ‘Auto-Icon’ has been in the possession of UCL since 1850, Fig. 1.1 Henry Tonks’ remarkable but completely unhistorical painting of the building of the College dates from 1922. It shows the architect William Wilkins offering his plans up to Jeremy Bentham for approval. THE WORLD OF UCL 14 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 15 subject from Campbell to Henry Brougham, another Scot. Brougham was a brilliant man, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review , who had moved to London to seek commanding outlets for his versatility and energy in the law and politics (Fig. 1.4). First elected as an MP in 1810, he became particularly involved with the cause of Fig. 1.4 The lawyer and politician Henry Brougham MP (1778–1868), another of the founders of UCL, in a painting by James Lonsdale. and occasionally attends meetings of the College’s governing body. His most recent appearance was at a Council meeting in July 2013, the minutes recording that Jeremy Bentham was ‘present but not voting’ (Fig. 1.2). In fact Bentham played no such personal role in the establishment of the College and was an old man of 80 when it opened. He did give his blessing and nancial support to the venture, however, and the founders certainly owed a very considerable intellectual debt to him. 1 UCL was founded by what Bentham called ‘an association of liberals’ in which the leading roles were played by an improbable duo formed by a poet and a lawyer. Credit for the original proposal must go to Thomas Campbell, the now largely forgotten Scottish poet whose Pleasures of Hope (1799) brought him popular fame and a rapid entrée into London literary society (Fig. 1.3). In 1820, on a visit to Bonn, he was impressed by the religious toleration of the re-founded university there and formed the idea of establishing ‘a great London University’ for ‘effectively and multifariously teaching, examining, exercising and rewarding with honours, in the liberal arts and sciences, the youth of our middling rich people’. In February 1825 The Times printed a powerful open letter on this Fig. 1.2 The clothed skeleton or ‘Auto-Icon’ of Jeremy Bentham, sitting in pensive posture outside the Provost’s office in the South Cloisters. The head is made of wax. Fig. 1.3 An engraving of the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), based on a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. One of the founders of UCL, Campbell envisaged ‘a great London university’ open to the middle classes. THE WORLD OF UCL 16 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 17 University of Edinburgh was the most powerful model of all, familiar as it was to Brougham and many of the founding professoriate in London (Fig. 1.6). When Campbell and Brougham began to organise a university for London, the only existing universities in England were those long established at Oxford and Cambridge – described by Bentham as ‘the two great public nuisances ... storehouses and nurseries of political corruption’. Membership of the Church of Fig. 1.5 The University of Virginia, founded in 1819 and designed by Thomas Jefferson, was an important model for UCL. Here it is seen soon after its opening in 1825. popular education, associating himself with George Birkbeck and the mechanics’ institutes and founding in 1826 the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 2 Brougham regarded himself as a Benthamite, as a believer in the utilitarian principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ – though it has been claimed that in his view the greatest number was number one. His extravagant style smacked of humbug to many, but he was a man who got things done. Under his direction Campbell’s dreams of a ‘great London University’ were turned into reality. A second university which provided a model for UCL was Thomas Jefferson’s carefully planned University of Virginia, which had opened in 1825 (Fig. 1.5). The THE WORLD OF UCL 18 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 19 doubled in the rst half of the nineteenth century, and the combined effects of industrialisation and urbanisation were producing new social patterns with new pressures and demands. The industrial revolution necessitated an extended system of higher education. The main appeal of the new university was therefore to the interests excluded from the established system, such as it was, and to the various new social groups. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, a millionaire nancier and later the rst Jew to become a baronet, played an especially signi cant role (Fig. 1.7). He brought Campbell and Fig. 1.7 The portrait of one of the leading members of Council, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, presented to the College by the Jewish Historical Society of England. England was necessary for admission to the one and for graduation from the other. All nonconformists, Catholics and Jews were thus excluded, while many Anglicans were kept out by the social restrictiveness, the cost or the institutions’ characteristic intellectual backwardness. The old universities were seen to be increasingly out of touch with a rapidly changing society. The population of England Fig. 1.6 The University of Edinburgh, familiar to Brougham and many of UCL’s first Professors, was the most powerful model for the new College. THE WORLD OF UCL 20 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 21 of between £150,000 and £300,000 by the selling of shares of £100 each (Fig. 1.9). From among the ‘proprietors’, as the shareholders were called, 24 men were to be elected as the Council, the all-powerful body which was to control the University’s property, appoint the Professors and regulate the education of the students. It was a fundamental principle of the new institution that religion in any form should be neither a requirement for entry nor a subject for teaching. As a corollary it was decided that no minister of religion should sit on the Council. The Revd Dr Cox served therefore as Honorary Secretary of that body until he became UCL’s Librarian in 1827. From the outset the promoters sought incorporation. Brougham’s soundings towards a Royal Charter in 1825 were rebuffed by the Tory government of the day, and his subsequent efforts to achieve an Act of Parliament were defeated by the in uence of Oxford and Cambridge (Fig. 1.10). Parliamentary assistance was provided by Joseph Hume, one of the members of the original Council. A leading radical, Hume was indefatigable in support of the College as well as of those other great progressive causes of the age, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. After 1832 he was joined in the House of Commons by another member of the original Council, William Tooke, a prominent solicitor who became the rst Treasurer of the College and of the Hospital. The strength of the combined opposition of Oxbridge and of the London medical profession to legal recognition of the College as a ‘University’ could not Fig. 1.9 A share certificate issued to the College’s original proprietors. Brougham together on the project and ensured the considerable support of the Jewish community. The nonconformists were actively led by Francis Augustus Cox, the Baptist minister of Hackney, while a different dissenting strand was represented by the support of Zachary Macaulay, whose main work had been devoted to the abolition of the slave trade. Catholics were represented by the Duke of Norfolk and the Whig establishment provided a number of other titled luminaries. James Mill, the utilitarian philosopher and father of John Stuart Mill, actively represented Benthamism, and the various progressive in uences rubbed shoulders readily with supporters from the City of London (Fig. 1.8). As the result of a year-long series of public and private meetings chaired by Brougham, the College came into formal existence on 11 February 1826 with the signing of an elaborate Deed of Settlement. It was agreed to raise a substantial sum Fig. 1.8 A foundation medal recording names of the original Council, including James Mill, Zachary Macaulay, George Grote and George Birkbeck. THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 23 easily be overcome in Parliament, despite the additional efforts of Brougham in the House of Lords, where he had gone in 1830 as Lord Chancellor. When UCL did eventually get its rst charter in 1836, it took an unexpected form. A base in Bloomsbury One of the rst acquisitions for the new University, even before it was of cially constituted, was a building site. Nearly eight acres in Bloomsbury were bought in August 1825 for £30,000 by three of the richest promoters, Goldsmid, John Smith and Benjamin Shaw, and held by them until it could be transferred to the new University (Fig. 1.11). Previously the site had served variously as a drilling ground, a place for duelling and a rubbish dump. It had been intended to develop it as Carmarthen Square, a projected addition to the yet un nished Bloomsbury. By the Fig. 1.11 The College and its environs, mapped to show the new parliamentary borough of St Marylebone after the 1832 Reform Act. The site was on the fringe of the expanding metropolis, with Euston Station (opened in 1837) not yet built. THE WORLD OF UCL 22 Fig. 1.10 George Cruikshank’s cartoon of 1825 portrays Brougham hawking shares in the projected University around Lincoln’s Inn. THE WORLD OF UCL 24 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 25 The architect chosen for the College was William Wilkins, whose fashionable, neo-Grecian design submitted in response to public advertisement in August 1825 was found exceedingly ne. Wilkins had previously designed new college buildings for Downing and King’s College at Cambridge, as well as Haileybury, the East India Company’s college in Hertfordshire. UCL is widely acknowledged to be Wilkins’ greatest work, far more distinguished than the National Gallery he built in Trafalgar Fig. 1.13 The original plan for the College, designed by William Wilkins in 1825. time of the holding of the rst meeting of the proprietors at the end of October 1826, 1,300 shares in the University had been sold, 200 fewer than the minimum believed necessary. Plans for the building were nevertheless being pressed ahead, and the digging of foundations was already underway. Despite the bad weather of the winter of 1826–27, work was suf ciently advanced by 30 April 1827 for the ceremony of laying the foundation stone (Fig. 1.12). This was undertaken with full masonic rights by the Duke of Sussex; a brother of George IV and the only member of the royal family with any intellectual pretensions, he was well known for his liberal sympathies. A copper plate with an inscription duly read out by Cox was placed in a cavity in the stone together with the traditional coins. Afterwards some 500 people gathered for a dinner at the Freemasons’ Tavern at which many speeches were made and £8,000 was raised. Henry Brougham made a memorably sarcastic oration attacking the opponents of the University, but annoyed Thomas Campbell’s friends by appearing to accept credit for founding the University single-handed. Campbell was absent from the foundation ceremony, being occupied as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and he did not serve on the Council beyond the rst year. Squeezed out by Brougham, Campbell’s connection with the University he had proposed ended as it was coming into being. Fig. 1.12 An invitation to the foundation ceremony for the College on 30 April 1827. THE WORLD OF UCL 26 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 27 The lowest tender received from a builder for the construction of Wilkins’ building was £110,000 – almost as much as the College had raised in total by autumn 1826. It was con dently declared that: ‘the wish of the Council will appear to have been rather to select a great design suited to the wants, the wealth, and Square a few years later. The main entrance was to be at the top of a wide staircase under a ten-column Corinthian portico topped by an elegant dome. A chapel was conspicuous by its absence, the main entrance being intended to give on to the three principal rooms: the Museum of Natural History to the left, the Library to the right and the Great Hall directly ahead. Lecture theatres of various sizes led off generous cloisters running to the impressive wings that contained further suites of rooms. In the event, shortage of money meant that Wilkins’ splendid design was only partially carried out (Fig. 1.13). Fig. 1.14 This engraving of the College buildings received a great deal of publicity in the late 1820s. The design shows the wings together with supplementary wings that were never actually built. THE WORLD OF UCL 28 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 29 Cockney College’ or ‘the radical in del College’ were published in the ultra-Tory John Bull and other papers: Come bustle, my neighbours, give over your labours, Leave digging and delving, and churning: New lights are preparing to set you a staring, And ll all your noddles with learning. Each dustman shall speak, both in Latin and Greek, And tinkers beat bishops in knowledge – If the opulent tribe will consent to subscribe To build up a new Cockney College. ‘The Cockney College’ in John Bull , July 1825 The opposition was provoked partly by the apparent pretension of a joint-stock company masquerading as a university in a period of nancial speculation and partly by the College’s appeal to social groups excluded from the two old universities – an appeal intolerable to the Establishment. Above all it was provoked by the rejection of all religious teaching and of compulsory religious conformity. Despite the nancial setbacks, the great hopes held by many for the new institution continued. Before the building had begun, the College was treated to the publication of what the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay called its ‘horoscope’ in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. ‘We predict’, he wrote, ‘that the clamour by which it has been assailed will die away, that it is destined to a long, a glorious, and a bene cent existence, that, while the spirit of its system remains unchanged, the details will vary with the varying necessities and facilities of every age, that it will be the model of many future establishments, that even those haughty foundations which now treat it with contempt, will in some degree feel its salutary in uence.’ A very bold prediction at the time, Macaulay’s words turned out to be remarkably percipient. Fig. 1.16 A cartoon lampooning the College, published at the time of UCL’s foundation in February 1826. Henry Brougham is shown hammering at the iron bar of philosophy on the anvil of public support. the magnitude of the population for whom the Institution is intended, than one commensurate with its present means.’ To this heroic decision the College owes the iconic centrepiece to its present rambling and in many ways unimpressive premises; the Portico has long formed part of UCL’s branding. It was decided to build the central range of the building with the Portico and Dome as envisaged by Wilkins, but to delay the addition of the two wings until the nancial position improved. Together with the stone ornamentation, various ttings and the two front lodges, the cost was not to exceed £86,000 (Fig.1.14). Financial stringency also involved postponement of the Great Hall and strict curtailment of expenditure on the Museum and Library. The steps under the Portico thus became something of a lavish white elephant; ‘the grandest entrance in London’, it has been called, ‘with nothing behind it’ (Fig. 1.15, overleaf). Augustus Pugin regarded the architecture of the College as pagan, adding acidly that it was ‘in character with the intentions and principles of the institution’. The College had to put up with a good many such snide remarks and attacks, especially in the crucial years between Campbell’s letter in The Times in 1825 and the opening in 1828 (Fig. 1.16). Verses and cartoons ridiculing what was quickly dubbed ‘the THE WORLD OF UCL 30 THE FOUNDATION: 1825–28 31 Fig. 1.15 UCL as it actually appeared at the time of opening in 1828 and for nearly 50 years afterwards. C H A P T E R 2 The University of London 1 8 2 8 – 3 6 C H A P T E R 2 The University of London 1 8 2 8 – 3 6 THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON: 1828–36 35 My last account of the university . . . was full of gloomy forebodings. I cannot say that, looking at the institution at large and for any permanent futurity, these are much removed. It is the opinion of many, I almost fear of most, that it contains within itself the seeds of dissolution. The expenditure has been lavish, the plans are ill-digested, and vibrating, like all things in which the Whigs have a hand, between the desire of being popular and the fear of being unfashionable, so as of course to satisfy neither class whom they seek to conciliate by cowardly half- measures. The Council are not united, and the professors as a body are openly at war with the Council. Sarah Austin, writing to her sister, April 1830 Although the building of the Portico and the Dome was not completed until the following year, the ‘University of London’ began its first academic session in October 1828 (Fig. 2.1). Selina Macaulay, daughter of Zachary, visited in the middle of the rst term and the College impressed her as ‘externally and internally a noble building’. She found ‘the theatres extremely spacious and so arranged that it is much easier both to see and hear the lecturer than in any other building of the same size’. ‘It seems so short a time’, Macaulay concluded in her diary, ‘since the whole scheme has been planned and executed that it reminds me of Aladdin’s enchanted palace which sprung up in a single night.’ The first Professors The most striking characteristic of the 24 Professors who constituted the teaching body of the College when it opened in 1828 was their relative youth. All but three were aged under 40, and six were 30 or under. The second striking fact is the number of posts in subjects not previously taught in English universities – nor, more signi cantly still, in British universities, nor even in European ones. The Chairs in the Modern Foreign Languages and in English Language and Literature were all especially notable innovations. Fig. 2.1 The full programme of medical classes offered by the College in 1828–29, its first year of operation. THE WORLD OF UCL 36 THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON: 1828–36 37 Fig. 2.2 Sir Charles Bell, FRS, Professor of Physiology and Surgery, who gave the first inaugural lecture in October 1828. UCL’s opening inaugural lectures were well attended by the public and were pronounced a great success. The rst was delivered on 1 October 1828 by Charles Bell, the Professor of Surgery and the most famous member of the distinguished Medical Faculty that had been assembled (Fig. 2.2). He had been educated at Edinburgh and joined the Speculative Society there – a notable group which, brought together in the 1790s, was to provide the London University with no fewer than ve members of its original Council and three of its rst Professors. Bell conducted important research on the working of the nervous system and became a surgeon of repute at the Middlesex Hospital. John Conolly also studied medicine at Edinburgh; he graduated in 1821 and subsequently practised medicine at Stratford-on-Avon, twice becoming mayor of the town. Neither Bell nor Conolly were to stay long at the College, however, owing to the unfortunate quarrels that soon engulfed the Medical Faculty. Bell resigned in 1830, going on to build up the medical school at the Middlesex and then returning to Edinburgh University. Conolly resigned in 1831, later taking charge of the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, where he introduced humane methods of treatment for the insane and pioneered revolutionary changes in this eld. His pupil and son-in-law Henry Maudsley (who quali ed at UCL in 1856 and became Professor of Medical Jurisprudence, 1869–80) was to be commemorated by the Maudsley Hospital. Another contemporary of Bell’s at Edinburgh, Anthony Todd Thomson, became Professor of Materia Medica. He too had come to London in the rst decade of the nineteenth century to make his mark in the medical profession, and also in the literary world. He conducted original research into the composition of alkaloids and iodides, and published a good deal. David D. Davis, a Glasgow graduate of Welsh origin, became Professor of Midwifery and Diseases of Women and Children. He had established himself as a successful London obstetrician, becoming a leading private teacher of the subject and pioneering many advanced methods, especially associated with obstetric forceps. Davis achieved some prominence by delivering the future Queen Victoria at Kensington Palace in 1819. Robert E. Grant was appointed Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the time of the opening; he remained in this post until his death in 1874, 46 years later, as the longest survivor of the original Professoriate (Fig. 2.3). Throughout this period he gave ve lectures a week and was believed never to have missed one. Imposing if eccentric in appearance, he invariably wore full evening dress. Yet another Edinburgh graduate, Grant had done important research there prior to coming to the College, especially on sponges, a genus of which is named after him. Among his Edinburgh pupils was Charles Darwin, who was arguably deeply in uenced by his ideas and lived next door to UCL in the early 1840s. A friend of French naturalist Georges Cuvier as well as of Darwin, Grant remained on the