William Wilkins (British politician)

Transcription

>> Thank you very much Susan [phonetic]. Is the -- is this sound all right? [Inaudible] everybody. Thank you for coming. It's -- I'm going to open by saying it's strange isn't it? To think that as we gathered in this distinguished and internationally known institution, well known for the excellence of its higher education and its research that at its beginnings nearly 190 years ago it was treated widely as a joke. Plans for the University of London were also viewed with suspicion. The new institution seemed to represent a danger to the social and political status quo to a tory [phonetic] government faced with agitation for reforms which were finally brought in by a Whig government in the Great Reform Act of 1832. Many of the founders and supporters of this new institution were reforming Whig and radical members of Parliament and therefore it's not surprising, perhaps, that from the start this institution was the object of press attention much of it hostile. I'm going to start with an article in The Times in June 1825. It's an article entitled The London College and its give an occurrent of a meeting at the Crown and Anchor [phonetic] Tavern on the Strand, the previous Saturday. [Inaudible] as The Times says about 120 of the gentlemen who have taken a principle interest in the formation of The London College or University. In the chaired [phonetic] meeting was Henry Brougham, prominent Whig lawyer and politician of which quite a lot more later or of whom quite a lot more later. Supporting Brougham were several other reforming members of Parliament including Lord John Russell, third son of the Duke of Bedford [phonetic] of this parish [phonetic]. And Joseph Hume [phonetic], finder famous for his dogged attacks on royal and aristocratic prophlagecy [phonetic] and in particular on the shenangans in -- with the Navy budget. Also there was Dr. George Birkbeck, founder of the London Mechanics Institution in 1823 and at the foot of the table was the poet, Thomas Campbell [phonetic]. All those present were agreed The Times reported on the necessity of establishing for the great population of this metropolis a college which would comprehend all the leading advantages of the two great universities while allowing students to remain at home with their parents thus catering for their domestic supervision and offering a cheaper education than could be had at the ancient residential universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Brougham announced at the meeting that he had sounded [phonetic] out various Cabinet members about the possibility of applying for a royal charter to establish the new university but had been discouraged. He was now in the process of putting a private bill to the House of Commons explaining to his fellow MPs [phonetic] that there was no intention at present of conferring degrees. Those students wouldn't be able at first to take degrees in the new institution, this was a concession to the vested interest of Oxford and Cambridge which Brougham saw as an unfortunate necessity for the time being. Though they wouldn't be able to take degrees, they would be offered a full higher degree syllabus. The founders most radical and contentious step was to exclude theological teaching. The syllabus would be much expanded to include in addition to the traditional subjects of mathematics and classics and philosophy, they would include science, literature and the arts. There would be no religious tests such as those operating at Oxford and Cambridge where students were obliged to sign the 39 Articles [phonetic] of the Church of England in order to take their degrees and [inaudible] teaching fellows had to do likewise. At the new university there was to be and still quoting from The Times account of the meeting, no [inaudible] to the education of any sect among his Majesty's subjects. Medical studies were [inaudible] and London students would have the advantage over their peers at Oxbridge though this was diplomatically less by Brougham to be inferred. They'd have the advantage of combining the academic study of anatomy and physiology at the university with attending practical medical classes at one of the London hospitals. If you studied medicine at Oxford and Cambridge at this time, you would have to come up to London at some point to attend one of the teaching hospitals here. So clearly a new university in London would be able to take advantage of the already existing teaching hospitals. Treading most wearily to avoid stepping on the toes of the two ancient institutions which would be unlikely to welcome a London rival, Brougham described how the money would be raised for this institution. The capital, he said, intended for the undertaking was estimated at 200,000 pounds and the mode of raising it by transferable shares of 100 pounds of each. While The Times which was friendly to Brougham and friendly to the university continued to report the doings of this [inaudible] institution in some detail from its conception in 1825 to the opening of a new building on Gurry [phonetic] Street to welcome the first intake of students in October 1828. The Times had been the chosen vehicle for the very first public suggestion of a university for London as early as February 1825 when it carried a long, diffuse open letter from Thomas Campbell to Henry Brougham entitled Proposals of a Metropolitan University. Now although Campbell didn't put the case as succinctly as his colleagues would have wished in this letter, it's apparent that the end of [inaudible] university was four-fold. One, to offer higher education in the political and financially most important city in the world and thus remove the enigmany [phonetic] of London having unlike Paris and many other European cities, no university. Two, to educate the sons only I'm afraid at this stage of the expanding middle class. Three, to welcome non-Anglicans of every kind by avoiding the religious tests which adhither [phonetic] to prevented them from graduating from English universities and four, to enlarge the curriculum beyond the traditional classical mathematical and theological education offered at Oxford and Cambridge. The radicalism with the proposal did not go as far as to include higher education for women at this point. Though when women were finally permitted to take degrees in 1878 it was at University College London that the innovation was introduced. One particular traction for parents stressed by Campbell in his letter to The Times was the relatively cheapness of keeping their sons at home instead of sending them away to live in a college. He writes, say a man a 1000 pounds of year. He can hardly send one son to an English university, to send three sons would cost him at least 750. Each son kept at home in London, on the other hand, would cost about 25 to 30 pounds for his education with perhaps clothing and pocket money amounting to another 25. Not wishing to [inaudible] the two ancient universities too much, Campbell does not state explicitly the further advantages of parents -- to parents of being able to close eye on their offspring and so to fort the well known propensity of young men at university to run up wine and tailoring bills not to mention such costly and tempting pursuits as gambling and resort to prostitutes. In the end once the university had been launched and the dust settled on the controversy it aroused, the two aims which were to prove truly important and influential for the education and culture not just of London but of the whole country were the opening of higher education to people of all faiths and none and the expansion of the curriculum. The University of London which changed its name to University College London in 1836 when it was finally given degree awarding status, the university was the first to include a range of subjects not taught before including several branches of science and medicine, geography, architecture, modern history, English language and literature and other modern languages and literatures including French, German, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew. These progressive aims [phonetic] was vigorously opposed by newspapers supporting the tory [phonetic] government and defending the special position of the Church of England. None entered the lists more [inaudible] than John Bull [phonetic]. The newspaper founded in 1820 to support the unpopular George the Fourth in his efforts to keep his estranged wife, Caroline, from his attending his coronation as Queen. Brougham had made an eternal enemy of George the Fourth by acting as Caroline's legal advisor in that matter. John Bull [phonetic] immediately seized on Campbell's letter in The Times to his friend, Brougham and began a campaign to ridicule the new university. [Inaudible] of its founders recent involvement in [inaudible] Mechanics Institutions and suggested that the new university was intended for the same clientele [phonetic]. It also carried broad exaggerated warnings about the potential threat to church and state of a non-Anglican university. For good measure, it hinted despite Campbell's remarks designed forestall such objections that London was a place of moral danger to young men. A short article in John Bull in February 1825 places Campbell, Birkbeck and Brougham in the line of fire. The last of the three having a gift of a name for satirists [phonetic] was both verbal and visual and this is number one on your handout. This is from John Bull 14th of February, 1825. It is understood that this magnificent national establishment will speedily be undertaken under the immediate surveillance of a learned [phonetic] and liberal committee. Its objects are evidently of first rate importance and it's end will be most salutatory. For instance, it has proposed to instruct butchers in geometry and telechandlers [phonetic] in Hebrew. Tailors are to be perfected in Oriental literature and shoemakers finished up in mathematics. Servants out of liberty are to be made good Grecians while lackeys [phonetic] are only to learn Latin. Campbell Fellowships so called after the great founder are to be created for the benefit of dustmen and chimney sweepers. And a Brougham Exhibition appropriated annually to [inaudible] housemaids. To Dr. Birkbeck the nation is already indebted for a great work of enlightenment, that's the Mechanics Institutions. Journeymen, carpenters and tailors and bricklayers and plasterers now dignified into [inaudible] artisans will listen with wandering [phonetic] advantage to the lecturing of popular professors. So you see this is John Bull pretending to assume that the people who are going to be studying at this new university are laborers and artisans. This article finishes with a perspective inventive by John Bull asserting that the new university will be built in Tothill Fields [phonetic], a notorious slum near Westminster Abbey. And that public owners and prostitutes will make a killing. This is number two on the handout. The morality of London, it's quietitude [phonetic] and solibriety [phonetic] appear to combine to render the capital the most convenient place for the education of youth. It is therefore intended to erect a spacious college with the proper residencies and offices for the reception of the metropolitan and suburban youth in Tothill Fields. And in order to meet any objections which heads of families may make to the pedilous [phonetic] exposure of their sons to the casualties arising from crowded streets, a large body of playing respectable females of the middle age will be engaged to attend students to and from the college in the mornings and evenings of each day. Well attacks and squibs of this kind became common place as the new university slowly became a reality. Traditionalists feared the changes which would form agitation insight and outside Parliament thought. That a [inaudible] Catholic disabilities which passed into law in 1829 and which many Bishops viewed as putting the Church of England endanger of the Church, endanger was one of that mantras went round at this time. And the [inaudible] of a proportion of working men which came about through the Reform Act of 1832. The fear of a working class revolution on the French model was also prevalent. A new university intended to open opportunities to [inaudible] marginalize groups might encourage social unrest. Campbell and his colleagues were aware of the prejudices which would greet their project hence the cautious statement of their aims in Campbell's letter to The Times. Campbell was a man of some fame as a writer and though his reputation was in decline, he was a well known and well connected London literary figure when he proposed the idea of the university. He was editor of the New Monthly Magazine and he was still residually celebrated for his youthful poem, The Pleasures of Hope published in 1799 in which he had expressed an imminently forgettable verse his sympathy with the anti-slavery movement. So he was properly radical and liberal and much more useful to the cause of reform than his versifying was Campbell's experience as a Scot who had graduated at the University of Glasgow and saw a partial model in the Scottish system. For [inaudible] established universities, [inaudible] Glasgow and [inaudible] of Aberdeen flourished in Scotland with a proud tradition of lecturing to young men who usually lived at home as distinct from the college tutorial system that prevailed at Oxford and Cambridge. In the Scottish universities there was no religious requirement in order to graduate. Several of the founders of the new metropolitan university had studied at a Scottish university. In fact this place was stuffed with Scots in its first years. Stuffed with them, you can't imagine any meeting that took place particularly in the medical faculty here in the late 1820s and early 1830s must have [inaudible] it was taking place in Edinburgh not in London at all. Anyway, full of Scots and several of the founders were Scots. Either they'd been educated at the Scottish university because they were Scots or because they were Englishmen who did not subscribe to Anglicanism. Brougham, for example, was born and educated in Edinburgh while Birkbeck was the son of a Quaker merchant from Yorkshire. So he too barred from Oxford and Cambridge went to study at Edinburgh. Campbell also brought to the new venture a knowledge of the German educational system having visited Bahn [phonetic] in 1820 and been struck by the tolerance of all religions that the recently established university there. In September 1825 with the new London university plan going ahead, Campbell went on a fact finding visit to Berlin where he attended lectures and spoke with professors coming away impressed by the encouragement giving to universities in Prussia, a country where the roads were still sandy tracks, the carriages were bone shaking and the streets of Berlin were as yet unpaved but where the universities were havens of philosophical scholarship. Campbell's contacts in America, meanwhile, where his father had had trade connections and his brother was living in Virginia also came in handy because it meant that he could bring forward the example of the new University of Virginia founded Thomas Jefferson in 1819 with the intention of educating American youth not only in the traditional subjects but also in medicine, modern languages, law, politics and economics. Having helped to set things in motion, Campbell soon faded from the scene. His domestic circumstances were difficult. He had a mentally unstable son and a wife who was sick and who died in 1828. His election to the rectorship [phonetic] of Glasgow University in 1826 meant that his energies and interests were divided and he missed the ceremony and dinner at the laying of the foundation stone of London University [inaudible] on the 30th of April, 1827 because he was in Glasgow fulfilling his duties there. He resigned from the [inaudible] Street Counsel on grounds of ill health a few months before the university opened to students in 1828. With that Campbell's contribution ended and in due course, his name was all but erased from the record while his first collaborative, the phenomenon that was Henry Brougham became the chief figure. [Inaudible] to like itself promotion and promotion of the interest of the university of which he was the first president from its opening until his death 40 years later in 1868, aged 89. During his long life, Henry Brougham was one of the most talked about, written about, and [inaudible] featured people of the age. In the political fraught [phonetic] 1820s, I looked into this and it seemed to me that early George the Fourth himself and the Duke of Wellington were more often subjects of caricature and cartoon than Brougham. And Brougham given his name, you can see how it was spelt but it was pronounced broom was represented of course either as a broom causing [inaudible] and [inaudible] or as a lawyer as he was with Whig and gown brandishing a broom showing that he was undertaking to sweep [inaudible] stables of the legal system as it was with his brandishing his broom. So you constantly see him as a broom or brandishing one and hence, of course, the joke in John Bull about [inaudible] housemaids and their broom scholarships. When this [inaudible] magazine [inaudible] was launched in 1841 most of Brougham's achievements were already in the past but he was still a major if controversial figure. A fact reflected in his appearance in almost every number of punch [inaudible] during the 1840s and 1850s. His accomplishments as a lawyer, journalist and Whig politician took the breath away. In Parliament, he agitated in opposition during the 1820s for a reform of the law and of the voting system. He argued in favor of extending education, against slavery, for Catholic rights and helped his own Whig government bring in the great Reform Act of 1832 after a decade of debating. Alongside these legal and parliamentary activities, Brougham helped Birkbeck to found the London Mechanics Institution and also the Infant [phonetic] School Society. He was the chief founder of the Society for the Diffusion of useful knowledge and wrote many of its pamphlets. And he became the prime mover of the new university. All this time actually while he was going off on the law circuit and doing all these things, he was also writing copious articles for the Edinburgh Review which he had helped to found and The Times. Not to mention dealing with sexual blackmail from the notorious courtesan Harriette Wilson to whom he gave legal advice when she was taken to court for libel after publishing her memoirs in 1825. She famously blackmailed several prominent men including the Duke of Wellington who's famously supposed to have replied to her threats with publish and be damned. Well Brougham helped her but by having an affair with her himself, he fell victim to her threats to tell his wife and the world of his faults of adultery and other follies as she wrote. In the history of University College a speech given in 1897 by the professor of medical juris [phonetic] prudence, George Vivian Pruer [phonetic], the early days of the institution were [inaudible] and Brougham's contribution described. And this is number three on your handout. This is describing Brougham. His mind was like a dry sponge. It soaked up everything in the shape of knowledge it came across and before he was 13 he had learned everything that could teach him at the high school at Edinburgh. He learned languages, science, philosophy and everything else without the least trouble. Lord Brougham was [inaudible] industry and was connected with the foundation of the Edinburgh Review and to show you what his mind was it merely stated that he wrote nearly the whole of one number of the Edinburgh Review. And that his articles ranged over a great variety of subjects from Chinese music to the operation of [inaudible]. His versatility was astounding and it is recorded that Samuel Rogers, the poet, when he saw Lord Brougham driving off from [inaudible]. It was Lord Cooper's country house it was said, there goes Solomon [inaudible], [inaudible], Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield and a great many other persons in one [inaudible]. Well this phenomenon Brougham presided from the first at the University of London over a heterogeneous and sometimes ideologically split group consisting of radicals, Whigs, utilitarian disciples of Jamie Binsom [phonetic], Catholics, Jews, and dissenting Protestants. And he did it and remained [phonetic] brilliantly. Most of the meetings were held at his chambers in Lincoln's [phonetic] Inn. He regularly fed reports of these to the press particularly The Times. He also published long articles in praise of the new university in the Edinburgh Review and did the reviews rising star Thomas Babington Macaulay who predicted, you'll like this I think, in February 1826 that the infant institution was destined to a long, a glorious and a [inaudible] existence and that it would be the model of many future establishments. Macaulay's father, Zachary Macaulay, was one of the founders of the university. Now the [inaudible] turned it earnest in the matter of raising money. The plan was to [inaudible] at least 150,000 pounds and the hope was that they would find enough good men and true in Brougham's words to take shares. Brougham was famously depicted selling shares as early as July 1825 by Robert Crookshank [phonetic]. And it's number four on your handout, you probably recognize it. Robert Crookshank was the brother of the more famous caricaturist George Crookshank. This cartoon called The Political Toyman shows Brougham in his lawyer's wig and gown walking around Lincoln's Inn with a model of the London College on his hand. A book at his waist entitled list of shareholders and a money bag over his arm inscribed subscriptions. It was, you see, thought to be intradink [phonetic] to set about a founding a new serious [inaudible] institution by selling shares. Three of the most wealthy founders of the new university including the financier and campaigner for Jewish rights, Isaac Lion Goldsmith [phonetic] were directly responsible for the new university finding its location not in Tothill Fields but in Bloomsbury. In 1824 a banker named Bevin [phonetic] had bought a site of nearly eight acres of undeveloped wasteland on the Mortimore [phonetic] Estate at the top end of [inaudible] Street. [Inaudible] projected square which was going to built on the site called Marvin Square but this was never built as the three university founders bought the land from Bevin for 30,000 pounds and held it until enough money was raised to start building. When William Wilkins' neoclassical design was chosen the [inaudible] was cost for a building and a purpose which was to help define the character of the area Blooms [phonetic] Street from that moment until the present day. Bloomsbury would from now be associated primarily with education and culture while visually it was represented quite frequently by elegant, classical and some said thinking of the godless college on [inaudible] street pagan architecture. And if you wanted to look at the Bloomsbury project you'll find that my colleagues and I have identified over 300 educational or cultural reforming institutions which were setup in Bloomsbury during the 19th century. Many of them closely related or by the same personnel as the people who started University College London. Wilkins designed the Long Building facing [inaudible] Street with a 10 column Corinthian portico [phonetic] in the middle topped by a dome and two side wings with smaller domes in the angles between the long building and the wings. When submitting his design Wilkins its grandeur and unusualness, features which were no doubt attractive to the founders and this is number five on the handout. This is Wilkins' description of his design. There is no example in England of a portico with 10 columns in front. It is for this reason that I have chosen as my prototype the magnificent portico of the Olympium [phonetic] at Athens, the proportions of which I have closely followed. The Times, the friendly Times reported in August 1828 that the building was nearing completion with scaffolding due to come down before the opening of the college in two months time when number six on the handout. As The Times says the public will have an uninterrupted view of a handsome and commodious structure [inaudible] of ornament or [inaudible] embellishment defects which disfigure so many of the public buildings of the metropolis but are [inaudible] a truly classic specimen of British and architecture. Well in the event there wasn't anything money to complete Wilkins' elegant plan and the two wings were not built until the 1870s and if you look at the picture at the head of the handout, you see that is a drawing of University College or the University of London as it was when it opened in 1828. You see it did not have the wings at that time because money ran out but even in its unfinished state, the new building was imposing. However the fact that it was on wasteland where rubbish was dumped and dirty puddles abound it was too delightful a gift for opponents to ignore. John Bull found a number of ways to insult the new university as in some way disreputable. The paper was edited and in fact entirely written by Theodore Hook [phonetic] a Bloomsbury born prankster and man without time who had perpetrated the famous Berners Street hoax in 1809 at the age of 20. On that occasion, you might've heard of the Burner Street hoax, he targeted a Mrs. Tottenham ordering a huge number of goods to be sent to her Berner Street home, wagon loads of coal, pianos, organs, jewelry and pieces of furniture of every description. At the same time as he had [inaudible] the Lord Mayor of London, the governor of the Bank of England, the Chairman of the East India Company and other notables to visit her. And he and a friend sat at the window of a neighboring house and watched the mayhem that occurred in Berners Street that day with all these people and all these things turning up to poor Mrs. Tottenham. Well, when in 1825 Hook as the editor of John Bull started writing about the plans for the new university, he had only recently left debtor's prison after losing 12,000 pounds of government money while he had occupied the post of accountant and treasurer in Mauritius. In July 1825 his article entitled Joint Stock Company Learning Company capital C 100,000 pounds appeared in John Bull. Here he pretended to be horrified at the supposed political and religious subversiveness [phonetic] of the new institution and cleverly coupled this attack with the mania at the time for the floating of companies dealing in insurance, gas, mining, canals, and of course the new steam technology. The implication was that there was something dodgy about selling shares in the university and that the risk of collapse was great. Even more of a gift than this share selling was the foul smelling site. In December 1825, a comic poem called Stinker Malee [phonetic] was printed in John Bull. To be sung apparently to the tune of Daddy Down [phonetic] it began and this is number seven on your handout, the [inaudible] says reason to fade, my college [inaudible] at length has a name, go trumpet it forth [inaudible] by land and by sea, my college is christened [inaudible] stinker [inaudible]. Later in the poem, Hook has Joseph Hume congratulating his fellow founder Brougham, number eight. The choice of its site, says Hume, properly falls to cultivate strong common sense in its halls. For whoever will come will find my dear [inaudible] very strong common sense in your stinker malee. Well on went John Bull with this fun. Another poem, Stinker Malee fans greeted the soon to be opened university in April 1828 and in May, there was an article describing Brougham and his colleagues as shareholders in the joint stock dirt and learning company of Stinker Malee. The nickname Stinker Malee stuck for a time as did others started by John Bull such as [inaudible] College or [inaudible] University which also appeared in the titles of cartoons like William Heath's number nine on your handout. This was an engraving published in February 1826 showing Brougham on the right hand side hammering on an anvil inscribed public support with a red hot iron bar named philosophy. And you'll see on the left hand side various rough looking individuals saying [inaudible] forever, [inaudible] for me. This is their take on the philosophy that they're going to learn. The most imaginative poem attacking the university was that by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, a young Tory and [inaudible] born in 1802 in Bedford [inaudible] Bloomsbury. His discourse delivered by a college tutor at a supper party imagines the response by an Oxbridge Don [phonetic] to the news of a new rival being founded. Having urged his colleagues to make opposition to the radical infidel college, the Don continues with an awful warning of social revolution and it's number 10. Tis a terrible crisis for [inaudible] and for [inaudible] that butchers are learning dissection and little glass makers become [inaudible] to study the rules of reflection. One [inaudible] young Tory a future political star of the young Bloomsbury resident Benjamin Disraeli also had fun with a planned university in his debut novel, Vivian Grey. The first part, of which, was published in April 1826. Disraeli had been born in 1804 just off Bedford Row. His father the antiquarium [phonetic] scholar Isaac Disraeli moved the family to Bloomsbury Square in 1817 to be even nearer the British Museum for his studies. And being a nonobservant Jew with ambitions for his son, attended church at St. George's Bloomsbury where Benjamin was baptized. Benjamin did not go to university. He spent some time as a solicitor's clerk and entered in Lincoln's Inn but he refused a legal career preferring to write as a journalist and novelist. Now though a Tory, a young Tory, Disraeli [inaudible] satire in the anonymously published Vivian Grey not just at real life radicals but also at [inaudible] Torys. This is 1850, 26 and it's the last on your handout. One of these [inaudible] Torys is given the name Sir Christopher Mobrey [phonetic] in the novel is a [inaudible] member of Parliament in his 79th year but still able to follow a fox though he has no idea of liberal principles or anything else of that school. Disraeli mocks Sir Christopher's horror at the idea of a modern university in London. This is number 11. The only thing which is not exactly comprehend is the London University. This affair really puzzles the worthy gentleman who could as easily fancy a county member not being a freeholder [inaudible] university not being at Oxford or Cambridge. Indeed to this horror the old gentleman believes that the whole business is a damnation of hopes and they should tell him that there's little apprehension in the course of a century, the wooden polls which are now stuck about the ground will not be as fair and flourishing as the most [inaudible] of new college gardens. The old gentlemen looks up to heaven as if determined not to be taken in and leaning back in his chair says for the skeptic and smiling, no, no, no that won't do. Well against very [inaudible] oppositions from the real [inaudible] compounding by a lack of funds and some poor decision making early in the early days, the new university did eventually and emphatically do. Though it took several decades of doggy determination on the part of its supporters and employees, the university eventually fulfilled Thomas Babbington Macaulay's apparently outlandish prophecy that it would set the standard for the universities of the future. [Clapping] >> Thank you very much for this very spirited and entertaining glimpse into UCL's past and all that it has endured. We have a -- four minutes left for questions but it is only four minutes so I would encourage you not to sit on your questions but to ask them. Yes? >> [Person not miked] Sorry. Is there documentation going on about the processes, the political processes happening at UCL at the moment? It seems very ironic that this has started as such a liberal, radical institution and where it stands now in its relationship to no student fees -- >> As you can imagine I couldn't possibly comment. [ Laughter ] Which is a shame. >> I just wonder what Bull would've said if he'd known about the bones which were discovered at the front of University College and if you know anything more about -- well I think there's going to be an exhibition but -- >> The bones which were recently found under the front [inaudible]. >> Yeah. >> I don't know whether they were thought to be human but they're now thought to be animal bones, I think. Are they not? >> I'm not sure. I did -- my son's doing archaeology here and I did a classics archaeology master's recently after I -- you know I had a life being [inaudible] having done a law degree here and came back to do that. And I understand there are some human bones and they're very, very old but -- >> Well there might be. I mean I can't go into it but the John Bull and other attackers of what was going on here, where everybody came to suggest that bodies were being robbed from graves, you know graves and so on here by medical students and professors. Before the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832 which allowed for dissection of bodies, before that it was illegal. It went on. It went on in Edinburgh [phonetic] all the time as we know with the [inaudible] hair scandal of 1829 but it -- but John Bull wanted to suggest that it was also going on here under the -- in the basement of University College. >> And that's very interesting because when I did my law degree here in 1975, there were only six female law students in my year and we had to [inaudible] many of our law lectures in the [inaudible] theater and the young male medical student used to throw bones at us so there was a lot less security of bones than now -- then there is now. >> Okay, well I [crosstalk] -- >> Thank you for that. The gentleman next to you had a question. Would you just pass -- no, okay. Any other questions? Yes, sir. >> Oh [inaudible] was founded 20, 30 years earlier. >> I'm sorry what was? >> Grecian [phonetic] College. >> Grecian, yes, Grecian. >> And [inaudible] what the relationship was between it and the founders of UCL back in the 1820s? >> None. None that I've come across. They may have -- if anybody knows of any I'd be happy to know them but none that I have come across. All the people here as I can see were intent on reintroducing the Scottish system actually mainly and you know there wasn't -- there was a recognition that there had been higher education for a longer period in Grecian College but there was no direct connection. Not that I know of anyway.