Early students and the University of the Busy: the Quay Street years of Owens College 1851-1870

Abstract

Readers of Thompson, the earliest historian of Owens College, 1 could be excused for believing it to be an organization without students. The book concentrated on the constitutional development of the institution, the evolution of a curriculum of studies appropriate to higher education and the development of the premises in which the College functioned. Any awareness of an organization devoted to the education of students as participants in a collegiate activity appeared to be entirely lacking, yet evidence suggests that this was far from the reality intended by the first professors. This omission was a characteristic contemporary approach to historical studies of educational institutions from schools to universities. The nineteenth-century genre which portrayed schools in an environmental limbo, populated by masters, governors and (occasionally) parents through which young people passed ghost-like, appearing to the historian only as names on honours boards and in sporting teams, is a familiar stereotype. Lack of knowledge of the early cohorts of undergraduates in the new civic universities of the mid-nineteenth century is no less profound. Fiddes, writing in 1937, does refer to the student body but briefly in a chapter shared with an analysis of the professors. This is intrinsically regrettable for historians of education but in particular because the students of the university colleges were pioneers in a social and educational revolution which exposed young men to a level of study and style of teaching, as well as a 1 The two histories which examine the Quay Street years are J. Thompson, The Owens College: its foundation and growth