A HISTORY

of

SEDGEWICK COLLEGE

by James B. Sumner

WHAT is now Sedgewick College, Cambridge, began its life in 1538 as the College of St Anthony and St Theresa and All Angels and God. It was founded by Vasco da Caldo Verde, a Portuguese sea captain who, having set sail for Madeira, lost consciousness in a storm and came to, days later, drifting in the tranquil waters of the Cam, presumably having been carried upriver during one of the monsoons plaguing Norfolk at the time. Hungry and penniless, the sailor made his way into the city and threw himself upon the mercy of the academics, whose initial suspicion evaporated when they discovered his cargo. Caldo Verde had been transporting eight hundred barrels of Port Wine, and furthermore had, by the means of his arrival, evaded the Customs and Excise. The drink proved highly popular among College Fellows, and the entire consignment was eventually sold to a University committee in exchange for an area of land corresponding to roughly one-tenth of present-day Cambridge. Speaking no English, Caldo Verde was readily assimilated into the academic community and decided to set up a College, there being very little else to do.

The original College statutes made provision for a Master, Pro-Vice-Master and seventeen Fellows; fifty Poor Scholars, to include mainly the sons of local noblemen and minor royalty; and several Officers including the Dean, the Bursar and the Special Haddock Pre-Proctor. This last post, generally believed unique to the College, was established, according to the statutes, "to insure… that the Scoulars placed under tutelage herin, are most adequateley emprovided for in of the Fysche that they doe require in our Lyfe this journeye". The holder of the position was initially intended to deal solely with haddock, but this rapidly became the most important of the Offices, and the remit was considerably expanded: the Founder's Will provided for the establishment of a Fishery which allowed the College, in time, to become self-sufficient in perch and several other freshwater fish.

The first Master was Colonel Sir John Flihamhamery-of-Over, who was also for a time Viceroy of Cheshire. At a time when heredity dominated, Flihamhamery was exceptional in that he had gained his wealth and title by speculation. The chief issue upon which he speculated was who was likely to gain power in the immediate future: his speculation was unerringly accurate, and had allowed him to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs (or being flayed alive, or burnt). Sir John's grandfather had commanded the only unit to fight on both sides at Bosworth Field; his own military achievements in his homeland included the repulsion of the Welsh (and, subject to conditions, several strains of English). His appointment as Master of a Cambridge College is therefore unusual, and is thought to have been achieved using money. Sir John was responsible for the building of the Master's Retrait, a residence on the Suffolk coast which still stands, to which he would travel for periods of contemplation spent watching the tides.

The initial site of the College backed onto the Cam, between St Stuart Hall and the Cross of Ditchfenwater. The Founder's original plan for the buildings involved four ranges closing up to one another to form a courtyard; this was abandoned after it was realised that nobody could get in or out, and work was begun following a revised scheme incorporating air arches (elsewhere known as 'gaps'). None of the original buildings are still standing, although it is said that in exceptionally dry weather, when the Cam is lowered, the remains of the ruined Gatehouse can be seen poking out above the water line. Exactly why the Gatehouse was built in the river is unclear, although this does perhaps provide the explanation as how it became ruined.

From the outset all College Officers were, in theory, elected by the Fellows, but for the first decade of the College's life they were in practice selected at random from among people passing in the street outside. Unsurprisingly this procedure led to numerous difficulties, particularly in the case of Hugh de Loeflet, first Dean of College, a devout atheist. De Loeflet steadfastly opposed the construction of the college Chapel, famously proclaiming: "So long as I live, there will be no Chapel at St I forget the name." Work on the Chapel was begun the day he died. In fact, the work was begun several hours before he died; contemporary accounts record that, on hearing the news, he rushed out and detonated the College Armoury's entire stock of gunpowder on the site, thus destroying both the foundation stone and himself. Many regard de Loeflet as the greatest (and only) atheist martyr in British history; the view of the Council for the Advancement of Secular Thought is that he was a bit of a fool, really, though.

The Chapel was, of course, completed nonetheless, the only resulting problem being a tendency for the structure to list slightly to one side during recitals and in high winds. However, more trouble lay ahead regarding the appointment of the first College Chaplain. Attempting to balance out the apostatic feeling which had grown up in the time of de Loeflet, the Fellows elected to the post Wendel Hatpyre, the Stylite of Ely. This unworldly presbyter lived out his entire chaplaincy at the top of a thirty-foot pole attached to the Chapel roof, living exclusively on rainwater and stale bread dipped in stale sweat, and refusing all offers of discussion, retirement or fish (proffered by a concerned Haddock Pre-Proctor). He became notorious, however, for yelling thunderous sermons at the bemused College members and townsfolk, which became increasingly extreme and, as the years passed, increasingly irrelevant to the lives of the people below. Eventually in 1555, after understandably developing a misconception regarding the state religion of England, he was branded a heretic and ultimately shot down by the soldiers of Queen Mary, at the instigation of the Master.

It is its famous circle of great artists and dypsomaniacs that has rightly earned the College a place in the cultural history of the seventeenth century, but in this era great progress was also made in the sciences. In 1652, Olf Bakenauld made one of the earliest attempts at a determination of the velocity of light, using a method which involved bouncing concentrated rays of sunlight off the clock tower towards a huge spinning mirror on the fountain. The value obtained -- one hundred and fifty miles per hour -- was later found to be somewhat inaccurate, yet Bakenauld's paper still received pride of place in the College library (possibly because shortly before its publication, the existing contents of the library were entirely destroyed in a fire started by a stray beam of concentrated sunlight).

Indeed, recent investigations have shown that in 1690 there was talk of the appointment, to the position of Master, of that greatest of all scientists, Sir Isaac Newton of Trinity College. The nomination was, however, thrown out; this is thought to have been owing to doubts voiced by several Fellows as to whether Newton's fabled Laws of Motion adequately described the behaviour of bodies travelling at speeds close to that of light (such as horses) or observable only on a sub-atomic scale, and his failure to resolve the question of the equivalence or otherwise of gravitational and inertial masses. (They were also slightly disturbed by his implicit claim that the heavenly bodies were not driven by angels turning pulley wheels). The post went instead to Peter O'Squirheld, the first Regius Professor of Civyl Engynering, whose promise to establish a Bursary for the Patronage of the Vintners probably endeared him to the Fellows. O'Squirheld designed the famous 'Engineer's Bridge' spanning the Cam; according to legend, this Bridge was constructed in such a way that no nails or glue were required to hold it together. When the Bridge was later taken down to discover the secret of its construction, however, it was found to be a huge plank of wood dug into the bank at both sides.

Some time following the Restoration, the Chapel received a Pind Haster organ which was placed on the Screen, which proved unable to support its weight and collapsed. Opinions vary as to whether this, or a lightning strike on the Hatpyre Pole, caused the building to subside into the ground, disappearing finally from view in 1722. The organ remained largely intact, and the pipes are occasionally activated by the natural release of marsh gas. The effect is unsettling, as the sound appears to come out of nowhere and is highly discordant and reedy (this is now known to result from the vibrational properties of methane -- natural gas -- which is lighter than air, rather than from any lapse of craftsmanship on the part of Pind or Haster). The submerged organ may well be the source of a tale in Mysteries and Crocadems of Old Cambridge (1844) which claims the site to be haunted by the ghost of an incompetent bassoonist.

In the mid-eighteenth century, with the student population rising all the while, the College entered a period of expansion. Unusually, however, this expansion consisted mainly in the purchase of fertile land along the Douro Valley in Portugal. This necessitated the sale of much of the main site to surrounding Colleges, and concern was expressed amongst the Fellows that, except in terms of its viniculture, the College was becoming something of an undistinguished backwater -- particularly when a scheme to build the largest Master's Lodge in Cambridge was abandoned, the funds instead being used in building the largest Port Lodge in Vila Nova de Gaia (then, previously or since). To quell such fears, the Master, Sir Telph Sturgeon, gave his promise that the sale of land would be 'sustained': for each acre sold off, the College would gain an acre of wine cellarage. The promise was faithfully kept, and the excavated earth was used to construct the Castle Mound, now the only raised ground within miles of Cambridge, and the old Market Hill (demolished in Victorian times, but originally overshadowing Great St Mary's Church at an elevation of 400ft). In the temporary absence of a Chapel, several cellars were officially consecrated and could thus be used to provide asylum for paying refugees.

When Sturgeon died in 1777, the College had lost all its outlying grounds and was effectively landlocked, maintaining only a small negotiated Corridor to the Cam. Like most encircled Colleges, it now consisted of small linked grassy courts which, exceptionally, were not unsightly, with very few ornamentations (and, since the labourers were often paid in barrels of marc brandy, very few right-angles). All this was overthrown the following year when Roger Wednesleyowl, heralding the Gothic Revival, built a gatehouse, an ornamental tower, the screen running east-west along the main road, and six domestic staircases with cupolas. Exactly why he did any of this is not clear; he certainly had no connection with the College, which was put to considerable legal expense and ultimately resorted to force in removing him permanently from the site, to say nothing of the inconvenience of demolishing his excrescent structures.

By 1790, work on a New Chapel was progressing apace; the building had reached a height of sixty feet on the east side sloping down to forty in the west. This turned out to be something of a problem since it was only ten feet long; in February of that year the temporary roof slid away, demolishing the clock tower in flight, and on landing gouged a long channel in the earth which diverted the Cam into the main shopping street -- much to the chagrin of local traders: it is recorded that later that week, the College was attacked by rampaging members of the Town Guild of Fruitmongers and Milk Ostlers, who berated several Fellows with sticks, chalked upon the Screen, and dispelled the Fishery.

By April of that year, the College was in dire straits. The Chapel incident had followed on from the loss of a series of buildings and other properties, chiefly the Great Gate (found to be unsustainable in the face of the new Size Taxes), the Hind Court (ceded to St Stuart Hall in 1787 following a small war) and the West Tower (which fell over because it was shit). To make matters worse, the ornate carved interior of the now roofless chapel, a gift from the Earls of Cheshire, began to suffer serious rain damage, being composed entirely of rock salt. This dramatic series of losses demoralised the Fellows to such an extent that they sought solace in drinking all the College's principal assets, precipitating a financial crisis: according to College records, in June of 1790 a priceless Bagaceira tapestry was given to the William Stetch Family Bakery in exchange for two hundred and thirty-four steak and turnip pies with which to feed the starving (and now fishless) students. The final straw came in 1791, when the College was forced to surrender the main domestic building to the Crown (its site was ostensibly to be used for the building of a new University Library; however, after the property had been pulled down, smashed to rubble and covered with burning pitch, George III claimed that he had made a mistake, and the College could have the land back if it wanted).

The College's glorious existence would almost certainly have come to an end at this point, had it not been for the intervention of Sir George Gareth Graham Sedgewick, the noted philanthropist, former merchant seaman, star of the emergent empire and magnate of the Cambridge and Huntingdon weft trade. Sedgewick had been searching for a chance to leave a lasting impression on the city, in which he had started out as a young and penniless coatman's vesseler, and now he saw just such a chance. In the summer of 1791 representatives of Sedgewick and of the College met to discuss a solution to the crisis. A plan was produced: subject to the approval of the Fellows, Sedgewick would fund the refounding of the College on an entirely new site, in the south of the city out towards Weftflit. The existing properties by the Cam would be sold, and the proceeds put towards measures designed to encourage more able and hence more illustrious undergraduates and Fellows, if necessary including cash incentives. In recognition of the refounding, the College's name would become 'Sedgewick College' (the Fellows were not given any say on this last point). The plan was accepted unanimously on the 30th of August, two days before the bailiffs were due to move in.

This momentous event represents a turning-point in the College's fortunes; after the years spent in the wilderness, the dynamism of old had returned, and the College began once more to progress in earnest. A bit like when the Damned re-formed. Except Lemmy out of Motorhead was not involved, probably. All this, of course, was due to the vision and single-minded determination of Sedgewick. It is no exaggeration to say that he alone could have brought about such a transformation; certainly no other man had the resolution, the money, and the authority to force all the workers then living on the intended site to clear out and go and live in tents if they had an eye to their jobs.

The new College was duly raised up; a model of the then-fashionable neo-postclassical Pretergothic style, it consists of a series of interlocking courtyards circumscribed by distinctive crenellated balustrades. The many gifts and provisions donated to the College by Sedgewick included a brand new Fishery, a hundred-foot-high statue of himself erected in the central court, and the famous Tower Tower, an almost unique architectural piece which can only be described as a tower surmounted by a tower. The renowned wit and social reformer, the Reverend Sydney Smith is said to have remarked: "On seeing this feature … one would find it curiously difficult to determine … where the Tower ends, and the Tower begins."

1820 brings us to one of the darker events in the College's history: during that year's May Bumps, certain over-enthusiastic members of the Sedgewick Second Boat Club accidentally brought about the death of a rival crew's cox, by repeatedly shooting him in the head and upper torso with pistols outside a riverside pub. Apparently they had been seeking to improve their own chances in the forthcoming race, but the manoeuvre turned out to be in breach of English criminal law, and considerable persuasion had to be exerted by the College authorities in order to prevent a stiff fine being levied upon those responsible. In recognition of the dishonourable nature of this unfortunate occurrence, the offending Boat Club was removed from existence; the College's two remaining clubs were merged, and the result named, 'Sedgewick Boat Club Which Is Not The One That Sent A Poor Innocent Man To His Grave'.

The later years of the nineteenth century saw great prosperity in Britain as a whole, as the country ascended to the height of its global power. This proved a little unfortunate for Sedgewick, owing to a bizarre pen-related error found in the original Act of Union, which resulted in the College being declared a separate sovereign state and forced into a rather ignominious twenty-year trade war with the entire British Empire. A net exporter only of freshwater sea-bass, the College gained some small advantage by its non-abolition of slavery, but was ultimately forced into rather more desperate measures in securing its economic survival: the notorious Jirrem's Light was attached to the Master's Lodge for the purpose of luring boats on the Cam, half a mile away, onto the treacherous and jagged bank, at which point armed Fellows would overpower the crews and make off with whatever they could find on board. The main result of this was a great surplus of wool within Sedgewick; even today, the only College Cellar not built for wine is known to be entirely filled with an immense knitted coverall having the same dimensions and shape as the Chapel, assumed to have been constructed during the schism. Whether, and to what end, it might have been used, is not recorded.

In fact, Sedgewick's wait for its share of prosperity was merely a little longer than most. It came, ultimately, thanks to its greatest champion within living memory, Alman Ketvering (1880-1955), three times elected Bursar, but generally better known for his work both as an economist and in the computer sciences. Ketvering developed the first machine capable of converting pounds, shillings and pence into binary, and founded the tremendously influential Department of Serious Mathematics, Applied Statistics and Liberal Economics (DSmasle). During the Second World War, he headed a group devoted to the interception of enemy secrets, their decoding, translation and sale to the highest bidder, under which system he was briefly the owner of Colorado. Ketvering was also successful in the fields of literature, commerce, lexicography, farming, politics, aviation, property speculation, firefighting and improvisational comedy; in addition to being a great patroniser of the arts, he used some of his wealth to enhance the standing of the college. Prior to his mysterious soap-related death in 1955, Ketvering made plans for the provision of a new building designed to house some 350 students; the Ketvering Building remains the greatest project yet completed by the College, and at the time provided the highest standard of living available to any Cambridge student, despite certain objections voiced at the time which seemed to revolve around the Building's site (in West London, there being no sufficiently expensive land available locally).

In 1932, Sir Osmal Clipton was elected to be the new Master of Sedgewick. Clipton's impeccable administration of the College was marred, in the eyes of many, by his somewhat uncritical support for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. This led him to create chairs in the schools of Racial Science, Militarism and Strength Through Joy, and in 1936 to bring a motion to the College Council proclaiming Union between the College and the Third German Reich (ultimately unsuccessful; although nothing under British law could prevent it, the motion was found to run counter to several College fish statutes). Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Clipton was interned on the Isle of Man; after five months, however, he escaped using wire and a knife, and made his way to neutral Portugal. From his bolthole in a small village near Porto, he proceeded to send a series of elaborately coded communications regarding the running of the College (which had been forced to cease all teaching so as to aid the war effort). There was considerable debate among the remaining Fellows as to whether to follow his increasingly incoherent instructions, eventually settled by his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1942.

The 1960s saw the rise of activism amongst the students of Sedgewick, culminating in a four-day sit-in in May of 1968, organised in response to the College's decision to provide a television room and several comfortable armchairs. When the students reassembled the following autumn, they showed a marked increase in militancy; few could forget such events as that November's celebrated Siege of Sedgewick, in which the massed ranks of students formed a blockade and kept up a non-stop barrage of chanting through the windows of the Master's Lodge and Fellows' Common Room. It is still not entirely clear how they had managed to gain entry to these areas, but by the time anybody noticed they had changed the locks. Police charges against the Lodge's historic Norwegian Doric porticos were met with hails of Molotov cocktails; when their supply of petrol was used up, the students began to improvise using bottles of Tawny Port, at which point the Fellows immediately acceded to most of the students' demands.

This increase in student power dramatically raised the profile of the College JCR, or, as it became officially known in the 1970s, Sedgewick Fucking Student Union. Under its flamboyant, militant leader, the Duke of Wilmslow's nephew David Tollemache-Plantagenet-Smith (who was later to abbreviate his name, and is now better known as plain Dave Tollemache-Plantagenet), SFSU set up a number of facilities run by and for students, including a Welsh Interest Noticeboard, the razor-blade exchange scheme, a weekly discothèque and the Shelley-Devoto Room, a late-night bar offering beer drinks and crisped potatoes.

1979 saw the College admit its first women since the controversial Harlot Scholarship was abolished in the late nineteenth century. This innovation was not entirely successful in that no further women could be persuaded to come to Sedgewick in the next three years, but the present male-to-female ratio, approximately 193:27, provides a much more accurate reflection of society today.

Despite recent financial setbacks (including the collapse of both the property market and much of the property, the chaos wrought by the Ascythian Decanter Blight epidemic of 1991, and apparent fiscal difficulties with the lawns, which have led to strained relations between the Master and several turf accountants), Sedgewick is determined to maintain high standards for its students and has recently embarked on a major new building project; the Portakourt, sited next to the Department of Virology, is set to become Cambridge's first fully demountable domestic court (although, many believe, by no means its last). Expected to house 150 students, the Portakourt will reach to a height of four sheds; each individual room will have its own balcony and private stairway or ladder. Sponsorship for the project is being provided by the manufacturers of Plastic Wood, who have also provided an accompanying service latrine, soon to receive an English Heritage Grade I listing.

For a College with such a distinctive history, Sedgewick maintains an eye to the future. To this end, the Cultural Overseas Exhibition Project, whereby valuable College possessions are transferred -- temporarily -- to international destinations including the Channel Islands, Switzerland, etc, was instituted by the Master and Fellows in 1995. Meanwhile, talks are in progress regarding the formation of a Shared Co-operative Partnership of Equality between the College and Anglia Polytechnic University, which, if realised, could bring great benefits and go some way to breaking down the age-old divides betwixt town and gown. But then again, UEA are offering to take the land for a better price at the moment and the word is De Montfort've started sniffing around down here as well.

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