The Johnson Society (Lichfield)

Biographical Details
(Lord Butler's presidential address is below. Click here for immediate access)

The Rt. Hon. Lord Butler of Brockwell became Master of University College, Oxford, following his retirement as Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil service in January 1998. Born in 1938, he was educated at Harrow School and University College, Oxford, where he read Greats and played rugby for the University.

In 1961 he joined the Treasury where he served as Private Secretary to the Financial Secretary in 1964 and Secretary of the Budget Committee from 1965 to 1969. He was Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Mr Edward Heath from 1972 to 1974, and Mr Harold Wilson from 1974 to 1975. In 1975 he returned to the Treasury as an Assistant Secretary, and then became Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher from 1982 to 1985. In 1988 he was appointed as Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service.

He was knighted (KCB) in 1988, and became GCB in 1992. In 1998 he was created a Life Peer and in 2003 he was awarded the Knight of the Garter (KG). In 1999 he was a member of the Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords. Early in 2004, he was asked to chair the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Lord Butler, who is married with three children, has just finished many years as Chairman of the Governors of Dulwich College. His leisure activities include golf and other such competitive games as he can still manage.

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When a former member of University College, Jonathan Rule, approached me on behalf of your then Chairman in February 2003 about being President of the Johnson Society for this year, I am sure that he knew more than I did. We all know that Johnson was an undergraduate member of Pembroke College at Oxford, remained a lifelong friend of his Master there, Dr Adams, and, when he fell out with Dr Adams’ successor, vowed to take up his abode at Trinity, where he had enjoyed working in the Library. But there is a strong case for saying that his intellectual and social home became University College. So it seems appropriate that your Presidents in recent years have included two other former members of Univ, Richard Ingrams and Judge David Edward, and the mother of a current member, Libby Purves.

I knew that Johnson had connections with Univ, where I was an undergraduate and of which I am now the Master. I did not know how extensive those connections were nor what a golden age in the life of my College they represented. So my researches over the last eighteen months have been a voyage of discovery – discovery not just about leading figures of Univ but about those of them who were also leading national figures of the latter part of the eighteenth century – and it is on that voyage that I invite you to accompany me this evening. I should like to thank the archivist of the College, Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, and the Librarian, Christine Ritchie, for being my helmsman and pilot on the expedition.

What better circumstances to make the voyage than after the excellent dinner we have enjoyed this evening? It is also appropriate that we should be doing so over a glass of punch. For while Dr Johnson was no doubt attracted to my College by the brilliance of its Fellows at that time, their conviviality should not be left out of account. When Dr Johnson testified to his stamina over dessert by saying ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it’, it was the Fellows of University College whom he invoked as witnesses. Boswell also records that he and Johnson dined at University College on 20 March 1776, saying, ‘We had an excellent dinner there with the Master and Fellows, it being S. Cuthbert’s Day, which is kept by them as a festival, as he was a saint of Durham, with which this College is much connected’. This is fondly recalled in Univ for, while Oxford Colleges like to be commended for their academic prowess, they also like to be praised for their table; and we still celebrate the Feast of S. Cuthbert every year.

The Winter Common Room at University College is an intimate panelled room which, by candlelight on a winter evening with the College silver laid out on the table, is one of the most beautiful and comfortable rooms I know. Beside the fireplace there is a mezzotint portrait of Johnson presented to the College by his friend and executor, William Scott, later Lord Stowell, with the following inscription in Stowell’s hand ‘Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in hoc camera communi frequens conviva’ – ‘Samuel Johnson, Doctor in Civil Law, in this common room a frequent guest’. I take it that this is the very print mentioned in Boswell’s Life as being one of the finest mezzotints ever executed, of which the plate was destroyed after four or five impressions were taken off. Boswell mentions that one of these was in the possession of Lord Stowell.

Lord Stowell was a close friend of Johnson’s for the latter part of his life and an executor of his will. So in surveying Johnson’s Univ connections, let us start with him, although he was not the origin of Johnson’s connections with Univ.

Stowell was the elder of two remarkable brothers, the other being Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor of England for the best part of thirty years. Their surname, before they were ennobled, was Scott; and I shall call them by that name. Both were Univ men, who flourished through their abilities rather than through any advantages of birth. They came from Newcastle and were sons of a coal-fitter, who might have become coal-fitters themselves if Oxford had not intervened. (The term ‘coal-fitter’ may suggest a more manual activity than was the case: their father fitted coal to carriers and so he was a sort of agent. He left a substantial fortune when he died. One can speculate that he must have been acquainted with Captain Cook who learned his skills by carrying coal in barges down the East coast).

William Scott was born in 1745. He had an adventurous beginning. There was a story that his mother, when she was about to produce him, had to escape from Newcastle to Heworth in Durham by being lowered from the walls as the Young Pretender advanced from Edinburgh. Anyway it was a lucky fact that he was born in Durham because this enabled him to get an Oxford Scholarship reserved to those born in that county. He took his BA in 1764 and was elected to a Durham Fellowship at Univ in 1765. His subject was Ancient History, in which he was reputedly a brilliant lecturer. When he was 37, he resigned his Fellowship and became a barrister and when he was 53 he was appointed a Judge of the High Court of Admiralty.

He sat as a judge for thirty years and produced judgements in maritime and international law which were described as ‘models alike of literary execution and judicial reasoning’. In 1801 he became MP for Oxford – odd to think that in those days membership of the House of Commons could be combined with being a judge – until in 1821 he went to the House of Lords.

More relevant for our subject today is the fact that William Scott was a very convivial man. In a case involving the proper use of certain funds he said from the judicial Bench ‘I approve of dining. It lubricates business’. One of his Univ pupils, Thomas Maurice (of whom more later) wrote ‘Mr Scott, in addition to his impressive lectures which improved their minds, was not sparing of good dinners to benefit the constitution of his pupils, of which Dr Johnson and some of the first scholars of the age were partakers.’ Boswell recalls a dinner he shared with Scott and Johnson in the Temple in 1778 (though Boswell’s account typically gives Scott very little of the conversation).

Boswell describes Scott as a two-bottle man, which I suppose makes his capacity about two thirds of that of Johnson. A Univ man who went up to Univ a century later, in 1872, recalled meeting an elderly servant of the College who told him that William Scott and his brother used to come back to the College every now and then, for what he described as ‘a little jaunt’. We might call it ‘a bender’. The College servant had waited on them in Common Room, and said, ‘they always had a beefsteak pudding with oysters, and several bottles of port - I forget the numbers’. There is the traditional discretion of the Oxford scout!

However I am sorry to say that, in addition to his brilliance as an ancient historian, his conviviality and his lucid judgements, William Scott was known for his meanness. After his first wife died, he married the widow of the first Marquess of Sligo, whom he had met when trying her son for enticing two naval seamen to desert their man-of-war in the Mediterranean to join his yacht. But the Marchioness found that Scott’s parsimony did not enable her to enjoy the quality of living to which she was accustomed and the marriage was not a success. It was perhaps not accidental that Scott was described by his brother as being capable of drinking ‘any given quantity of port’.

The aforesaid younger brother of William, John Scott, Lord Eldon, was even more famous though his long-lasting contribution to the law was probably less. When William became established as a Fellow at Univ in 1765, he sent a message to his father, the coal-fitter in Newcastle, ‘Send Jack up to me: I can do better for him here’. That must have been one of the understatements of the century. Jack got his degree by answering just two questions:- (1) What is the Hebrew for ‘The Place of a Skull’? and (2) Who was the founder of University College? He eloped with the beautiful daughter of a Newcastle banker (though this did not cause him to be understanding when his own daughter subsequently eloped), became a lecturer in law, was called to the bar, became a member of Parliament, solicitor general, attorney general; and then, in 1801, Lord Chancellor, a post which he held almost continuously until 1827. George III had a great affection for him.

Eldon was a handsome man, with immense charm and courtesy, but unlike his brother was not socially minded. His motto was to live like a hermit and work like a horse! He renounced social life and was never a member of Johnson’s Literary Club. So, although he was great and famous and well known to Johnson, I will spend no more time on him for the purposes of this evening’s talk.

I said earlier that neither of these distinguished brothers started Johnson’s connection with University College. That distinction belongs to Sir Robert Chambers, another Fellow of the College. He met Johnson in 1754 when enrolling at Middle Temple and Johnson took him under his wing from the beginning almost as a second father. The earliest letter from Johnson to Chambers is dated 1754. Chambers became a Fellow of Univ in 1761, became Vinerian Professor of Law in 1766 and departed from Oxford to India in 1774 where he subsequently rose to become Chief Justice of Bengal. Chambers’ A Course of Lectures on the English Law was in fact the product of a collaboration between Chambers and Johnson.

Now here’s a coincidence. Chambers, and the two Scotts were all at the same school in Newcastle and had the same teacher, the Revd Hugh Moises. It is not a coincidence that all three came to Univ because no doubt Chambers’ appointment as a Fellow at Univ brought Stowell and Eldon in his wake. What is a coincidence is that three young men of such remarkable talent were at the same school with the same teacher. Those who suppose that one teacher is as good as another should reflect on the record of the Revd Moises.

Chambers, though capable of charm, was not invariably charming. Mrs Thrale could never understand the partiality which all her acquaintances felt for him and indeed Johnson seems to have irritated him at times. Boswell describes a dinner with Johnson and Chambers in the Temple at which Johnson teased Chambers about a will he had just written. Even Boswell is surprised at Johnson’s jocularity and records that Chambers ‘seemed impatient till he got rid of us’. Thereupon Johnson laughed so much that on leaving the Temple he had to support himself on one of the posts at the side of the pavement and ‘in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet–ditch’. Perhaps one glass of port too many on this occasion? Whenever I come out of the Temple now through the Fleet Street gate, I think of Johnson rolling about helpless with laughter.

A more harmonious story of Johnson and Chambers appears in John Scott’s memoirs. John Scott recalled that on one occasion he was walking with Chambers and Johnson in the garden of New Inn Hall in Oxford and Chambers was gathering snails and throwing them into his neighbour’s garden. When rebuked by Johnson for this unfriendly behaviour Chambers said that the neighbour was a dissenter. ‘Oh’, said Johnson ‘If so, Chambers, toss away; toss away as hard as you can’.

It may well have been the predominantly Jacobite sympathies of the Univ Fellowship, as well as the brilliance and the port, which was one of the features drawing Johnson to the Senior Common Room. Nathan Wetherell, who became Master of Univ at the time of these great stars and continued as Master for no less than forty three years (an achievement which makes my mind boggle), was certainly of that bent. In 1756, Wetherell had preached a sermon on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution which was so Tory that it created a sensation in the University. It is evident from the fact that the Fellows of Univ elected Wetherell as their Master that these sentiments were not anathema to the Senior Common Room. Nor were they anathema to Johnson, even if Boswell is right in saying that Johnson affected more Jacobitism than he really felt.

There was, however, another member of the Univ Fellowship who was certainly not Jacobite and who was also one of Johnson’s friends. His name was William Jones and he writes about dining with Johnson in the Univ Senior Common Room in 1769. He was, in scholarly terms, perhaps the brightest star in even that bright firmament of Univ Fellows. Born in 1746, he became a member of University College at the age of 17 in 1764 and a Fellow just two years later. William Jones had the most amazing gift for languages and appetite for knowledge. He knew thirty languages and his first publication was a translation from Persian to French at the commission of the King of Denmark (who gave him scant thanks). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1773 and in 1774 he was elected a member of Johnson’s Literary Club, with whom he dined often. Finding the stipend of a Fellow insufficient and anyway wishing to marry, in 1783 he went as a judge to India, where his greatest scholarly achievements took place. In order to understand directly the subtleties of the Hindu law, he learned Sanskrit and, observing the similarities to Persian, Latin and Greek, he deduced the common parentage of all the Indo-European languages.

A portrait of Sir William Jones hangs in the Univ Senior Common Room on the other side of the fireplace from Dr Johnson. But this is not the most distinguished portrait of him. William Jones’s mother thought so much of her son that she commissioned Sir Joshua Reynolds to paint him. A copy of the portrait hangs over my fireplace in the Masters’ Lodgings at Univ. Like me, Jones was at school at Harrow before going to Univ, but I am afraid that at that point our academic affinity ends.

Together with his Univ Fellowship, Jones was engaged as tutor to the Spencer family at Althorp, and a demanding tutor he must have been. His attitude to education was illustrated by something he devised and called an andrometer – ‘the measure of a man’ - listing the accomplishments which an educated man should acquire in each year of his life, a sort of eighteenth century list of key stage attainments. I have seen a copy of this written in his own hand. For a child of the age of six, he specified ‘grammar of his own language’, Latin at eleven, Greek at twelve, composition in verse and prose at sixteen, rhetoric and declamations at seventeen and so on each year until the age of seventy when the prescribed activity was ‘preparation for eternity’. Up to that point it was all hard going every year with no room for relaxation and, although he remained a lifelong friend of Viscount Althorp, Jones did not last as tutor at Althorp for very long. I cannot believe that he would take a sympathetic view of the dumbing-down of A levels.

I have one final member of Univ to introduce you to and that is William Windham. He seems to me one of the most attractive members of the circle, not only because his family home was Felbrigg, one of my favourite houses, near our cottage in Norfolk. Son and grandson of members of Parliament, it is not surprising that, after graduating from Univ as a student of Robert Chambers, he was drawn to public rather than academic life. He became a close friend of both Johnson and Burke, and was the political protégé and disciple of the latter. His care for Johnson in the last day’s of the latter’s life, despite his own preoccupations in public office, is commented on favourably by Boswell and he kept a touching diary of those days during which Johnson entrusted to him the care of his negro servant, Frank Barber. Windham was one of Johnson’s pall bearers.

What an amazing era of scholarship the latter part of the eighteenth century was in Britain and what a brilliant circle this group of Johnson’s Univ friends was – the Scott brothers (Stowell and Eldon), Chambers, Wetherell, Jones and Windham. It is not surprising that Johnson felt such an affinity to the College and recommended others to go there. We find him securing a place at Univ for George Strahan, the son of his publisher, in a letter to Strahan’s father which is worth quoting: ‘I think I have pretty well disposed of my young friend George, who, if you approve of it, will be entered next Monday a commoner of University College, and will be chosen next day a scholar of the House….. The College is almost filled with me (sic) friends and he will be well treated’.

Johnson’s influence may also be the reason why Charles Burney, the great musicologist and father of Fanny, took his Doctorate in Music from University College instead of a more conventional music College.

We have accounts of Johnson staying at Univ. The student I mentioned earlier, Thomas Maurice, recalled a visit by Johnson to William Scott as follows:

When he visited Oxford, he liked his host and his quarters (to say nothing of the Burgundy, a wine to which, at one period of his life, he was partial,) so well that he would sometime stay for weeks together; and for a certain time every morning would exercise himself with swaying backward and forward the ponderous leaden handle of the water pump by way of opening his chest and relieving the asthmatic complaint with which he was affected. A multitude of vagrant boys and girls was generally assembled to witness his athletic exertions in this way, among whom he very liberally expended the small copper money with which he used previously to load his pockets.

Maurice was so star-struck by Johnson that, when he heard from William Scott that Johnson had praised a poem he had written he kissed a page from the Rambler three times and did not rise from his desk until he had written a fifty line poem in praise of Johnson.

We have a less starry-eyed account in the letters of another student, William Stanhope. Writing in April 1767 he says:

We had Johnson ye Author of ye Dictionary, and to dine with us today; he seems a man of very strong sense, and deep judgement, but not remarkably bright, or of quick apprehension; he is also fond of sarcasm, which has a double portion of gall, flowing from ye most disgusting voice and person you almost ever beheld.

Then, as now, clearly some students were not dazzled by seniority and eminence.

One passage of Johnson’s views on universities, as quoted by Boswell, I cannot resist quoting because it has such a contemporary ring. At a dinner with Johnson and Mr Murray, Solicitor-General of Scotland, in 1776, Boswell records raising the topic ‘that the universities of England are too rich, so that learning does not flourish in them as it would do if those who teach had smaller salaries and depended on their assiduity for a great part of their income’. Johnson riposted:

Sir, the very reverse of this is the truth; the English universities are not rich enough; ... for they have nothing good enough to keep a man of eminent learning with them for his life. In the foreign universities a professorship is a high thing. It is as much almost as a man can make by his learning; and therefore we find the most learned men abroad are in the universities. It is not so with us. Our universities are impoverished of learning by the penury of their provisions. I wish there were many places of a thousand a year at Oxford to keep first rate men of learning from quitting the University.

The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket Street,
Lichfield, Staffs. WS13 6LG
contact@lichfieldrambler.co.uk