This edited article about the Oxford and Cambridge Air Race originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

All the Oxbridge pilots had flown with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. Picture by Wilf Hardy

As they sat in their studies at Oxford or Cambridge working for their degrees, young men who had flown against the enemy in the First World War had a nagging ambition to get back into the air again. Only a few years before, they had been buzzing among the clouds in their struts-and-wires machines, battling with the German aces like Baron Manfred von Richthofen and his Jagdgeschwader fighter squadron.

To return to their universities after excitement like this was a big contrast for the former pilots. What was needed was something to keep alive their adventurous spirit. Of course, there was the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Then one of the students, a former test pilot named A. R. Boeree, who had gone back to Oxford after the war, had a thrilling idea for an Oxford and Cambridge air race. Men in both universities, who had flown S.E.5.A machines in the war, swamped the organisers with their applications to take part.

Finally, each university picked a team of six pilots, three of whom would fly in the race, the others being held in reserve. Each of them had more than a thousand flying hours behind him.

The Royal Aero Club provided the money to hire eight S E.5.A machines. These had been built just before the end of the war and had 220 hp Wolseley-Viper engines. They were to be flown over a 129 mile course from an aerodrome at Hendon, near London, making three laps of the circuit. Two of the planes would be kept in reserve.

Prize money to the total of £400 was raised, some of it being provided by an oil company which made aeroplane fuel.

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This edited article about Oxfordshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

A picture history of Oxford by C L Doughty

Everyone loves their own county the best, and in Oxfordshire it is easy to see why. At either end of it rise rolling lines of hills – Chiltern ridges capped with woods to the south-east, the lovely Cotswolds to the north-west.

Between the two lies the central plain, chequered by fields, and criss-crossed by streams.

Oxfordshire is the enchanted county. Its villages lie hidden down narrow winding lanes, groups of stone-built or brick-and-timber cottages with musical-sounding names – Nettlebed and Little Rollright, Sibford Gower, Broughton Poggs.

Early last year, the county’s boundaries were extended so that it now includes part of what was formerly Berkshire, and has added greatly to its total population. Abingdon, which is now in Oxfordshire, is an ancient market town with the remains of a 7th century abbey.

It is six miles from the city of Oxford which lies on the central plain. It has been a seat of learning since the twelfth century, and the colleges, with their towers and domes and “dreaming spires,” started a century later.

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This edited article about Andrew Carnegie originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 686 published on 8 March 1975.

A Christmas Reminder for Andrew Carnegie, who was often critisised for seeking fame

by founding colleges and  libraries instead of helping America’s chronic social problems

In the nineteenth century, America, and particularly the United States, represented hope and opportunity to millions of poor people in Europe. There, across the Atlantic, they hoped to find freedom from poverty, hunger and insecurity. Shipload after shipload of hopeful emigrants left ports in Germany, Italy, Russia, and the British Isles to cross the ocean and so gain a chance to get their share of the work and wealth which America offered them.

One of those ships was the “Wiscasset”, which left the River Clyde in Scotland on May 17, 1848, on a fifty-day journey to New York. Among the passengers was a fair-haired twelve-year-old Scot, Andrew Carnegie, the son of an out-of-work Dunfermline linen weaver.

Young Andrew knew a lot about poverty and above all, about the shame and degradation of poverty. He remembered only too well how grey and gaunt his father’s face had looked when lack of work and lack of money forced him to sell three of his four looms. Andrew also remembered vividly seeing his mother work night after weary night, stiching shoes in order to provide food for the family. Then came the dreadful day when William Carnegie, Andrew’s father, had to go to the manufacturer who employed him to beg and plead for more work.

“It was burnt into my heart then that my father, an honourable, upright, hard-working man, had been forced to humble himself just because he was poor,” Andrew Carnegie wrote later. “And then and there, came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man.”

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This edited article about Cambridgeshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

A picture history of Cambridge by C L Doughty

What connection can there be between a royal princess called Etheldreda, who lived thirteen hundred years ago, and an atomic power station? Perhaps there is no connection. But it is possible that if Etheldreda had not defied her husband, Egfrid of Northumbria, taken refuge on the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire and there founded a monastery, the world as we know it would not exist.

It was monks from Ely who established a nucleus of learning in the town of Cambridge, and in 1284 it was the Bishop of Ely, Hugh de Balsham, who founded Peterhouse, the first college of Cambridge University.

It was in Cambridge, in first floor chambers north of the great gate of Trinity College, that Sir Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion, interpreted gravity, revolutionised scientific thought and paved the way for the modern world.

It was in Cambridge, in the Cavendish laboratories, that in 1918 a scientist from New Zealand, Lord Rutherford, the atom scientist, became the first man to transmute one element, nitrogen, into another, hydrogen.

Conceivably, Rutherford would still have ushered in the atomic age, Newton still have made his great deductions, if Cambridge university had never existed. Equally, it is possible that both would have missed the mental stimulation that Cambridge provides.

Since the alteration of the county boundaries in England and Wales last year, Cambridgeshire now embraces Huntingdonshire, and with it the story of another man of letters who also studied at Cambridge University.

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This edited article about Thomas Barnardo originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 667 published on 26 October 1974.

Thomas Barnardo, better known as simply Dr Barnardo, and the homeless London boys whom he would rescue from their perilous fate on the streets

On a cold winter’s night a half-starved ragged boy sought shelter at a school inside a donkey stable among the slums of Stepney. Thomas Barnardo, the man who was to devote his life to the care of unwanted children, had found his first homeless waif to save.

He wore no shoes, no shirt, and no cap. Only a few torn rags, held together by shreds, clung to his cold, shivering body. He was starving, and had been walking the streets all day, trying to earn a few pennies, and he had failed. As he had done the day before and the day before that. All he wanted that night was three pennies in his pocket; the price of a lodging house bed. But the light was now quickly fading so he prepared himself for another night’s sleep out in the cold, bleak night.

Then the small urchin remembered that his friend had told him about a night school in Stepney. It was run by a young gentleman who did not mind what the boys and girls looked like when they went to him for lessons. Most of all, he remembered his friend saying that there was a lovely warm fire in the school.

So the lad made his way to a tiny shed in Hope Place where a crowd of children dressed more or less like himself, were listening to their teacher. After the other pupils had gone, the young boy waited behind. The young, harassed teacher noticed him huddling over the fire and told him it was time for him to go home.

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This edited article about Glasgow originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 644 published on 18 May 1974.

The sensational trial for murder of Madeleine Smith by C L Doughty

Glasgow, glorious Glasgow! There’s no city in Scotland to compare with it. It is quite simply the greatest, and letters challenging this opinion should not be written until doubting readers have finished the whole article, by which time all but the inhabitants of Edinburgh should be converted.

Consider the facts. Glasgow is famous for thinking and living big. You cannot think much bigger than those most famous of liners, the “Queen Mary” and the “Queen Elizabeths” 1 and 2, all built on the Clyde, Glasgow’s famous waterway. And you cannot think bigger – in Great Britain at least – than the city’s Hampden Park football ground, the stadium with the largest capacity in the country. One record day in 1937 a few short of 150,000 people watched a match there. And while we are on the subject of football, long before riots became fashionable elsewhere on and off the field, where were the most notorious outbreaks of violence? Why, at Hampden Park when Rangers played Celtic.

No one, therefore, could or would suggest that Glasgow is perfect, especially as perfection is rather dull, like several lesser cities we dare not name. Glasgow has always gone in for the worst as well as the best. Its slums, now a thing of the past, were once the worst in Britain, and so were its gangs, which are still around. But then the city does have a genius for fighting, as enemies of its immortal regiment, the Highland Light Infantry, have reason to know from bitter experience.

Glasgow, which, as we are seeing, believes in living life to the full, is also Scotland’s artistic capital. Did someone mention the Edinburgh Festival of Music and Drama? As Glaswegians will readily point out, that only happens for three weeks every year, and there are plenty of Edinburgh folk who resent it bitterly, but Glasgow has a rich cultural life all the year round.

Scotland’s leading theatre is the Glasgow Citizens’, founded in 1942 by a great Glaswegian playwright, James Bridie. Scottish Opera, founded in the early 1960s, is world famous, but Glasgow based, though it naturally plays in other Scottish cities, as well as parts of England. And where did the Western Theatre Ballet fly to when England no longer offered the company a home? To Edinburgh? To Glasgow, of course, where it became the Scottish Theatre Ballet. The city is also the headquarters of the Scottish National Orchestra, it boasts the internationally famous Michell Library, and it has a fine museum, art gallery and botanical gardens.

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This edited article about Cambridge originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 642 published on 4 May 1974.

A picture history of Cambridge by C L Doughty

Coming home from his evening walk, Henry Cavendish let himself into his house with his latchkey, placed his walking stick in the hall-stand, and began to climb the stairs to his workroom, mumbling all the while to himself.

Suddenly, half-way up the staircase, he stopped and recoiled in disgust. The object of his displeasure – a woman servant carrying mop and pail – cringed in terror, for she knew what could be the consequences of the master’s gaze falling upon her.

Already several of the maids who had crossed his path in the house had been dismissed. For Cavendish, one of the greatest scientists Britain has produced, and whose fame and fortune founded the great Cavendish Laboratory for Experimental Research at Cambridge, was a woman-hater. So great was his dislike of the opposite sex that he could not even bring himself to look upon a woman.

Cavendish’s eccentricities were not confined to woman-hating. His bankers, charged with looking after the considerable fortune he had inherited – Cavendish was the son of an eighteenth century nobleman – wrung their hands when the scientist told them that if they ever bothered him about money he would take it away from their care.

Once a member of his staff wanted help during an illness in his family . . . £100 would have been enough. Too impatient to listen to the details before a sum was suggested, Cavendish gave the man ten thousand pounds.

As a physicist and chemist, Henry Cavendish built an international reputation – and he hated it if anyone mentioned the fact. His chief work was in the chemistry of gases, but his theorems on the nature of electricity and of heat were remarkable.

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This edited article about T H Huxley originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 639 published on 13 April 1974.

Thomas Huxley defending Darwin in the lecture hall of Oxford’s New University Museum in June, 1860 by C L Doughty

“Soapy Sam” was going to be the star attraction, and his many admirers were sure that he would demolish Charles Darwin for ever. “Soapy” was more respectfully known as Samuel Wilberforce and was the Bishop of Oxford. He had got his nickname because he was too glib by half, but he was an orator in a thousand.

Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species, had caused an uproar. In Victorian times, the story of the Creation at the beginning of the Book of Genesis was believed literally, and many accepted the theory that the world was created at 9 a.m. on 23 October, 4,004 B.C. Suddenly this quiet naturalist had come forward with his theory of evolution: all forms of life must have evolved from earlier forms.

Darwin had written of natural selection, the survival of the fittest. While many species had vanished from the earth, variations of those same species had enabled others to survive. Today, Darwin’s ideas have been modified slightly, because more is known about heredity, but basically his views still hold. And the one that caught the startled public’s attention was that man and the monkey had a common ancestor.

Darwin was not there to challenge “Soapy” that June day in 1860, but he had his champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, as great a scientist as Darwin and better able to cope with the hurly-burly of public debate. He was to become known as Darwin’s Bulldog. Like Darwin, he had travelled to the tropics when he was young aboard a naval vessel, and his life had been transformed by what he had seen and learnt of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

The crowd in the great hall of the New University Museum at Oxford was thickening faster for the battle royal to come. It was the annual meeting of the British Association and was to be the most important ever held.

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This edited article about Oxford originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 639 published on 13 April 1974.

A picture history of Oxford by C L Doughty

Walking through the centre of “the city of dreaming spires,” as Matthew Arnold called it, down the busy “High” – one of the most famous streets in Europe, one can only wonder how it all began. In what dim distance of far-flung time did Oxford become the first university of Britain?

To try to answer this question we must go back more than twelve hundred years, to the Anglo-Saxon days of about 737, when St Frideswide founded her nunnery in the place where Christ Church now stands. That was the first known beginning of Oxford, but it was not yet distinguished for learning.

The credit for founding the university is often attributed to Alfred the Great. There is no direct evidence of it. We must move on another two hundred years, when, at the end of the twelfth century, we hear of Oxford as the home of 3,000 students.

They did not go to colleges, and they had no university buildings. Instead, “Masters” gave lectures in Latin to any students who cared to attend, and at the end of each lecture they collected a fee from the listeners.

After lectures, the students often ran riot around the city, picking fights with the townsmen, so that the turbulent “town and gown” riots of Oxford became proverbial.

Colleges had to come, of course. Which was first? The distinction is disputed. We know, though, that University College, founded in 1249 by William of Durham, but not established as a society until 30 years later, was the first to be endowed. Balliol College, founded by John Balliol between 1263 and 1268, was the first to exist as a corporate body. And Merton College, established by Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England about 1264, was the first corporate body to exist with full statutes.

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This edited article about education originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 634 published on 9 March 1974.

A game of rugby at Rugby School by Peter Jackson

“Have you had a rebellion lately, eh, eh?”

That was King George III’s standard greeting whenever he met an Eton boy, for in the 18th and early 19th centuries, many leading schools were little better than battlefields. At some of them, total anarchy reigned for long periods, at others, only a diet of terror kept the boys in any sort of order. One Harrow headmaster proudly boasted that he never flogged anyone twice in one lesson.

Bullying on a horrifying scale was rife in most schools, while boys hunted, drank heavily, went to the races and fought, and poached and stole from local farmers, having no respect at all for other people’s property. Occasionally, they played football and cricket organised by themselves, for “organised games” arranged by the school were unknown.

Masters were too few and the curriculum they taught was a solid diet of Latin and Greek, occasionally leavened by a little mathematics. The grammar schools copied the public schools in this, and only at the “dissenting academies” was a wide range of subjects taught. Not surprisingly, many a giant of the Industrial Revolution sprang from them or was self-taught, or had a private tutor.

One famous school, Rugby, needed reforming more than most. It was 1827 and there were as few as 100 pupils, so low had its reputation sunk. The retiring headmaster ruled (as far as he did rule) by terror. Just occasionally a boy would be expelled if some particular crime came to his notice. Meanwhile some of the senior boys were spending £100 a year at least on drink, worth £700 by today’s reckoning.

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