Download PDF - St. Catherine's College - University of Oxford

MESSAGES
Master’s Report
In our fiftieth anniversary year as a College, it is worth
reflecting on the paths that have drawn the community
of St Catherine’s together. Our roots lie in the founding
of the Delegacy for Unattached Students in 1868,
following the Royal Commission of 1852, which had
concluded that Oxford and Cambridge needed opening up
to a broader based clientele.
George Kitchin, later Dean Kitchin, Dean of Winchester
and then of Durham, had the privilege of being the
pilot of this great experiment, taking on the role of first
Censor. As part of the research for the book we have
recently published about St Catherine’s, we uncovered
his portrait lying in a basement in Christ Church. He can
now be seen in our book alongside his five successors,
Censor Bullock being the last of them.
The book also offers a glimpse of the character of JB
Baker – known as ‘The Jibber’ – in the photograph of the
1899 Torpids Four. He appears there as the scruffiest,
most nondescript coach, and together with an equally
flea-bitten mongrel, poses alongside the proud winners of
a prize pewter tankard for their performance on the river.
The Jibber was actually a very popular Senior Tutor from
1891 and, later in the book, he may be seen thirty
years on, sporting the same unmistakable luxuriant
moustache, but now in smarter attire, as Censor, a post
he held from 1919 until 1930. He conducted a much
needed reorganisation of the tutors and sowed the
seeds for our taking the name ‘St Catherine’s’.
The moving finger of time shifts now to the last Censor,
Bullock, appointed sixty years ago, becoming the first
Master eight years later, and the orchestrator of all we
see around us today. The Bullock years and characters
seem so vibrantly familiar to my generation that it
In our fiftieth
anniversary
year as a
College, it
is worth
reflecting on
the paths that
have drawn the
community of
St Catherine’s
together
2 /ST /A MESSAGE CATHERINE’S FROM COLLEGE THE MASTER 2012