The campaign for a University of Manchester
- A University for Manchester?
- John Owens’ Legacy
- ‘Extension’ and the new Owens College
- Discussion Points
- Additional Resources
A University for Manchester?
Manchester’s rapid development in the early 19th century brought wealth but not necessarily social or cultural respectability. Critics, some internal, alleged that the Manchester had failed to create educational institutions appropriate to its status as England’s leading industrial town.
There was some justification for this: Manchester had very few secondary schools and lacked institutions for advanced learning. Occasional initiatives such as Manchester New College, a dissenting academy, were short-lived. The private medical schools, which emerged after 1810, supported basic science education but for a very limited audience. For Manchester’s wealthier inhabitants contemplating university for their (male) children, the choice was between an aristocratic and Anglican Oxbridge or the distant Scottish universities.
Despite this, there was intermittent interest in creating a university in Manchester. In 1784, Thomas Barnes, a local Unitarian minister, proposed the idea to the Literary and Philosophical Society. Over fifty years later in 1836, the Rev. Henry Longueville Jones, a former Cambridge don, set out a much more detailed plan.
Jones envisaged that the university would teach arts and sciences (but avoid theology), and would be financially self-supporting through student fees.
John Owens’ Legacy
Some local citizens took up Jones’ proposal, forming a small committee to investigate the feasibility of a university. It was soon realised that this would require a very large initial endowment. Fortuitously, in 1846, a Manchester merchant, John Owens, left the sum of over £96,000 for an institution to instruct young men “in such branches of learning and science as now and may be hereafter taught in the English universities”. Owens’ donation was almost certainly due to the recommendation of his business partner, George Faulkner, who had been involved with the earlier committee.
Owens’ trustees set out about establishing this unfamiliar institution (a minority of them had attended university), and they sought advice from established universities, especially in Scotland. When Owens College opened in March 1851, it was not called a university because it did not have the right to award degrees. However, it had the trappings of a university on a minor scale: a small professoriate teaching subjects to a standard found at the established universities. Theology was not taught as being too contentious, and women were expressly excluded from membership of the College according to the terms of Owens’ will.
Despite Manchester’s reputation for science, arts subjects were treated as equally important, and to a large extent, the College followed the conventional curriculum of a liberal education. The need to appeal to local industry was understood, particularly in chemistry, but the College initially struggled partly because there was limited demand from business for this level of education.
‘Extension’ and the new Owens College
Owens College survived these initial difficulties, and grew during the 1860s. The Quay St site could not accommodate this expansion, and became a serious impediment on developing the curriculum. In the mid-1860s, when the uncertainties of the ‘Cotton Famine’ were over, the Trustees planned a new fund-raising campaign, importantly targeted not only at a few wealthy benefactors, but at the wider body of Manchester citizens.
The ‘Extension” campaign was launched in 1867, directed by the cotton industrialist, Thomas Ashton. It raised £211,000 — above expectations, and significantly more than the original endowment. This allowed the College to plan a new site, increase staff and introduce new subjects, such as geology and engineering.
Land was acquired at Oxford Road, then a suburban area, situated close to middle-class areas in south Manchester from where it was hoped to attract new students — at this date, virtually all students came from the local area. The new College opened in 1872, and in the following year received a major boost when the Royal Manchester School of Medicine joined it. A medical school was seen a critical test of the credibility of the institution.
In the mid-1870s, the College lobbied hard to gain university status, thereby achieving the goal first set out in the 1780s. This plan failed, after it came up against the combined opposition of Oxbridge, the University of London, and other Northern cities concerned it would stifle their own university plans. In 1880 a compromise was agreed when the federal Victoria University was established for the north of England, and based in Manchester, with Owens as its original sole member. Despite this disappointment Owens College had become one of the key civic institutions in late Victorian Manchester, and an exemplar of a new type of higher education institution.
Discussion Points
Why did elite opinion believe that a local university was so important to Manchester’s status?
Why was there disagreement and uncertainty over the form that a Manchester ‘university’ should take?
Additional Resources
W. H. Chaloner , The movement for the Extension of Owens College, Manchester, 1863–73 (Manchester 1973).
Edward Fiddes, Chapters in the history of Owens College and of Manchester University, 1851–1914 (Manchester 1937).
D.A. Jones The origins of civic universities: Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool (London 1988)
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