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"Peterhouse, Cambridge - College & Chapel" .................................................................................................. by Constantin Roman. How I came to write a history of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. ................... "During my tours as a Cambridge guide I came to realize that some of the Colleges, such as King's, Trinity, or St John's, which attracted a greater number of visitors, had prepared little pamphlets with the history of the College. At Trinity, G. M. Trevelyan a former Master, had produced a charming little pamphlet for visitors. He was held in high esteem by historians, who generally regarded him as a "20th century Gibbon", for his invaluable "English Social History", which had pages of a literary beauty, reflecting the workings of a poet's mind. He had a deep love for his college, to which he was appointed by the King, on Churchill's recommendation and he found it useful to produce this unprepossessing small college history for visitors, which was a little gem. I felt that Peterhouse deserved to have one equally well informed: "Surely I could be one up on Trevelyan by producing an illustrated guide?!" I talked to Tim Horne, a gifted amateur photographer, who was a Chemistry undergraduate in Peterhouse. We both agreed that the project had to be done. Tim Horne took a series of beautiful black and white photographs of architectural details, which I deemed to be the most important in College. The text was ready in French, covering mainly the history of architecture of the College and highlighting various personalities of national repute, such as Lord Kelvin the physicist, the poet Grey, the composer Thomas Campion, Babbage the Mathematician and inventor of the first computer, Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, all of whom were at Peterhouse. The text was translated from French into English and the guide presented as the first bilingual edition in Cambridge. It filled in a gap in the Cambridge guidebook literature and I was pleased to be told, some twenty years on, that the pamphlet was printed again in a second edition".
In retrospect, looking at this little foray in the History of Architecture of the oldest college in Cambridge I still wander today how it came all about: Peterhouse had many distinguished historians in its ranks, like Sir Dennis Brogan, Sir Herbert Butterfield, Maurice Cowling and many others of international repute. Why didn’t they produce such a guide book? Maybe the subject was regarded as a kind of ‘sacred cow’ – far too important to tinker with, unless one produced a ‘definitive history’ – a kind of opus on par with the Doomsday Book. Yet this young scientist in his youthful ignorance was not in the least inhibited in dealing with the subject. I told reproachfully the Senior Tutor Roger Lovatt who was also my long-suffering Tutor (and a Historian and Medievalist), after I published the pamphlet: "You had to wait 800 years for a Romanian to write a History of Peterhouse?". It remained, to this day the only bilingual French-English College History in Cambridge. The other irony of it was that both the writer and the photographer who did the illustrations were scientists and not historians. This is what Cambridge is so good at – if an idea is considered worthwhile it does not matter whom you are – you just do it and everybody will be happier for it. By contrast, in Communist Romania, you had to reach a crusty old age before you could make a public pronouncement and then you had to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, before you might get into print, with the caveat that your track record from the kindergarten days onwards had to be without blemish: no place here for late developer dilletante who were young and were not Party members "Vive la difference!" |
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