THERESA MAY: Time at Oxford (Updated Oct. 29, 2016)

Calling Sherlock.

Theresa May was born Oct. 1, 1956 in Eastbourne, Sussex, only child of Zaidee Mary Barnes (1928–1982) and Hubert Brasier (1917–1981).

Her father was a Church of England clergyman who was chaplain of an Eastbourne hospital and later vicar of the Church of St Mary the Virgin at Wheatley, near Oxford. 

May was educated primarily in the state sector but with a short spell at an independent Catholic school. At 13, she won a place at the former Holton Park Girls' Grammar School. She then attended Oxford where she studied geography at St Hugh's, graduating in 1977.

The current issue of Private Eye has a lead story about gossip writers trying find out about Mrs May’s time at Oxford. A potential source was a campaign pamphlet of 45 pages written by undergraduate  David Blair to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA, founded 1924). The source is believed to include self-serving articles for and against notables such as William Hague, Daniel Hannan, Jeremy Hunt and Sally Ullman (later Bercow).

Postscript 1, Aug. 11, 2016

The British Library, according to Ian Senior, has no copy in its catalog but the Bodleian and Trinity College allegedly do. Both these copies were reportedly searched for and found missing. Lord Gnome of Private Eye was correct in his report that no dirt about the undergraduate lives of Theresa (nee Brasier) and Philip May was to be found in the 1994 History of the Oxford University Conservative Association by David Blair. But he was entirely wrong when he asserted that a rare copy of this slender volume had "mysteriously gone missing" from the Trinity College Archive. The only mystery is why no one from Private Eye thought to check this erroneous detail by means of a email to Clare Hopkins, Trinity College Archivist.

Postscript 2, Oct. 29, 2016

I have since visited with Clare Hopkins in Oxford and have seen the 1994 History of OUCA. It is a slim volume indeed and I could personally add a lot of detail about the years 1962-65. There is nothing in it about the Oxford activities of Theresa May.

R.I.P.: John Brademas, Oxonian and NYU President

John Brademas, 1927-2016

John Brademas was for many years a Congressman from Indiana and then Prsident of New York University.

He was born on March 2, 1927, in Mishawaka, Ind., the son of Stephen Brademas and Beatrice Goble. His father was a Greek immigrant who ran a restaurant. His mother was an elementary-school teacher, and one grandfather was a college professor.

In 1945, he graduated from Central High School in nearby South Bend, where he was valedictorian and the football team's quarterback. He enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he joined a Navy ROTC program.

After his freshman year, he won a scholarship and transferred to Harvard. There he became president of the Wesley Foundation, the campus Methodist student group. In successive summers, he worked at an auto plant in South Bend, lived among Indians in Mexico and was an intern at the UN's temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N.Y.

After graduating from Harvard with high honors in 1949, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and in 1954 earned a social studies doctorate. Back home in northern Indiana, he resolved to run for Congress in a largely Republican district with diverse demographics. After losing races in 1954 and 1956, he gained political experience as an aide to two members of Congress and in Adlai E. Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. He taught political science at St. Mary’s College for a year and was active in civic affairs.

In 1958, on his third try, he won the seat for Indiana’s Third Congressional District. In 1977 he married Mary Ellen Briggs, a third-year medical student at Georgetown University and mother of four children by a former marriage.

As a Democrat who represented Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Brademas sponsored bills to add funding to education. He opposed the Vietnam War and many defense measures, rebuked President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted for civil rights legislation, environmental protection, day care programs and services for the elderly and people with disabilities.

He became majority whip, the House’s third-ranking official, and was re-elected 10 times in a mostly conservative district, winning up to 79 percent of the vote. He was defeated in the 1980 Republican landslide that elected Ronald Reagan president.

Brademas was president of NYU from from 1981 to 1992. After the couple moved to New York in 1981, his wife became a dermatologist at N.Y.U. Medical Center.

Mr. Brademas was the author of Washington, D.C., to Washington Square (1986) and, with Lynne P. Brown, The Politics of Education: Conflict and Consensus on Capitol Hill (1987). From 1994 to 2001 he was chairman of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and from 2004 to 2007 he was a member of the New York State Board of Regents. In 2005, N.Y.U. established the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress, a research and teaching facility.

By the end of his tenure — he stepped down in late 1991 and retired as president emeritus in 1992 after a sabbatical — he had raised $800 million for NYU and nearly doubled its endowment to $540 million. He added new fields of study, like the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; enlarged the campus; and added 11 residence halls, providing housing for half of the undergraduates. He also had established N.Y.U. study programs in Cyprus, Egypt, France, Israel and Japan.

After 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of NYU, John Brademas died on July 11, 2016 in Manhattan at 89. He is survived by his wife, three stepchildren, John Briggs, Katherine Goldberg and Jane Murray; a sister, Eleanor Brazeau; and six step-grandchildren. His stepson Basil Briggs Jr. died in 2003.

BRITISH PMs: Universities Attended (Updated Aug. 15, 2016)

Theresa May. Oxford gets another, to make
27. Cambridge has 14 British PMs.

With Theresa May installed as British Prime Minister, Oxford racks up another PM spot. There have been 76 Prime Ministerial Administrations so far (the official UK Govt. site shows 75, but it also still indicates as of July 17, 2016 that Cameron is the Prime Minister).

The official site counts a Prime Minister twice if he came back after an interim (so far no female Prime Ministers have achieved this). The Disraeli-Gladstone pas de deux leaps to mind.

The Oxford and Cambridge rankings now show, by my calculations, a total of 41 Oxbridge Prime Ministers:
Oxford - 27
Cambridge - 14

[Postscript July 22: These numbers were confirmed in a recent post by the Editor of Oxford Today, Richard Lofthouse. I was pleased to see that two of the comments on his post as of July 22 stepped away from self-congratulation or  questions about pre-university testing to ask fellow Oxonians, more or less: "Where did our educational go wrong to produce a Cameron and a Johnson?" (And, by implication, a Brexit.)]

Within Oxford, the leading colleges are:
Christ Church - 13
Balliol - 3
Trinity - 3
Brasenose - 2
Other: Hart Hall (later Hertford), Jesus, Somerville, St Hugh's, St John's, Univ.

Within Cambridge, the leading colleges are:
Trinity - 6
St John's - 4
Other: Clare, King's, Pembroke, Peterhouse.

Other universities attended (10, of which 5 are not in addition to Oxford or Cambridge. I credit two universities when someone attended both; none of the Prime Ministers is listed as attending both Oxford and Cambridge, but five attended a second university in Birmingham, or Scotland, or the Netherlands or Germany):
Edinburgh - 3
Glasgow - 2
Mason Science College (later part of Birmingham) - 2
Leiden - 1
Utrecht - 1
Leipzig, Saxony - 1

No university attended - 8

Summary: Oxford 27, Cambridge 14, Other university (not additional) 5, No university 8.

Prime Minister	Term of office	University	Total	College	Total
Thomas Pelham-Holles Duke of Newcastle	1754–1756 1757–1762	Cambridge	14 Cambridge	Clare	1
Robert Walpole	1721–1742	Cambridge		King’s	1
William Pitt the Younger	1783–1801 1804–1806	Cambridge		Pembroke	1
George Hamilton-Gordon Earl of Aberdeen	1852–1855	Cambridge		St John's	4
Frederick J. Robinson Viscount Goderich	1827–1828	Cambridge		St John’s
Charles Watson-Wentworth Marquess of Rockingham	1765–1766 1782	Cambridge		St. John’s
Spencer Perceval	1809–1812	Cambridge		Trinity	6
Charles Grey Earl Grey	1830–1834	Cambridge		Trinity
William Lamb Viscount Melbourne	1834  1835–1841	Cambridge		Trinity
Arthur Balfour	1902–1905	Cambridge		Trinity
Augustus FitzRoy Duke of Grafton	1768–1770	Cambridge		Peterhouse	1
Stanley Baldwin	1923–1924 1924–1929 1935–1937	Cambridge & Mason Science College		Trinity
John Russell Earl Russell	1846–1852 1865–1866	Edinburgh	3 Edinburgh
Gordon Brown	2007–2010	Edinburgh
Henry John Temple Viscount Palmerston	1855–1858 1859–1865	Edinburgh; Cambridge		St John's
Andrew Bonar Law	1922–1923	Glasgow	2 Glasgow
Henry Campbell-Bannerman	1905–1908	Glasgow; Cambridge		Trinity
John Stuart Earl of Bute	1762–1763	Leiden	1 Leiden
Neville Chamberlain	1937–1940	Mason Science College	2		2
William Cavendish Duke of Devonshire	1756–1757	None	8
Arthur Wellesley Duke of Wellington	1828–1830 1834	None
Benjamin Disraeli Earl of Beaconsfield	1868  1874–1880	None
David Lloyd George	1916–1922	None
Ramsay MacDonald	1924  1929–1935	None
Winston Churchill	1940–1945 1951–1955	None
James Callaghan	1976–1979	None
John Major	1990–1997	None
Herbert Henry Asquith	1908–1916	Oxford	27	Balliol	3
Harold Macmillan	1957–1963	Oxford		Balliol
Edward Heath	1970–1974	Oxford		Balliol
Henry Addington	1801–1804	Oxford		Brasenose	2
David Cameron	2010–2016	Oxford		Brasenose
George Grenville	1763–1765	Oxford		Christ Church	13
William Petty Earl of Shelburne	1782–1783	Oxford		Christ Church
William Cavendish-Bentinck Duke of Portland	1783  1807–1809	Oxford		Christ Church
William Grenville Lord Grenville	1806–1807	Oxford		Christ Church
Robert Jenkinson Earl of Liverpool	1812–1827	Oxford		Christ Church
George Canning	1827	Oxford		Christ Church
Robert Peel	1834–1835 1841–1846	Oxford		Christ Church
William Ewart Gladstone	1868–1874 1880–1885 1886  1892–1894	Oxford		Christ Church
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil Marquess of Salisbury	1885–1886 1886–1892 1895–1902	Oxford		Christ Church
Archibald Primrose Earl of Rosebery	1894–1895	Oxford		Christ Church
Anthony Eden	1955–1957	Oxford		Christ Church
Alec Douglas-Home Earl of Home	1963–1964	Oxford		Christ Church
Henry Pelham	1743–1754	Oxford		Hart Hall (Hertford)	1
Harold Wilson	1964–1970 1974–1976	Oxford		Jesus	1
Margaret Thatcher	1979–1990	Oxford		Somerville	1
Theresa May	2016–	Oxford		St Hugh’s	1
Tony Blair	1997–2007	Oxford		St John's	1
Spencer Compton Earl of Wilmington	1742–1743	Oxford		Trinity	3
Clement Attlee	1945–1951	Oxford		Univ.	1
Edward Smith-Stanley Earl of Derby	1852  1858–1859 1866–1868	Oxford		Christ Church
William Pitt the Elder Earl of Chatham	1766–1768	Oxford; Utrecht University	1	Trinity
Frederick North Earl of Guilford	1770–1782	Oxford; Leipzig	1	Trinity