Students at Magdalen College, Oxford, should think again about the Queen
Magdalen College, Oxford (Shutterstock)
A front page headline in the Times today reads: “Oxford college removes Queen’s portrait over colonial links.” A proper marmalade-dropper of a headline. The accompanying picture reveals that this is not any old Oxford college that they are talking about, but Magdalen College.
Full disclosure: I went up to Magdalen as an undergraduate 46 years ago. Three years later I took a First in Modern History. I owe a great deal to my college and have returned there often. My father and my brother also studied there; the latter has been a substantial donor to the college, especially to medical research. Like, I imagine, all its alumni, I care what happens there. I was meant to be shocked by that headline. And I was.
Magdalen is not the oldest college in Oxford, having been founded in 1458, but it is almost certainly the most beautiful. Whether, as the Times claims, it is one of the wealthiest, I do not know. Not mentioned, but more relevant to the story, is the fact that it was the first college in either ancient university to be attended by a Prince of Wales. The future Edward VIII, the present Queen’s uncle, studied (or rather played polo) at Magdalen before the First World War, about a decade before my maternal grandfather went up to read medicine there. (Unlike the Prince, he was so hard-up that he paid his way by teaching other students.) The college has many other royal connections and the Queen herself last visited the place in 2008. So the thought of royal portraits being taken down conjures up an image of the Hall, lined with huge paintings of the founder, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, followed by Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth I, plus many others portraits of the great and (sometimes) good. As most of these are male, there is at present an exhibition in Hall of photographs of women with links to Magdalen.
As is so often the case, there is less to this Times news story than meets the eye. It is not “the college” that has taken down the Queen’s portrait, nor even the undergraduates, but a committee of the Middle Common Room (MCR) — which represents graduate students. As the President of Magdalen, Dinah Rose, commented: “The Middle Common Room is an organisation of graduate students. How they choose to decorate their room is a matter for them.” The portrait in question is a colourised print of a photograph taken at the time of the Accession in 1952. It has hung there, doubtless hitherto unnoticed, since 2013.
The news story does not reveal who decided to make an issue of this harmless photo, but apparently the MCR committee voted to remove it because “for some students depictions of the monarch and the British monarchy represent recent colonial history”. The head of the committee, Matthew Katzman, said that “the room should be a welcoming, neutral place for all members, regardless of background, demographic or views”. They wish to replace the royal image with “art by or of other influential and inspirational people”.
The MCR common room is not a public space, but neither is it a matter of indifference for those who care about Magdalen. It is very sad indeed that these students, every one of whom is privileged to have been accepted there for postgraduate research, are so blinkered and limited in their outlook that they find this reminder of our Sovereign in their common room obtrusive or even offensive. The Queen is also head of the Commonwealth, which has 54 members; she is head of state of 15 of them. It is her personal achievement to have transformed the Commonwealth from a relic of the colonial era into a benign and entirely voluntary presence on the international stage. Largely because she has remained scrupulously above politics throughout her long reign, uniquely among world leaders she is universally respected. In fact, it would be hard to find a more “influential and inspirational” person, or one better suited to a “welcoming, neutral place”.
A few months ago, Magdalen was briefly in the news because the President — a distinguished human rights barrister — was criticised for representing a Commonwealth country, the Cayman Islands, in a case that involved the legality of same sex marriage there. Absurdly, it was suggested by Stonewall and others that the college of Oscar Wilde was no longer a “safe space” for LGBTQ students and that President Rose — the first woman to be elected head of the college — had done something wrong. Her colleague Edward Fitzgerald QC pointed out that she had “acted perfectly properly” and that to return her brief would be a “breach of her professional duty”. For a brief moment it, though, looked as if the campaign against her might escalate on social media; I wrote about the controversy here. Once the Fellows and undergraduates made clear their support for the President, however, the row soon blew over.
This time, the bone of contention is even more trivial. Of course, nobody should be forced to hang a portrait of the Queen in their common room. Even its removal is a matter of the utmost insignificance. Perhaps the MCR committee thought nobody would notice or care what they did. Now that it has become a news story, however, I confess that I am dismayed by the lack of judgement, tact and taste shown by these students. Nor did they do their research very well. It evidently did not occur to them that if the Queen had been a symbol of colonialism, Nelson Mandela would hardly have been one of the few non-royals to be on first name terms with her. (He called her “Elizabeth”, she called him “Nelson”.) The best thing the committee could do now is to consult more widely among their members and, perhaps, consider a change of heart. Better still: Magdalen should invite the Queen to revisit the college, so that its graduate students can see for themselves why her portrait belongs in their common room after all.
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