14th Haldane Talk
31st March 2011
The Senior Common Rooms at UCL
The Men’s, the Women’s and the Joint
Dr Negley Harte
and
Professor John North
A general meeting of the Staff Common Rooms was held in the Staff common
room on Friday November 14th 1924 at 1.40 p.m. …
J . Arthur Platt, Professor of Greek,
1894 – 1925, is remembered as the
creator of the common-room life of the
academic staff, at first using his own
private room as a meeting place after
lunch: ‘there he sat for more than a
quarter of a century instructing
Chemists in the Humanities and
teaching Zoologists wisdom’, wrote a
colleague… He inspired affection in all,
including the animals at the Zoo;even
the giraffe, a contemporary student
recalled, would bend its long neck down
and rub its head on Platt’s bald pate.
After a chequered early career, having
obtained a First in Mods at Oxford but
then failed in Greats, A. E. Housman
worked for ten years in the Patent
Office, though for the latter five he was
publishing a series of remarkable
papers on classical literature. These
led ultimately to appointment as
Professor of Latin at University College
London in 1892, where he remained
until 1911. It was while he was at UCL
that he published a small volume of
poems, A Shropshire Lad, which made
him famous throughout the Englishspeaking world. Housman’s students
and colleagues were astounded by the
contrast between the romanticism of A
Shropshire Lad (1896) and the outward
severity of the man they knew as their
Professor of Latin. He may have struck
contemporaries in College as austere
and reserved, but all his letters to Platt
were destroyed by Mrs Platt after her
husband’s death as ‘too Rabelaisian’.
A. E. Housman, after whom the
Housman Room is named, by Francis
Dodd
Margaret Murray, after whom the Women’s Common Room (now the Graduate
School) was named, photographed receiving an address from the Professorial Board
on her 100th birthday in 1963.
Margaret Murray taught
Egyptian hieroglyphics and
history at UCL before
becoming in her old age a
highly controversial figure in
the historiography of
witchcraft. In 1963, in her
hundredth year, she
published her memoirs, My
First Hundred Years, which
included entertaining,
though wildly inaccurate,
memories of UCL in the late
nineteenth century,
including an account of her
own part in the formation of
a women’s common room.
J. B. S. Haldane, after whome the
Haldane Room is named, by Claude
Rogers
J. B. S. Haldane came to UCL as
Professor of Genetics in 1933 and
became the first Weldon Professor of
Biometrics in 1937. He had made his
name by a series of papers showing
mathematically how Darwin’s theory
would actually work in terms of
Mendelian genetics. Regarded by many
as a near-genius, he was also famous
as one of the great popularisers of
science, and moreover had shown his
splendid patrician pugnacity against all
forms of imposed authority.
His achievement as a scientific
theoretician was formidable, but his
achievement as professor at UCL was
limited by his own perversity:
cantankerous to a degree, he became a
legend for mismanaging business,
terrorising secretaries and abusing
administrators. However, his stature
as a scholar survives all the
aberrations.
Minutes of the General meeting held in the Men’s Staff Common Room on
Friday February 2nd 1945 at 1.45 p.m. The Provost in the chair…
‘The Provost read a letter from the Committee of the Women’s Staff Common
Room, with reference to a proposed Joint Staff Common Room…’
Note: Minute books and other papers of the UCL Common Rooms, from November 1924 to February 1978,
are lodged in Special Collections. The texts relating to J. Arthur Platt, A. E. Housman, Margaret Murray and
J. B. S. Haldane are largely taken from Negley Harte and John North, The World of UCL, 1828 – 2004, third
edition 2004, published by UCL.