Greetings from Manchester!
In 1846 John Owens‘ will provided funds for the establishment in Manchester of “an Institution for providing or aiding the means of instructing and improving young persons of the male sex (and being of an age not less than fourteen years) in such branches of learning and science as are now and may be hereafter usually taught in the English Universities…”
He placed two conditions on this bequest – first, that there should be no religious test for staff or students, and that nothing taught should reasonably offend their conscience or those of students’ parents or guardians; and second, that if there are more applicants than places, preference should be given to students whose parents were from Manchester, or failing that from South Lancashire.
John Owens was a merchant, in the cotton trade, and latterly in finance. His family were from North Wales, but had moved to Manchester, then a boom town. John was born in 1790 – the only surviving child of three. His father grew prosperous, and John did too.
When he died in 1846 he left no heirs, and his estate – worth nearly £150,000 (£15.5 million in today’s prices) – was divided between friends and minor charitable giving (£52k) and the new college (£96k).
A college is born
By 1851 the college was open and teaching. Initially it offered teaching for University of London degrees. Owens’ bequest had stipulated that it was not to be used for the purchase of land, so further fundraising had been necessary to buy freehold land for the college. The university’s own account of its history suggests that the 1850s were difficult, with few students, and that in the 1860s a new direction was taken, bringing a research mission to the college, modelling the German research university model.
This clearly helped – by 1870 the university needed new and bigger premises, and the older building shown on the postcard – the John Owens building – was completed in 1873.
The 1870s also saw the incorporation into the college of the Manchester Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, which had opened in 1824. This school prepared students for the examinations of the Society of Apothecaries and the Royal College of Surgeons, then the regulatory bodies for medicine and surgery – and was the first provincial medical school in England, with similar schools being established soon after in Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, and Liverpool.
The federal question
It’s important at this point to note that today the process of gaining university title – in England at least – is more defined and less controversial than it was in the nineteenth century. It was apparent that Victorian Britain did not like the idea of creating too many universities, and the federal university model – a central degree-awarding university with constituent member colleges – was the order of the day.
London had started this in 1836; the federal Queen’s University of Ireland was created in 1850; and the federal University of Wales would be founded in 1893. But there was a need to address higher education in the north of England, and in 1880 the Victoria University was established.
Owens College was a member from the start. And once it was established there was obviously a pressure for other colleges to be able to join too. And so they did – University College Liverpool followed in 1884, and Yorkshire College, in Leeds, joined in 1887. Would other colleges have joined at some point? Firth College, in Sheffield? We’ll never know, because the Victoria University, as a federal university, was not to last.
Going it alone
The trigger seems to have been the establishment of the University of Birmingham, in 1900, out of Mason University College. Birmingham was a unitary university – no separate degree-awarding powers here – and grew out of a college – Mason Science College – which was very similar in origins to Owens College, Yorkshire College, and Firth College in Sheffield. But Birmingham – thanks to the influence of Joseph Chamberlain – had got its own university.
And so the process of de-federalisation began. In 1903 University College Liverpool gained a charter and became the University of Liverpool. In 1904 Yorkshire College gained a charter and became the University of Leeds.
Owens College was left alone with the Victoria University, and became – on the passage of the Victoria University of Manchester Act 1904 – part of the Victoria University, which was renamed – the clue is in the title of the act of parliament – the Victoria University of Manchester. The act kept the conditions of John Owens’ will, including that preference be given to students from Manchester, if there were not sufficient places for all.
The other Manchester
Now we have to jump back to 1824 for a brief diversion. As well as the medical school, 1824 saw the establishment of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution. This became the Manchester Technical Schools in 1883 and from 1892, now being partly funded by Manchester Borough, was the Manchester Municipal Technical School. It moved in 1902 to a grand new building in Sackville Street, becoming the Manchester Municipal College of Technology.
The expectation of such colleges was that they would be working at a high level, and in 1905 an agreement was reached that the faculty of the college would form the faculty of technology at the Victoria University. The university already had a faculty of engineering, so there was clearly a need to differentiate.
The Manchester Courier of 19 June 1905 reported that the degrees awarded would be “Bachelor of Technical Science and Master of Technical Science, with the abbreviations BScTech and MScTech.” Fees for full-time study at the Faculty of Technology also rose to 20 guineas per year, to match those of the university.
Where the science happened
Diversion over, for now. The university continued to develop, with significant research strengths growing. Ernest Rutherford‘s work on the structure of the atom was at Manchester; Niels Bohr did postdoctoral research at Manchester, having been invited to do so by Rutherford. Mathematician Alan Turing worked at Manchester, pioneering computing, as did Paul Erdös.
Erdös was a prolific co-author, writing with 511 different authors. The Erdös number – coined in his honour – showed how many degrees of separation were required from any given mathematician, or other academic, to Erdös, and it’s the idea behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
We’ve seen how radio astronomy was a strength. And it wasn’t just sciences – historian AJP Taylor started his academic career at Manchester; Dorothy Emmett the philosopher was head of department; W Stanley Jevons, who brought mathematics to economics and was a foundational figure in modern logic, was tutor then professor at Owens College; Michael Polanyi was professor of physical chemistry and then professor of social studies. And this is just highlights – it’s an impressive list.
Enter UMIST
In 1956 the faculty of technology became a college of advanced technology, with university college status. In 1966 it became the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – UMIST – about which I will write more another day – with pretty much full autonomy from the Victoria University of Manchester. And in 1994 it became fully independent, with its own degree-awarding powers and everything.
Other organisational changes included the incorporation of the Whitworth Art Gallery, which joined the university in 1958, and the John Rylands Library, established in 1899, which joined the university in 1972.
Back together
But the story isn’t over yet. In practice, for much of the twentieth century, the university was commonly known as Manchester University. Victoria was still in its Sunday best name, but it didn’t often use it. That changed in 2004 when UMIST re-incorporated into the university, and it once more brought Victoria University of Manchester to the fore. It celebrated its bicentenary in 2024, and there are some lovely words and pictures on the university’s website celebrating this.
Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard, which wasn’t sent but, I guess, dates from the late 1950s or early 1960s. The Morris Minor is no longer on the road.
