SELWYN COLLEGE

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 33, 8 August 1933, Page 7

SELWYN COLLEGE

JUBILEE LAST JUNE

GREAT MAN'S MEMORIAL ■„

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, June 23. On June 21, Selwyn College, the youngest of the Cambridge colleges, celebrated its jubilee. Tho inaugural year was represented by four clergymen—the Eevs. F. Barry-Koberts, 11. B. Clark, C. W. H. Connolly, and W. G. Melville—-who matriculated in. 1882. There were also presaht two former masters of the college, Dr. A. F. Kirkpatrick (now Dean of Ely) and Dr. J. O. F. Murray. The site was a cornfield 53 years ago, when the college was founded by friends and admirers" of' George Augustus Selwyn, first Bishop of New Zealand. Mr. Baldwin, who was greeted by hundreds of old scholars, including four who were at the college in its foundation year fifty years ago, said that George Selwyn Jiad four attributes which'made "him typical o£ his age. He was a Christian, he was a gentleman, a scholar, and an athlete —the complete and perfect man. They could not do better than take for their motto two of his sayings: "Be temperate in all things" and "Bend to your oars." GENESIS AND AIM. Selwyn sailed for New ■ Zealand in December of 1841,. and cast anchor at Auckland on tho last day but one of May, 1842, in a. very different kind of ship from any that this generation had ever travolled'in.; When he arrived at Auckland there was nothing there but a one-storeyed wooden building where tlie Governor lived, a. wooden barrack with a half-company of men accommodated within, a few wooden houses dotted about, in which officials lived, and a Supreme Courthouse which was used on Sundays as a church, and also as a milliner's shop and a blacksmith's shop and a general store. There was no butcher,* no baker, no beef, no mutton. Selwyu saw New' Zealand through the days of early settlement and through the clash of the: Maoris and tho British; ho saw the Maori wars which threatened upset all he, had been living and working for for years before. He went out into Melanesia, sailing his own boat, and founded the Melanesian Mission; and before ho left he saw it organised and Patteson made Bishop. He saw the See of Auckland established, with six suffragan bishops; he saw the Church independent, organised, working right through the islands of New Zealand. Andwhen he was wanted1 at Home, reluctant as he was to leave his beloved islands, ho camo to Lichfield. In that diocese his influence) became supreme, and he did a great work, and when he died there passed one of tho bravest and greatest Englishmen of the century, it was'ou the minds of many men to see iir what way thiy might commomorato his life and spirit, in something that niight live and germinate and possibly produce in future ages men of that spirit. Such was the genesis of Selwyn .Collego. It was, as he understood it, an ideal of plain living and high thinking. There was an idea in tho minds of the founders that it should bo possible in an old university to havo a college to which men of tho most moderate means could send their sons, to obtain for them those inestimable advantages which you got from the community of a university and their associations with the ago-long traditions of Cambridge or Oxford. Thus the fathers of Selwyn were laying down lines which, ho was assured, would be followed, and wero already being followed to some' extent throughput many of the colleges in Cambridge. They ought never to forget the. men who started in tho little buildings that then existed, with the £30,000 that was all the collego had to start with. . > Mr. Baldwin continued: "I have been struck by the fact that every college in Cambridge has its own particular soul. It does not always show it to the outside world, but no one of sensibility can be unconscious of it when ho is among the •. men of those colleges. It is a tribute to those who have gone before us that, even after a. short half-century Selwyn may' say that .it has its own' individual^ son! as a member of those colleges which form our great university." i