1 00:00:03,140 --> 00:00:05,660 Walks our Stanson, always leaving the city behind, 2 00:00:05,660 --> 00:00:11,780 you pass Christchurch in towards the River Thames before you reach Folley Bridge, you'll see on your right. 3 00:00:11,780 --> 00:00:16,610 A Grand Ashley building high up on the facade is a plaque. 4 00:00:16,610 --> 00:00:22,160 It features the upper body and head of a man, his arm resting casually along the top of the tablet, 5 00:00:22,160 --> 00:00:28,460 which reads William Morris Viscount Nuffield, 1877 to 1963. 6 00:00:28,460 --> 00:00:37,620 Motor manufacturer and generous benefactor. I think that that short poetic phrase sums up very neatly a man who did more 7 00:00:37,620 --> 00:00:42,870 than any other individual to transform Oxford in the 20th century physically, 8 00:00:42,870 --> 00:00:48,120 economically and socially. My name's Liz Wolly. 9 00:00:48,120 --> 00:00:54,120 I was a student here in the 1980s, but stayed on afterwards and crossed the Great Divide to become a townie. 10 00:00:54,120 --> 00:00:58,110 Now I'm a freelance local historian working on commercial research, 11 00:00:58,110 --> 00:01:05,070 community history projects and as a part time tutor at the university's Department for Continuing Education. 12 00:01:05,070 --> 00:01:14,640 My main interest is in the city of Oxford in the 19th and early mid 20th centuries and in particular in social history, industry and commerce. 13 00:01:14,640 --> 00:01:22,560 And that's why the subject of this plaque. William Morris or Lord Nuffield, as he became in 1934, is so appealing to me. 14 00:01:22,560 --> 00:01:31,620 And like many other people, I also have reason to thank him. I was born in the maternity wing of the Radcliffe Infirmary, which he built in 1932, 15 00:01:31,620 --> 00:01:38,530 so that, as he put it, any woman in Oxford can have her baby in hospital. 16 00:01:38,530 --> 00:01:41,110 This building here is now the county court. 17 00:01:41,110 --> 00:01:47,770 But the plaque is here because it was originally built as one of several motor garages which Morris had around the city. 18 00:01:47,770 --> 00:01:57,010 Large curved plate glass windows on the ground floor now filled in, allowed passers by to admire an impressive display of the latest cause. 19 00:01:57,010 --> 00:02:02,230 And in the days before private garages and car parks, you could leave your vehicle here. 20 00:02:02,230 --> 00:02:08,500 They were changing rooms so that motorists could shake off the dust of the road change into their evening clothes. 21 00:02:08,500 --> 00:02:17,110 When attending functions without having to trouble about a hotel and whilst you were dining at the Randolph or enjoying a theatre production in town, 22 00:02:17,110 --> 00:02:26,020 your chauffeur could while away the hours in the special waiting room here, smoking and reading the latest motoring journals. 23 00:02:26,020 --> 00:02:28,900 By the time this building was erected in 1932, 24 00:02:28,900 --> 00:02:34,720 William Morris was well on his way to becoming one of the most successful businessman that this country had ever seen, 25 00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:41,550 one of its most generous benefactors, and someone who put Oxford firmly on the international map. 26 00:02:41,550 --> 00:02:45,600 He started at the age of 15 with a capital of just four pounds. 27 00:02:45,600 --> 00:02:50,190 By setting up a bicycle repair business in a shed at the back of his parents house. 28 00:02:50,190 --> 00:02:54,660 Soon he was building bicycle's and selling them. His business expanded. 29 00:02:54,660 --> 00:02:59,700 And by 1981, when he was 24, he'd taken over premises in the city centre. 30 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:08,550 By 1912, he was assembling cars and soon moved his factory to Cowley, a village two and a half miles to the southeast of the city. 31 00:03:08,550 --> 00:03:12,810 Within 15 years, he was making fifty five thousand cars a year. 32 00:03:12,810 --> 00:03:17,400 Two fifths of all the cars being produced in Britain and on the eve of the Second World War. 33 00:03:17,400 --> 00:03:23,610 He was employing 11000 people. Thirty percent of oxfords working population. 34 00:03:23,610 --> 00:03:31,410 A lot of those workers actually came from outside the city, though. Thousands of men migrated here from depressed mining areas in South Wales, 35 00:03:31,410 --> 00:03:36,360 Yorkshire and Derbyshire, where Morris actively advertised for their labour. 36 00:03:36,360 --> 00:03:45,000 Their wives and children followed and large new housing estates were built, particularly between these stocks that in Cowley to accommodate them. 37 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:49,170 These men and their families brought with them their religious nonconformity. 38 00:03:49,170 --> 00:03:53,430 They left wing politics and trade unionism and their culture. 39 00:03:53,430 --> 00:03:57,270 That's why we still have an Oxford Welsh male voice choir. 40 00:03:57,270 --> 00:04:05,630 To this day. The manufacturing and residential expansion prompted by the growth of the motor industry had an enormous 41 00:04:05,630 --> 00:04:11,510 effect not just on Cowley but on the makeup of the population and the layout of Oxford as a whole. 42 00:04:11,510 --> 00:04:16,190 Many people, particularly within the university, were dismayed by these developments. 43 00:04:16,190 --> 00:04:21,650 Morris received a lot of criticism from academics over the changes that his business had wrought. 44 00:04:21,650 --> 00:04:32,930 The writer C.S. Lewis said, How I hate that man. And the poet John Benjamin sneered at pale faced mechanics in Oxford bags walking down corn market. 45 00:04:32,930 --> 00:04:37,250 They were also alarmed by the fact that Morris's factories paid reasonably well. 46 00:04:37,250 --> 00:04:45,500 Certainly better than jobs at the colleges, which base their payments to staff on Oxfordshire is notoriously low agricultural wages. 47 00:04:45,500 --> 00:04:53,960 And so, although employment in the car industry meant putting up with long hours, dangerous working conditions and sometimes ruthless supervisors, 48 00:04:53,960 --> 00:04:59,510 many preferred to be part of an exciting new industry with an employer who provided sports and social 49 00:04:59,510 --> 00:05:08,550 facilities rather than kowtowing to pampered undergraduates and fusty old dons at the centuries old university. 50 00:05:08,550 --> 00:05:16,680 So within just a few decades, William Morris changed the demographics, the physical layout and the social and religious life of the city. 51 00:05:16,680 --> 00:05:20,640 He also made Oxford World famous not just as the home of a university, 52 00:05:20,640 --> 00:05:26,670 but as a manufacturing centre from which cars were exported all over the globe to meet demand. 53 00:05:26,670 --> 00:05:31,290 He set up foreign assembly plants in South Africa, India and Australia. 54 00:05:31,290 --> 00:05:39,510 The Hindustan ambassador, based on the Morris Oxford, was still being manufactured in India in 2014. 55 00:05:39,510 --> 00:05:46,020 Such was the fame of the fame of the Morris Carr works here in Oxford that tourists flocked to visit the factory, 56 00:05:46,020 --> 00:05:55,200 and some academics noted ruefully that the university had become little more than Cowley's Latin Quarter. 57 00:05:55,200 --> 00:06:02,520 William Morris was a complex character. He had an infinite capacity for hard work and tremendous energy, which stayed with him all his life. 58 00:06:02,520 --> 00:06:10,830 He was a great entrepreneur, but he was autocratic and stubborn, which had a disastrous effect on his business in the late 1930s. 59 00:06:10,830 --> 00:06:17,310 He inspired devotion amongst sections of his workforce, but fell out spectacularly with some of his senior managers, 60 00:06:17,310 --> 00:06:22,170 with friends and with people on the city council and within the university. 61 00:06:22,170 --> 00:06:30,330 He amassed a fortune at one time. He was said to be earning 2000 pounds a day, but gave most of it away and lived frugally. 62 00:06:30,330 --> 00:06:37,320 When asked about the benefits of riches, he said, Well, you can only wear one suit at a time. 63 00:06:37,320 --> 00:06:44,820 He gave enormous donations to higher education, to scientific research and to medicine, both here in Oxford and elsewhere. 64 00:06:44,820 --> 00:06:50,970 His interests in medicine was a personal one. He was almost obsessed with medical complaints and their cures. 65 00:06:50,970 --> 00:06:55,170 A notorious hypochondriac and was a great taker of pills. 66 00:06:55,170 --> 00:07:03,450 His sovereign remedy for most ailments was by Cabaniss of Soda. He gave regular and large benefactions to various hospitals, 67 00:07:03,450 --> 00:07:08,670 including the Winkfield Orthopaedic and Headington, later renamed the Nuffield Orthopaedic. 68 00:07:08,670 --> 00:07:16,260 He bought the Radclyffe Observatory site on the Woodstock Road for the Radcliffe Infirmary, where the Oxford and Empire Network is now based. 69 00:07:16,260 --> 00:07:19,590 And he established the Nuffield Institute of Medical Research, 70 00:07:19,590 --> 00:07:25,710 forcing the university to show an interest in medical sciences really for the first time. 71 00:07:25,710 --> 00:07:32,550 He provided numerous medical research scholarships at various colleges and endowed the Nuffield Dominion scholarships, 72 00:07:32,550 --> 00:07:39,750 bringing medical graduates from universities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to further their education in Oxford. 73 00:07:39,750 --> 00:07:47,580 Though when asked why he didn't include Canada, he replied, Well, they haven't bought any of my calls. 74 00:07:47,580 --> 00:07:49,320 This former more Scarrow Johnson, 75 00:07:49,320 --> 00:07:57,900 although it says just one of many sites across the city which remind us of the lasting impact which Lord Nuffield had on both town and gown, 76 00:07:57,900 --> 00:08:01,770 you can visit his first city centre premises of 48 High Street, 77 00:08:01,770 --> 00:08:09,540 where he built and sold bicycle's and motorised pedal cycles or see his first car showroom built in 1913, 78 00:08:09,540 --> 00:08:13,500 36 Queen Street and his garage on Long Wall Street, 79 00:08:13,500 --> 00:08:20,960 where you could garage your car and have it repaired, and where Morris assembled the very first Bolaños Morris. 80 00:08:20,960 --> 00:08:27,800 Visit St. Peter's, the college which he saved from collapse only a few years after it opened and where a student accommodation block 81 00:08:27,800 --> 00:08:35,150 is named the Emily and Morris building after his mother and his portrayed as benefactor hangs in the dining hall. 82 00:08:35,150 --> 00:08:41,510 We'll go to see Nuffield College, founded by William Morris with a donation of nearly a million pounds to the university. 83 00:08:41,510 --> 00:08:50,060 The first stocks that college to have a subject specialisation to admit both men and women, students and academics, and to be graduate only. 84 00:08:50,060 --> 00:08:56,420 Or, of course, you could leave the city behind, head south east and visit the car works at Cowley, 85 00:08:56,420 --> 00:09:00,560 where 5000 of the world famous meny are made every week. 86 00:09:00,560 --> 00:09:07,250 Every one of them pre-ordered by a customer from somewhere across the globe, and every one of them unique. 87 00:09:07,250 --> 00:09:14,930 Would William Morris, Lord Nuffield, approve of the high tech robots which have now largely replaced human workers on the production line? 88 00:09:14,930 --> 00:09:20,420 He was always looking to the future. So I think that he probably would. 89 00:09:20,420 --> 00:09:22,280 I hope that you've enjoyed this podcast. 90 00:09:22,280 --> 00:09:37,541 Please visit the Oxford and Empire Network Web site to listen to others and to find out more about about Oxford's relationship with Empire.