Walks our Stanson, always leaving the city behind,
you pass Christchurch in towards the River Thames before you reach Folley Bridge, you'll see on your right.
A Grand Ashley building high up on the facade is a plaque.
It features the upper body and head of a man, his arm resting casually along the top of the tablet,
which reads William Morris Viscount Nuffield, 1877 to 1963.
Motor manufacturer and generous benefactor. I think that that short poetic phrase sums up very neatly a man who did more
than any other individual to transform Oxford in the 20th century physically,
economically and socially. My name's Liz Wolly.
I was a student here in the 1980s, but stayed on afterwards and crossed the Great Divide to become a townie.
Now I'm a freelance local historian working on commercial research,
community history projects and as a part time tutor at the university's Department for Continuing Education.
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.
And that's why the subject of this plaque. William Morris or Lord Nuffield, as he became in 1934, is so appealing to me.
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,
so that, as he put it, any woman in Oxford can have her baby in hospital.
This building here is now the county court.
But the plaque is here because it was originally built as one of several motor garages which Morris had around the city.
Large curved plate glass windows on the ground floor now filled in, allowed passers by to admire an impressive display of the latest cause.
And in the days before private garages and car parks, you could leave your vehicle here.
They were changing rooms so that motorists could shake off the dust of the road change into their evening clothes.
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,
your chauffeur could while away the hours in the special waiting room here, smoking and reading the latest motoring journals.
By the time this building was erected in 1932,
William Morris was well on his way to becoming one of the most successful businessman that this country had ever seen,
one of its most generous benefactors, and someone who put Oxford firmly on the international map.
He started at the age of 15 with a capital of just four pounds.
By setting up a bicycle repair business in a shed at the back of his parents house.
Soon he was building bicycle's and selling them. His business expanded.
And by 1981, when he was 24, he'd taken over premises in the city centre.
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.
Within 15 years, he was making fifty five thousand cars a year.
Two fifths of all the cars being produced in Britain and on the eve of the Second World War.
He was employing 11000 people. Thirty percent of oxfords working population.
A lot of those workers actually came from outside the city, though. Thousands of men migrated here from depressed mining areas in South Wales,
Yorkshire and Derbyshire, where Morris actively advertised for their labour.
Their wives and children followed and large new housing estates were built, particularly between these stocks that in Cowley to accommodate them.
These men and their families brought with them their religious nonconformity.
They left wing politics and trade unionism and their culture.
That's why we still have an Oxford Welsh male voice choir.
To this day. The manufacturing and residential expansion prompted by the growth of the motor industry had an enormous
effect not just on Cowley but on the makeup of the population and the layout of Oxford as a whole.
Many people, particularly within the university, were dismayed by these developments.
Morris received a lot of criticism from academics over the changes that his business had wrought.
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.
They were also alarmed by the fact that Morris's factories paid reasonably well.
Certainly better than jobs at the colleges, which base their payments to staff on Oxfordshire is notoriously low agricultural wages.
And so, although employment in the car industry meant putting up with long hours, dangerous working conditions and sometimes ruthless supervisors,
many preferred to be part of an exciting new industry with an employer who provided sports and social
facilities rather than kowtowing to pampered undergraduates and fusty old dons at the centuries old university.
So within just a few decades, William Morris changed the demographics, the physical layout and the social and religious life of the city.
He also made Oxford World famous not just as the home of a university,
but as a manufacturing centre from which cars were exported all over the globe to meet demand.
He set up foreign assembly plants in South Africa, India and Australia.
The Hindustan ambassador, based on the Morris Oxford, was still being manufactured in India in 2014.
Such was the fame of the fame of the Morris Carr works here in Oxford that tourists flocked to visit the factory,
and some academics noted ruefully that the university had become little more than Cowley's Latin Quarter.
William Morris was a complex character. He had an infinite capacity for hard work and tremendous energy, which stayed with him all his life.
He was a great entrepreneur, but he was autocratic and stubborn, which had a disastrous effect on his business in the late 1930s.
He inspired devotion amongst sections of his workforce, but fell out spectacularly with some of his senior managers,
with friends and with people on the city council and within the university.
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.
When asked about the benefits of riches, he said, Well, you can only wear one suit at a time.
He gave enormous donations to higher education, to scientific research and to medicine, both here in Oxford and elsewhere.
His interests in medicine was a personal one. He was almost obsessed with medical complaints and their cures.
A notorious hypochondriac and was a great taker of pills.
His sovereign remedy for most ailments was by Cabaniss of Soda. He gave regular and large benefactions to various hospitals,
including the Winkfield Orthopaedic and Headington, later renamed the Nuffield Orthopaedic.
He bought the Radclyffe Observatory site on the Woodstock Road for the Radcliffe Infirmary, where the Oxford and Empire Network is now based.
And he established the Nuffield Institute of Medical Research,
forcing the university to show an interest in medical sciences really for the first time.
He provided numerous medical research scholarships at various colleges and endowed the Nuffield Dominion scholarships,
bringing medical graduates from universities in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to further their education in Oxford.
Though when asked why he didn't include Canada, he replied, Well, they haven't bought any of my calls.
This former more Scarrow Johnson,
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,
you can visit his first city centre premises of 48 High Street,
where he built and sold bicycle's and motorised pedal cycles or see his first car showroom built in 1913,
36 Queen Street and his garage on Long Wall Street,
where you could garage your car and have it repaired, and where Morris assembled the very first Bolaños Morris.
Visit St. Peter's, the college which he saved from collapse only a few years after it opened and where a student accommodation block
is named the Emily and Morris building after his mother and his portrayed as benefactor hangs in the dining hall.
We'll go to see Nuffield College, founded by William Morris with a donation of nearly a million pounds to the university.
The first stocks that college to have a subject specialisation to admit both men and women, students and academics, and to be graduate only.
Or, of course, you could leave the city behind, head south east and visit the car works at Cowley,
where 5000 of the world famous meny are made every week.
Every one of them pre-ordered by a customer from somewhere across the globe, and every one of them unique.
Would William Morris, Lord Nuffield, approve of the high tech robots which have now largely replaced human workers on the production line?
He was always looking to the future. So I think that he probably would.
I hope that you've enjoyed this podcast.
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.