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Scratchings on the glass

Mark Nicholls has served as Librarian of the College since the last century, andis currently a Tutor.

Annotation of College Library books is necessarily frowned upon. No reader likesto find a page defaced by underlinings, ‘NB’s, sarcastic comments and untidymarginalia. When identified, a culprit should expect to set to with an eraser, orin severe cases to bear the cost of a new book replacing the one defaced. In amodern collection, the clean page is the order of the day.

Time, however, changes our perspective in these matters. When examining abook that is centuries old the librarian, the scholar and not infrequently thecollector welcome the presence of pointing hands, bookplates and signatures. All this is ‘provenance’, to be recorded carefully in any respectable catalogue. A caustic comment in the margin, written by the long dead, is taken asengagement with the text. Our own College Library’s first edition of Darwin’sOrigin of Species is considered all the more precious because of the scepticalcommentary added by its first owner, the Johnian polymath Samuel Butler. Butler was not entirely convinced by the detail in Darwin’s article. He favouredinstead the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and said so in these notes, reflectingin his own way the ferment of disputation and debate prompted by publicationof Darwin’s great work. As this particular example demonstrates, many suchannotations are ‘legitimate’, in that they were added by former owners beforethe volume in question found its way into the College Library. We should notforget that the vast majority of books acquired by St John’s in its first four centuriescame here as gifts or bequests. In those less enlightened days the College spentvery little in the purchase of new books, and instead waited for copies to comein at second hand, relying on the generosity of Johnian collectors. Nevertheless,it remains obvious that the survival of a marked text from an earlier age, howeverthat marking came about, is often more exciting and academically stimulatingthan the preservation of an ‘unmarked’ copy.

Similar principles apply to the College buildings. Graffiti of any kind is rightlydeplored, and in St John’s it is happily rare. But the wonderful gathering of Tudorsignatures and mottoes carved into the fireplace of the Old Treasury over theGreat Gate is admired as a link with some famous names from our first century,Roger Ascham, William Fulke and Edward Alvey among them. And this was nounthinking undergraduate prank – all but one of the names are those of Fellows,and the exception is that of a Master of the College, John Taylor.1 The strange

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wall paintings in present-day K4 Second Court, dating from the seventeenthcentury and showing animals, fruits, plants and other details, and the drawing inH1 First Court, carved into the wood of a door at some point in the eighteenthcentury, are also preserved carefully by the College, and written about in thisjournal and elsewhere.2 To the best of my knowledge, however, no one has yetexamined another manifestation of College graffiti, the names, emblems andother decorations scratched into some windows in our older buildings. The survival of these things demonstrates firstly that College glass is often ancient.We tend to forget, looking at brick walls and stone tracery, that the panes in aCollege range or façade, and the frames in which the glass is set, are sometimescenturies old, and in many cases as old as the building itself.

Scribbles have interesting stories to tell. In a short article there is room for justthree. We begin west of the Cam, and high in the river range of New Court. In one of the windows of B11, looking eastward past the oriel window of the Old Library and over the Master’s Garden, ‘Tansley Hall’ is scratched neatly intothe glass, along with a date, 16 February 1832.3 Tansley Hall was born in 1811at Ely and was educated at Charterhouse. He matriculated in Michaelmas 1829and took his BA in 1833. Although the imperfect state of early room recordsprevents us from being certain, he was probably the first occupant of the set:New Court rooms were allocated in 1830. In later life Hall entered the Church.

Tansley Hall’s name scratched into a window in B11 New Court.

He was ordained priest in 1841, and was for more than thirty years rector, and patron, of Boylestone, in Derbyshire. Outliving three wives he died in 1893,aged 81.4

The magnificent windows of the Upper Library tell other tales. At the eastern endof the range looking north over the Master’s Garden towards the Lodge, keeneyes or the zoom lens of a camera will spot a couple of inscriptions. One appearsto be ‘J. P. Brereton from Cromer, Norfolk’. The other gives us the name WilliamEllis, and also his age, 16, and the date, 23 July 1806. Ellis was no undergraduate.Given the circumstantial details assembled by my colleague the Sub-LibrarianKathryn McKee, he came from a dynasty of Cambridge craftsmen. In the Collegerental for 1806 there are references to R Ellis glazier, who carried out work in theLodge for just under £5 and, more significantly, work in the Library amountingto £74 12s, in those days a significant sum.5 In the quarterly journals (from whichpostings were made to the rentals) the references are to Ellis the glazier in theLodge, and to Ellis the plumber in the Library. The Junior Bursar’s account bookfor 1807 contains further details for work by ‘R.Ellis’, a glazier.6 So youngWilliam appears to have been working in the family business. It seems likely thathe was the second son of Robert Ellis and Martha Wilson Waits, who married atSt Giles in Cambridge on 4 October 1789. Scratching at the glass he mayoverstate his age by a year, not unknown among teenagers.

What became of the young man who left his mark on the fabric two centuriesago? A William Ellis married an Anne Hepworth (or possibly Anne Papworth;transcriptions vary) on 1 October 1816 at Holy Sepulchre Church in Cambridge– the so-called Round Church. They had two children. Eliza Ellis, daughter ofWilliam and Anne, was baptised in 1820, with residence given as Barnwell. A William Ellis of Barnwell, aged 37, died in 1827, and was buried at HolySepulchre. His father Robert Ellis, plumber and glazier, was buried there on 3 May 1837.7

A third instance of glass engraving can be found in theeighteenth-century James Essex south front of FirstCourt. Amid other abortive scratches, and a depictionof a flower stem with leaves, is the name ‘C J C Touzel’and the date 1874. Charles John Cliff Touzel was bornin Birkenhead in 1855, the only son of Charles Touzel,superintendent of the South American SteamNavigation Company, and his wife Mary. He waseducated at Wellington College, matriculated in 1874and took his BA in 1878. Touzel secured a Blue atrugby football in 1874, 1875 and 1876, and playedtwice for England in 1877, including in their first ever

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fifteen-a-side match, against Ireland. Like Hall before him, Touzel went into theChurch, and was rector of Heswall for five years in the early 1880s beforeavailing himself of the provisions of the Clerical Disabilities Relief Act of 1870 –legislation that allowed a man to do what had hitherto been impossible andwithdraw legally from his clerical vows. It appears that he intended to study Law,for he was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1886. But the sources do not tell usmuch more. Touzel served as a captain in the 3rd Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers,a militia battalion, and died in 1899.

The College rugby team in 1876, with C J C Touzel in the centre of the back row (thin-striped shirt).

The Dean may wish to skip over this article in any close reading of The Eagle. It is likely to give him some sleepless nights contemplating a new offence againstorder within the College, something to ponder in the way of a new penalty-tariff.Any current junior member will of course bear in mind that attempts to emulatethis group of nineteenth-century window-decorators are likely to havedisciplinary consequences. I would, however, welcome further information fromthose who remember seeing a name in the glass when occupying rooms in theCollege. Not everyone spots these things immediately; residents – and bedmakers– are often in the best position to pass on information.

Mark Nicholls

1 M G Underwood, ‘The Old Treasury and its graffiti’, The Eagle 68 (Easter 1980), 23–6.Mr Underwood notes that wine was served in the auditor’s chamber ‘at the times ofaccount; perhaps in the aftermath of some such festivity it became the custom, for awhile, to leave one’s name in the Treasury stone’.

2 For example, see ‘The wall paintings in K, Second Court’, The Eagle 44 (December1925), 1–9; ‘Wall paintings’, The Eagle (2003), 38–40.

3 I am grateful to Professor Gray for drawing my attention to the inscription and forallowing me to photograph it.

4 The Eagle 18, 207, and the Biographical Archive.5 SB4.48, p. 34.6 SB3.1.7 The firm of Robert Ellis, plumber, painter and glazier, is found in Pigot’s, Robson’s and

Gardner’s Cambridge and regional Directories of the 1830s to 1850s, trading from St Sepulchre Passage and, latterly, from 43 Sidney Street, while Gardner’s 1851Directory has William George Ellis trading from St Mary’s Passage. I am most gratefulto Kathryn McKee, the Sub-Librarian, for establishing these biographical details for Ellisand his family.

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