Education: The Munificent Monsieur

Never before, as far as the oldest Old Oxonian could recall, had the University Congregation been convened during the “Long Vac.” But last week, with almost a month of vacation still ahead, the Hebdomadal Council (Oxford’s “cabinet”) summoned a special session of Congregation (the academic legislature). To the black-gowned, curious dons, Dean John Lowe of Christ Church broke an exciting piece of news.

An anonymous Frenchman had offered Oxford £1,500,000 ($6,000,000)—biggest gift ever received from a foreigner, and second largest in modern times.* There were a few strings attached. Most of the money was to be used to start a new college. Its name: St. Anthony’s. Its general purpose: training young men “of strong will and character as leaders of the future.” One-third of the college’s undergraduates must be French. A final condition explained the council’s unacademic haste: the offer was a take-it-or-leave-it; the donor was about to move “to a part of the world where … he will not be accessible . . .”

Who was the munificent Monsieur X? Apparently he was determined to remain anonymous. All that Dean Lowe would say was that the donor was a shipping magnate, “over 70,” who had hired many Englishmen and Oxonians for his business, had found them “particularly good and useful,” and wanted more like them in the world. The donor also hoped that St. Anthony’s might contribute to peace and “Western understanding” by encouraging Anglo-French friendships.

It took the dons less than one hour to accept the offer, but it would be months before Oxford’s senior common rooms tired of the great guessing game the gift had started. From Paris last week came one guess about Monsieur X’s identity: Leon Fabre, 62, multi-millionaire head of the Fabre shipping lines, and a postwar resident of the U.S.

Dean Lowe, who knew, wasn’t saying. Said he: “If by inadvertence I let slip something which may conceivably give a clue to [the donor’s] identity, I beg you most earnestly not to take advantage of it, but to restrain those detective instincts which tend to be stimulated in some of us by such a challenge to our ingenuity.”

*Bigger: the gifts of Motor Magnate Lord Nuffield (by now amounting to some $12 million) to endow university medical research and establish Nuffield College (for public affairs and economics).