Welsh members of parliament stepped up pressure, and in July 1879 a debate in the House of Commons on the subject drew a favourable intervention from Gladstone. A year later, when Gladstone was elected Prime Minister for the second time, he established a ‘departmental committee’ to investigate higher and intermediate education in Wales. It was chaired by Lord Aberdare, a former Liberal Home Secretary and, at that time, President of the Aberystwyth University College. Other members included Henry Richard MP (a Vice-President at Aberystwyth), Lewis Morris (Honorary Secretary at Aberystwyth) and John Rhŷs of Oxford (an Aberystwyth governor). The odds seemed strikingly in favour of bolstering the advance of the college at Aberystwyth. But it was not to be.
The Aberdare Report, which appeared in August 1881, was a hugely significant report for higher education in Wales. Its central theme was not unfamiliar: it recommended simply that there should be one university college in north Wales and one in south Wales. However, the report then made a momentous observation: the college at Aberystwyth ‘whether retained on its present site or removed to Caernarvon [sic] or Bangor’3 must be accepted as the north Wales college.
For Aberystwyth, those 12 words seemed to sound the death knell. They cast doubt on its continuation, and threw open other possibilities. Within months, a campaign in favour of Bangor had begun. In early 1883, a government grant of £4,000 per annum was promised to both the new colleges in Wales. Bitterness, wrangling and confusion lay ahead, however. The central question was the location of the college in north Wales, if it was not to be Aberystwyth. At a meeting at Lord Aberdare’s London home, it was agreed to convene a conference on this matter at Chester in January 1883. Not surprisingly, Aberystwyth fought a valiant, eleventh-hour battle for survival at Chester, but influential north Walians closed ranks and outnumbered the Aberystwyth sympathizers. Harsh words were spoken and an amendment in favour of Aberystwyth fell – but, that aside, the Chester conference resolved little. A site committee was then appointed, comprising various official representatives of north Wales, and led by the Earl of Powis.
The site committee did not come up with the answer either, but in May 1883 they recommended that the issue be referred to three arbitrators: Lord Carlingford, A. J. Mundella (the government minister) and Lord Bramwell (a retired judge). This was a shrewd move, for the three commanded respect. They had already performed the same task in south Wales, choosing Cardiff in March 1883. The decision in the north, however, was to be somewhat more problematic. Whilst the north Walians at the Chester conference had been clear that they wanted a university college unambiguously in north Wales, they were not united as to the precise location. Caernarfon and Bangor may have been mentioned in the Aberdare Report, but other contenders appeared in 1883. Indeed, at the start of the arbitration process, 13 towns staked their claims to be the site of the university college in north Wales.
The arbitrators moved quickly to shortlist six towns – Bangor, Caernarfon, Conwy, Denbigh, Rhyl and Wrexham. Rhyl had assembled an intriguing case based, it seemed, on the climate there and ‘a supply of free ozone’.4 Denbigh had the radical Nonconformist editor, Thomas Gee (of Y Faner) in its corner. Wrexham was the largest town in north Wales, and was near to an industrial and coal-mining area, though it was also close to English urban and rural areas. Caernarfon, often considered at that time the capital of north Wales, had benefited from the expanding slate industry. Bangor, which exported slate from Port Penhryn, had been massively transformed by the advent of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century. Houses and hotels had been built, and importantly, Coleg Normal, a college founded principally to train teachers, had existed there since 1858.
The vision that inspired the leaders of the movement for a university college in north Wales was matched by the grit and self-lessness of the quarrymen, farmers and others in the region who gave money (the so-called ‘pennies of the poor’) towards the cost of founding the institution. The Chester conference had resolved to raise funds for the north Wales college – wherever it was sited – and a number of prominent individuals present in Chester, including the Duke of Westminster and William Rathbone MP, pledged £1,000 each. The Penrhyn and Dinorwic quarrymen also took up the cause with enthusiasm, holding lunchtime meetings to pledge money. At one meeting, in April 1883, 42 quarrymen immediately promised £86 to the north Wales college: ‘Dyna engraifft o’r teimlad sydd yn meddianu Chwarelwyr Bethesda ar y mater,’ wrote the secretary of the quarry-men’s committee. (‘This is an example of the extent of the feeling in the minds of the Bethesda Quarrymen’).5 Many workers contributed a fixed sum out of their earnings, and ultimately the quarrymen raised over £1,250. Before the end of 1884, £37,000 had been raised in total from around 8,000 subscribers, and all but a tiny fraction gave less than £100. This is all now part of the great romantic story of the establishment of the university college in Bangor, and it should not be downplayed: there is no doubt that the idealism and strength of this local show of support helped to sway the arbitrators.
Nevertheless, there seemed almost as many arguments against Bangor as there were for. There were examples of poor health and social conditions (an outbreak of typhoid in 1882 did not help), and there were strong religious and political antagonisms in the city. That Bangor was held by many to be firmly Conservative and Anglican – through the influence of Lord Penrhyn and the presence of the cathedral – did not sit easily with some of the Liberal Nonconformist champions of university education in Wales. One writer to a newspaper recalled the poet Caledfryn’s description of Bangor as a ‘nest of bats and owls’.6
On 24 August 1883, the arbitrators announced their decision: Bangor was the selected site for the north Wales university college, and the decision was unanimous. They gave no reasons for this outcome and would accept no appeals. Joy was unconfined in Bangor. Last-minute protests from Aberystwyth were declared invalid, and some of the bitterness of the campaign remained for many years. Happily, of course, Aberystwyth also survived, helped by a government decision that it should receive the same grant as Bangor and Cardiff.
Establishing a university college is no trivial matter, and once the decision had been made the pace of activity quickened. A charter and constitution for the university college were drawn up and approved by the Privy Council in October 1883. Following Cardiff’s lead, women were to be welcomed into full membership of the college and, significantly, the college was to be independent of any religious influence or control. Students would work for degrees of the University of London, as did students of many new university colleges in the nineteenth century.
The Earl of Powis, because of his position as president of the north Wales site committee took a leading role in the preparatory work, along with William Rathbone, the former Liverpool politician and businessman who had been elected MP for Caernarfonshire in 1880; the dean of Bangor and Thomas Gee were also active. Another important part was played by Henry Jones, then an outstanding young philosophy lecturer in Aberystwyth. Jones, the son of a Denbighshire shoemaker, had left school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice shoemaker himself. But after winning a scholarship to Coleg Normal in Bangor at the age of 18, he was to train as a teacher, become a Calvinistic Methodist minister and study philosophy at Glasgow. In 1882, to the fury of Aberystwyth, he became secretary of the north Wales site committee, and he clearly had input into the drafting of the political and religious aspects of the Charter.
There were few surprises in the election of the principal lay officers of the university college: the Earl of Powis became President, and the Vice-Presidents were George Osborne Morgan and Richard Davies, Liberal MPs for Denbighshire and Anglesey respectively. John Roberts, MP for Flint Boroughs, was Honorary Treasurer. In fact, for all the concern that the new college would be in thrall to Conservative opinion, to some extent almost the opposite was the case. Rathbone, fellow Liberal MP Stuart Rendel and Thomas Gee were all members of the University College Council. The first meeting of the Council took place on a Saturday, 8 March 1884, at the Queen’s Head Café in Bangor: Colonel W. E. Sackville West, appointed to the Council by Oxford University, was elected