50 Fun Facts About Oxford University

Which tavern grievance sparked Oxford's 1355 St Scholastica Day riot that killed dozens of scholars?

The quality of the wine served to two students at the Swindlestock Tavern started it all; the town's mayor was made to do annual penance for the dead until 1825, when one incumbent finally refused.

Great Tom tolls 101 times at 9:05 each night, once per original scholar, over which college?

Christ Church began with 100 scholars and later added one, hence 101 strokes; 9:05 pm is nine o'clock in old 'Oxford time', which ran five minutes behind Greenwich.

By Oxford tradition, what colour carnation does a student pin on for the final exam of their run?

Red marks the last paper: candidates start in white and switch to pink for the exams between; after the final one, friends 'trash' the finalist, still in exam dress, with flour, confetti and alcohol.

Which Latin-derived term names the dark clothes, gown and cap Oxford students wear to sit exams?

Sub fusc comes from the Latin for 'of a dark or dusky colour'; when Oxford students voted in 2015 on whether it should stay compulsory for exams, about three in four chose to keep it.

Which future Australian prime minister set an Oxford college record for downing a yard of ale?

Bob Hawke set the record among students of University College; in 1980 he gave up alcohol in order to run for Parliament.

The Inklings met informally in the 'Rabbit Room' of which Oxford pub?

The Eagle and Child gave the group a private back room for informal talk; the Thursday-evening sessions where they read out their unfinished manuscripts took place in Lewis's college rooms instead.

Which college's students walk backwards round its Fellows' Quad drinking port as the clocks go back?

Merton's 'Time Ceremony' was invented by two undergraduates in 1971 as a spoof of older Oxford rituals; its stated purpose is to protect the space-time continuum while the clocks change.

Hammersmith Bridge's closure and COVID rules sent the 2021 Boat Race from the Thames to which river?

The Great Ouse near Ely hosted both races behind closed doors, on Cambridge's own training water, with female umpires for the first time; the 2020 race had been cancelled outright.

Philip Pullman based Lyra's Jordan College in His Dark Materials on which Oxford college, his own?

Exeter also produced Tolkien, Richard Burton and Roger Bannister; The Golden Compass filmed there in 2007, and Inspector Morse suffered his fatal heart attack in its Front Quad in the final episode.

The Bodleian's vaulted Divinity School doubled as which Hogwarts location in the Harry Potter films?

The hospital wing scenes were shot there, along with Professor McGonagall's dance lesson; the Bodleian has also appeared in The Golden Compass, Wonka and The Madness of King George.

Which first name did Colin Dexter finally reveal for Inspector Morse in Death Is Now My Neighbour?

Endeavour became the title of the 2012–2023 prequel series starring Shaun Evans; on television Morse hinted at it with the clue 'my whole life's effort has revolved around Eve, nine letters'.

Oxford policeman Albert Alexander became the first patient treated with which drug in 1941?

Penicillin rallied Alexander for days until Howard Florey's team ran out of it and he died; the famous 'rose-thorn scratch' that started his infection was more likely a bombing-raid injury.

Which drug company manufactured the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Oxford's Jenner Institute in 2020?

AstraZeneca signed an initially not-for-profit licence with the university in 2020 and agreed 300 million US doses at about $4 each; Sarah Gilbert co-led the Oxford team, and the jab was withdrawn worldwide by May 2024.

Whose annual Tortoise Fair races its mascot against rival colleges' tortoises for charity?

Corpus Christi's elected Tortoise Keeper looks after its mascot, named Foxe after the college's founder; on race day the tortoises start inside a ring of lettuce and the first to reach the leaves wins.

Whose choir sings the Hymnus Eucharisticus from the top of its tower at 6 am on May Morning?

Magdalen's tradition dates to the days of Henry VII; after the hymn the Dean of Divinity leads prayers for the city and the choir sings the madrigal 'Now Is the Month of Maying' to the crowd below.

Opened in 1683 around a donated cabinet of curiosities, what is Britain's first public museum?

The Ashmolean was built for the curiosities Elias Ashmole gave the university, many of them first gathered by the gardener John Tradescant and his son; it opened in 1683 with the naturalist Robert Plot as keeper.

Which Oxford collection took its shrunken heads off display in 2020 after decades on show?

Pitt Rivers Museum's director said exhibiting the tsantsas 'reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking'; its largest object is an 11-metre Haida house post from British Columbia.

Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce argued over Darwin in 1860 inside which brand-new Oxford building?

The Museum of Natural History had opened that very year; the clash came at a British Association meeting, and because nobody took it down verbatim, what the two men actually said is still uncertain.

Which extinct bird did the stammering Lewis Carroll cast as himself in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

The dodo's only surviving soft tissue anywhere is a dried head in Oxford's university museum, where Carroll and Alice Liddell used to go to look at the remains.

Which Oxford institution keeps the blackboard Einstein chalked during his 1931 lecture there?

The History of Science Museum has the board because dons including E. J. Bowen rescued it after Einstein's lecture of 16 May 1931; it sits among some 18,000 objects on Broad Street.

Which circular domed library of 1749, designed by James Gibbs, is now a Bodleian reading room?

Radcliffe Camera takes 'camera' from the Latin for room; the physician John Radcliffe left £40,000 in 1714 to build it, and an underground reading room, the Gladstone Link, now joins it to the Old Bodleian.

Which 1660s Wren building gave Oxford's rowdy degree ceremonies a home outside St Mary's church?

The Sheldonian Theatre was paid for almost entirely by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a cost of £14,470 when a craftsman earned £2 to £4 a year; it still hosts graduations and Encaenia.

Whose house style, set down by printer Horace Hart, gave the serial comma its nickname?

Oxford University Press had Hart write the rules for its own compositors, yet the label 'Oxford comma' only surfaced in 1978, in Peter Sutcliffe's history of the publisher.

Who edited the first Oxford English Dictionary from an iron shed he called the Scriptorium?

James Murray's team hoped to finish in ten years; he died in 1915 with the dictionary still incomplete, and the last part only appeared in 1928, some seventy years after the project began.

Which Civil War army surgeon fed the Oxford English Dictionary quotations from a secure asylum?

William Chester Minor shot a man in London in 1872 during a delusion and spent 38 years locked up, mining his own antiquarian library; Simon Winchester told the story in The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

The Oxford Union's notorious 1933 debate voted 275 to 153 never to fight for what?

King and Country became known as the 'Oxford Oath'; three weeks later Randolph Churchill tried to have the motion expunged from the records and lost 750 votes to 138 amid hisses.

What does Cambridge call the enclosed college squares that Oxford knows as quads?

Courts is the Cambridge word, as in Trinity's Great Court, where students try to run the perimeter before the clock finishes striking twelve, a dash re-created in the film Chariots of Fire.

Which novelist coined 'Oxbridge' in 1850 by sending Pendennis to the fictional Boniface College?

Thackeray also coined 'Camford' in the same novel, but it never caught on; Virginia Woolf, citing him, took up 'Oxbridge' in A Room of One's Own in 1929.

Which crime novelist was among the first women awarded an Oxford degree in 1920?

Dorothy L. Sayers had earned first-class honours at Somerville in 1915, but Oxford did not then confer degrees on women, so she waited five years; from 1927 to 1957 a quota still capped women's numbers.

Which Oxford term, running January to March, is named for a fourth-century bishop of Poitiers?

Hilary term takes its name from St Hilary, whose feast falls in mid-January; the labels come from the medieval legal calendar, and England's judges still sit in a Hilary term each winter.

Which singer-songwriter behind 'Me and Bobby McGee' came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1958?

Kris Kristofferson, a summa cum laude English graduate of Pomona, was already performing his own songs in England and signed with Tommy Steele's manager Larry Parnes while still at Oxford.

Which astronomer kept a promise to his dying father by reading law at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar?

Edwin Hubble spent three years on jurisprudence, then went home to teach high-school Spanish and coach basketball in Indiana before returning to astronomy, where in 1929 he showed that distant galaxies are racing away.

'Rhodes Must Fall' targeted a 1911 statue of Cecil Rhodes over which college's High Street gate?

Oriel's 1911 statue honours its graduate Rhodes, whose will funded the scholarships; protests began in 2015 and hundreds demanded its removal again in June 2020 after Bristol's Colston statue fell.

Which Oxford chemist, the only British woman with a science Nobel, solved vitamin B12 and insulin?

Dorothy Hodgkin took the 1964 Chemistry Nobel for B12 and cracked insulin in 1969 after 35 years; a young Margaret Thatcher studied under her and later hung her portrait in Downing Street.

The first Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race, in 1829, was rowed not in London but at which Thames town?

Henley hosted the 1829 race, which Oxford won easily before a crowd put at 20,000; boat races on that reach drew so many visitors that the town founded its own regatta ten years later.

Which physicist, who found Oxford 'ridiculously easy' at 17, coxed a college rowing crew?

Stephen Hawking steered his crew on risky courses that damaged boats, his coach recalled; he reckoned he did about 1,000 hours of work in three years and still took a first in physics.

Which comedian met Richard Curtis at Oxford while taking a master's in electrical engineering?

Rowan Atkinson's 1978 master's thesis dealt with self-tuning control; he met composer Howard Goodall in the same drama society, and both men followed him into Blackadder.

Who built a computer out of an old television set while taking a first in physics at Oxford in 1976?

Tim Berners-Lee bought the television from a repair shop; a decade and a half later he wrote the first web browser at CERN, and in 2016 he received the Turing Award for inventing the Web.

Which Nobel Peace laureate graduated from Oxford in 2020 and is Linacre's youngest honorary fellow?

Malala Yousafzai settled in Birmingham after being flown there for treatment when a Taliban gunman shot her on her school bus in 2012; she then read her degree at Lady Margaret Hall.

Which degree did Oxford launch as 'Modern Greats', a modern rival to Classics?

Philosophy, Politics and Economics began in the 1920s as an alternative to Classics for students hoping to join the civil service; it went on to produce numerous British politicians, prime ministers among them.

Which reigning monarch studied Thames navigation at Oxford and wrote the memoir The Thames and I?

Emperor Naruhito arrived in 1983, toured some 21 of Oxford's historic pubs, The Trout among them, and wrote up his thesis on upper-Thames traffic only after going home to Japan.

Which Evelyn Waugh novel gives Oxford undergraduate Sebastian Flyte a teddy bear named Aloysius?

Brideshead Revisited's bear was inspired by John Betjeman, who took his own teddy, Archibald Ormsby-Gore, up to Oxford and kept him for life; Archie was in the poet's arms when he died in 1984.

Which 1993 film has Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis falling for the American poet Joy Davidman?

Shadowlands drew on A Grief Observed, the journal of loss that Lewis published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk to keep his name off it; Richard Attenborough directed, with Debra Winger as Joy.

Tolkien and his wife Edith lie in Wolvercote Cemetery under which two names from his own mythology?

Beren and Lúthien, the mortal man and elf-maiden of the Silmarillion, were inspired by Edith dancing for him in a hemlock glade in 1917; Lúthien went on the stone in 1971 and Beren when he followed in 1973.

Which Inkling's 'supernatural thrillers' include War in Heaven and Descent into Hell?

Charles Williams never finished a degree, leaving his London college in 1904 because he could not pay the fees; T. S. Eliot coined the 'supernatural thriller' tag and introduced his last novel, All Hallows' Eve.

Which college began as a penance, legend says, after its founder kidnapped the Bishop of Durham?

Balliol's founder John de Balliol is said to have been publicly beaten by the bishop and told to support scholars; after his death in 1268 his widow Dervorguilla, mother of a future King of Scots, secured the foundation.

Which student-free college elects fellows by an exam that until 2010 set an essay on a single word?

All Souls' two-day September exam, open to women since 1979, has been called 'the hardest exam in the world'; one past paper asked whether Nazi uniforms change the moral character of an orgy.

Proposed in 2018 as 'Parks', which graduate foundation is Oxbridge's first new college since 1990?

Reuben took its name after an £80 million gift from the Reuben Foundation in June 2020, and admitted its first graduate students on the old science library site in the Science Area in 2021.

The 'Bridge of Sighs' spanning a lane beside the Bodleian links two quadrangles of which college?

Hertford's bridge was finished in 1914 to Thomas Jackson's design, over objections from neighbouring New College; a false legend says it was once closed to make the college's overweight students take the stairs.

Under warden John Wilkins, which college hosted the 1650s meetings from which the Royal Society grew?

Wadham was founded in 1610 by Dorothy Wadham, a widow in her seventies who never visited the college yet directed its affairs by letter until her death; Christopher Wren was an undergraduate there.