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 added one in 1663, 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 with a white carnation, switch to pink for the middle exams, and finish in red, usually a gift from friends in their college 'family'.

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' and is compulsory at matriculation, university exams and degree ceremonies; the rules no longer prescribe separate male and female versions.

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

Bob Hawke's feat is routinely sold as a Guinness world record, but it was only a record among students of his own college; he swore off alcohol entirely in 1980 to run for Parliament.

The Inklings met at midday on Tuesdays in the 'Rabbit Room' of which Oxford pub?

The Eagle and Child's landlord Charlie Blagrove lent Lewis and Tolkien his private parlour; the group's Thursday-evening readings happened 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' marks the end of British Summer Time; the same college's Mob Quad, built from 1288, is claimed as the oldest quadrangle in Oxford.

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 sold the jab as Vaxzevria and Covishield, agreeing 300 million US doses at about $4 each; Sarah Gilbert led the Oxford team, and the company withdrew it worldwide by May 2024.

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

Corpus Christi keeps at least one tortoise, cared for by an elected 'Tortoise Keeper'; the 2013 incumbent was named Foxe after the college's founder, and the fair turned 50 in 2024.

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 blesses 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 opened on 24 May 1683 with the naturalist Robert Plot as its first keeper, built around the collection Elias Ashmole gave the university; it is also the world's second university museum.

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 debate came at a British Association meeting, and with few eyewitness accounts, most versions were written by scientists.

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?

History of Science Museum dons including E. J. Bowen rescued the board 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 the Gladstone Link bookstack now runs underground beneath it.

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 in 1905, gave the serial comma its nickname?

Oxford University Press employed Hart as printer and controller from 1893 to 1915, 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 shed held 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips; the project begun in 1857 hoped to be finished in ten years and finally appeared complete in ten volumes in 1928.

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 courtyards that Oxford knows as quads?

Courts is the Cambridge word, as in Trinity's Great Court; Oxford's oldest quad, Mob Quad, went up between 1288 and 1378 and holds a library in continuous use since 1373.

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 gave 'Oxbridge' its first recorded use in A Room of One's Own in 1929.

On 7 October of which year did Oxford finally admit women as full members entitled to take degrees?

1920 brought full membership, but in 1927 the dons capped women at a quarter of the men's number; Cambridge did not grant women full degrees until 1948.

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

Hilary term takes its name from St Hilary's feast day on 14 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 at Oxford studying jurisprudence instead of science, then in 1929 confirmed that galaxies recede faster the farther away they are, the basis of the expanding universe.

'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.

Going into the 2026 race, Cambridge led the men's Boat Race 88 wins to how many for Oxford?

81 Oxford wins stood against 88, plus the single dead heat of 1877; Cambridge has led the cumulative count since 1930 and then extended it by winning again in 2026.

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 read her degree at Lady Margaret Hall after finishing school in Birmingham, having become the youngest Nobel laureate in history at 17 in 2014.

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

Philosophy, Politics and Economics was set up between the wars for future civil servants; critics blame it for edging classicists out of public life, and other universities only copied it in the 1980s.

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

Emperor Naruhito spent 1983 to 1986 at Oxford, visited some 21 historic pubs including The Trout, and only submitted his thesis on upper-Thames traffic in 1989, the year he became crown prince.

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

Brideshead Revisited's bear was inspired by John Betjeman and his own teddy, Archibald Ormsby-Gore; Waugh, who 'did no work' as an undergraduate, put narrator Charles Ryder in his own college.

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

Shadowlands drew on Lewis's own account of grief, A Grief Observed; Debra Winger played Joy, Richard Attenborough directed, and it won the 1993 BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.

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 was publicly beaten by the bishop and ordered 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, facing the Bodleian's main gate, carries the carved name of Henry Boyd, the principal who built it in 1913; Evelyn Waugh came up in 1922 and wrote 'I do no work here and never go to Chapel'.

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

Wadham was founded in 1610 by its founder's widow, who never visited Oxford yet ran its finances until her death; Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke attended the Wilkins meetings, and Christopher Wren was an undergraduate there.