The charter did not define the relation of the college to the University, but in Keble College was admitted by the Convocation of the University to the privileges defined in a statute on New Foundations which had been passed earlier that year.
The college was thus able to offer its members everything expected from an Oxford education, while ordering its corporate life in such a way that poorer men could live together within its walls without embarrassment. It is safe to assert that before the modern introduction of extensive State assistance to undergraduates Keble made a university education possible to some hundreds of men who would otherwise have been debarred from it for financial reasons.
Though the college has naturally attracted many sons of the clergy it has never made a special point of producing candidates for Holy Orders. Its members have, in fact, served Church and State in every kind of profession which men normally enter after taking an Oxford degree.
The charter placed the government of the college in the hands of the Warden and Council, and gave the Warden absolute power in all matters of internal administration. The tutors had no constitutional position, but the charter provided that the council which has always been composed of distinguished non-resident members of the University might devolve such of its powers as it saw fit upon the tutors. In accordance with this provision, the tutors became fellows in , and the whole internal administration of the college was made over to the Warden and fellows.
The college has never been provided with general endowment. Numerous benefactors have given funds on trust for the award of scholarships and prizes, and these are now sufficient to maintain a respectable number of awards in the usual subjects.
The organ scholarship in particular has brought to Oxford a series of outstanding musicians. Among the portraits in the hall, the following are noteworthy: those of John Keble G. Richmond, , Dr. Talbot G. A major member of the movement was John Keble and following his death in it was decided to found a college as a memorial to him. The design was by architect William Butterfield , also a member of the Oxford Movement.
Whereas the college buildings of Oxford had been built primarily of stone, he went with brick and built in Victorian Gothic style. It is one of the few secular building built by him.
The use of different coloured bricks enable a high degree of ornamentation without having to "add" anything extra to the building - one of the tenets of the Gothic revival. The use of brick also made it less expensive, and led to the college being able to offer cheaper courses.
For most of its history Keble College architecture was controversial and heavily criticized, and students at the nearby St. John's College started a Destroy Keble Society, membership of which entailed taking a brick from Keble College in the hope of completely dismantling it.
Sir Kenneth Clark went so far as to call Keble College the "ugliest building in the world". In recent decades the architecture of Keble has come to be more positively appreciated as a fine example of Victorian Gothic.
The college is usually open to the public in the afternoons, and the chapel is obviously a highlight. Not surprisingly, its original focus was on theology, but this has since been expanded to take in the sciences.
Money to build the new college was raised by public subscription. The major benefactor was William Gibbs of Tyntesfield , Somerset, who made a fortune by exporting guano from the Pacific islands. Gibbs gave funds to build the chapel, and his sons Antony and Martin gave money to build the hall and library.
Keble is known for its neo-Gothic buildings, designed by William Butterfield in a striking pattern of red, blue, and white bricks. The basic colour is provided by red bricks, with white and blue bricks used to create exterior patterns. Butterfield famously claimed that he had ' a mission to give dignity to brick '. His design resulted in residential rooms arranged along corridors rather than around staircases as was traditional in Oxford. Keble is considered Butterfield's masterpiece, though not everyone was an admirer of the result.
He was an ardent admirer of Gothic style, but was even more consumed by a passion for polychromatic design, with patterns made with tiles and mosaics, inlaid marble. He rejected the use of paint, because it decayed and paled over time, and as a result, his buildings do not mellow with age, but instead appear as vivid today as when they were built.
The high point of Butterfield's design for Keble is the Chapel, a wonderful example of Gothic style using colourful tiles, mosaics, and stained glass to create colourful patterns and a powerful sensory experience. Butterfield was a High Church follower, famous for his many Gothic church designs and his use of rich colours. His design for Keble College aroused antagonism from the start. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner called it 'actively ugly', while GM Trevelyan wrote that Butterfield's efforts 'daily give pain to posterity'.
Some students of St John's College decided to take matters into their own hands - literally. They formed a secret society, which required aspiring members to remove a single brick from Keble College. A red brick would give the applicant a standard membership, while a white brick would give a higher membership and a rare blue brick would grant chairmanship of the society. The first Oxford College of the modern era, it was founded in memory of John Keble , well known for his best-selling Christian verse and a key member of the so-called Oxford Movement which sought to recover the Catholic heritage of the Church of England.
The College was originally strongly Anglican in its ethos. It attracted funding from leading sympathisers of the Oxford Movement, including the Gibbs banking family, who made their money from a monopoly on imports of bird droppings a valuable fertiliser from the Galapagos Islands.
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