Goldsmiths’ historian Professor Tim Crook relates twenty short stories about the university’s history you may or may not know about in four sentence narratives.

This is Part One- many more to follow… perhaps until we get to 1,000.

1.Black Magic and Goldsmiths

If you are inclined to give any kind of Goldsmiths-themed present to anyone, you might consider ‘Black Magic’.

The iconic box of chocolates brand was designed for Rowntrees by Goldsmiths Art School alumnus William Larkins in 1933 while working as Director for Display for the global advertising agency J Walter Thompson.

The ‘Black’ referred to the dark chocolate and the ‘Magic’ to the idea that this affordable version of what at the time was usually an expensive luxury present was the most romantic gift anyone could give to a loved one.

Larkins (1901-74) would go on to be Art Editor for Reader’s Digest and Nestlé now own the ‘Black Magic’ brand and have retained much of the original design.

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2.Goldsmiths and the ‘greatest cricketer of all time’

If you were on the Goldsmiths’ College cricket team in the 1913 and 1914 seasons you might have been lucky or unlucky enough to play against Dr W.G. Grace (1846-1915) who played first class cricket for 44 seasons and dominated the sport.

He was also somewhat notorious for gamesmanship and moneymaking, meaning something of a cheater and a hypocrite for taking money while ostensibly an amateur.

In his later years, he played club cricket for Eltham, and when hosted by Goldsmiths on what is now the College Green on 5^th May 1914, he captained his side and inspected the pitch, but did not turn out to play and ‘Smiths won scoring 125 and bowling out the visitors for 96.

On 20^th June 1914, Goldsmiths visited Eltham and in one of his last ever matches Dr Grace took to the field, and his son, also a doctor and in the team, Charles Butler Grace, bowled six wickets with special ‘lobs’ and the match was drawn.

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3.Goldsmiths and the Radio Times Christmas numbers

It is not widely known that some of the most memorable cover designs for Radio Times Christmas numbers were the creations of Goldsmiths Art School alumni Eric Fraser and C. (Cyril) Walter Hodges.

Fraser (1902-1983) and Hodges (1909-2004) dominated graphic design and illustration throughout the 20^th century and were responsible for iconic Radio Times Christmas covers such as in 1949, 1958, 1962 (Fraser) and 1938, 1950, 1954 (Hodges).

Eric Fraser is also known for creating ‘Mr Therm’ in the 1930s advertising for the Gas Light and Coke Company and for illustrating J. R. R. Tolkien’s books such The Lord of the Rings in the 1970s.

Walter Hodges is also highly respected as a children’s book illustrator and for recreating Elizabethan theatre in graphic art, with nearly 900 of his designs acquired by the US Folger Shakespeare Library.

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4.Goldsmiths Lecturer who inspired the most famous love poem of the Spanish Civil War

The Communist activist, academic and writer Margot Heinemann lectured at Goldsmiths between 1965 and 1977 and was the lover and fiancée at Cambridge University of the poet and Spanish Civil War volunteer John Cornford who served with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

Cornford fought in the battles for Madrid and Boadilla, and was killed on the Cordoba front in December 1936, either on or just after his 21st birthday.

He wrote ‘Poem’ for Margot Heinemann with the opening line ‘Heart of the heartless world’ which Carol Rumens described in the Guardian in 2010 as ‘one of the 20th century’s most moving love poems.’

The four-verse poem ends with the words ‘Remember all the good you can; Don’t forget my love’ and the heart-broken Heinemann (1913-1992) would continue a life full of teaching, writing and inspiration, became a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge (now Murray Edwards College) where she taught until 1989, and remained an activist with the Communist Party of Great Britain until it was dissolved in 1991.

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5.Another first for Goldsmiths- the student union bar

It is not widely known, nor with any particular reason perhaps to boast about it in the present age, that Goldsmiths’ College, University of London was the first to be awarded a drinks licence for their student union bar.

The author of this breakthrough was the Warden Sir Ross Chesterman (1953-1974) who in his early years worried about the safety of his students, not so much about his staff, and feared ‘anything could happen in a New Cross pub’.

The move was welcomed by the Ministry of Education and Sir Ross recalled ‘there was never any real trouble with the bar’; perhaps meaning there was some, but it was something they could control.

He liked to regale visitors he escorted into the College by paying homage to his predecessor celebrated with a stone tablet for saving it during the Second World War and then pointing to his legacy in the sign above the entrance: ‘Dudley Ross Chesterman- Licensed for the purveyance of Beers, Wines, and Spirits on these premises.’

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6.The Goldsmiths Donkey  

When the economic climate after the First World War was harsh, the management of Goldsmiths had a difficult decision after the passing of the horse which had been used to pull the grass cutting machine and roller over the many acres of the College’s extensive grounds.

In May 1920, there was not enough money to buy another horse, but there was enough to buy a donkey- an animal needing less food, lower veterinary bills and having much more stamina.

As George Orwell had written for his donkey character Benjamin in Animal Farm ‘donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.’

The Goldsmiths donkey had a stable between what is now the Whitehead and Lockwood buildings and the students adopted the animal as its official mascot to take it out during ‘rag weeks’ to help raise money for charity.

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7.‘Sweet Sixteen’ and Goldsmiths Art School  

‘Sweet Sixteen’ is a coming-of-age party in North America to celebrate a young person’s sixteenth birthday party and it was also the age students could join Goldsmiths Art School up until the 1950s.

The Goldsmiths Art School pre-dated Goldsmiths’ College as it began in 1891 when part of the Goldsmiths Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute.

It kept its ‘School’ status with a ‘Headmaster’ rather than ‘Warden’, ‘Principal’ or ‘Vice-Chancellor’ until being transformed into a Department and the formalisation of subject degrees in the 1960s and 1970s.

Apart from the development of a special certificate qualification for Art Teachers, the Art School’s students would only be assessed by exhibitions and could attend courses for as long as they wished.

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8.The Annual Goldsmiths ‘Sports Day’

Goldsmiths’ used to have an annual Sports Day in the Summer which would also be a major social occasion and they began at the end of the first academic year in 1906.

Staff and students would keenly contest cricket ball throwing, running [there was a track around what is now the College Green], boxing, wrestling, ‘single sticks’, foils competitions and tennis matches in the quadrangle between what is now the Refectory and lecture rooms adjoining the King’s Corridor.

There would be a Warden’s Cup awarded to the athlete who achieved the highest performances in most of the events.

There was also an unofficial billiards’ championship decided at the Marquis of Granby pub across Lewisham Way which for some unexplained reason in the early years was usually won by a Welshman.

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9.Student and Staff Common Rooms

At the beginning of Goldsmiths’ College in 1905 men and women students had separate Common Rooms in the main building for relaxation, conversation and ‘socialising.’

The Men’s Common Room had a billiard table and board games; the Woman’s Common Room only soft furnishings and flowers on their tables.

Goldsmiths Staff, men and women, shared just one common room, furnished with just one comfortable leather armchair.

From the 1960s until the beginning of the 21^st century Staff would ‘enjoy’ a separate dining area on the first floor of the refectory with a separate Common Room on the floor above with an attendant called Luigi who would serve sandwiches, biscuits, cakes, teas and coffees.

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10.Equality of pay at the beginning?  

The Goldsmiths archives reveal that at the beginning in 1905 there was apparent equality in salaries paid to the men and women lecturers.

For example, university minutes show Caroline Graveson, Vice Principal for Women received the same salary as her equivalent, the Vice Principal for Men, Thomas Raymont at £500 per annum, though their private files indicate Raymont was in fact paid £75 more.

The Bank of England’s Inflation calculator gives the 1905 salary of £500 the value of £51,580.79 in December 2024, and the highest salary was paid to the Warden William Loring at £750 per annum, worth £77,371.18 at the time of writing.

Men and women lecturers with similar ages, backgrounds, responsibility and qualifications received an average salary of £200, which would be worth £20,632.31 at the end of 2024.

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11.Goldsmiths hit by the V1 and V2 in World War Two

Goldsmiths is the only university campus in the UK to have been struck by both German Nazi vengeance rocket weapons during the Second World War.

The first, a V1 doodlebug, was brought down by an auxiliary RAF Barrage Balloon unit on what is now the College Green adjacent to houses in St Donatts Road on Monday 26th June 1944.

Most of the College had been evacuated to Nottingham University but the Art School was still resident and the blast killed two RAF men, narrowly missing Art School Headmaster Clive Gardiner and College accountant John Mansfield.

The terrible V2 bombing of Woolworths on Saturday 25^th November 1944 also flattened and severely damaged buildings on the other side with the corner of St James with people being killed in numbers 286 and 288 New Cross Road now used by Goldsmiths for teaching.

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12.Goldsmiths and its ‘Smithy’ Between 1905 and 1931, Goldsmiths had a ‘Smithy’ complete with forges to melt and mould molten metal.

This may have inspired the first Vice Principal for Women, Caroline Graveson, (1905 to 1934) to write the College Hymn replete with blacksmiths’ metaphors such as ‘In the vapour of the furnace’, ‘The beating of the hammer’ and ‘We work in richer metal.’

The ‘Smithy’ served the College’s Engineering department which taught industrial metallurgy and welding.

Coincidentally, the Second Warden of Goldsmiths, Thomas Raymont, was a blacksmiths’ son who must have found the clanging of hammers and hissing of metal cooling in water rather familiar.

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13.Striptease in the Great Hall

The current generation of staff and students may well be horrified to learn that Goldsmiths Art students in the 1960s pushed the boundaries of the so-called ‘Swinging’ decade so far, they actually booked a female stripper to perform at their annual May Ball.

This is likely to have been 1969 when the ending of the Lord Chamberlain’s theatre censorship led to displays of nudity in the West End with the musical Hair and avant-garde, risqué revue Oh! Calcutta!

Goldsmiths Warden Sir Ross Chesterman and his wife attended the Arts Ball unaware of the programme and were not amused when the students, unimpressed by the professional performer they had booked, encouraged and celebrated one of their own showing how she thought it should have been done.

The Warden subsequently issued an edict banning any future striptease and events of this kind in the Great Hall or anywhere else on the College campus.

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14.Handwritten application and CV of the first head of Goldsmiths

In December 1904, typewriters were uncommon and computers completely unknown when 39-year-old William Loring decided to apply for the advertised post of Warden of Goldsmiths’ College.

The King’s Scholar from Eton and Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge used just fountain pen and ink across ten pages to write his application complete with curriculum vitae and testimonials.

‘Sir’, he started, ‘I beg leave to offer myself as a candidate for the post of Warden of the Goldsmiths’ College, (University of London); even remembering the apostrophe and placing it in the right place.

There were secretarial colleges where he could have had it typed and even printers who could have produced a special booklet, but at the time the demonstration of clear and authoritative handwriting was an important part of making an impression when applying for posts of this kind.

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15.‘Looking At History’ pioneered by Goldsmiths’ alumni  

If you went to a state school in Britain, particularly at Primary level between the 1950s and 1970s, it is more than likely your first introduction to history would have been pictorial books researched and written by J.R. Unstead.

John Robert Unstead (1915-1988) won a scholarship to Cambridge University but could not afford to go and instead trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths’ College, London between 1933 and 1936.

He went on to become a headmaster at two schools, but was so fed up with the turgid, heavy fact and text based history books for children that he researched and wrote Looking At History in 1955 complete with 16 colour plates and nearly 1,000 illustrations.

He became Britain’s most successful educational author selling over 8 million copies of Looking at History alone, though the book would be criticized now for not mentioning the slave trade and Britain’s involvement in it.

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16.Gladys Mitchell- creator of Beatrice Bradley, first fictional psychoanalyst detective

Goldsmiths has produced some significant detective fiction writers including one of the most prolific women crime authors, Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983), who trained as a teacher in New Cross between 1919 and 1921.

Her first novel, Speedy Death in 1929, created the polymathic psychoanalyst detective ‘Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley’ who went on to feature in a further 65 books and was dramatized in 1999 by BBC television in the series The Mrs Bradley Mysteries starring the late Dame Diana Rigg.

Gladys may well have been strongly influenced by the teaching of educational psychology when she was at Goldsmiths and she herself went on to teach English, History and Games in a career lasting until her retirement to Corfe Mullen, Dorset in 1961.

When teaching she coached her students in hurdling, wrote an annual school play, and continued writing a novel a year until her death at the age of 82.

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17.Goldsmiths, Firearms and Shooting  

It is not widely known that for many years when walking to and from the Goldsmiths campus the sound of loud reports from multiple gunshots was not an unfamiliar sound.

For the College had provided for a very busy and popular firing range dug out and built by the first students between 1905 to 1907.

Located in the far corner of the College Green between the St Donatts boundary and current tennis courts it provided recreation and training for the oversubscribed ‘Rifle Club’ running an annual hotly contested shooting competition for the ‘Warden’s Cup.’

The first Head of Goldsmiths, William Loring, was a crack shot himself being a veteran of the South African War (1899-1901), decorated for bravery, and he insisted one of the ground floor rooms in the Men’s North-Eastern corridor be converted into the ‘College Armoury’ for storing all the guns and ammunition.

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18.Laughter at Goldsmiths’ Official Opening

The pomp of formal academic dress, a procession headed by the Chancellor of the University of London, Lord Rosebery, and classical music, including Mascagni’s ‘Ave Maria’ played on the College organ, would be followed by a speech full of jokes rather than solemnity.

This is because Rosebery, the former Liberal Prime Minister, had a sense of humour and was most amused teacher training at Goldsmiths was being jointly funded by County Councils which competed and hated one another.

A reporter present for the Bromley Journal and West Kent Herald had excellent shorthand and recorded Rosebery remembering how difficult it was to referee the rivalry: ‘nothing would have surprised me more than to know that these County Councils were ready and willing to co-operate with the London County Council in any enterprise whatever (laughter).’

Rosebery went on: ‘I confess I drew from those negotiations the very clear impression that Surrey did not love us (laughter), that we were not agreeable to Middlesex (laughter), and that we were absolutely distasteful to Kent (loud laughter).

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19.Rumours of the death of a Goldsmiths student ‘greatly exaggerated’

The American novelist Mark Twain is said to have responded to his premature obituary with the words ‘reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’, but a Goldsmiths student had the right to say it for every year for fifty-seven years.

This is the case with First World War veteran, Lieutenant Kingsley Fox Veasey, who studied for the teaching certificate in New Cross between 1913 and 1914.

The Goldsmiths War Memorial in the reception of the Richard Hoggart main building has his details carved into the oak tablet as having been a fatal casualty killed in action.

In reality, Mr Veasey was very much alive after the unveiling of the memorial in 1920, had survived five years of Great War service, had married his wife Hilda in 1917 and became a head teacher in several Leicestershire schools until his death at the age of 77 in 1967.

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20.Goldsmiths and Rubbish  

In the early days of schools broadcasting produced by the BBC, Goldsmiths Geography lecturer, G. J Cons, produced one of the most popular programmes called ‘Emptying the Dustbin.’

George Joseph Cons was a pioneer of using film and radio for education and his 1938 twenty-minute radio feature on rubbish in Deptford was regarded as a classic.

A Deptford dustman was the main character in the programme, and the Radio Times  revealed that for it the BBC’s recording van ‘has been busy collecting some of the unlovely, though invaluable, dins of his daily round.’

Sadly, an archive of the programme has not survived but listeners had the privilege of imagining the dustmen’s world in London disposing ‘of every empty tin, every twist of potato peel, every discarded or broken gewgaw [useless or worthless thing] in the house.’

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Many thanks to the staff of Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London including Dr Alexander Du Toit, and staff alumni Pat Loughrey, Ian Pleace and Lesley Ruthven. The Goldsmiths History Project contributes to the research and writing of the forthcoming That’s So Goldsmiths: A History of Goldsmiths, University of London by Professor Tim Crook.

The project is dedicated to being Open Source which means free access for reading and appreciation.

Kultura Press will be publishing in book form a series of volumes preserving the research and writing called The Goldsmiths History Series. These will be a printed format of the online work for future book reading and library research.

The planned volumes are:

The origins and beginning of Goldsmiths University of London 1792 to 1914

The First World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1914 to 1919

The Nineteen Twenties and Thirties at Goldsmiths University of London 1920 to 1939

The Second World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1939 to 1946

V2 on the New Cross Road 25th November 1944

Post War Goldsmiths University of London 1947 to 1959

The Sixties at Goldsmiths University of London 1960 to 1969

Late Twentieth Century at Goldsmiths University of London 1970 to 1999

Early Twenty First Century Goldsmiths University of London 2000 to 2030

Other volumes commissioned are:

That’s So Goldsmiths

One Thousand Short History Stories and Pictures of Goldsmiths University of London

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