No. 124
The Trusty Servant
The Porters’ Lodge
Suzanne Foster delves into her archives:
A rare photograph of some of the College’ s domestic staff in the mid-1860s was donated to the College Archives this summer. It shows a group of men identified as the carpenter, the manciple, the chambermen, the brewer, the Head Porter and his deputy, and the cook. Notes on the reverse of the photograph and additional records held in the archives enable us to name these men, but in general we know very little about
the generations of men and women who have worked as domestic staff at Win Coll.
Staff records often just listed a job title, not an individual’ s name, and proper wage books are sadly lacking for many years. It is even harder to track down the staff who worked in the boarding houses.
The photograph has prompted me to think about the history of the Porters’ Lodge. Staff, OWs and visitors will all, at some point, have had reason to call in at the Lodge, which is one of the few buildings at the College which has had the same continuous use since the school opened in 1394.
The buildings in Outer Court were constructed between 1393 and 1401, with work on Outer Gate and the tower over it beginning in November 1394. The gates themselves were hung in
1396 / 97. The master mason William Wynford was responsible for this building work and Outer Gate itself was finished in 1401, with the buttresses added to stabilise the structure as work progressed.
The Porters’ Lodge occupies its original premises and until the Reformation it had a secondary function as the barber’ s room. All the scholars and fellows were required to be tonsured and it was therefore necessary to have someone on the staff who could maintain the tonsures. In the College’ s early accounts, the Lodge is known as the barbaria. An inventory of 1413 reveals that the Lodge was furnished with a bed, a chair, a form or bench, a press or cupboard, a round chafer( saucepan) with a lid, a pottlepot( a half gallon pot or tankard), three basins, six shaving cloths and four razors. The job of porter and barber was sometimes held separately, sometimes not. At least one of the porters slept in the Lodge until 1907, and until 1886 the only window was the one looking into Outer Court, as the window facing out onto College Street was created in that year.
The Lodge otherwise remains relatively un-changed. In the mid-1880s, one of the walls was decorated by a scholar with a cartoon showing the difference between a faithful porter performing his job well and the damage caused by a porter who enjoyed his allowance of beer a little too much – the cartoon was still visible in photographs of the Lodge in the 1950s.
The main function of the porters has always been to man the entrance to the school and to‘ take care that no suspicious or low people frequent the lodge, or loiter about the gates or courts of the College’. They were also to open and close the gates, and to collect and distribute the post, making sure that any packages thought to contain wine or spirits‘ first be submitted to the notice of the Second Master’. In the past, a porter’ s duties included many other activities. These included attending to the lighting, heating and cleaning of Chapel and Chantry, the cleaning of Chamber Court and Cloister, the cleaning of the bursary and the servants’ lavatories, helping at meal times in College Hall, winding the clock, operating the blowers for the organ in Chapel, cleaning and care of the library when it was housed in Chantry, mowing the grass in Cloister and acting as a tour guide. The tips received from this last job provided a bit of extra income. The porters were also required to attend divine service on Sunday and to ensure that neither visitors nor boys brought any prohibited items into the school – sadly we don’ t know what these prohibited items were. All this was rewarded with a weekly wage, meals, and 6 pints of beer a day for the Head Porter and 12 pints a day for the under-porter. Tours might have been very entertaining indeed as a result!
What do we know about individual porters? Not a great deal in many cases. For some years, the deputy porters were all given the names of minor prophets – Obadiah in the 1840s, succeeded by Amos, and then by Joel in the early 1920s. Joel, aka Mr Rawlins, lived in Mill Cottage and kept goats and ducks. He was known for wearing noisy shoes but his boss, Henry‘ Johnny’ Bishop, wore quiet shoes- no doubt a useful distinction for the scholars to note. Johnny Bishop served the school for 66 years, starting as a boot-boy at
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