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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