The Governing Body and Honorary Fellows’ Dinner 2025
The Governing Body and Honorary Fellows’ Dinner, which was held this year on Saturday 21 June to inaugurate the College’s 75th anniversary, was the largest ever and had representatives from all the constituencies which make up the college community: Honorary Fellows; Foundation Fellows; Emeritus Fellows; Governing Body Fellows; Academic Visitors; Visiting Fellows; Associate Members; Honorary Antonians; Members of our external Advisory Committees; as well as, of course, Staff and a cross-section of our Students who had been nominated for their exceptional achievements and service to the College over the past twelve months.
This year we were delighted to be joined by 42 members of the extended Besse family, which was surely the largest meeting of members of the family on the grounds of St Antony’s since the College was officially founded by Antonin Besse in the late 1940s.
At the end of the Dinner, Antonin Besse’s oldest grandson, John Collins, gave a moving speech about his grandfather. He recalled spending a year in Aden in 1945/46 and being taken to what they knew as ‘the big house’ to be read a story by the great man, as well as spending time with him in the late 1940s whenever his visits coincided with school holidays. He gave us an insight into Antonin Besse’s personality and style –‘a man who could see opportunities where others saw only danger’ – as well as why he came to found the college:
‘On the business front he was a capitalist, but politically and socially he was well to the left and believed that children should inherit nothing from their parents. He was interested in education and decided he would found an institution specialising in international relations. Being a patriotic Frenchman, he first approached the French educational establishment. He found them very interested in the money but less interested in his ideas. And so, he came to Oxford’.
The four youngest members of the Besse family cut a cake of the Hilda Besse Building – and were requested to return to do the same in 25, 50 and 75 years, thereby in one evening forging a 150-year link between the past, the present and the future.
On the Sunday morning, a large contingent of the Besse family accompanied the Warden on an inspection tour of four of the colleges which had benefitted from the then-University Registrar persuading Antonin Besse in 1948 that his benefaction of £1.5 million was more than was needed to found a new college and that £250K (around £8.5 million in today’s money according to the Bank of England inflation calculator) should be used to increase the resources of the poorer colleges by enabling them to put up buildings and offer scholarships. That money was divided with Worcester, St Edmund Hall, Keble and St Peter’s, each receiving £38K each; Wadham £35K; Pembroke £30K, Lincoln £18K and Exeter £15K. Traces of what the colleges have done with those funds can still be found today.
Exeter College has an official Besse Lecturer and Fellow in French Literature.
At Lincoln, the Besse monies funded the addition of a fourth floor to the Grove Buildings which still stand.
Pembroke used the funds to put up a Besse Building in 1954 and establish a ‘Bourse Besse’ available to students of any nationality enrolled in a French University or Higher Education Institution to teach French at the College.
St Edmund’s Hall used the Besse benefaction to substantially increase the number of its student rooms along the High Street. 49-56 High Street is still known as the Besse Building and recently went through a major refurbishment programme that was completed in 2021. It is best viewed from across the street from in front of the Examination Schools.
The tour of inspection though took us to the four other colleges which had received a share of the funds. At Worcester, we were able look at the archives relating to the disbursement of the funds to the Colleges – and the warm relationship which subsequently developed between the Provost of Worcester, Sir John Cecil Masterman, and Antonin and Hilda Besse – and visited the Besse Building which was erected in 1955 and still houses the College’s academic office, admissions office, bursary, IT, finance and maintenance teams.
At St Peter’s, we were surprised to find a bust of Antonin Besse (a replica of the bust in the SCR at St Antony’s) at the foot of the Besse Staircase which houses the college’s academic office.
We learned that Wadham decided in 1946 to build a new Junior Common Room at an estimated cost of £15,000, which was to be, also, a memorial for both World Wars. When the College received £35,000, from the Besse fund, it decided to build a much more substantial building with not just the JCR, but a new library, thirty undergraduate ‘sets’ and a squash court. This building has been knocked down recently to make way for a new Undergraduate Centre which opened in 2021 and the only remaining sign of it are the war memorials commemorating the names of Wadham students who died in both wars.
Keble’s gift was used to complete the north side of our main quad in 1957, which had remained incomplete until then due to a lack of funds. The building therefore has a prominent place in College but is not widely known by the Besse name nor labelled as such, but Antonin Besse does get mentioned every year in the College’s Bidding Prayer which are read as part of its St Mark’s Day celebrations which can be seen in this YouTube clip at 26 minutes 40 seconds St Mark’s Day Celebration – YouTube.)
