At the turn of the century, OSPL was badly run and the company had acquired significant debts. Worst of all, few people were aware of quite how bad the situation was, particularly on the editorial side of the paper. Events finally came to a head in the summer of 2001, as Jon Boone the editor of In at the Deep End and incoming editor of the Cherwell returned to the offices during the long vac. He discovered that invoices from printers had not been paid in months and that the company had not filed tax returns for three successive financial quarters.  The situation was critical – OSPL had acquired £19,000 in outstanding bills and was already £16,500 into its overdraft. Tax authorities were pursuing £7,000 in unpaid VAT bills and bailiffs were preparing to remove all valuable property from the offices. This would have made it impossible to produce the newspaper, even if OSPL had money to print it. Meanwhile, the Chairman of OSPL had fled. One week before the first edition of term was due to go to print, Boone wrote in desperation that without help:

With bailiffs at the gates and the company on the verge of collapse, the paper was only saved by the help of alumni who were able to arrange an emergency overdraft of £25,000 from HSBC. However, rather than turn a corner at this point, the paper continued to be plagued by poor management. In October 2001, OSPL had appointed a new board member to help turn around the company. But when a new Chairman started in November 2002, he found that no advertising had been arranged for Michaelmas and that the company’s books had disappeared. After a partial recovery, the company’s financial situation had worsened again and it was now £27,000 in debt. It was only with great perseverance and the work of those who chose to stay to sort out the company’s problems, rather than evade responsibility, that it survived. The paper was slashed in length and almost all colour was removed. The legacy of the crisis is still perceptible today, as The Isis was permanently cut to one issue per term to lower costs.

In 2009, the Cherwell acquired national attention of a different kind. The problem began when the editorial team printed 50 copies of a spoof edition of the paper dubbed the ‘Lecher’. Some of the ‘jokes’ included a story where two students talk about sexually abusing and killing babies, while another included a photoshopped image of a former editor of the paper dressed in a Ku Klux Klan costume. As if that was not enough, they also wrote a spoof story about a busker whose bagpipe music had annoyed Oxford residents, joking that the instrument had been used as a means of torture during the Holocaust. The spoof edition went down well at a meal for staff, but drew universal condemnation when it was picked up by the website Oxford Gossip. OSPL demanded that the editors resign. While the spoof edition was in poor taste, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the newspaper had not made things like it before. For example, the 1979 edition of the Cherwell Guide had included a picture of the editor in an SS officer’s uniform on the contents page. What this episode really demonstrated was that, in the digital age, undergraduate ‘jokes’ would no longer go unnoticed by the outside world. If it was not obvious before, it was now clear that Oxford undergraduates were under greater national scrutiny than ever before.

In contrast to these moments in the not-so-distant past, the paper’s current situation is remarkably stable. The Cherwell makes a small profit, and is no longer used to subsidise The Isis. Every week in term time, a 32 page edition of the paper is printed and the paper’s staff is consistently larger than it has ever been before. But is it only a matter of time before the Cherwell returns to crisis again? History would suggest that is bound to be the case. After all, despite the current illusion of stability, the paper faces greater structural challenges than ever before as it adapts to a new, increasingly digital context. Ultimately, however, the fate of the paper lies where it always has – with the students who run it.

By Robert Walmsley

Preface

Part 1 – The Founders

Part 2 – Two Rivers, Two Publications

Part 3 – The Early Paper

Part 4 – ‘The Cherwell Renaissance’

Part 5 – Office Space

Part 6 – A Near Death Experience

Whilst it is tempting to write a history of the Cherwell which glosses over its many mistakes, it would be wrong to ignore the harm that the platform a newspaper provides can cause. One of the worst controversies the paper has been involved in was in 1980. The paper had printed the caption ‘Could you rape this woman?’ beneath a photo of a female student named Fiona McTaggart, who had organised a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march. In response, 11 JCRs passed motions condemning the Cherwell. Balliol banned the paper altogether. Things escalated a step further when a crowd of around 40 protestors gained access to the Cherwell offices and destroyed past editions of the paper. The editor eventually apologised for the caption, but not the accompanying story.

In 1981, the paper changed landlord from the Oxford Union to Brasenose College, by moving to Frewin Court. The College said that OSPL would only have to pay electricity and phone bills, but no rent. With this move it seemed that the Cherwell had finally found a solution to the financial problems that had plagued it since its foundation. After all, the bursar of Brasenose had promised the paper that it could stay on the site as long as the Cherwell remained ‘a general undergraduate magazine’. Only five years later the paper was told by the College that it intended to redevelop the Frewin Court site to build more student accommodation. OSPL asked Brasenose whether it would consider including a space for student journalists on the site. The College rejected the proposal. It took severals years for the development to begin, but by July 1993, the bursar was writing to the paper to say that he was ‘astonished’ to see that the Cherwell was still occupying the premises. Time had run out. and the paper had to endure the shock of paying commercial rents in Oxford for the first time since 1954.

The 1990s proved a moment of transition for the student press in Oxford. It started with the Scott Trust (owners of the Guardian Media Group) offering to buy the Cherwell, in response to its financial problems – an offer the OSPL Council of Management declined to preserve the paper’s independence. A new Oxford arts newspaper named The Word appeared in May 1990 and would survive until 1996. The would-be rival complained that there was a ‘lack of any comprehensive guide to the vast number of events in the town’ and said it was conceived out of ‘a certain disillusionment’ with existing publications. In 1992, OUSU had a go at displacing the Cherwell and founded The Oxford Student – rubbing salt in the wound of independent publications in Oxford which were already struggling to be commercially viable. Somehow the Cherwell survived. The Isis did not and was taken over by OSPL in the late 1990s, ending the official rivalry between the two publications.

By Robert Walmsley

Preface

Part 1 – The Founders

Part 2 – Two Rivers, Two Publications

Part 3 – The Early Paper

Part 4 – ‘The Cherwell Renaissance’

Part 5 – Office Space

Part 6 – A Near Death Experience

The Cherwell was not resurrected again until either 1946 or 1947. The Bodleian’s collections resumes under the proprietorship of Martyn de B. Gordon-Fisher in 1947. However, the first editorial of Gordon-Fisher’s paper makes reference to how the paper had been restarted some point after the war, before it was sent into liquidation by the Proctors. Why had the Proctors destroyed the Cherwell? The owner of the paper, Alan Beesley, had accidentally sent a questionnaire about women’s sexual experiences at Oxford to a female don. Unsurprisingly, the Proctors were not impressed, and suspended its publication. The resurrected paper did not recover easily, and it quickly became a bi-weekly publication. At the same time, some stability was restored and Gordon-Fisher was able to attract a wide range of contributors. The new owner promised: ‘we will do our best to avoid the criticism usually directed against Varsity magazines – that of cliquishness.’

The future of the Cherwell changed forever in 1951, when it was bought by Clive Labovitch and Earl M. White. Initially, Labovitch and White continued with the paper’s existing magazine format for a year, before deciding that a fundamental change was needed. Sales were not what they once were, and the Cherwell was struggling to differentiate itself from other Oxford magazines with a literary bent. On Tuesday, 27 January 1953, the Cherwell was reborn as a newspaper. The two proprietors laid out their thinking in the first newspaper edition of the paper:

Every innovation is not an improvement, every change is not necessarily for the better. But while we must admit to a slight nostalgia for our shiny pages and glossy birdcage of a cover, we feel that the war of magazines in Oxford is an outmoded conflict, and there is a need for us in our new form. When Cherwell was established in 1920, the University was barely a third of its present size and it was much more possible to be informed of almost all that was happening. Today the University is not merely physically larger, but has increased the scope of its activities to such an extent that a weekly newspaper has become practically the only remaining desideratum.

The Cherwell: News Edition was eight pages long, and included news, interviews, and listings. Having to deal with news stories led the paper to take a more serious tone, particularly when there were a large number of student suicides in 1953. The editorial team wrote in frustration that there was ‘no such thing as an imaginary psychological ailment’ and that ‘the University must in the name of humanity provide a service which is overdue by several young lives.’ The paper was more financially successful than the magazine, but to provide a greater degree of stability, Labovitch also negotiated a move to a small brick hut at the back of the Oxford Union in 1954, with the help of his friend Michael Heseltine, the Treasurer of the Union at the time. 9a Saint Michael’s Street would prove the paper’s longest lasting office, where the Cherwell remained from 1954 until 1981.

Barely a year after the Cherwell adopted newspaper form, its Cambridge competitor Varsity attempted to enter the Oxford media market. Trouble occurred on 24 January 1955, when a dozen members of Varsity’s Cambridge staff visited Oxford and were followed around its colleges, by people who tore down posters and leaflets advertising the newspaper. These shadowy figures were allegedly doing their bidding on behalf of the Cherwell. On the day the Oxford edition of Varsity first went on sale, the BBC even sent down a cameraman who told The Observer that he hoped to film ‘a bit of scuffling’ between the two papers. Thankfully he would be disappointed, although the Cambridge Editor of Varsity, Michael Winner, kept a low profile as he had heard that the Cherwell staff wanted to throw him in the river. Fortunately for the Cherwell, Oxford students remained too tribal to buy a newspaper that had its origins in Cambridge, and Varsity’s presence proved short-lived.

By relaunching the Cherwell as a student newspaper, Labovitch and White saved the paper. They had taken a struggling publication from a room in New College to a well-equipped office at the centre of events in Oxford. In the last edition of the Cherwell before they graduated, its staff wrote that the two had truly been responsible for a ‘Cherwell Renaissance’.

Labovitch and White sold their interest in the paper to another student called Michael Sissons in 1957. However, this state of affairs did not last long, as the Cherwell was sold to a trust consisting largely of senior members of the University in April 1958. To improve the management of the paper the new owners created Oxford Student Publications Limited (OSPL), which was formally established on 6 January 1961. In the short run, this seemed to strengthen the paper as the editors looked to publish it twice a week and staff were even told at one meeting that ‘Cherwell was a newspaper steadily working towards Manchester Guardian level’. Meanwhile, The Isis mocked the Cherwell’s increasingly professional pretensions, by commenting on all the ‘impovements’ that were taking place – a jest aimed at the quality of the paper’s proofreading. But in the long run, dons proved no better at managing the Cherwell in the long run than student proprietors had been. Barely a decade after the incorporation of OSPL, there was serious talk in 1972 of a merger between The Isis, and the equally impoverished the Cherwell. In fact, the situation had deteriorated so much that, in 1974, the paper had to launch a national appeal in order to stay in print. Leading political figures of the day, including Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, contributed £5. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn both declined. The bluntest rejection came from the writer Kingsley Amis, who wrote:

By 1977, it looked like OSPL might finally have recovered and the Cherwell jokingly ran a front page with the headline ‘Fleet Street Shudders!’, which announced that OSPL would make a bid ‘not exceeding two figures’ for the Evening Standard. But the situation deteriorated again, and by the 1980s the advertising revenue from publishing a careers guide was the only way it avoided shutting down.

By Robert Walmsley

Preface

Part 1 – The Founders

Part 2 – Two Rivers, Two Publications

Part 3 – The Early Paper

Part 4 – ‘The Cherwell Renaissance’

Part 5 – Office Space

Part 6 – A Near Death Experience

The first edition of the Cherwell was published on Tuesday of Fourth Week during Michaelmas Term, 1920 and cost four pence. It covered all aspects of university life from drama to sport. One notable early feature in the magazine was ‘Rollers’ – a series of one or two sentence observations and pieces of gossip about what had happened in Oxford that week. For instance, one week the writers of ‘Rollers’ observed:

Who exactly worked for the publication at this time is difficult to ascertain, as early editions of the magazine contain no staff list, and most articles were written using pseudonyms, such as ‘Ambrose’, ‘Porp’, and ‘Jael’. However, Edinger wrote in 1949 that Louis Golding had been the paper’s first literary editor and that Robert Graves had performed the rather cryptic role of ‘literary adviser’. The habit of holding ‘Conference’ dates back to those early days, when the paper’s staff would meet at 10.30 on Sundays. One editorial describes the purpose of these conferences as twofold:

1. To criticise contributions from people outside the staff.
2. To transact “any other business.”

Overall, the tone of the paper was satirical – it professed revulsion at both ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Anti-Bolshevism’ as well as serious politics of any kind. Soon after the departure of Edinger and Binney in 1923, the magazine swiftly became more literary. ‘Rollers’ came to an end and there were noticeably more poems and literary essays appearing within it. However, the magazine had not lost its sense of humour. For example, the editors announced that the Cherwell would be delivered in 1924 using a ‘large fleet of armoured cars’ acquired from the Romanian government.

By the 1930s, the paper had moved to new premises on 33 St. Aldate’s Street – just down the street from where the offices are today. It often took unpredictable stances in editorials. One year it published one saying that Armistice Day should no longer be observed, because it shut ‘the nation’s eyes to the War’s results.’ The next year, it called for the Labour Club to be more moderate and argued that Oxford politics had ‘too long been regarded as a playground for vociferous extremists’. Regular features included ‘Samuel Pepys – Undergraduate’, a fictionalised diary of an Oxford student’s life, and ‘La Gazette’ a gossipy roundup of weekly goings on. The paper also convinced guest writers like Vera Brittain to write about their experiences at Oxford. By far the most memorable work published by the paper at this time was The Oxford “Cherwell” Wine Book (1932) – a collection of articles by the ‘best known and best qualified’ writers on the subject of wine. The three editors of the Cherwell at the time, A.M.E. Goldschmidt, Giles Playfair, and Derek Hudson, called the book a ‘breath of genius which touched our weary foreheads’ and boldly called for ‘all who take interest in the art of living’ to read it. The book included reviews of hock, champagne, claret, burgundy by prominent writers, as well as a chapter on port by a Catholic priest from Ireland. It proved so popular that a second edition was printed two years later.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 did not cause the Cherwell to cease publication, despite the vastly reduced number of undergraduates at Oxford. This was in contrast to The Isis, which ceased publication for the duration of the war. However, by this point the Cherwell was in a greatly diminished state. There were even rumours that the Conservative Association would take it over. Meanwhile, Oxford Magazine predicted that the publication would soon meet its demise. The Cherwell fired back by suggesting that the author of the Oxford Magazine article seemed like ‘a rather stupid and left-wing undergraduate’ who did not realise:

In the final edition of Hilary Term 1942, the editors promised that the Cherwell would be back next term and ‘continue to serve you on the twelve miserable pages allowed by Paper Control, with such talent as the Recruiting Board leaves us.’ It was never to be. The Bodleian’s collections abruptly end at this point, Derek Mond, one of the two people who ran the paper would die in a flying accident before the end of the war in April 1945. His co-editor was wounded twice, but survived the war.

By Robert Walmsley

Preface

Part 1 – The Founders

Part 2 – Two Rivers, Two Publications

Part 3 – The Early Paper

Part 4 – ‘The Cherwell Renaissance’

Part 5 – Office Space

Part 6 – A Near Death Experience