It is no coincidence that the two longest-running student publications in Oxford are both named after rivers. For most of its near hundred year history, the Cherwell’s rival was not its relatively recent competitor The Oxford Student, but The Isis. As Binney and Edinger wrote in the paper’s first ever editorial, ‘For us the Cherwell personifies all that is most truly Oxford–it is all our own, the Undergraduates rivers, that is why we take its name for our Undergraduate paper.’ In contrast, they claimed ‘No one could call the Isis, which is the Thames, an Oxford river. It is just as freely associated with a hundred other places’

When Cherwell marketed itself as ‘Anti-Political Weekly Review’, the intention was to emphasise it was everything that The Isis was not. It was concerned with Oxford life, rather than outside politics. It contained undergraduate gossip, rather than long articles on the major national issues of the day. Politics was an outside influence distracting from the Oxford undergraduate experience, as outside organisations were ‘spending money so freely as to disturb our little community’. Thus the first edition proclaimed: ‘We don’t want Tories or Liberals or Bolsheviks to set us all by the ears for our opinions. We don’t want London papers to admonish us or our Dons, and we don’t want France to approve or disapprove of what we do here in Oxfordshire.’ Instead, Binney and Edinger believed that undergraduates needed a publication without a political affiliation, which would treat the Oxford undergraduate experience with the levity and appreciation it deserved. They were convinced that a partisan publication could never serve all Oxford students and thus could never acquire a large readership amongst them.

Ironically, The Isis had been founded in 1892 with some similar pretensions. In its founding ‘programme’, it too said it would ‘have no politics’ and intended ‘to be humorous without being ill-humoured’. Edinger said that by the time he was a student The Isis was ‘Conservative, traditionalist and anti-Woman student’, while he claimed that the Cherwell was ‘Radical, iconoclastic and feminist’ (this statement sits rather oddly with the idea that it was also non-political). Maintaining a consistent identity would prove a challenge for both publications. Throughout their histories, both the Cherwell and The Isis have repeatedly switched orientation within the Oxford undergraduate community. It was only after the Cherwell became a newspaper in 1953, while The Isis remained a magazine, that they permanently became distinct.

Edinger’s description of the Cherwell in later years is, at times, sharply at odds with the idea of the paper as non-political. For example, in 1949, Edinger even wrote that in its early years the Cherwell had been broadly supportive of the Liberal Party. The conclusion I have reached on this issue is that Edinger believed that the Cherwell’s non-political status really meant two main things. Firstly, that it should not be connected to any political party and remain independent of any society in Oxford. Secondly, that it should be a platform that all Oxford students, regardless of their political persuasion, felt able to contribute to. The day that the paper was taken over by a narrow and self-perpetuating political clique would be the day that it would no longer be representative of student opinion. Rather than forgetting this founding principle, the surprising thing is that for a large part of its history the Cherwell has been able to maintain this tradition. Indeed, the Cherwell’s non-political stance has probably contributed to its ability to outlast its partisan competitors more than many past editors would be willing to admit.

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 founded as an undergraduate magazine by Richard Christian Cecil James Binney and George Adolphus Edinger in 1920. Binney and Edinger had both served in the First World War before coming to the University of Oxford in 1919 – Binney served with the Royal West Kent Regiment in France and Edinger with the Field Ambulance Convoy and later the American Red Cross in Italy. During their time at Oxford, both men studied at Balliol College and it is clear from early editions of the paper that they spoke regularly at the Oxford Union. The magazine was first conceived in the long vac of 1920, when the two men were heading to Austria to do relief work on behalf of Save the Children. On their way to Vienna, the packet boat from Dover to Ostend was running three hours late. As a result, Binney and Edinger talked about ‘the deplorable state of Oxford journalism’ to pass the time. The two noted that, at that point, Oxford had no undergraduate-owned weekly journal. ‘One of them said Oxford didn’t want one. The other said it would be worth trying.’

Of course this account of the paper’s founding is somewhat selective. The Isis had been recently relaunched in 1919 by Beverley Nichols, after a four year hiatus resulting from the war and no less than seven other undergraduate publications produced by political societies also existed. Both The Isis and the Cherwell were written by undergraduates and came out weekly – The Cherwell’s claim to be the sole undergraduate periodical only existed in its ownership. Whereas The Isis was owned by Holywell Press, which allowed students to produce it as long as it was profitable, the Cherwell was to be entirely financed, staffed, and owned by students. However, even this is not as neat as it sounds, with the magazine’s first editorial acknowledging the existence of a somewhat similar publication called the Cardinal’s Hat. Therefore, although the Cherwell was not entirely unprecedented, it is significant that it was conceived as something that should be run – both financially and editorially – by students from the very beginning.

Binney and Edinger would both run the magazine until they graduated in 1923. Binney would go on to become a barrister and died in 1966. Meanwhile, Edinger would also become a barrister, but he clearly could not resist returning to journalism. In 1928, he got a job at the Sunday Express and was a war correspondent during the Second World War. After that experience, he moved to Southeast Asia, where he worked for the Strait Times of Singapore and as a freelancer. He would die in 1984. Whereas Binney disappears from the pages of the Cherwell after leaving Oxford, Edinger continued to write occasional guest contributions for the magazine. In 1975, when the paper’s editor wrote to Edinger, he replied telling them:

You do not need to tell me all the Cherwell has accomplished and provided over the last 50 years. But you do need to tell the world.

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