Founding Fathers

Abstract

In 1950 Edward Paget celebrated the 25th anniversary of his consecration as Bishop of Southern Rhodesia. He was a towering figure, physically and otherwise, and he looms large in the story of Peterhouse.²⁵ He was born in 1886 in Christ Church College, Oxford, where his father, Francis, had recently become a canon of the cathedral and Professor of Pastoral Theology, in succession to Edward King, one of Edward’s godfathers, after whom he was named, and who went on to be the great (and controversial) Bishop of Lincoln. Paget’s paternal grandfather was Sir James Paget, a leading Victorian surgeon and vice-chancellor of the University of London; James’s brother became Sir George Paget, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge.

Speaking at Cambridge in December 1857, David Livingstone said: ‘I beg to direct your attention to Africa. I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again! I go back to Africa to try to open a path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it to you’. As the Chinese proverb has it: ‘If you are planning for a hundred years, plant men’. The planning and the planting have followed Livingstone’s Cambridge speech, and no matter what selfish motives may be imputed to those Europeans who have their roots deep in the soil and in the soul of Africa, Livingstone’s challenge has been accepted.

B.G. Paver, His Own Oppressor (London 1958) p 91