Professors of Greek and Latin

• George Long

‘George Long … had been recruited from Trinity College, Cambridge to be the founding Professor of Ancient Languages at the University of Virginia. He returned to England to take the Chair of Greek, but then resigned in 1831, along with several of his colleagues, over the sacking of Pattison [Granville Sharp Pattison, the Professor of Anatomy]. He went on to work full-time for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, first as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Education and then of the famous 29-volume Penny Cyclopaedia. Long was to return to UCL as Professor of Latin for four years in the 1840s, but left again to combine schoolteaching in Brighton with his literary and scholarly work’ (World of UCL, pp. 42-43).

• Arthur Platt

‘Arthur Platt, the Professor of Greek, was … remembered as the creator of the common-room life of the academic staff, at first using his own private room as a meeting place after lunch. ‘There he sat for more than a quarter of a century, instructing Chemists in the Humanities and teaching Zoologists wisdom,’ wrote a colleague – an Arts colleague, of course. He inspired affection in all, including the animals at the Zoo; even the giraffe, a contemporary student recalled, would bend its long neck down and rub its head on Platt’s bald pate’ (World of UCL, p. 125).

• A. E. Housman

‘It is one of UCL’s proud achievements to have brough him back into the university world [from the Patent Office]; when he left after 17 years, it was to the Latin Chair at Cambridge. Housman’s main work was limited in scope to the exposition and textual criticism of Latin poetry – he produced three editions of unsurpassed quality. He struck contemporaries in College as austere and reserved, though all his letters to Platt were destroyed by Mrs Platt after her husband’s death as ‘too Rabelaisian’. He must have seemed, then as now, a tissue of inconsistencies. There was kindliness beneath the cold exterior, especially towards young people; but he attacked other scholars with extraordinary ferocity. However, his treatment of women students is far from edifying. R. W. Chambers recalled that Housman would reduce female students to tears one week, then profess the following one not to remember them at all. He was a poet – A Shropshire Lad was published during his years at UCL – who would write nothing about the beauty of ancient poetry, and devoted 30 years to elucidating the text of a writer for whom he felt little sympathy’ (World of UCL, pp. 125–26).

• T. B. L. Webster and Michael Ventris

‘T. B. L. Webster, a brilliant and prolific writer on the relations of art and literature in ancient Greece, was the founder of the University’s Institute of Classical Studies; he must take credit also for offering Michael Ventris his only academic post as Honorary Research Associate in Greek after the latter’s revolutionary discovery that Linear B tablets were written in an early form of Greek’ (World of UCL, p. 227).