4 min read

Morris’ manufacturing legacy continues

Off of the Oxford Ring Road sits an array of white and grey cubic structures, whizzed past every day by workers starting their days, perhaps sparing a glimpse for the creatively placed MINI Cooper on the roof, posing pompously next to a billboard of itself. A sharp contrast to the architectural grandeur that is found just a few miles down the same road, it can be easily overlooked that this site has an immense history in its own right. In 1876, the Oxford Military College opened on these grounds taking cadets as young as 13 from the UK and British colonies around the world. Funded by Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, buildings were purchased from the Cowley Middle Class School and were expanded upon (although most of the said expansions have since been demolished) while colonial scholarships were set up, likely to attract colonial children to a life of military service in their overseas British territories. The college’s prestige, however, was short-lived as it was driven to bankruptcy in 1896, only 20 years after its opening. The stock of the British automobile, meanwhile, was exploding. Today the leading manufacturing employer in the county, assembling more than a thousand cars a day, and the head of a pyramid of factories (to engine manufacturer Plant Hams Hall, and body pressing manufacturer Plant Swindon), the property’s industrial beginnings trace to 1912 when the town community of Oxford scored a minor victory over that of the prevailing gown.

Taking inspiration from the assembly lines of Henry Ford in the United States, a rather successful engineer and bicycle repairman William Morris purchased the college lot to move into automobile production, starting with his recent design, the “bullnose” Morris Oxford. Finding some success amid a market dominated by less expensive American vehicles, the demand for British cars after wartime grew exponentially and WRM Motors Ltd. was exceedingly cheerful to pitch in. From 1919 to 1925, car production of William Morris’s cars rose from 400 a year to 56,000 a year, requiring massive expansion to other locations across England, and to the original factory in Cowley, new railroads to accommodate workers’ commutes. It was around this time that Morris Motors overtook Ford as the UK’s largest automobile manufacturer, moving Morris clearly into the national spotlight as a titan of industry.

With the Second World War looming the Oxford plant, as recommended by the government, expanded its facilities to accommodate the production and repair of aeroplanes. The de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth was a very popular model manufactured here, bought by the Royal Air Force for training pilots recently joined. As time progressed, the company’s founder became more authoritarian with his control over the company, refusing other key members shares of the business and refusing to adapt to new and necessary market techniques to keep up with competitors. In 1952 Morris Motors merged with the Austin Motor Company to form the British Motor Corporation, which Morris headed for a year before his retirement. From 1966 to 2000, the company to which the plant belonged went through a long series of acquisitions, mergers, restructurings and renamings, from the British Motor Holdings through British Leyland and the Rover Group to British Aerospace and BMW, which despite selling the Rover Group in 2001, kept the site to produce their new MINI line.

To prepare for this change, a large part of the factory was demolished and the land sold to be incorporated into the Oxford Business Park, now office space to the global headquarters of Oxfam, the European headquarters of Harley-Davidson, and major outposts for Royal Mail and HM Revenue and Customs. Next to these, the renovated Oxford plant now assembles about 1,000 cars a day (one every 67 seconds) and employs over 3,700 employees. BMW’s declaration that MINI will be the first of their brands to become fully electric starts with Oxford, as does their strategy to reduce emissions from all plants by 80 percent by 2030. It seems that 108 years later, this old and ugly factory, still often called “Morris’s”, strives for history yet.

4 min read

Unexpected connections to the past from volunteer Olivia

When I moved into my college accommodation this year, ready to start my final year at university, I was intrigued to find a plaque above the doorway, to one ‘H. Huggard’, with ‘Gallipoli 1915’ inscribed below it. I was immediately drawn to find out more – to develop this man’s story, and his connection to my room, into more than just a small plaque. This led further to an investigation into the university during the war, and the role that the city played in the ‘War to End All Wars’.

Hewitt Huggard was born on 5th August 1889, the eldest son of Reverend Richard Huggard, MBE, and Frances Marion Huggard (née Lloyd), in Tuam, county Galway. His family then moved to Dublin, before returning to Reverend Huggard’s town of birth, Dungannon, and then St John’s Vicarage, Barnsley. He attended Bronsgrove School between 1904 and 1908, before taking a second-class degree in History at Merton College in 1911, and enlisting in August of 1914. With the war starting on 28th July, this makes him one of the earliest to sign up; we can imagine that he would have felt eager to do his duty for his country. Hewitt then served in Egypt before being sent to Gallipoli. He was then reported wounded and missing during an attack on Tekke Tepe Ridge, at Suvla Bay, on 9th August 1915. He was later confirmed dead, at the age of just 26. He is commemorated on the Helles Memorial at Turkey (Panel 52-55), as well as the Dungannon war memorial in County Tyrone, the Roll of Honour in the East Yorkshire Regimental Chapel, Beverly Minster, Yorkshire, and on Merton College’s War Memorial. Unfortunately for the Huggard family, Hewitt’s brother Lewis was also killed in the war; they are not the only family to have lost multiple members in the conflict, as attested by the matching surnames on war memorials all over the country.

However, Hewitt was not acting in isolation; he was one of many students of the University who joined up (by 1918, virtually all fellows were in uniform and the student population in residence was reduced to just 12% of the pre-war total), and Oxford locals joined the forces in droves. As well as this, the city saw less obvious changes including the production of around 2000 mine sinkers a week by the Morris factory, and the 9th Duke of Marlborough speaking in the House of Lords about the loss of labourers to the forces, and the idea of bringing women in to replace them (as well as digging up the flowerbeds and lawns of Blenheim for vegetables and crops!). For those less actively engaged in the war, the effects were no less noted. The letters of Violet Bonfiglioli, an Oxford resident during the war years, reveal what life was like for her family in the city at the time: her son Owen, at just 17, was conscripted and sent to France; she was harassed in the street for handing out pacifist leaflets; noted soldiers drilling in the parks, and the city gull of hospitals and wounded soldiers. One of the things that many struggled with, understandably, was the lack of food: Mrs Bonfiglioli described getting to the shops before 8am and arriving to a queue of around 100 people! While it should not be surprising, in such an old building, to know that my predecessors would have been involved in such world-encompassing events as World War I, to come face-to-face with a name made the connection, and the history of the building, much more personal.

You can read more about Oxford’s war efforts during 20th century here.

The bright side of America’s political polarization and neverending crises may be that it has provided ample creative fodder for painter Eric Fischl.

Fischl, who has been making and showing figurative paintings since the ‘70s, has become a self-fashioned bard of American decline.

In recent years, he has hewed to the news cycle: Shortly after Trump took office, he posted a painting to Facebook, fresh off the easel, that showed a boy curled into a fetal position wrapped in the American flag. Art critic Jerry Saltz said, at the time, that the work made him as though he “had fallen through a trapdoor into an infected field of American fissures formed by the election.”

During the fall of 2020, after six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fischl showed a series called, “Meditations on Melancholia,” more flag-wrapped figures, and a hula-hooping nude.

With this year’s midterm elections looming in November, Fischl unveiled his latest series, Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America, last week at Skarstedt Gallery. The work leans heavily on the idyllic Hamptons town of Sag Harbor, where Fischl has lived for decades, as a backdrop for a grotesque and sympathetic parade of American every-men and -women.

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The Headlines

OPENING THE TREASURE CHEST. That’s how the New York Times describes its preview of Paul Allen’s storied art collection, which will head to auction this fall at Christie’s New York. More than 150 of them will be sold and are expected to bring in over $1 billion, as we learned last month. But at last, we know more about which works the ultra-wealthy can bid on, like  Georges Seurat ’s 1888 Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), which features a section of his famed painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. That work is expected to sell for more than $100 million, as is van Gogh’s Verger avec cyprès, one of five works by the post-Impressionist still in private hands and a rarely exhibited piece. A Klimt could sell for over $90 million, or more than double what Allen paid for it in 2006. It’s a collection filled with art historical gems. 

ARTISTS SUPPORTING ARTISTS. The Guardian reports that artist Tracey Emin, who made her name as a Y.B.A. back in the ’80s, will soon auction her painting Like a Cloud of Blood to benefit a residency program for emerging artists that she is creating in Margate, England. To be sold by Christie’s next month, the work is expected to fetch £700,000 ($775,000). Fashion designer and sometimes-curator Duro Olowu has organized another exhibition, this time for octogenarian artist Robert Earl Paige, who was a member of AfriCOBRA and identifies as a “a doodler, a tinker, and a dabbler.” The show is on view at Salon 94 Design in the Lower East Side until October 29. And finally, Hilarie M. Sheets has a close look at a group of artists who were formerly incarcerated, including Jesse Krimes, Russell Craig, and Jared Owens , who have supported each other as they established their now closely watched art careers. 

The Digest

June 1 – September 24, 2022

June 1 – September 24, 2022

June 4 – September 24, 2022

How cinematic depictions of the troubled Hollywood icon have missed the mark

Why is censorship on the rise again?

July 24 – September 25, 2022

July 8 – October 2, 2022

From new Scandi to rustic, each of these homes reflects a style of décor

September 7 – October 22, 2022

September 8 – October 8, 2022

'Political intrigue, spycraft and daring Rebel missions'

How Orlando quietly skewered 90s bigotry

Revisit BBC Culture articles from the Platinum Jubilee earlier this year

How visibility doesn't mean authenticity

The inner sanctums of artists through the centuries are shown in a new book

Independent 20th Century—the newest venture from the Independent art fair—makes a compelling argument that the typical fair set-up, a multi-story sprawl of the art historical canon, needs rethinking. There are just 32 booths featuring famous and unfamiliar 20th-century artists. It unfolds over a single floor of the Battery Maritime Building, steps from the Staten Island Ferry send-off. It’s intimate and tightly curated, and a blessed departure from Spring/Break and the Armory Show, which both opened this week. 

The baseline of quality here is high, chock-full of highlights, and many galleries matched the unusual circumstances with ambitious offerings. Below, a look at six stellar artists getting their due there.