Anthony Smith
Wise president of Magdalen College, Oxford, also remembered for his role in founding Channel 4
ANTHONY SMITH, who has died aged 83, made his name as the Director of the British Film Institute and helped to found Channel 4, but he will be best remembered as President of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he enchanted the undergraduates and transformed the college’s fortunes.
As President from 1988 to 2005, Tony Smith introduced a touch of showbiz – which the students loved.
In 1990, he invited Dudley Moore, a former college organ scholar, to give a piano recital in Magdalen Chapel for the students and pick up his degree – which he “forgot” to do 32 years earlier when he left the college. When Richard Attenborough was filming
Shadowlands (1993), starring Anthony Hopkins as CS Lewis, a Magdalen fellow, Smith encouraged Attenborough and Hopkins to drop in to the college bar, much to the undergraduates’ delight. The Prince of Wales was a regular visitor to the college during Smith’s presidency.
In 1992, Smith arranged a loan from the Royal Academy of a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper by Giampietrino, da Vinci’s follower. It hung in Magdalen’s Antechapel for 25 years. Smith presided over an inaugural lecture about the picture by the art historian E H Gombrich.
Seamus Heaney, a Fellow of the College from 1989 to 1994, became friends with Smith. On Smith’s retirement in 2005, Heaney composed a poem in his honour, “A Toy for Tony”, referring to the deer and fritillaries in Magdalen’s Deer Park:
Fritillaries in flower, the deer, He’ll miss them, miss them. And the tower.
And choir and cloisters, fellows’ gardens,
The office even and its burdens. And we shall miss his just being there, His sprezzatura, staying power. His presidential head of steam.
His smile. His visionary gleam.
Smith was also a sympathetic soul for undergraduates going through the torments of youth. No one ever came to him with a problem he did not try to solve – and he usually succeeded. Thousands of students at Magdalen were astonished by and benefited from the extraordinary care he gave each of them individually.
He lent a considerate ear to those who failed to excel in “Collections” – the academic sessions for students with their tutor and the President. And when one undergraduate, having taken drink, became rowdy in the college’s dining hall, he was reported to the President. Smith spoke sternly to him in front of staff, to maintain discipline. He then withdrew to a corner of the cloisters, alone with the young man, and, smiling gently, told him: “Don’t worry about it. You aren’t in any trouble.”
A sensitive, shy man, with a slightly melancholy air, Smith realised that youth is not all wine and roses, even at a celebrated Oxford college. He knew, too, that minor misdemeanours at university should not be allowed to mar later professional life.
It is rare for a Head of House to be quite so sympathetic to the undergraduates. But Smith was also adept at the nuts and bolts of running a modern college.
Magdalen, the alma mater of Oscar Wilde, Edward VIII and John Betjeman, is one of Oxford’s grandest colleges, as well as its most hauntingly beautiful. But, for long spells, it slumbered beneath Oxford’s dreaming spires. In 1752, one former undergraduate, the historian Edward Gibbon, attacked the “dull and deep potations” of the Fellows, “who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder”.
Under Smith’s presidency, the college burst into life – and expanded. Smith was responsible for a whole new quad, Grove Buildings (1994-99), with accommodation for 100 students and tutors and a 160-seat lecture theatre. The buildings were designed by Demetri Porphyrios in a style Smith dubbed “Magdalen Vernacular”, reflecting the combination of the college’s Gothic and classical buildings.
Thanks to Smith’s sensitivity, the prospective options for Grove Buildings – Porphyrios’s Gothic and Classical Revival plans and some less attractive, modernist, steel and glass designs – were voted on by the undergraduates. They plumped overwhelmingly for the Classical-gothic option – which has proved to be very popular.
Smith built up the Student Support Fund for undergraduates in financial difficulty. But his greatest coup was to encourage the Governing Body to build the Oxford Science Park in 1991. The 75-acre Science Park has become one of the leading places of its kind in Europe. It is now home to 130 businesses, employing 2,700 people.
Today, the Science Park plays a crucial part in preserving the long-term financial security of the College and supporting undergraduates. Only this October, the college sold a 40 per cent stake in the Park for £160 million, 10 times what it was worth five years ago. As Smith himself wrote, during the 1990s “the college passed through the most rapid augmentation of its estate in the whole of its 550-year history.”
Anthony David Smith was born on March 14 1938, the son of Henry and Esther Smith. Henry Smith served in the Navy in the First World War before becoming a civil servant in the Admiralty and the Ministry of Works. After Harrow County School for Boys, Tony read English at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he would be made an Honorary Fellow in 1994.
He began his career at the BBC in 1960, producing current affairs programmes, including 24 Hours, the investigative news series, anchored by Cliff Michelmore, which began in 1965.
As well as working in broadcasting, he also wrote about it, in books which changed people’s understanding about the future role of the press and broadcasting: they included British Broadcasting (1974), The British Press Since the War (1974), The Newspaper: an International History (1979) and Television: an International History (1998).
On leaving the BBC in 1971, his writing and academic interests led to him becoming a research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, until 1976.
Smith played an instrumental part on the 1974 Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, which recommended a fourth national channel. Smith became a board director of Channel 4 in 1980 – before its launch in 1982 – until 1985, and wrote the major policy document which led to the creation of Channel 4 as separate from ITV, so as to encourage Britain’s independent production industry. That was revolutionary at the time.
He might well have been disappointed not to get top jobs at the BBC or Channel 4, but it would be wrong to see him as a disappointed man with a sense of failure. A good man and a wise one, he did not hold grudges, and gloried in every aspect of his life.
In 1979, he was appointed as director of the British Film Institute, for which he raised vast amounts of money (principally from his very generous friend Paul Getty); and he helped to launch the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank in 1988. He was appointed CBE in 1987.
When he became President of Magdalen in 1988, more fogeyish voices were surprised by the appointment of a television supremo to one of the top Oxford jobs. Those voices were soon silenced by his natural ability at the job.
In all that he did, he excelled in an extraordinary and charmingly understated way. Every institution he touched, flowered, and with that went a unique gift for friendship. When Wilde (1997), the biopic about Oscar Wilde, was filmed in the college, Smith threw open his home, the President’s Lodgings. “He was very kind and very knowledgeable about Oscar,” recalled Stephen Fry, who played Wilde opposite Jude Law as Lord Alfred Douglas. “Jude Law and I stayed in the President’s Lodgings. He was so helpful in arranging scenes to look just like they did when Oscar was at Magdalen.”
Smith was sometimes described as a man of the Left, but he loved England and its traditions, especially the Anglican church, though he was not a believer.
In retirement, Smith spent a great deal of time in Russia, where he brought the country’s best students together for summer schools. At home he divided his time between an Oxfordshire cottage and his rooms in Albany, Piccadilly; when he was dying his flat was constantly filled with people whose lives he had touched and improved and who were miserable at the thought of his departure. His funeral will be held in his beloved Magdalen College Chapel. He was unmarried.