Very recent history, whether of a college or anything else, poses inevitable problems of perspective. It is all too easy, both for the observer and for those engaged in making them, to fail to discriminate between decisions of long and of short term significance, particularly in an era when changes are multifarious and momentous. The history of the modern college, therefore, is made all the more difficult to write by the fact that E. A. Benians could characterize the years between 1918 and 1940 as a period of change ‘unexampled in the history of the university’. At the same time, he summarized the scale of the transformation which took place in the years between the wars in words we will do well to mark.

Benians, of course, spoke as vice-chancellor and of phenomena marking the history of the university in general; but what he said is relevant to the history of St John's College as much as it is to the history of any other part of the university.