What links the Gunpowder Plot, an 18th century pornographic poet and the Enigma code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park?

The answer is Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which has just published its first full account of its history.

Sidney, as it is affectionately known, has a reputation as being one of Cambridge’s more unassuming colleges – both in terms of the number of students it admits each year and its profile in the outside world.

But Sidney Sussex A History by Richard Humphreys may go some way to changing that. For within its 390 pages are long-forgotten stories, characters and achievements that have played a central role in shaping the country’s history, politics and scientific advancement. The chief satisfaction – for Cambridge buffs in particular – is that so many of them are revealed here for the first time.

Did you know, for instance, that the Sidney benefactor Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton initiated the bill, passed in 1606, for the public thanksgiving that became Bonfire Night?

Or that the Sidney founder, Lord Harington of Exton, spirited Princess Elizabeth – the nine-year old daughter of James I – to safety before the Gunpowder plotters could kidnap her and install her on the throne?

Sidney Sussex students also played a key role in the breaking of German ‘Enigma’ codes during the Second World War. Gordon Welchman, a Mathematics Fellow at the college, was instrumental in organising the famous Hut 6 at Bletchley Park and recruiting bright young undergraduates to the code-breaking nerve centre.

One of these was Sidney scholar John Herivel, who first predicted that German Enigma operators might introduce clustered messages that could be deciphered. His prediction came true and, from his work, the Allies obtained access to Nazi-coded communication.

“If Herivel had not been recruited in January 1940, who would have thought of the Herivel tip, without which we would have been defeated in May 1940?” Welchman later wrote in his account of the Bletchley Park code-breaking operation.

Like many Cambridge colleges, Sidney has had its peaks and troughs since its foundation in 1596 by Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex. It has, throughout its more than 400-year history, been variously perceived as a hothouse, fashionable and professorial and, through its most famous alumnus Oliver Cromwell, linked to the English Civil War.

It has produced Nobel Prize winners, heads of MI5 and MI6, sportsmen, novelists and, of course, that 18th-century pornographic poet.

As Richard Humphreys says, the college has always, from its origins as a Puritan stronghold with 10 Fellows to the present day, “punched way above its weight”.

'Sidney Sussex A History' is available for £45 from the Membership and Development Office, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.


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