The seventh object in our 12 Objects series, in celebration of Jesus College’s 450th anniversary, is a photograph of the 1903 College Cricket team.
This photograph is one of the most important in our College archives as it allows us to explore the life and experiences of John Christopher Wilberforce Rock (1882-1946), the first black undergraduate to attend Jesus College, who was awarded an Open Classical Scholarship in January 1901.
Rock (top row, far right) had arrived at Oxford the previous year on a government scholarship from Barbados, joining the University as a Non-Collegiate Student in October 1900. In an age when few Barbadians proceeded to secondary education, Rock had been one of the still fewer black Barbadians to attend the school of the white merchant-planter elite: Harrison College. There, at an institution modelled on British public schools like Eton, Rock received an education whose cornerstone was Classics; at Jesus, he impressed his tutor, Ernest Genner, with his ‘exceedingly good’ prose.
John Rock, the first black undergraduate student to join Jesus College can be seen in this close-up image of the 1903 Cricket Team – top right.
Genner, though, also reported that Rock had struggled to settle in: ‘Has felt the cold much this term; lives out, & has got to know few men’, he wrote in 1901. However, through cricket (which was encouraged at Harrison College as a source of masculine character and discipline) Rock seems to have found a way into College life. ‘[B]eing in the Eleven he has got to know more men’, wrote Genner later in 1901, going on to remark that Rock was also ‘said to play “ping-pong” a good deal’.
Perhaps relatedly, Rock seems from Genner’s reports to have begun to devote less time to his academic work during his time at Jesus, though he was still praised as ‘very acute, and a keen critic’. After a Second in Classics Mods in 1902, he graduated with a Third in Greats in 1904, going on to join the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
Our Vice-Principal, Professor Patricia Daley, and Dr Michael Joseph, M G Brock Junior Research Fellow in History at Corpus Christi College, tell us more about the life of John Christopher Wilberforce Rock and his time at Jesus in a new film here: https://youtu.be/dODveqHHlbg