A typically ‘hearty’ Old Member of University College, opening his copy of the 1929/30 issue of the University College Record, the College's annual magazine, and reading its opening sentences, would have felt that all was right in the world: ‘Seeing day by day five University College names in the University Crew gave great pleasure to all members of the College during the early months of 1930. The College has a great tradition on the River … It was a good year in College athletics’. He would have been still more cheered, no doubt, to find the whole of the first page devoted to thoughts on College athletic success. Page 9 of the 1929/30 Record, though, contained a surprise: ‘The College Musical Society has made a vigorous start through the initiative of Mr. John Maud, who gave the impulse to its formation, and has provided admirable programmes’.

Univ. had never been a particularly musical college, lacking, like the majority of Oxford colleges, any kind of choral foundation. Individual members of the College had played or sung for pleasure at least since Elizabethan times, and during the late nineteenth century there grew up the tradition of so-called ‘Smoking Concerts’, after-dinner medleys of orchestral items, songs, instrumental pieces, and recitations, performed mainly by members of the College, past and present, but that was all. There were glimmerings: Paul Rubens (matriculated 1893), for example, won a considerable reputation before 1914 as a composer of successful musical comedies for the London theatre. His performances at Univ. Smoking Concerts were always a highlight, when, like some Edwardian Dudley Moore, he sang and played his songs to a delighted (and well-lubricated) audience. There is also evidence for occasional summer concerts put on at Univ. before 1914, but these appear to have been on a smaller scale than those arranged elsewhere. This chapter, therefore, will offer a case study of how such a college came to acquire a musical tradition through its Musical Society, and to create thereby a different focus for collegiate social life.

The situation changed when John Maud was elected the College's first Junior Research Fellow in 1929. Maud, an alumnus of Eton and New College, was a lover of music, and his fiancée Jean Hamilton a concert pianist (who had studied with Artur Schnabel), and he thought that the College ought to have a music society.