It is very understandable that, after three Bills had been lost in successive years, there were those who felt reform of the University was not a priority of Government, and without being given that priority would always be thwarted in the House of Commons. Such feeling produced the last alternative Scheme to be publicised: it was proposed and supported, almost exclusively, by a sizeable group of teachers in the London Medical Schools.

The ‘moving spirit’ of the Scheme, which envisaged the establishment, by Charter, of a federal University of Westminster, quite separate from the existing University of London, was Dr J. Kingston Fowler, Physician to the Middlesex Hospital. One of his more influential colleagues in the venture was Isambard Owen of St George’s Hospital Medical School. The idea came from a suggestion made in October, 1895, by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, to the Council of Legal Education. Russell had proposed an Inns of Court Law School, separately or in connection with a University, to grant degrees in Law. Kingston and his collaborators – ‘representative members of the teaching staffs’ of nine Medical Schools – built on the notion, and planned a University which was in effect a federation of Faculties. A printed prospectus was widely circulated, and attracted a good deal of correspondence in the Times. By early December, 1897, a list of 153 supporters was published. All but a very few were doctors; among them one or two Deans, signing in their personal, not their official, capacities.

But this grass-roots medical initiative came too late. The governing bodies of the Medical Schools and the Royal Colleges were unmoved by it. The Lancet gave it little coverage, and proclaimed that ‘It would serve no practical purpose to discuss the scheme in detail.’ The British Medical Journal, mouthpiece of the British Medical Association, reported the Scheme at length without supporting it. And the Journal carried an exchange of letters between Kingston Fowler and Pye-Smith, in which the latter dismissed the University of Westminster idea as ‘inchoate’ and ‘stillborn’, stressing the strength of agreement among institutions in favour of the Bill, and arguing that only a unified University would attract endowments for research.