Many menus were created for dinners of College clubs and societies, as well as for College Balls. A great many were produced for dinners held by the Shakespeare Club, which in those days was Univ’s exclusive dining club. The Shakespeare Club did not cut costs, for here is a menu for their dinner of 18 June 1907, with a delicate embossed Art Nouveau design on the cover, with the actual menu alongside:

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As remained the custom well into the 20th century, ribbons have been bound into this menu, here, of course, in Univ colours of blue and gold. The menu inside was a gargantuan affair. Members of the Shakespeare Society ate their way through eleven courses, which can be roughly translated as:

Caviar and shrimps.
Ham soup.
Sole fillet.
Chicken.
Lamb cooked on a spit with spinach and new potatoes.
Maraschino sorbet.
Aylesbury Duckling with green asparagus.
Strawberries with whipped cream.
Lobster crust.
Dessert.
Black coffee.

The alternation of sweet and savoury dishes towards the end of the meal is striking. In later years the Shakespeare Club would display a pineapple at their dinners, but there appears to be no mention of it here.

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Then as now special meals were held for rowing triumphs, and here is a menu for 27 May 1914, when Univ’s First Eight went Head of the River.

The College’s other sports clubs did not tend to hold regular dinners by themselves, but waited for an appropriate event to do so. This was invariably when a visiting team came to play the College at, say, cricket, football, hockey or rugger. If the other team came from Cambridge or London, then their hosts would put them up for the night, and entertain them after the match with a splendid dinner. Invariably, these menus were very elaborate: the relevant sports club was clearly aiming to impress its guests. A good example is this menu for a dinner given for Trinity Hall Athletics Club, 7 March 1906.

As was customary with dinners given for visiting sports teams, care has been taken over the ribbons on the menu: this one has ribbons of black and white for Trinity Hall, and blue and gold for Univ. The menu for this occasion was a bit less overwhelming than that for the Shakespeare Club.

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The eight courses are, roughly, as follows:

Mock Turtle soup (a soup using calf’s head or beef and seasoning to create a substitute for green turtle soup, which was much more expensive).
Fillets of sole coated with forcemeat whiting.
Chicken breast garnished with truffles and balls of foie gras.
Saddle of mutton, with cauliflower cheese and potatoes.
Guinea fowl with potato straws and chicory salad.
Meringues with fruit.
Charlotte with cream of chestnuts.
“Diablotines”, which appear to be cheese croutons.

The left hand page of this opening lists the members of the home and visiting teams: this was customary for menus of this sort. Univ’s Athletics Team for 1906 includes Alan Fyffe (matr. 1903), whose splendid photograph album was the subject of a previous Treasure, Coincidentally, you can actually see there a photograph of the two teams taken on the occasion of this meeting.

College Balls were the occasion for buffet suppers. One of the oldest menus in the book shows the menu for a Ball of June 1890 (below left). And next to it is a menu from a much more lavish ball from June 1906.

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Sometimes undergraduates in the College hosted dinners to mark their coming of age. No doubt these were the preserve only of undergraduates who could afford them. Here, for example, is a dinner held in May 1913 to mark the 21st birthday of Harry Boustead (matr. 1911).

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Just four years later Boustead would die of wounds received in battle. His name is on the First World War memorial in our Chapel.

Senior members of the College regularly hosted meals. The Dean, in particular, did so several times a year, no doubt as a way of getting to know the students in batches. The menu (below left) from March 1910 is very typical. Menus for such occasions were much more basic – just a simple card with the menu listed on it. In the bottom right-hand corner someone has written “The Dean 4/-”. Many of these menus have sums of money written on them, and they must refer to the cost per head of these meals. A. B. Poynton, the Classics Fellow (and later Master) regularly held lunches, of which below right is an example from 1909:

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Here, we see that Poynton hosted a comparatively simple meal costing 3 shillings a head, for 14 people.

The College might host dinners for outside organisations. These were usually arranged due to the involvement of a College member. Thus below is a menu – with a seating plan – for a meeting of the Oxford University Officer Training Corps form 1913. A. S. L. Farquharson, one of our Philosophy Fellows, was much involved with the OUOTC, and will have arranged this event.

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Likewise, it was no doubt thanks to our Medical Fellow, Ernest Ainley Walker, that the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland held a dinner in Hall in 1911. This menu, below, is unusual because it lists the drinks served. It is a notable feature of these menus that details of the wines drunk at these occasions are almost never listed.

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It seems that sometimes an Old Member could arrange meals at Univ. From May 1910, a C. L. Freeman hosted meals here at least twice a year.

This appears to be Charles Lawrence Freeman, who had come up to Univ in 1886 and got a Fourth in Classics in 1890. Nothing so far is known of Freeman (his date of death is not recorded in the College), let alone how he arranged with the College to do this.

The summer of 1914 contained a typical collection of menus for Trinity Term, and the last menu of season was for an unspecified event held on 23 June 1914 (below, left). A page later the keeper of the book wrote “The Great War 1914-1918”, and no more menus are pasted in until 29 May 1919, a dinner for an unspecified occasion (below, right). This was the only dinner recorded for the whole of Trinity Term 1919.

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Things really return to normal in November 1919. Below are two menus from that term, one for the Shakespeare Club (left), and the other for a meeting between the College Rugby Team and the Rugby Team of Middlesex Hospital (right).

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The last dinner in the book dates from November 1920, but 1920 did include one unexpected meal. In March 1920, the Martlets, which in those days was a literary society, held a dinner for members of the Martlets of Pembroke College, Cambridge (another literary society, it seems).

The inside of the menu shows that the President of the Univ Martlets in March 1920 was none other than C. S. Lewis.

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This is their menu:
Beef consommé, with leeks, tomatoes and cheese croutons.
Fillets of sole with whiting forcemeat, garnished with mushrooms.
Mutton chops cooked with wine wine, tomatoes, mushrooms and anchovies, served with asparagus, cream sauce and chateau potatoes.
Roast pheasant with Lorette salad.
Frozen brown bread soufflé.
Toast with grilled mushrooms and bacon, covered with beef bone marrow and breadcrumbs.
Dessert and black coffee.

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Before conservation, the volume was difficult to handle and was very actively and visibly breaking down each time it was opened. This was mainly due to the damage it had incurred when it had been exposed to a substantial amount of water in the past.

This influx of water resulted in an outbreak of mould which had a disturbing visual impact and caused the paper to drastically weaken, particularly towards the end of the volume.

During this damage, it seems one board went missing whilst the remaining board became heavily distorted. The result of all this was that the book became very difficult to handle and access.

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The treatment approach chosen was the result of dialogue between the conservator and the archivist. Options involving digitisation and minimal repair were discussed initially but eventually dropped owing to the complexity and fragility of digitising such a volume. Instead, it was decided that the physical structure of the book should be sufficiently strengthened so that it could be consulted occasionally and periodically displayed.

The first stage of the treatment was to surface-clean the textblock so that it could be repaired as necessary. This was necessary in order to clean off mould residues and the very visible accretions of surface dirt. However, the high degree of structural and material fragility meant this was itself difficult as the textblock had very poor opening characteristics and was actively breaking down even when handled carefully.

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After completing the surface cleaning, the damage to the textblock leaves had to be addressed. Our attention was focused on the most damaged areas where tears and cracks were in danger of spreading far into the page. Towards the end of the textblock there were some particularly fragile areas where the textblock had been historically exposed to water resulting in major damage from mould. Additionally, at the beginning of the textblock there were a number of leaves which had become completely detached. These leaves were re-attached to the textblock by sewing them on to linen braids which were adhered on top of the original recessed sewing supports.

Blank endleaves were constructed from a combination of handmade papers. The main body of the endleaves used paper manufactured by Barcham Green Mill (closed in 1987) in Maidstone. The colour, thickness and texture of this paper matched sympathetically with the original material of the menu book. The reinforcing stub which added strength along the fold of the endleaf was made using more recently manufactured handmade paper from the Moulin Du Verger mill. The new endleaves were sewn on to the linen braids, providing a secure attachment and making them an integral part of the textblock.

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The overall spine structure was stabilised by adhering Japanese paper spine-lining panels followed by “aero” linen textile panels. These spine linings, along with all other repair materials, were adhered onto the textblock using wheat starch paste, a widely used adhesive in book and paper conservation. During the cleaning and paper repair stage, it was noted that there were a number of points within the textblock where the added bulk of the menu books had caused the sewing thread to break at the tail end. Linen thread was used to secure these textblock breaks. This thread moved between the kettle-stitch at the tail end and the outermost sewing support.

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Once the textblock was consolidated as a single unit, new boards made of archival boxboard were attached. The remaining original board was not re-used since it was heavily distorted and was too stiff and inflexible to protect the textblock effectively. The internal density of the textblock varied greatly as it was a guard book structure and the menu booklets were distributed unevenly across the area of each leaf. Due to this, it was more beneficial to have boards which were semi-flexible and could bend slightly in response to the differences in textblock density. This decision drew on the concept of “limp” parchment and paper binding structures in conservation which are able to protect the textblock very effectively whilst also being supple and flexible.

The new boards were considerably thinner than the original which gave them a greater degree of flexibility and they were attached by simply adhering the spine lining and sewing braid extensions to the outer face of the board. To complete the binding, the boards were covered with a non-adhesive wrapper constructed from 230 gsm archival paper whose colour matched sympathetically with the book as a whole. The final result was a book which was now stable enough to be consulted and displayed with care.