The emblematic image featured in The Guardian’s ‘One hundred years of SOAS’ picture gallery shows Sir Cyril Philips, Director of SOAS from 1957 – 1976, looking at plans for the new building with a group of students. Fourth from the right (top) is Professor Philip Jaggar, Emeritus Professor of West African Linguistics (social anthropology and Hausa, 1968), who at the time was the President of the SOAS Students’ Union. Philip
The morning of 3 September 1945, as pictured, was the day after the formal surrender of Japan and, consequently, the end of World War II. The turning in of the rubber stamp and defense regulation books by the press censors also marked the end of the government’s need to ‘massage’ the news and public perception. An exemplary situation of the Senate House press team at work was during the battle
Sir Philip Joseph Hartog (1864 – 1947) has now become the largely forgotten founder of SOAS after he campaigned for the parliamentary committee to consider starting an Oriental school in London. Even in the face of cynicism from Oxbridge wigs and crippling underfunding Hartog still managed to see the future of the school beyond being a post-war language training arm of the University of London. While the government was only
K A Subranamia Iyer was one of the SOAS’s first students, enrolling on the Sanskrit and Pali programme in 1917 at the then School of Oriental Studies. Born in 1896, he matriculated in 1912 and by the time he came to the School had already studied in Paris and London. He was the School’s first graduate, receiving in 1920 the Diploma in Sanskrit for ‘research in Indology.’ He returned to
Pathé Film footage shot on the occasion of the opening of the School of Oriental Studies at the London Institute in Finsbury Circus. King George V was accompanied by Queen Alexandra and Princess Mary on 23 February 1917. According to its Royal Charter, the School’s purpose was “to give instruction in the Languages of Eastern and African peoples, Ancient and Modern, and in the Literature, History, Religion, and Customs of
Sir Edward Denison Ross had a much decorated career before becoming the School of Oriental Studies’ first director in 1916. He famously spoke thirty languages from the then called ‘Far East’ and spent almost two decades travelling India and Central Asia. His obituary in the School’s bulletin read “he contributed more than any Englishman of his generation to the encouragement of Oriental studies in this country.” Ross was well regarded