Bulmershe College was an education institution in the Reading suburb of Woodley, in the English county of Berkshire.
Historically, Bulmershe has been the name of a manor and of two quite distinct country houses, one of which still stands but is now known as Bulmershe Manor.
Bulmershe College opened for teaching in 1964 but merged with the University of Reading in 1989 to create the Bulmershe Court campus.
History
Origins
Bulmershe first appears in existing records in the 12th century as a place in the parish of Sonning. The first reference to it as a manor was in 1447 when it was granted to Reading Abbey. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the land was acquired by the poet William Gray. He probably built the first house here, the remains of which may be the basis of the present Bulmershe Manor.
William Gray's wife, Agnes, was the widow of Robert Blagrave, a merchant of London and Reading and their son, John was Gray's heir. Through this the Blagrave family came to own Bulmershe Court, although both John Blagrave the mathematician and Daniel Blagrave the regicide resided at the family's other residence, at Southcote House in what is now the Reading suburb of Southcote.
The main branch of the Blagrave family died out in 1789, and the estate was sold to Henry Addington, then Speaker of the House of Commons. At the same time he purchased the adjoining Woodley House, which had been built some seven years earlier.
Addington preferred to live in the more modern structure, and in time the name Bulmershe Court transferred over to that building. The earlier Bulmershe Court became known as Old Bulmershe Court. For a time it fell into disrepair, but was restored in the 1920s and renamed Bulmershe Manor. Bulmershe Manor is a Grade II* listed building.
Becoming an educational establishment
The newer Bulmershe Court was used by the War Office during World War II, but was pulled down in 1962 to make way for an educational establishment called Bulmershe College of Education which opened two years later. Tom Hollis the first principal would not take students straight from school for the first two years. His successor was James Porter, who went on to be Director of the Commonwealth Institute, London. Principally a centre for Teacher Training, the institution later broadened by offering a range of higher education courses validated by the now defunct :Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA). It became Berkshire College of Education in 1975, awarding its own degrees two years later.
Merger with the University of Reading
Finding itself facing extreme financial pressure as part of a national education funding squeeze at the latter days of the Thatcher government (under Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker, and others), the future of the college (and others in a similar position) then became doubtful. Principal Brian Palmer led a widespread study of all available options (including a drastic cutback of its expanded provision) and after these had been fully investigated, Bulmershe then merged with the University of Reading in 1989. This created the Bulmershe Court campus of the university. The merger secured its funding and thus safeguarded a large number of its courses and staff, both academic and administrative, for the next few years.
The campus was sold by the University of Reading in January 2014, as the university had earlier decided to concentrate its activity on its three other campuses. Reading moved all teaching and research at Bulmershe either to Whiteknights or to London Road by 2011/12, having invested in new buildings several years previously, and closed the student accommodation. It had planned to redevelop the site for housing but eventually chose to sell it. There was a "Farewell to Bulmershe" event in 2011 for alumni of the institutions before and after the merger.
Academic profile
Courses and subjects
As Bulmershe College of Higher Education (BCHE), alongside existing BEd and other education qualifications (such as the PGCE), the new establishment ran a range of BA Honours courses in humanities subjects such as History, Geography, and English.
The American Studies programme ran a regular exchange with students in America's Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. Students at Boston University also regularly visited campus as part of an established exchange programme.
Courses in Modern European Literature and Film and Drama Studies were especially prestigious. Film director Richard Kwietniowski taught on the latter course during the mid-1980s, as did one-time Channel Four Commissioning Editor Stuart Cosgrove, and the feminist film academic Laura Mulvey.