University College, or Univ. as it is commonly called, is the oldest collegiate foundation in Oxford, dating back to a bequest made in 1249. Its founder, William of Durham, hailed from the north-east of England, and it was from there that most of its early scholars came. As the centuries passed other colleges were created, and many eclipsed in grandeur and in achievement the first-born, although the kudos of its primogeniture was unassailable and its fortunes fluctuated. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was respectable if unremarkable. Between 1850 and 1881 the winds of change swept over Oxford and Cambridge. Most significantly, the religious test which prevented entry to those who refused to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, thus excluding Catholics and Dissenters, was removed. By the time Alec Paterson was ready to go to Univ. his Unitarian background proved no problem. His four years there would reinforce all that he had been brought up to believe, and would open a door of opportunity to put his beliefs into practice.

Paterson, still seventeen, matriculated as a commoner of the college in October 1902, towards the end of the long tenure of James Bright. Bright had been a Fellow since 1874 and became Master in 1881. He would retire the same year that Paterson graduated. Bright was liberal in his theology and Liberal in his politics. Others among the Fellowship were more radical, some even espousing the novelty of socialism. The Bursar, Charles Faulkner, who had caused a sensation by inviting his friend William Morris to give a lecture which had amounted to a public avowal of the cause, had relinquished his post in 1882 and gone on to create the Oxford Socialist League.