William Spens

Vocation

Sir William Spens was an eminent educationalist in the mid twentieth century, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He graduated in natural sciences from King's College Cambridge. Elected a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1907, he spent the rest of his working life in Cambridge, apart from wartime service between 1915 and 1918 with the UK Foreign Office. Elected Master of Corpus in 1927 he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1931 to 1933 and then chaired the consultative committee of the Board of Education (known in retrospect as the Spens Report) which recommended the tri-partite split of secondary schooling into grammar, technical and modern varieties. During the Second World War he was Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence for the Eastern Region, which prompted and exacerbated rumours that the cellars of Corpus extend across (and indeed further than) the entire college campus and that the college was to be used as the centre of operations for East Anglia in the event of a German occupation. Spens retired in 1952 and died 10 year later. Link to Wikipedia