Stanhope essay prize
# Stanhope essay prize

The Stanhope essay prize was an undergraduate history essay prize created at Balliol College, Oxford, by Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope in 1855.

## Notable winners

Notable Stanhope Prize winners:

* John Richard Magrath, 1860
* Francis Jeune, 1863, 1st Baron St Helier
* Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead, 1866
* Thomas Buchanan, 1868, Liberal politician
* Arthur Francis Leach, 1872
* Richard Lodge, 1875
* Charles Harding Firth, 1877, British historian
* Arthur Elam Haigh, 1878
* Holden Hutton, 1881
* John Bruce Williamson, 1883, barrister, historian and writer
* William Carr, 1884, biographer
* Owen Morgan Edwards, 1886
* George Arnold Wood, 1889, English Australian historian
* John Buchan, 1897, British novelist
* Robert Rait, 1899

   * Robert Howard Hodgkin was proxime
* Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, 1902, New College, Oxford, British classical scholar and historian
* Archibald Main, 1903
* George Stuart Gordon, 1905
* Vivian Hunter Galbraith, 1911, English historian
* Michael Sadleir, 1912
* Aldous Huxley, 1916, English writer
* Bruce McFarlane, 1924
* Bernard Miller, 1925, British businessman
* Maurice Ashley, editor of The Listener
* Derek Pattinson, 1951, Secretary-General of the General Synod of the Church of England

## In fiction

In Max Beerbohm's satirical tragedy of undergraduate life at Oxford, Zuleika Dobson (1911), the hero Duke of Dorset was awarded, amongst others, the Stanhope:

   At Eton he had been called "Peacock", and this nick-name had followed him up to Oxford. It was not wholly apposite, however. For, whereas the peacock is a fool even among birds, the Duke had already taken (besides a particularly brilliant First in Mods) the Stanhope, the Newdigate, the Lothian, and the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse.
