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.