Sir – David Horner gave us an interesting contemporary account of the great floods in Oxford in 1852 (Letters, January 23).

What did they do to try to prevent such floods in the future? According to a biography of the great Dr Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, ‘The abolition of the floods became such ‘a consuming passion’, during his four years as vice-chancellor, that it disrupted ‘his intellectual pursuits’ and delayed ‘his translation of Aristotle’s Politics’.

Both Jowett and Dean Liddell of Christ Church supported a radical plan put forward by a report of 1853, which recommended the dredging of the Thames above Iffley, a new mouth to the Cherwell and the removal of Iffley Lock. According to the author R.C. Whiting, in 1883 there was a joint city and University appeal for funds for such a scheme which was claimed would confer ‘great and lasting benefit on Oxford’.

However, Whiting said that the ‘battle over Iffley Lock [was] comparable to that over Christ Church Meadow in the 1960s’. The ‘retentionists’ claimed that if Iffley Lock went it would ‘jeopardise Oxford’s health by exposing mud with its accumulated sewage’. As we know, the supporters of Iffley Lock won in the end.

Ann Spokes-Symonds, Oxford