The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Here his contemporaries included Benjamin Jowett Arthur Penrhyn Stanley John Campbell Shairp William George Ward and Frederick Temple. In the autumn of 1849 to provide for them he became principal of University Hall a hostel for Unitarian students at University College London but found its ideology as oppressive as that which he had left behind in Oxford.

He was the brother of suffragist Anne Clough who ended up as principal of Newnham College Cambridge.