Robinson is one of the newest colleges in the University of Cambridge. It was founded with a donation by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir David Robinson and formally opened in 1981. It now has 80 Fellows, and around 400 undergraduate and 100 graduate students.Robinson College was formally opened by the Queen on 29 May, 1981. Typically, Robinson avoided the opening ceremony, tendering his apologies to Her Majesty on the grounds that he had become increasingly immobile and his wife had for some time been incapacitated. He was knighted in 1985.
Robinson, Sir David (1904-1987), entrepreneur, College founder, and philanthropist, was born 13 April 1904 in Cambridge, the third of six sons and third of nine children of Herbert Robinson, cycle shop and later garage owner, and his wife, Rosie Emily Tricker. He was educated at the Cambridge High School for Boys, which he left at the age of fifteen in order to work in his father's bicycle shop in Cambridge. In 1930 he moved to Bedford, where he took over a garage and developed it into a large and prosperous firm