K is for King’s
On the 1st of October 1963, I joined a gaggle of newly arrived undergraduates, short black gowns flapping in the breeze, walking to the King’s College dining hall entrance. I’d got over my first anxieties: I was a student at the University of Cambridge (it wasn’t a mistake); I had somewhere to stay; I had a bike with a basket hanging on the front (the only realistic means of transport); and I’d explored the town enough to discover shops, tea rooms, cinemas and faculty buildings. This was the day the first issue of the Cambridge Reporter for Michaelmas Term was to appear, where I would discover when and where my classes would be held. I had checked my mailbox on the way down, and it must have been for that reason I found myself standing alongside three other first year undergraduates from lower down in the lower the alphabet. We introduced ourselves, and so I became friends with David (S,) Peter (T) and Andrew (W). Serendipitous, but we were to be close colleagues for the next three years.
Perhaps I should stand back briefly, and provide a little context. As befits an old institution, founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge (Cambridge from now on) is unusual compared to most other universities, although it is similar to the University of Oxford, (Oxford), which is claimed to have commenced in 1096. We don’t need to dwell on Oxford. Cambridge people prefer to ignore it, often thinking of it as a small place close to a large car manufacturing area. [i] I suppose I should admit it does have a decent bookshop. Sorry: Cambridge snobbery!
Let’s get back on track. What makes the university unusual is the college system, and the way teaching is undertaken. If you are accepted as a student at Cambridge, you will have classes in whatever faculty is offering your program. The faculty buildings are spread all over the town. However, much of the teaching is done by tutors, and these are college based. Every student is also a member of a college, and, in fact, you apply to a college for entry to the university. Most of the colleges are spread along the areas on either side of the River Cam. Many are old (King’s was founded in 1441), most are rather beautiful: It goes without saying (but I will say it), King’s is the most magnificent! My briefly occupied second floor college room was on a staircase in Bodley’s Court, just a few yards away from the river and the college punts for hire. [ii]
Lecturers hold faculty appointments; tutors hold college positions. I believe every faculty member is also a member of a college; but many college tutors may hold only sessional teaching positions in a faculty, or not even teach classes. Since I was enrolling in Chemistry and Geology, I would have tutors for these subjects, and tutors are key to the Cambridge system. While formal teaching would be held in the respective faculty buildings, I would have little contact with the teaching staff except for practicals, where full-time and sessional teachers would be watching and helping us in the laboratories. You met your tutor face-to-face, weekly.
For the first day or so, King’s can be rather intimidating. There are rules. You couldn’t walk on the grass, unless accompanied by a senior member; in 1963 you had to wear your gown out in the town; no women in rooms after 10 pm (I think that was the hour); King’s then was a men’s college. But mention of rules makes it sound intimidating. It was in some ways, but not in others. Take that rule about women not staying overnight. That was the rule; in practice you had to ensure a woman friend was out of the college by 6 am; the only way to do so was for her to climb round the gate at the western end of the college grounds, the King’s Backs. The gate was in the centre of a small bridge, crossing over a minor stream. Now, at some point a student had complained to the College that his girlfriend kept laddering her stockings as she climbed around. Nothing was said, but a little while later a small metal ledge appeared on the outer edge of the gate. Above the stream, it allowed you to get around safely! Is the story true? I believe so, but it didn’t matter: it spoke to how we were seen, as adults. Is the ledge still there? It was in 2015.
Intimidating in other ways? Back then, a boy from a state school, a grammar school, was in a conspicuous minority. Public schools (private schools in any other country’s parlance) prepared their pupils for college entry examinations, and many public schools had one or two closed scholarships, for boys from Eton seeking to enter King’s for example. I’d better explain about Eton, which will take us on to the famous King’s College chapel. This is a story about jealousy.
Way back in 1440, King Henry VI founded Eton College as a charitable school for 70 poor boys, endowing it with considerable land and funds. The following year, he established what was to become King’s College (although originally it was to be named after St Nicholas). His first modest plan for the college was abandoned when he learned William of Wykeham, England’s Chancellor and Bishop of Winchester, had jointly founded Winchester College and New College in Oxford. Not to be outdone, and indeed to surpass Wykeham, Henry promptly upgraded his proposal, and decided his college would comprise a community of seventy fellows and scholars headed by a provost. Members of King’s were to be recruited entirely from Eton.
Each year, the provost and two fellows would travel to Eton to elect the worthiest boys to fill any vacancies at the college, always maintaining the total number of scholars and fellows at exactly seventy. Membership of King’s was a vocation for life. Scholars were eligible for election to the fellowship after three years of probation, irrespective of whether they had achieved a degree or not. In fact, undergraduates at King’s – unlike those from other colleges – did not even have to pass university examinations to achieve their BA degree and instead had only to satisfy the college. Every fellow was to study theology, except for the two who were to study astronomy, the two studying civil law, four more studying canon law, and two pursuing medicine; all fellows apart those ten studying secular subjects were obliged to become priests, or be expelled!
The building plans were quickly revised for this newly upgraded institution. Now the college would comprise a great courtyard, bordered on all sides by buildings: a chapel to the north; accommodation and the entrance gate to the east; further accommodation and the provost’s lodge to the south; and a library, hall and buttery to the west. Behind the hall and buttery was to be another courtyard, and behind the library a “cloistered cemetery with a magnificent bell tower”.
The first stone of the chapel was laid by Henry in July 1446. However, within a decade he was running out of money, one result of the costly Wars of the Roses. Henry was deposed by Edward IV in 1461, and by that time the chapel walls had risen 60 ft high at the east end but only 8 ft at the west; the building line can still be seen today as the boundary between the lighter stone below and the darker stone above. Not much happened until 1508 when Henry’s nephew, Henry VII finished the chapel shell. The interior was completed in 1544 with further support from Henry VIII. All the other plans were revised. It is a nice if not surprising fact that King’s sister college at Oxford is Wykeham’s New College! Incidentally, inside the chapel you’ll see the Tudor rose everywhere: these major chapels were political statements as much as anything.
By the time I went to Cambridge, the number of closed scholarships had declined, and the Entrance Examinations were based on merit. However, grammar schoolboys had a poor grounding in the classics, and we were a minority as I mentioned earlier. We were a minority in a different sense, too. Many students from a public school background had grown up in schools more like a Cambridge college than a city grammar school. They were confident, articulate, and superior. It took some time for people like me to realise they weren’t all as intelligent as they sounded, yet, more to the point, in comparison we were ill-prepared. With limited knowledge of the classical world, we lacked the breadth from a wider education at an Eton or Harrow. We had no understanding of living in a college, and lacked insight into sexual and social mores. King’s was, I soon discovered, a known safe haven for homosexuals. Soon to live in the town, married, a child on the way, I was an outsider twice over, however involved in college I became.
As an undergraduate, a program of study will have two critical exams, Tripos Parts I and II. The word Tripos is said to derive from a three legged stool, and the idea was that a student sat on such a stool taking an examination each year. Now, you will have noticed I have only given two exams. Practice is way more complicated. In a three year degree, you may have only two Tripos exams, the third one less significant. Some faculties split the Tripos I or Tripos II into an A and B in successive years, so there are major exams every year. As I was studying Natural Sciences, there were intermediate exams at the end of the first year. I then changed faculties, and studied Social Anthropology, and only took one Tripos, Part II, at the end of my third year (and thereby was not able to try for a ‘double first’ as I never took a Part I – oh, never mind!!).
Today the world of King’s is very different. In the heady late 1960s, equality was one of the rallying calls. Early on I saw massive cultural changes, evident as the number of students from government schools had begun to increase. That was nicely demonstrated when the 1966 intake behaved in a way no previous year would have contemplated. Post was held in the Porter’s Lodge, where each room, and for others living outside, each group of names, had a letter box, covered with a purple flap. At the beginning of that new term, someone had entered the lodge, and, unobserved, had removed the flaps to reveal F-U-C-K. I can’t imagine how many former members must have turned in their graves. By the way, King’s leads in the number of state school students it admits on merit, having established an excellent reputation over the years.
In 1972, the college joined with two others to become co-educational. It was the year after I had left, but it was a change in which I played a role. As an undergraduate in that exciting 1960’s atmosphere, I believed the college should change and address inequities. It should go co-educational, and it should provide real support for the partners of students. Together with a fellow student, we led the junior common room to press for change. Back then, the number of women studying at Cambridge was less that 10% of the total, basically attending the two women’s colleges at that time, Newnham and Girton. I researched the benefits of co-education, and wrote a report for the College Council. It was politely received, and politely ignored!
Returning to the task, I began talking with some sympathetic Fellows, realising change on moral principles alone would not be enough. Now part of a larger group pushing for the admission of women, we identified one factor that might be influential. King’s liked to perform well in the annual ranking of colleges within the university, based on the percentage of students receiving first class honours (topping the Tripos examinations). King’s could improve its rating by going co-educational early and seeking applications from the best women students (in terms of final year school results). It could bring in a group of high achievers, achieving both gender equity and competitive success! We completed a second report for the College Council, and it was accepted. As one snarky friend pointed out, given its traditionally strong homosexual culture we had achieved as much impact on King’s as had Henry VI: it was a nice exaggeration.
Next I moved on to support for partners, and set up a network for women accompanying male postgraduate students studying at the university. Cambridge was ill-equipped to deal with married students (there were almost none in the undergraduate body, except for the odd ‘mature’ student – and me!). The challenges were great. Some international students locked their wives in their flats while they were at the university, afraid as to what might happen to them. Other wives found it difficult to shop, or find social events and meet with other partners, or even to obtain basic furniture and household goods. I hit on the idea of helping a small number of couples first, and then, once we had assisted those, getting these ‘veterans’ to work with the next group arriving. The network grew, and success led us to move on to kindergarten and nursery school provisions, first for King’s, and then for the university as a whole.
Cambridge colleges are unusual and privileged places. They are homes to great minds, leading researchers and intellectuals. After eight years, I sensed that it wasn’t the place for me. I could never be a dedicated academic, researching a topic in great detail over twenty or more years. [iii] In some ways, I was still growing up, beginning to understand myself, discovering what would turn out to be a lifelong pleasure in being a teacher and a mentor. Today I describe my career as that of a wanderer; back then I was more like a grasshopper, jumping from one thing to the next! As an undergraduate, I changed courses. As a postgraduate, I enjoyed practical, policy oriented and applied research, always anxious to complete each task and then move on to something new. My first such project assessed training needs in Scottish woollen mills, an initial step into consulting.
In one sense you can never leave. Once admitted to King’s, you are a member of the college for the rest of your life. If I lived in England, I would be off to hear the choir from time to time, eat at High Table occasionally, and visit the library. For certain, if I do get back to Cambridge in the next few years, I will go to an Evensong, and possibly stay for a night. A welcoming home, less familiar now, but still enjoyable, part of a life left largely in the past. In another sense, my years at King’s are deep in my soul. They consolidated my love of classical music. They defined and shaped the way I teach, and work with other people. I suspect they weave through my character in other, less easily recognised ways. It is my intellectual home, though I’m no intellectual.
My life took a very different trajectory from what I might have imagined when I stood waiting to get a copy of the Cambridge Reporter. Those early friendships have been lost, and I have wandered in and out of academia, run organisations, working in the commercial and government sectors. but I will always be a member of King’s and King’s is clearly part of me.
[i] Cambridge is on the edge of East Anglia, and seems to have avoided much manufacturing. Oxford is next door to Cowley, originally the home of Morris Motors, then British Leyland, and now, amazingly, a BMW plant.
[ii] Punting is one of the clear ways in which Cambridge shows superiority: we put standing on the platform at the back of the punt; Oxford chaps punt standing inside the punt, as they aren’t skilled enough to stop falling off!
[iii] Merrill Goozner, ‘The $00 Million Pill’ (UCal, 2005), gives some amazing examples of dedication and persistence.
