CAMBRIDGE AND ME

In my final year at school, I had done well enough in my A level exams to qualify for entry to any British university and had secured a Manchester city Bursary to pay for it. History was my passion, and I was expecting to go to either Bristol or Durham which had strong reputations in that discipline.

My headmaster blind-sided me with a proposal that If I stayed on another year and applied for Cambridge university entry, he would appoint me head boy of the thousand boy North Manchester Grammar School and put me forward as one of Manchester’s participants in the Rhodes Trust tour to Canada. It seemed like an offer too good to refuse and so later in 1961, I set sail for Canada, along with a crowd of fellow “ambassadors for Britain” and then went on to Join Selwyn College Cambridge, where I had won a ‘Commonership’ entry to read history.

I was full of pride at getting into this prestigious university and basked in its reflective glory amongst peers-many of whom expressed amazement, confessing that they didn’t think me that bright (usually schoolmates from the Science stream). My mother was over the moon with pride and as usual my father said nothing to reveal his feelings. Some of the neighbours in our street however were not slow in suggesting to my parents that it was a waste of time for a working-class lad, like me, going to Cambridge and that I ought to leave school and go to work and contribute money to family living. Some even warned (rightly) that I would never pay them back for all the time I spent in further education. The newspaperman I delivered for and the local catholic priest (despite my being an Anglican) on the other hand, treated me as a very special protegé. But I had no grasp of what I had really let myself in for and set off blithely ignorant of what lay ahead.

I arrived at Cambridge railway station early in the evening and not having funds to justify a taxi I set off to walk to Selwyn. Although I had a rough sense of direction, based on my coming up earlier in the year to sit the entrance exams. A dense mist descended as I came closer to the river and visibility became so bad that I had recourse to mounting the steps of a war memorial which allowed me to get my head above the fog and confirm the right direction to the college. Clive James came up to Cambridge shortly after me and I was amused to read in his book about his experiences-May week begins in June-that he faced the same problem and applied the same solution. It was a great relief to reach my college, especially as the mist had given way to a light drizzle and as one of my shoes was needing repair, my foot and sock were squelchy wet. None of the colleges, at that time, had plain English name boards and could only be identified by carved crests or Greek and Latin texts, so it was as well I had been there before.

During my first eight-week term I learnt to cope with the demands of learning and living and realized that I was as green as my uncles when they first left home to do military service. I was singularly unprepared and there was nobody there from my school to mentor me. My broad Mancunian accent jarred with the mellifluous tones of the mostly public-school students, and I mistook their peremptory requests in hall to” pass the butter Smith!”-without so much as a please and ignoring my first name, as rudeness, until I realized that was the norm. My pronunciation of words like bath or puddle, caused general amusement and mocking imitations. When I attended my first cocktail party, wearing my smart school prefect’s blazer, I was embarrassed to be the only person not wearing a dinner suit.

An even greater shock was the lack of academic direction. Cambridge was about self-directed learning not teaching. I was required to research and write a weekly essay on a historical issue and be prepared to defend it on a one-on-one, face to face basis with a subject expert tutor who might be resident at another college. Lectures were available in the mornings and there was a history library, but I was not told which lectures I should attend, and which books I should consult. In my initial ignorance I even attended two different lectures which covered the same period of Viking history.

Sports were played on most afternoons, and I signed up for the rugby first fifteen trials. I had captained my house and school rugger teams but my comparative lack of fitness and skill, when contesting with boys who had played nothing but rugby at famous schools, were savagely exposed and I was mortified to be deemed suitable only for third team membership.

The only solace I found in this first term was the company of a small, clique of equally disaffected Grammar School boys who winged about life at Selwyn and spent most of our leisure playing darts in local pubs. I was glad to go home and immediately signed up to deliver Royal mail parcels to garner some pocket money for my university return.

Strangely enough it was rugby that changed my experience of the second term. I returned fitter than I was for my first team trial, and I was doing well on a terrible rainy, cold day on a pitch that was ankle deep in mud. My contribution was dogged defence and making up for the lack of courage of a Welsh fullback, who preferred to keep his shorts dry by kicking rather than running and tackling. At the end of the game, I was approached by a giant of a man, wearing a rain sodden duffle coat. He said, well played, and invited me to attend drinks in his rooms later that week. He was both captain of Selwyn rugby and the Oxford and Cambridge heavy weight boxing champion.

At the drinks session I again stood out in my blazer amongst a dinner jacketed crowd and found out by talking with some of them that this was the first rugby team and I had become one of them. People who had seemed much older than me were freshmen, like me, and were friendly and happy to give me advice on making it in playing and in my studies. They pointed out I was wasting my time attending a Saturday morning lecture on medieval industry, because it was all covered by the lecturer’s textbook, and this freed up all my weekends thereafter. I was advised to rip and muddy my gown so that I was not so obviously a new boy and where to buy the necessary History books at secondhand prices. All in all, I felt that I had arrived at Selwyn, one term late.

What did I get out of reading History at Cambridge? I was close to extremely intelligent people who made me understand my more modest abilities. How to learn with minimal direction, how to assess contradictory ideas and argue my case in writing and face to face, one on one, with the subject experts who “wrote the Penguin books”. I was expected to write an essay per week which might require attending certain lectures and reading seven or eight books, whilst pursuing social activities, such as playing rugby, participating in societies, and holding my own in the hard debating sessions amongst my fellow undergrads on topics such as to ban the bomb or not. The history subject matter was very interesting and enlightening-dealing with questions such as “were the founding fathers of America, true democrats or self-serving land grabbers?” The subject scope and variety-Tudor and Stuart constitutional history, History of America, Economic history from the iron age to the second world war, European history from 1648, Theories of the modern state from Plato to Rousseau and Rousseau to Mao Tse Tung and a special study-The Oxford religious revival movement (which I elected to pursue in my final year so that I could be tutored by the master of my college a charismatic clergyman and former captain of Cambridge rugger,) On top of this, one had to keep up a foreign language as best one could which I did by reading a French novel with my lunch. None of this had any bearing on what occupation I would pursue but, as I discover more and more as time goes on, it provided an underpinning of knowledge on which I have been able to build my experience and by reference to which ,I have been better able to understand the world in which I have lived and worked. But the most important value of a Cambridge education was the ability to learn.

Key to this was the one-on-one tutorial sessions and three incidents from these illustrate the power of this process. At 19 years of age, it was a disconcerting experience to enter a hundreds of years old College to attend a tutorial in the study of the leading expert in the subject area and defend, one on one, the essay I had submitted.

On one memorable occasion I had played 5 games of rugby that week, and had put together a poor essay for a tutor in theories of the modern state, who had a double starred first in History. He went on to be Dean of York Minster. His study had a bright open fire whose flames were reflected in the cut glass sherry decanter and glasses on a side table. He greeted me affably and offered me two choices. “We could spend the next hour like true English gentlemen and enjoy this fine dry sherry or we could waste the time reviewing your pile of drivel masquerading as an essay.” Naturally I chose the sherry and we proceeded to drink whilst he put me through the wringer, orally, focused on the essay topic. I never made that same error of poor preparation again.

On an even more memorable occasion I was due to be tutored on my essay about the pros and cons of the Tudor coal industry (about which I had never heard until I was handed this issue) with a tutor resident in my own college, who was known to be gay. He greeted me at his door wearing only a bath towel with half his jaw sporting unshaven lather. He apologized for not being ready but said I should go up to his study where George, who was perfectly capable, would conduct the tutorial. As a died in the wool northern protestant, I had really got stuck into the catholic church’s exploitation of women and children in their Tudor era coal mines, managed by the monasteries, and I was taken aback when George turned out to be a catholic priest who certainly knew all there was to know about my essay topic.

The next hour was very taxing and humiliating as, in the mildest and politest manner possible, he exposed my ignorance and Protestant bigotry.

For European medieval history I was tutored by a blind Canadian lady. Her house décor was back in the thirties, and I was confronted by a vibrant woman whose sightless eyes stared at me with penetrating force. My essay had been read to her by her German au pair and her powers of memory were such that she put me through the most searching analysis of my essay, as though she had the written work in her hand. I was humbled by this experience and learned to really concentrate on defending the views I had espoused.

In the final year of my time in Cambridge, I took up residence in a hostel within college grounds. My neighbours were an interesting bunch, including a gay poet and a fencer, and markedly classical public-school products. Despite my class aversion to ‘hooray Henries’, I befriended some of them and was introduced to Borstal (boy’s prison) visiting. This was very important to me, as I was developing an interest in pursuing a career in prisoner welfare. I both visited a local prison, stayed in for the weekend, subject to all the disciplines that the inmates endured, and hosted a group of the boys who enjoyed a day of freedom in Cambridge. This continued during my final year and I became the leader of this initiative.

The public-school push was far more socially concerned than the group of graduands I had socialized with during my earlier Selwyn days and rammed home the lesson that one should withhold one’s prejudices until they have been confirmed or invalidated by direct contact. The new group of friends greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the final year and the prisoner visiting experience confirmed my career interest such that my first post Cambridge job was deputy warden of Britain’s first hostel for released long-term prisoners who for various reasons had no home to go to or would not be welcomed back.(eg pedophiles)

Cambridge inspired significant changes in my life, and I met Sandra Mary Dee, there, who has remained one of my dearest friends for over sixty years. She was also a great solace as Cambridge only had two women’s colleges in those days and I enjoyed her visits and weekend escapes to London where she lived and taught history.