Cockeyed Optimist

I arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in early October, 1953.

There were two or three fairly mild days, then winter set in, and Cambridge winters, as I was to find out, are particularly bleak, especially if you are spending them in a College established in 1546, during the reign of Henry the Eighth.

Cambridgeshire is in East Anglia (as were many of the RAF stations I had spent time in during my National Service). It is a flat area of the country, adjacent to the North Sea coast, and because of that, during WWII, it was a checker-board of airfields, for sorties against occupied Europe and Germany; if you fly over the area today, it is still possible to see their outlines.

They say that, if you go east from Cambridge, there is no land higher than 300 feet until, after crossing the Northern European Plain, you eventually reach the Ural Mountains, in Russia. So, likewise, there is nothing to stop the freezing easterly winds on their journey from Russia.

My set of rooms in Trinity New Court (’New’ being a comparative term - it was built in 1825) I shared with a school friend, John Feavearyear, known as ‘Fev’. There was a living-room and a kitchen, and a bedroom each. We were very fortunate to get into College straight away; most undergraduates had to occupy licensed lodging-houses, run by demon landladies for the most part, who, as well as being landladies, were spies for the University authorities, and would report you if you dared to get in late, or tried to keep contraband (such as pets) in your rooms, or had unauthorized visits from GIRLS.

In College, we were scrutinized, too, by the Porters, who guarded the gates and would again report you if you were out after 10 pm without a pass (or ‘exeat’). So, if you wanted to have a late night out, the thing to do was to ‘climb in’ - we all knew places around the high walls of the College where this was possible (I used to do it by Nevile’s gate, see above). As for the other forbidden pursuits, the bedder (bedmaker), who came in every morning to do some chores, would also report infractions to the College (so it was essential to keep her sweet).

There was a single toilet, halfway up the staircase leading from the court to our set (H8, on the fourth floor of ‘H’ staircase). And, in the corner of the court there was a room with basins for washing and shaving, and bathrooms and showers. This was reckoned as luxury by some of the Dons (senior members of the College, usually academics); one was reputed to have said, when the bathrooms were being installed “I don’t know why the students would need bathrooms - they are only up (in residence) for eight weeks.”

We ate most of our meals in Hall - breakfast and lunch were optional, but we were obliged to dine in Hall a certain number of times per week. Hall was a long wide room, with a Minstrels’ Gallery at one end, and a stage containing the High Table, where the Dons dined, at the other. There were many paintings on the walls, the most notable being an early copy of a Hans Holbein portrait of Henry VIII, the college founder.

We undergraduates sat on benches at long tables (if you wanted to reach a place near the wall in the middle of a table, it was perfectly acceptable to walk across the tabletop). We were waited on, and we ate with silver cutlery, some of which had dates on it from the 18th century (not that we were impressed by that).

I once found a blackbeetle in my vegetables, and with the arrogance of youth, demanded that the kitchen manager present himself at the end of the meal for an explanation; he duly appeared and said “Our apologies, sir, but you should realize that the kitchens are several hundred years old; the ceilings are swarming with cockroaches and beetles, two and three thick. It is inevitable, I’m afraid, that occasionally one will drop into the food, and the staff don’t always spot them.”

I was enrolled in the Mechanical Sciences course (the Cambridge word for Engineering), and most of the lectures and labs were in the Engineering Building in Trumpington Street, a couple of miles from Trinity. Not being allowed motor vehicles (except that Fev wangled this and had a little Ford Prefect), most undergraduates had bicycles, which had to be registered with your college. At one time bicycle ownership had been communal; you just took the handiest one, but this, of course had led to trouble and was discontinued.

We had classes most mornings only, Monday to Saturday, depending on our programs. I was enrolled in what was called the Fast Course, which led to Part One of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos (this is another historical name that was used at Cambridge for a set of exams) in two years, followed by Part Two the next year; three years was the minimum to get your degree. Some students were satisfied to do only Part One, but to take three years over it (the Normal Course). The teaching periods occupied about 8 weeks of each of three terms in the year, so you could theoretically get your degree after 72 weeks of study altogether, which doesn’t sound much nowadays. By the way, we engineering students were studying for a BA, in fact ALL undergraduate students were studying for a BA - it’s the only first degree at Cambridge (maybe this has changed - all this was over 50 years ago, and even Cambridge changes).

Maybe the rules and regulations that are imposed on students have changed, too - surely modern students wouldn’t put up with what we thought normal. I have already mentioned some controls; there were others, for instance, we had to wear gowns on the street after dusk. Of the more than 150 pubs in the city, there were always a number that had been declared ‘off limits’ to students, for a number of reasons, such as a reputation for being a haunt for ‘loose women’, or where the landlord had ‘had enough of students’ for a while. The reason for the gowns was so you could be identified as students by the Proctor, an official of the University who prowled the streets in the evenings, in full academic dress, with his ‘bulldogs’ - college servants picked for their burly physiques and fleetness of foot. If the Proctor spotted a young gentleman behaving in an inappropriate manner (such as lying in the gutter stupified by drink, or climbing lamp-posts) he would accost him, demand his name and college, and he would find himself fined a tidy sum (six shillings and eight pence for a first offence, then thirteen shillings and four pence, then a pound!).

I shall not bore you with the details of my course, and my progress through it, but just relate a few anecdotes. In the electrical machines laboratory there was a large motor-generator set that we were supposed to run tests on (it was reputed to have come out of a submarine). When we were about to run a test, we had to call the University Press, a little distance away, and let them know, because if we ran our machine at the same time as the Press started up, it would overload the local power station and everyone’s lights would go dim. That power station was certainly badly in need of an upgrade; when we were crouched in our college rooms on a cold winter’s night, trying to keep warm with a one-bar radiator, it was quite common to see the red-hot zone of the bar shrink until there were only a few inches in the centre that still glowed.

During one of the long (summer) vacations, we on the Fast Course had a six-week vacation school on surveying. This involved the use of measuring chains, and dumpy levels, and theodolites. We surveyed the hell out of a fen just behind the main Engineering labs; the instructors knew it down to the last inch, so you couldn’t fudge the figures. The whole site, like much else in Cambridge, was built on fen-land (marsh); the main lab, three or four floors high, literally floated on a huge concrete raft. I remember waiting between classes on the top floor, with a group of fellow students, watching a steel-framed building going up next door, and marvelling at the agility and daring of the workers, balancing on and walking along the beams. I said that nobody would ever get me doing that, as I had no head for heights, when another student said, in a very upper-class accent, “Father, who is a riveter, tells me that if he is with such a building from the ground up he has no trouble as the height increases, but he couldn’t go straight to a high level on a building new to him.”

We had a guest lecturer at one point, an expert in timber from a large local mill, I think. He came into the lecture room and said, in a tone of disgust “I don’t know what you’re all doing here on such a nice day, you should all be at the Newmarket races!” He still gave the lecture though (it was on various defects in structural timber - knots and shakes - now why do I remember that?).

The department used to put on a series of presentations on modern engineering developments. One that was on very cutting-edge stuff was a demonstration of colour television, demonstrating two or three of the rival systems that were then competing for a slice of the market. The main thing I recall about that was a live demonstration, with a rather nice-looking model; unfortunately her face came out green however much they tried to adjust the equipment. Another demonstration was of a novel device called the transistor; they showed us that it was possible to build a perfectly functional radio that was only about the size of a chocolate-box. We were all very impressed by that (this was in about 1955, remember).

To cut a long story short, I did graduate after three years. We all had several interviews with prospective employers at the University Appointments Board; we had been advised not to be dazzled by attractive offers, as these often led to dead-end jobs. The criterion for success at that time was “a thousand (pounds) a year by the time you’re thirty”. I accepted the offer of a graduate apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce Ltd, Aero-engine Division, at Derby, in the industrial midlands, at a starting pay of eleven pounds ten shillings and sixpence a week; certainly enough to get married on!

And so, onwards and upwards into the real world!

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

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