Beer Bit - Drinking at Cambridge University (UK)
Glucanase
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 31 2001
Viewpoint
A hangover from the past
BY RICHARD MORRISON
Cambridge students drunk? 'Twas ever thus
Naked bodies streaking fearlessly across the sacred college lawn.
Undergraduates rushed to Addenbrooke's with alcohol poisoning. A student
carried out, insensible, from dinner in Hall. Bread-roll blitzes launched
nightly across ancient candle-lit oaken tables. And - horror of horrors! -
vomiting in the Senior Common Room.
Ah, how memories of student life at Cambridge come tumbling back after 25
years! I was not at St Catharine's College, where the Dean has unwittingly
supplied the press with its jolliest story for weeks by issuing a stern
"sober up, or else" letter to his 410 charges. But as I read accounts of the
Catz undergraduates' alleged bucolic excesses, my eyes grew misty with
nostalgia. Cambridge students get drunk - shock news? Oh, please. The first
journalist to write that story probably worked for the gossip column of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Drink played such a large part in the lives of Magdalene College
undergraduates, circa 1976, that I find it hard to recall a single event
that did not culminate in a communal binge in The Pickerel or the JCR bar,
with its squelchy, permanently beer-sodden carpet. Someone passed their
driving test? You all got drunk. Labour won the general election? You all
got drunk. Your girlfriend was pregnant? You all got drunk. Your girlfriend
wasn't pregnant? You all got even more drunk.
You handed in an essay only ten days after it was due? I think you can guess
what happened next.
And that was just the daily routine. Special occasions - end-of-term
booze-ups, for instance - would last three or four days, like the nuptial
celebrations of Renaissance dukes. My long-suffering father would drive to
Cambridge on the last day of term to bring me home, and we would inevitably
have to stop in Royston so that I could be sick. Royston became a kind of
ritual; even now I cannot pass through that estimable town without feeling
queasy, and I imagine that my father doesn't feel too good about the place
either. And while I have no idea what the current Catz craze of "pennying"
constitutes - and perhaps, at my age, ought not to find out - we in the
1970s had just as many arcane rituals designed to produce catastrophic
alcohol saturation in record time.
The Magdalene favourite was the "King Street run": you dashed down a road
boasting eight or nine pubs, downed a pint of heavy-duty Adnams or Abbot in
each, and were not allowed to pee until you had finished. Most people didn't
finish, which was embarrassing on several levels. Sophisticated stuff, eh?
The boorishness of our behaviour shocks me today, but didn't then. The ethos
was: work tolerably hard by day; get smashed by night. I daresay it still
is. The most mystifying part of the Dean of Catz's outburst is that he links
academic achievement (or its absence) to the drinking binges. Some of the
brightest people I knew at Cambridge were also the heaviest drinkers. They
got good degrees and have become distinguished barristers, surgeons,
architects, newspaper editors.
Some of them have subsequently sobered up; some haven't.
I cannot believe that present-day students behave more irresponsibly than
their predecessors. Of course, each generation likes to think that their
drunken deeds were done with more wit or style than the exploits of those
who came before or after them. And it's true that certain Cambridge
wheezes - the overnight appearance of a Mini on top of the Senate House, for
instance - have won a hallowed place in the annals of prankishness.
But, on the whole, the behaviour of Cambridge undergraduates in the
mid-1970s was public-school loutishness of the grossest kind. Two incidents
stand out in my mind. One was the Battle of the Brussel Sprouts: a rowing
dinner after the May Bumps that ended with a valuable oil of Samuel Pepys -
the college's most famous benefactor - being splattered in soggy vegetables
(a college speciality, as Pepys would undoubtedly have appreciated).
Doubtless someone's daddy coughed up for its restoration.
Then there was the Magdalene Bridge Affair. The bridge was being repaired,
and the workmen had stored drills, JCB and other tools on it overnight. Too
much of a temptation, I fear, for a bunch of drunken students who heaved the
equipment into the Cam. Next morning all hell broke loose. The workmen
called the police, the police sent in divers to salvage what they could,
then called the Master of the College. Finally the students - who, if memory
serves, included a Middle Eastern prince and the son of a Cabinet minister -
were carpeted. They admitted everything. "What are we going to do about all
the damage you have caused and police time you have wasted?" the Master
thundered. At which point one student took out his pen and, with an
insouciant flourish, wrote out a cheque for a five-figure sum. Nothing more
was said.
But all that happened in the days when Cambridge colleges were still
predominantly all male. What seems to have startled people about the
shenanigans at Catz is that, in the enlightened, mixed-sex world of modern
Cambridge, the women students behave as laddishly as the men. But why are we
startled? In an intensely competitive environment, of course feisty young
women are not going to bottle out ( as it were) when the bread rolls start
flying and the cream of Britain's youth gets down to some serious
post-prandial pennying. Jeremy Paxman is simply showing his age when he
moans that "it used to be the rugger and rowing fraternity who went in for
that sort of thing, not the women".
A bigger question is: why do very brainy students do very stupid things? The
answer is that even eggheads go through a phase called growing up. In ten or
20 years, some of those drunken Catz revellers will be running the country.
It's probably better that they get their loutish urges out of their systems
now, even if it does leave nasty stains on the Senior Common Room floor.