Cold comfort college

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

The episode of this week that has come most close to my bosom has been the refusal of the Associated Society of Locomotive En- gineers and Firemen to live in the slum condi- tions provided for them by Merton College. True, as the Morning Star, which called my attention to this outrage, has pointed out, one `loco man' noted with disgust that this was the kind of accommodation students had to put up with. But what they were willing to put up with, or bad to put up with, was not good enough for

ASLEF.

It is a widespread illusion, especially in the United States, that Oxford and Cambridge house their young men (and not their young women) in Sardanapalian luxury. The picture of Oxford life presented before the last war in one film of Charley's Aunt and in A Yank at Oxford provoked a good deal of ribald laughter from the undergraduates. For example, the pre- sence of telephones in undergraduate rooms led to a good deal of whistling. But the illusion about the luxurious accommodation for the idle young men of Oxbridge is not confined to the United States. I can remember an eminent exile during the last war coming down to Oxford for the weekend to stay in a rich college and being horrified by the misery which he had to suffer, even allowing for wartime conditions. He thought these conditions insufferable. They had been suffered for hundreds of years by the victims of the system. Of course, there were often very opulent lodgings kept by well-to-do- young men outside college. Some colleges had much more luxurious suites for the wealthy than for the poor. But at the very best the accom- modation, if not as bad as that of the average public school, was certainly not the equivalent of the accommodation provided by the Fratern- ity Houses in the United States or even of the accommodation provided by the Gold Coast dormitories of Harvard.

However, some colleges were beginning to house the dons if not the undergraduates in a rather more humane way. I remember being impressed by the comparative luxury of Cam- bridge when I began visiting it, not realising that I was a privileged guest and that ordinary guests and, much more, undergraduates were not treated this way. There was the great prob- lem of bathrooms (in a general sense). In one college of Oxford I knew well, a senior fellow was allowed to put in a bathroom in his own suite at his own expense although some others deprecated such luxury. A very eminent Irish scholar, with vast academical experience, was delighted to find in All Souls that the plumbing was just as backward as it was in his eighteenth century house in Dublin. But news of Ameri- can devices and news of the often superior pro- vision made in the women's colleges was begin- ning to spread.

Oxford and Cambridge suffered no great loss as far as the old colleges are concerned by the fact that they were not designed for modern standards of cleanliness, heat, or comfort. A retired Cambridge gyp has just contrasted Cam- bridge in 1968 with the Cambridge of forty years ago. 'Then,' he said, 'young men changed their shirts every day and had a bath once a week. Now they have a bath every day and change their shirts once a week.' This may be a slight exaggeration, but not much of an exag- geration, for the provision for what one would call modern standards of bathing in most Oxford colleges, and I suppose in Cambridge colleges, was still extremely meagre and was often pre-empted by the dirty athletes, especially during the rugger season.

The fact that the male colleges are organised round staircases demanded a constant supply of faithful and reasonably competent servants. These were in increasingly short supply. Some of the scouts in my time at Balliol and, indeed, later when I was a don at Corpus, were in more senses than one characters. I can remember going back to shave after breakfast. The venerable Sawyer, who was like a cork- screw, began to talk to me about the famous Oxford by-election which in its result raised Liberal hopes, soon to be falsified. I asserted, untruthfully, that I was taking no interest in the election. I was in fact anxious to finish shaving and to get out and had no desire to listen to Sawyer's conversation. He went on, 'I am a Conservative, sir. I was brought up to build up, not to knock down. I believe there are people like you who would have been called in ancient Greece "idiots."' I could only mumble that I believed the were. I doubt if any under- graduates at Oxford or Cambridge today find Greek-quoting servants or, indeed, many ser- vants of any kind.

The women's colleges, designed along cor- ridors, were more easy to run, and I suspect were far more comfortable than most of the ancient male colleges. And this humane and civilising tradition is not confined to the women's colleges of Oxbridge. I can remember how astonished my wife was when we were visit- ing one of the best of the redbrick universities at the luxury of the accommodation provided for the young women. They had electric drying rooms for their hairdos! As a survivor of Chel- tenham Ladies' College, she thought this was remarkable and admirable.

`Welcome to the intellectual iliter In fact, the leaders of ASLEF (whose real motive, it has been suggested, was to get out of

Oxford altogether, and they didn't care what

accommodation it had to offer) had something on their side. Just as public school boys have

more than once asserted that they found the army a great relief after school, or indeed, found school had been an admirable preparation for

Dartmoor, as in the case 'of Paul Pennyfeather, many Oxford alumni and, indeed, many Ox- bridge dons have revelled in the unwonted luxury of American universities. But there are exceptions even in America. In no other university have I been offered such odiously unattractive accommodation as in the richest university in the world, Harvard, of which I am in fact an alumnus. I will not inflict the story of the horrors of a summer confer- ence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in one of the former Gokl Coast dormitories. I was rescued from the worst by the master of the house who was himself a Balliol man: he was shocked when I told him that the accommoda- tion was worse than anything Balliol had to offer.

But today, although there are great pockets of misery, as we learn, the standard of comfort in England and even in North Britain has risen a great deal. People do not feel that being cold is in itself a moral virtue. I was told as long ago as 1939 that, in women's colleges, the young dons closed their windows, keeping out the healthy draughts in which their elders flourished. Probably few Rhodes scholars now leave Oxford as soon as possible just to escape from the mere discomfort of Oxford; and evi- dence of how backward Cambridge University was can be found in that admirable book by Gwen Raverat, Period Piece. But now there are electric light, plumbing, central heating, tele- phones (not, of course, in undergraduates' rooms), and the accommodation provided for dons is in most cases respectable. And dons sometimes have very attractive historical suites, even if they are not very comfortable.

The ASLEF leaders pointed out that the accom- modation provided for them by British Rail hostels was vastly superior to what the unfor- tunate undergraduates had to suffer. This may well be true as I have never sampled British Rail's hospitality at that level. It is possible that the blankets were not as smart and clean as ASLEF no doubt insists on. But at any rate, in Balliol, they would have had a historical lesson which would have kept them from being taken in by some Merton propaganda. Merton is not the oldest Oxford College. It admits that it was founded in 1265. All the covers in my time as a Balliol undergraduate had on them the state- ment: `Balliol 1263,' which was undoubtedly correct. As for the claim of University College to have been founded by Alfred the Great, this is a piece of hoary fiction.

`Luxury' is, of course, an ambiguous term; so is 'comfort,' a word much disliked by Stendhal, who also professed to dislike the thing. I suspect there was very little of it in his beloved Milan in the early nineteenth century. The late Sir Robert Rait, the Historiographer Royal for Scotland and my much admired teacher, once gave me an example of the odd views people had of the past by quoting from the Scottish Field. There had been a big shoot- ing party in one of the 'Scotch baronial' castles on Deeside. The journalist hired to write up this festivity told his readers that the guests, `revelled in more than mediaeval comfort' Obviously, Merton College has not reached this standard yet.