The UNI CYCLE

Two events this week – the annual ritual of ‘A’ level results and the death of my old professor – have taken my mind back to my own fraught days of trying to get into and then surviving at university. By the by, we never used the horrid term “uni” in those days. We were most apt to say “college”. I recall a pair of elderly and very proper maiden sisters, the Misses Parsons, speaking to me in the street towards the end of my time at school: one asked in her fluting high soprano, “And will you be going up to the varsity?” You see why “uni” offends my ear.

My experience of gaining a university place makes, I like to think, for a diverting yarn, but you, dear reader, are at liberty to stop me at any moment that you should grow bored. Forty-five years ago, what is now called UCAS was known as UCCA but it served pretty much the same function of processing college applications.

My UCCA form, however, fell foul of the zeal of a new headmaster. My parents had sent me as a day pupil to the local fee-charging educational institution, a four hundred year-old establishment of little distinction – what in the biz is known as “a minor public school”. Its best-known graduate, Andrew Loog Oldham (who first discovered and managed the Rolling Stones), once described it as “the kind of school where the parents turned up on Speech Day in Land Rovers”. Those splendid off-road vehicles were not, at the time he made that remark, the fashion accessory that they have subsequently become.

During my middle years at Wellingborough School, the headmaster was a handsome, dynamic man called Humphrey Bashford. He came from a distinguished family – his father, Sir Humphrey, was a highly regarded physician who, to our delight, was quoted by Richard Dimbleby in his commentary to the BBC’s coverage of the state funeral of Winston Churchill. With his stylish wife and pretty children, Bashford’s tenure was held by us pupils to be our own glamorous version of the Kennedys in Washington.

But there was another aspect to Bashford that singled him out. Possibly uniquely among public school heads, he was a Socialist. So when Labour came to power in 1964, he decided that it was time to move on. The new government had as its stated aim the banishment of the independent sector in primary and secondary education. Of course, this was never achieved.

The Bashfords left at the end of the calendar rather than the academic year. At the beginning of the Hilary term – our school favoured the Oxford terminology but to any normal school that would be the Spring term – John Sugden began his tenure. He represented a very different philosophy. At the time, my assessment of him was that he was in all things essentially a Victorian. One of his first acts was to avail himself of the souvenir programme my mate Tony and I had designed for the annual school show, held at the end of every Michaelmas term. The most recent, largely created by Tony and me, had been a raucous celebration of the Bashford years, couched in the satirical mode that was at that time all the rage. Sugden wrinkled his nose and decreed that no such abomination would be perpetrated again.

Not that Sugden had no feel for the live stage. Indeed, he was quite an authority on the work of Gilbert & Sullivan. In his retirement from education, I believe he picked up a lucrative second career lecturing in the States on G & S. You may imagine, then, his delight when he discovered that the best actor among the pupils of his new school rejoiced in the name of WS Gilbert. Moreover, this boy was a tenor in the school choir. It was just too good.

JGS welcomes Her Maj to Wellingborough School: photograph by Tony Coult

I can relive the moment at the end of Trinity term (summer) when JGS summoned me to his study. I knew I was to be house captain and hence a school prefect for my final year. Was it possible, after Sugden and I had sized each other up as an obvious deadly enemy and skirted each other warily for two terms, that he was going to make me head boy? Of course not.

His behaviour was most odd, though. He stood in the middle of his study, kicking first one, than the other leg rather high in front of the remaining leg. He was like a bashful suitor. “Now then, Gilbert”, he said in that pinched nasal drawl that we all mimicked to perfection, “you are going to play Sir Joseph Porter for me next term, aren’t you”. This was the first I had heard of his grand plan to mark his first year as headmaster at this (or, it had transpired, any other) school with a production of HMS Pinafore, directed by himself. I was well aware that this put the kibosh on the school show but I said of course I would be interested to do it. “Though”, I said, ever diligent, “I do have Cambridge scholarship entrance exams next term …” but JGS jumped in to pre-empt my objection. “Oh, there’s no danger that it will clash with those”.

The Michaelmas term was wholly dominated by preparations for this grand production. Those of us who were cast were excused the ordinarily mandatory military training in the so-called Combined Cadet Force (formerly the Officer Training Corps), in which I had by then risen to the rank of sergeant with my own squad. From half term, we were taken off games as well. Rehearsals came thick and fast. Sugden assembled a small semi-professional orchestra at a rumoured cost – an outrageous sum – of £300. The musical director, one Alan Hemmings, was a short-term replacement for the school’s high-flying music master, Derek Clare, who was away on some jaunt that term and who, the following year, went onto the staff at Eton College. Hemmings was a juvenile gadfly, a sort of Danny Kaye character, and never likely to form a good working relationship with the driven and demanding Sugden.

As you will have anticipated, the dress rehearsal and three scheduled performances of Pinafore coincided precisely with my Cambridge exams. Perhaps a less stage-struck teenager than me would have stood up to his headmaster and dropped out of the show but, truth to tell, I was perfectly cast as Sir Joseph Porter, the dilettante “master of the Queen’s nav-ee”, and I was having the time of my life.

At the dress, when I had already spent two mornings sitting exams, Sugden and Hemmings’ simmering enmity boiled over in a furious row and Sugden, summoning all his authority, sacked Hemmings from both his function as music director and his job as music master in front of the entire cast and the hired musicians. I don’t remember now if he took over the baton himself or conscripted a member of the orchestra. I do remember that several of us sat up till after two that night, smoking and drinking wine and chewing it all over. Not very surprisingly, I walked out of my exam the following morning after about fifteen minutes.

Sugden was clearly dismayed that his monomania had had such a far-reaching effect and undertook to write to the Cambridge authorities. Whether he did so and in what terms I have no way of confirming. At any rate, I didn’t win a scholarship to Cambridge. But Pinafore was a huge hit. Mrs Sydney Cook, a revered local actress and stalwart of the cast of The Archers, let it be known that she considered it the best amateur production of a Gilbert & Sullivan she had ever seen. We even cut an album of the numbers and my copy still sits in the ‘shows’ section of my vinyl collection.

Having stayed on at school primarily to try for Cambridge, I now had two terms with not much to do but make sure I got into university somewhere else. I had sat an ‘A’ level in French the previous summer as a dry run, with the undistinguished result of a D. Happily, my results the following year were perfectly adequate to the task. You didn’t need to achieve an A-grade pass in everything like you do now but, along with three other good grades, I did get an A in English, my chosen subject, and applied to both Oxford and Cambridge to read English. Sugden, ever determined to show that he was on top of the game, collected our UCCA forms from us so that he could enter our results as soon as he received them and get our forms in at the earliest opportunity. It was disappointing, then, that I wasn’t even called for interview at most of the colleges on my chosen list of six.

I did get an interview at King’s College, London. It went pretty well and I was feeling good as I got up to go when the interviewer observed: “I think you’re a strong candidate in interview but I don’t think you have much chance with just a D in French”. “No, no”, I protested. “I have an A in English, a B in History and a B in British Constitution”. “Oh really?” said the man. “I can only find a D in French in the list of results … oh wait … ah, I see … your headmaster has put your other results in the body of his personal report. Well, you need to speak to him about that”.

Next morning, I phoned Sugden’s secretary, a charming woman but a fierce gatekeeper, and asked for an appointment with the head. “I can’t fit you in today” she said. “May I ask what it’s about?” “Yes,” I said. “I want to tell him he’s a bloody fool”. Without missing a beat, she said “He can see you at 10.00.”

Sugden was plainly mortified at his mistake but he couldn’t admit it to me. He hummed and hahed and said he would write to all the colleges to which I had applied but my faith in his ability to help me out any further was gone.

At the end of the admissions process, I was one of the many – though nothing like the thousands today – left to the tender mercies of the clearing scheme. I could see myself ending up in what a teacher at another school called the lowest form of academic life: “reading geography at Hull”. As my trust in authority was now at rock bottom, I decided to use my initiative and wrote to many departments in many universities across the country, explaining my circumstances. I finally landed an interview in the Philosophy Department at University College, London. In our VIth form game of collecting and dropping splendidly obscure but exotic references in English essays, my chum Tony and I had turned up the names of many a forgotten philosopher and, though I’d not exactly conned much actual writing in the field, I thought the subject must be at least interesting.

My interview was with the head of the department, Richard Wollheim, who spoke with the exaggeratedly precise English you normally hear in someone European to whom English is not the first language, though in fact Wollheim was English. In any case, it was the substance rather than the accent of his questions that I found baffling. Nevertheless, I was offered a place and took it gratefully.


Richard Wollheim

But I didn’t much enjoy my time at the tiny depart ment on Gordon Square. Many of the students were older – what is termed “mature students” – and when one of them opined that those of us who were still teenagers were too young to read philosophy because we hadn’t hit any brick walls yet, I felt inclined to agree with her. I didn’t make any lasting friendships in the department nor anywhere else at college because, getting my place so close to the start of term, I was too late to secure a room in hall, the preferred residential arrangement for freshers. I was rescued by the grandmother-in-law of one of the younger of my schoolmasters who took me in as a lodger, but stuck out in Tooting I grew somewhat lonely and felt that my best years were being spent as a recluse.

What’s more, I found the course itself very taxing. Wollheim, who took several classes himself, was always talking about “the essential charrrrracter” of things and I began to feel that I didn’t much care. There were some brilliant lecturers: Americans like the charismatic Jerry Cohen, who died just a few months ago, and the intense but laid-back Trotskyite Ted Honderich both stood out for me; we also had as a visiting lecturer the astounding Iris Murdoch, who came dressed like an old washerwoman, and a Dutchman whose name I forget but whose wild gesticulations I remember well – his favourite word was “myth” which he pronounced “muth”.

After the hour that we spent with Wollheim exploring whether the essential charrrracter of a table was the same seen from above as from five yards away, I decided that I had to apply to swap to the department I had wanted to join in the first place: English. This was permitted after a certain amount of investigation but it was too late in the cycle to be effected for the next academic year so I had to take twelve months out, which I spent earning my living teaching prep school boys.


Randolph Quirk

The English Department was large and its staff packed with stars. Among them was a strange and swarthy-looking dandy called Grey Ruthven (said ‘Riven’), who became known by his hereditary title, the Earl of Gowrie, when he later served in Thatcher’s cabinet. There was the statutory big name from the practice of creative writing, Stephen Spender, made up to Professor for the occasion.
His lectures were mind-bogglingly dull which, considering the astonishing adventures of his life, was seriously disabusing. And there were the two professors who jointly headed the department, Frank Kermode and Randolph Quirk, Manxmen both and equally electrifying characters.


Stephen Spender

Quirk and Kermode: they sound like a dubious firm of solicitors out of Dickens. I wrote of Lord Quirk, as he now is, in an earlier posting (see the labels list to the right of the text: scroll down to R for Randolph). Sir Frank, as he became, died on Tuesday in his rooms at Cambridge. He was 90 and writing until the end.

At the opposite extreme to Sir Stephen Spender, Kermode was a bobby-dazzler of a lecturer – elegant, graceful, witty, nimble, modest, comprehensively gifted. Truly, he was the Fred Astaire of academics. I could listen to him for hours, charmed, enlightened, bedazzled. Books poured from him and he became, as the obituaries agreed, this nation’s foremost literary critic.

Though a serious academic, he was not so aloof that he wouldn’t write for the newspapers and periodicals. One piece he published while I was a student, probably for The Listener, was about the pleasure of anagrams; en passant, he mentioned his sadness that he could make nothing coherent of his own name. I dropped him a line, proposing “modern freak” as a particularly apposite rendering of him, given his championship of contemporary literature. He wrote back a charming note of thanks. He was too kind and too classy to point out that I, clumsy oaf, had summoned a ‘k’ too few to make my anagram.


Frank Kermode

I enjoyed my time in the UCL English Department but. thanks to John Sugden’s impatience and certainty that he always knew best, I was half-way through my 20s before I graduated. I have no idea how many other university entrance attempts he screwed up during his time as a headmaster. But, as we know, there ain’t no justice in the world. Humphrey Bashford, Richard Wollheim and Stephen Spender are all dead, now along with Frank Kermode. Despite the curse of Gilbert – a dreaded imposition of premature passing on so many who have thwarted me and my interests over the years – John Sugden, at 97 or 98, as far as I know still lives.