He had had the honour of presiding at dessert, where he always drank the accepted minimum. He had entertained some of the guests with his account of the council estate on which he had grown up, and his bedder’s perennial inability to reposition objects correctly on his mantelpiece.
He returned to his rooms, hung up his gown, went straight to his desk still wearing his biscuity jacket and college tie, sat down, and pulled out a sheet of headed paper. He took from his breast pocket the black fountain pen he was given when he passed the 11-plus, unscrewed the top, and wrote:
Dear Master,
A case for restricting undergraduate guest hours can be made simply on sociological grounds, without reference to religious or moral scruples (which I hold, but do not argue here).
A residential community of scholars is not a microcosm of society. We of the Fellowship are all aware of the historical origins of the College in an ecclesiastical, contemplative and celibate way of life. Scholars have for centuries freely chosen to isolate and insulate themselves from the ‘world’ in order to concentrate all their energies and noetic powers on the gleaning of knowledge and pursuit of truth.
One implication of this is that over-mastering distractions, whether of thought or emotion, have to be shunned. In this respect it is a universal experience that most serious love-affairs during adolescence are destructive of serenity of mind. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to review the many contributory factors: infatuation, jealousy, fear of contagious disease, worry about chance pregnancies, exacerbated impecuniousness, psychosomatic penalties of violating a subconscious morality, etc. Even when an adolescent is constrained by conventional hindrances to such affairs, it is not easy to avoid distraction. It would be irresponsible (to say the least) for a College to remove a chief hindrance by providing comfortable facilities round-the-clock. It is significant that the proposal is being pressed by certain students whose tenor of mind is assuredly not the pursuit of learning, but is squalidly manifest in Rag magazines and the like.
That all-night stops scandalise College servants is generally acknowledged. It is signally to the credit of our lady bedmakers that hitherto none has communicated what she may have witnessed or suspected to a Sunday newspaper.
There are, I believe, two groups of persons to whose judgment the College must be especially alert. First, there are generations of members of the College who never enjoyed loose guest hours themselves, certainly do not approve of them now, and may well voice their disapprobation in the strongest of terms. Doubtless many will choose to withhold benefaction from an institution that sets at naught the authority of their experience and wisdom.
A second group consists of those young men who wish to respect the monastic tradition by reason of religious or moral convictions. Little sensitivity is needed to feel how intolerable they would find nightly proximity, on the same staircase or even in the same court, to proceedings they abhor. A College can not afford to sacrifice the allegiance of such men.
For these reasons alone I believe that guest hours at least as restrictive as those now obtaining should be rigidly enforced.
Yours very faithfully,
Alan Cook
He sat back and sighed. If that didn’t do it, he would resign. The College’s days were numbered.
© Patrick Miles, 2021
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
