Farewell to Brideshead
Henry is part of a dying breed amongst Oxford students. Will you help?
Take pity on poor Henry. Two weeks before this term started, he was blissfully happy. He was about to start at St John’s, Oxford, and with his father having been there before him, and an old family friend lined up to be his personal tutor, he felt he already knew the lie of the land.
He anticipated days spent in the ‘Bod’ (he knew all the slang already), pouring over Virgil and Homer, followed by evenings spent in the Union bar, or, better still, with chaps from one of the drinking societies to which he so longed to belong. His father had belonged to the Bullingdon club and he was all but guaranteed membership of Oxford’s most prestigious societies himself • provided, of course, he was able to down the bottle of whisky that constituted initiating into the gang.
One week into term, things still seemed to be going so well. He had been accepted into the Bullingdon, with few long-term repercussions from the initiation (the doctor said that the stitches in his head would leave no permanent scarring).
However, things suddenly took a turn for the worse when he was informed by the other members of the club that when they went on outings he was not allowed to take drugs, cause damage to any of the premises they visited, and couldn’t even engage in a little light-hearted fisticuffs with his fellow club-mates. This is not what he’d been led to expect at all. He’d so looked forward to the fun and games of the famous Bullingdon get-togethers.
It had been too long since he’d had the blood of another living thing daubed on his face, and he couldn’t believe that since the abolition of hunting with dogs, the only other legitimate blood sport in which he might participate had also been taken away.
Apparently, since last year, when that Trotskyite, pinko-liberal rag of a paper, The OxStu, had run a piece outing poor Alex Fellowes (or ‘Beetle’ to his pals) as the leader of that piece of harmless fun that had got just a little out of hand at the White Hart, Bullingdon members now had to play it safe and even (get this!) consider members of the wider community.
Henry didn’t understand what the problem was, since the group had offered to recompense the owner of the pub for more than the damage was worth. It just shows what happens when locals get a sniff of the money that could be earned by exploiting poor Oxford students for a bit of publicity for themselves. Worse was to come, when, this term, St John’s decided to ban bops after some of his chums, in high spirits, had had a little fun around the squash courts, and caused some unfortunate damage.
It would have been easy for the college just to sweep it under the carpet, giving the students a ticking off and a warning about future conduct. After all, students are likely to be somewhat boisterous amid the excitement of coming back to college after a long, lonely summer.
Henry had also heard from his liberal friend at Wadham that they had received numerous complaints about noise levels at their bops, with a man from Environmental Health even sent down to monitor the levels that could be heard from the nearby school. It was, quite frankly, political correctness gone mad. What really wound Henry up, however, was the appalling hypocrisy of it all.
On the one hand, local people seemed happy to make as much money as they could from having the world’s most famous university on their doorstep, especially if they got the chance to shop some of the press. On the other hand, meanwhile, they were not willing to put up with some of the side-effects of being part of such a community. Surely if they want to benefi t from living near Oxford University, they should be happy to pick up the pieces if the inevitable boisterousness got out of hand.
Of course, Henry realised that having a community where students were living in such close proximity to the wider community was not really feasible. The collegiate system works fi ne so long as there’s a minimum of people living in between each college • perhaps a few shops, pubs and clubs would suffi ce.
However, bar starting a war with the towns in order to kick them out (and we all know where that led last time • the Polytechnic of East Anglia-upon-Fen, or Cambridge as it is known to those outside of the loop), Henry felt powerless and adrift, suddenly alienated in an institution where he expected to feel so at home. So take pity on poor Henry, the days of this type of ‘good egg’ are numbered.
Recent events have suggested that Oxford University and its affi liated institutions and organisations are fi nally re-evaluating their attitude towards the wider community in which we are fortunate enough to study. Tragic though Henry’s story is, perhaps it is a sign that perhaps as an institution Oxford may fi nally be growing up.
10th Nov 2005