A golden jubilee that will not be celebrated at Christ Church this year, for obvious reasons, is that of a riotous rampage by students that took place there in the summer term of 1962. This was unlikely, I suspect, to have been reported, so I didn’t bother ploughing through our files. Such details as I have come from the late Sir Steven Spender in his New Selected Journals, just published by Faber and Faber at £45.
The passage concerns his son Matthew’s coming interview for a place at the House, before which Spender told a member of the interviewing panel that the college was considered to be full of “baying bloods”.
“[The don] said this wasn’t quite so though last term the worst rag ever had taken place — all the windows in Peck Quad broken and two or three undergraduates thrown in the fountain of Mercury [right] in Tom Quad.”
When Chris Koenig wrote about such riots at Christ Church in one of his recent history columns, I understood that history was precisely what they were.
I was therefore surprised, indeed, to find them going on some ten years into my lifetime.
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