Oxford in the sixties was pretty much a male dominated place. There were the five women's colleges, but none of them were in the city centre and female students were in a distinct minority. Here I digress slightly to relate that almost my first day I met an attractive young lady who couldn't find the Examination Schools where university lectures (then and presumably now) take place. I assisted her, but in a gruff public school male superior manner, and to my chagrin saw her later around our college as the girl friend of one of my more savvy colleagues. Missed out there then!
Looking back, we did take ourselves pretty seriously. We abhorred the word 'students': we were 'undergraduates' and thought of ourselves as adults. College notices referred to us as 'Mr.' plus initials, never by our first names. We wore sports-jackets and ties generally about Oxford, and deplored the blazers apparently favoured by chaps at Cambridge. There seemed to be a lot more dining in Hall than nowadays, perhaps because you were charged for it unless you signed out, and it reminded us of school. There were entrance scholarships (leading to league tables showing which schools got the most - usually Manchester Grammar), and scholars wore fuller gowns than commoners. Classics was the 'top' subject, and the ultimate achievement for an aspiring schoolboy was to win a classics scholarship to Balliol.
Although my fellow freshmen were almost all around 19, male, British and from nominally Anglican schools, apart from one polite tea party I had little to do with the college chaplain, and rarely went into the chapel. Today my old college (Corpus Christi) has a flourishing (mixed) choir which makes CDs and goes on tours - things which only New College, Magdalen and Christ Church - with their professional all-male choirs - did in my time. Talking of Christ Church reminds me that meritocracy had hardly taken hold in the 60s - Christ Church's Peckwater Quad in particular was packed with young Peers of the Realm. Once I got a note in my pigeon hole (no mobile phones then) summoning me to a set of rooms in the said quad to meet a brace of youthful aristocrats, Lord Irwin and Sir Percy ffoulkes, regarding the setting of the trail for the Oxford University Drag Hunt. (I agreed, and ran the trail, but that's another story). Certain schools were linked with certain colleges: Winchester and New College, Eton and Christ Church were two, while Balliol had a lot of Scots, and Queens' boys (or 'men' as we had it) hailed largely from the North.
I recall that approximately 8% got 'firsts at 'Schools' in my time (I understand this word has dropped out in favour of 'finals') while today the figure is far higher. My old philosophy tutor tells me that the difference is not from dumbing down, but stems rather from the fact that today's students work harder, and that entrance to the university is far more meritocratic: no longer is Christ Church full of toffs, and being good at sports or having had a brother (or sister) at the college helps not at all (so they say).
I have omitted the main difference to last. Students now wear different coloured carnations for exams along with their sub-fusc (formal dress). I can tell you that this is not an old Oxford tradition. Undergraduates in the 1960s and 1970s very definitely did not sport carnations- nor did they daub themselves with paint after exams: a quiet glass of champagne was however acceptable behaviour for a young gentleman outside the Examination Schools.
- by Kit Villiers
