This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 18 April 1974.
New Books by Alan Kersey
MASTER: “Do you mean to say that we accept candidates without academic qualifications if their parents subscribe to an endowment fund?
BURSAR: I’m afraid so. Frankly, the College could hardly continue without their contributions.
WHEN Cambridge writer Tom Sharpe turns his attentions from South African politics to Cambridge University’s academics it is time for the former to heave a sigh of relief and the latter to brace themselves . . .
For Porterhouse Blue, just published by Secker and Warburg at £2.25, snaps wickedly at the foundations of many a comfortably ensconced college in a way that might well cloud the after-dinner port on a few High Tables. And it won’t go down too well in the kitchens, either.
Porterhouse — no relation whatsoever to Peterhouse, he assures me — possesses all that is worst about some of the less scrupulous colleges: low academic standards, a lethargic hierarchy and, perhaps worst of all, an arrogant and corrupt head porter.
His name is Skullion and for Tom Sharpe he represents a typical senior college servant, doing more to preserve the old class barriers than the dons would dare to do. His ancestors had always looked to the college for survival, literally picking up scraps from the gentlemen’s tables; for him the passing of those days when everyone knew their place are much lamented.
One of his own more important functions has been the fiddling of pass degrees for the benefit of high-born dunces. The few bright young men who have crossed his path have usually agreed, with cash offers of up to £1,000, to sit exams as substitutes for their richer contemporaries, so there are men in high places sprinkled all over the country who have reason to be grateful to Skullion.
To those who have not been through University this is pure fiction, but the author has been surprised and amused to find graduates from a dozen different colleges reacting in the same way: “That must be my old college!” As far as Tom Sharpe is concerned, if the mortar board fits, then they can wear it. “Things haven’t changed all that much and although this book is not based on any single establishment there are many home truths contained in it that still apply to some of them.”
“One lecturer told me that unless you are totally thick, absolutely incompetent and do no work whatsoever it is virtually impossible to fail to get a degree,” he said. “I didn’t believe this was true at first, but I have checked with people closely connected with the university and they told me this was so.”
From his own experience (he was at Pembroke) he can recall one example of someone being given a degree without proving himself in the examination hall. Similarly, he was a rich South African who had to rush home when his father died.
If the book does provoke a major controversy in Cambridge he will not be too alarmed; his first book, “Riotous Assembly”, has already made him an undesirable alien in South Africa due to the outspoken cut for his anti-apartheid views. Both this and its sequel, “Indecent Exposure”, are now selling well in paperback, much to the chagrin of the white police in South Africa who are ridiculed in both books in much the same way as the inhabitants of Porterhouse are in his new novel.
If anything he is more cutting in his prose here than ever before. Colleagues at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology where he teaches history are well aware of his strong views on social injustice and “Porterhouse Blue” gives him an ideal vehicle for bringing them home to Cambridge. Even for him, however, he has retained the ability to raise a few belly-laughs in the process.
The curtain opens on a typical scene of tradition: the college feast, where the dons consume a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of food and drink and talk about the college’s economic disaster. The new Master does not approve. He has just left a pioneering career in politics to get his teeth into an old bone of contention — and the college feast seems as good a place to begin as any. He defies tradition and makes a speech. Not only does he make a speech, but he talks unforgivably about change about expansion about raising standards… Everyone is stunned, particularly Skullion, and the politicking to scupper the Master begins.
Tom Sharpe is in his element as the situation gets out of hand and he revels in the embarrassment of his invented establishment and gleefully watches it crumble. We are introduced to the principal characters: the crusty Dean who leads the revolt against proposed changes, the doddery Chaplain and the college’s only research graduate who has a big sex problem.
Zipser’s frustrations lead to another subject that will cause a few blushes along the Backs: contraceptive machines. An infatuation for his buxom but ageing bedder eventually leads to an explosive and embarrassing situation in which contraceptives — dozens of them — become the issue of the day. The Master’s wife suggests that a machine be installed.
Nowadays of course, this is a routine matter; but in recent years there was quite a fuss when first Selwyn, then Downing and King’s took a similar decision. Another author was quick to make use of the subject in a book “A Clip of Steel” in which the Master of a Cambridge college was handed a prophylactic on a plate.
At Porterhouse it provides a good excuse for an outrageously funny episode culminating in just the kind of incident that the reactionaries did not want. Sir Godber, who has threatened to do away with High Table and introduce both self-service food and female students to the college, is also quite bemused.
Anyone who knows Cambridge will be able to identify to some extent with this book with its frequent references to the streets of Cambridge (we can forgive the mis-spelling of Petty Cury). And those involved at any level with the University must feel involved, whether they be at King’s, referred to by Sir Godber Evans as a hotbed of homosexuality, or at one of the newer colleges whose skeletons have yet to be planted in the cupboards.