This article was published in the Yorkshire Post on 15 November 1999.
TOM SHARPE, author of the Wilt novels about low English college life, said in a recent interview that lecturers still cornered him to say the real thing is just as mad as it was when he last taught, 30 years ago.
He taught at Cambridge College of Art and Technology 1961-70, after being deported from South Africa, where the other main strand of his writing is set.
He spent some time trying to teach “liberal studies” to groups of apprentices who were required to spend a day at college while learning their trades. As in the books, he says, the lecturers used a sort of code for these classes which meant, for example, that third-year butchers’ apprentices and first-year confectioners were summed up as Meat 3 and Cake 1.
They had a literature programme, Sharpe recalled, based on Lord of the Flies, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Voltaire’s Candide and and the classic clean western novel Shane.
“You can imagine what Plasterers 2 made of that little lot after a drunken lunch,” said Sharpe, talking to Peter Kingston, for the Guardian.
“Not that they were a bad bunch of lads. It was just that they couldn’t see the point and you could sympathise with them.”
They did enjoy an argument, he conceded. When reading Lord of the Flies, they all sympathised with the bullying Jack rather than the bullied Piggy “because they knew it would upset the more sensitive lecturers”.
Many of the staff found it hard to handle boisterous 17-year-olds who did not share their ideologies.
At one point, Sharpe took over the class of a lecturer who had committed suicide.
“One of them said ‘We killed the last one, sir’. I said ‘I know you did but you ain’t going to kill me’.”
Courses for the improvement of the working classes are a theme we might have heard about somewhere else recently, of course.
A lot of Government money depends on system and students understanding each other better nowadays. Any observations from our professional readership – or from their pupils?