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feared the worst when the
Cambridge Evening News
rang up to get some more information, but was assured (!) that the story would be carefully and accurately handled, when it appeared in the Thursday edition. Well, the story itself was. But the headline (on the front page) ran ‘GRACE BANNED’ (which it certainly hadn’t been).
    It was only a matter of time before it was picked up by the
Mail, Express, Telegraph
, Jeremy Vine etc. etc.
    How naive could I have been?
    There was something in this story for every journalistic prejudice. The
Mail
managed to combine a hit at ungrateful students (‘Students lucky enough to have won a place at Cambridge have plenty to be thankful for’), with a side-swipeat their anti-Christian sentiments (the Christian content of the traditional grace had ‘proved too much for them’). This was followed by my objections to the Latin and some sensible words from the Senior Tutor. (Barely a mention of the non-denominational traditions of the college … which was a big part of the students’ point.) The comments on the article turned out to be a very mixed bag, from those cheering the abolition of the fetters of religion (yes, in the
Daily Mail
) to those lamenting the decline of Christian Britain (with a good bit of student-bashing mixed in).
    The
Express
managed a cruder version of the above – ‘Grace is ditched before dinner …’ (no it’s not) – while the
Telegraph
and the
Times’s
Ruth Gledhill were predictably more measured, and researched. Ruth had even got Philip Howard to comment on the Latin (‘I quite like its rhetorical triptych form. Not sure that Cicero would have liked those ‘Inters’) – and on the college (‘Newnham is a college for high-minded ladies, and I dare say they want to think about peace and world poverty as well as pudding before sitting down’ – sounds a bit Laura Ashley to me.)
    All this has, of course, taken up a lot of time of the college officers, and as you can imagine, I am not exactly flavour of the month round here (though actually the publicity has been pretty good, by and large, and they had very nice pictures of the college).
Comments
    I can′t help feeling sorry for those members of Newnham reading who happen to like wearing Laura Ashley … I understand the cliché you are working against, but you might choose not to goalong with it, and rather acknowledge that young women who like floral dresses might also be serious intellectual beings with their own independent-minded take on the world.
    RICHARD
    Going to Oxford from Catholic Liverpool all those years ago, as I did, I was quite surprised to hear Latin being used by Protestants to thank the Omnipotent One for food on the table. We were told at school by the Jays not to read the Thirty-Nine Articles under any circumstances, so of course we did at the earliest opportunity. I was quite struck by the handsomeness of the English. I wonder why the ′clever men at Oxford′ didn′t produce a grace in English, which is an infinitely more beautiful language than Latin.
    ANTHONY ALCOCK
    Hold on, is it actually wrong to be thankful? I can see it being wrong to feel entitled – but thankful? ′True′ thankfulness would produce generosity … I suppose the other option is just not to eat, etc. A possibility the morally ravaged have indeed explored, to their undying ethical credit.
    Q
    Being definitely not a Christian, I still took pleasure years ago from having to recite the college grace, that being the duty of scholars by rotation, a week at a time. Long Latin periods still resonate in my inner ear. And driving to work of a morning, I pass the west front of Westminster Abbey, where an English translation of much the same text is incised in stone letters about 6 inches high. These are experiences that you cannot buy, and one somehow feels that the young are misguided in pushing them