I doubt there can be a more agreeable place where to sit and write. I happen to be installed in rooms overlooking the so-called Cambridge Backs, the stretch where some of the finest college buildings in the city back on to the river Cam. My view takes in the right angle formed by the late Gothic chapel of King’s College and the 18th-century Gibbs Building.
In theory, these two should jar. Only they do the exact opposite, a reminder that good architecture can hardly ever be called disparate, even when style rubs shoulders with wildly-different style.
My topic, however, is elsewhere. I’m interested in the line of choirboys making their way to the chapel for Evensong. It may be a daily routine of many Cambridge colleges but at King’s it’s special, for two reasons. First, the quality of the singing makes the choir world-famous. Second, on their march across the Backs to and from Evensong, the boys wear black gowns and top hats.
University rankings and resources apart, Oxbridge is all about these quirks and arcane rituals. Latin is still spoken at graduation ceremonies and college meals, for example. Dining protocol and etiquette can be devilishly hard to fathom, not least since they vary from college to college and from day to day. Both students and academics commonly walk and cycle about in gowns. And so on.
The roots of these traditions are said (to visitors, especially) to be lost in the mists of time. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that, just like a good number of the ‘Gothic’ buildings favoured by Japanese tourists, many owe their origins to 19th-century revivalist fervour. Which doesn’t make them young, just not as old as all that.
Nor are they spared criticism. In a recent opinion article in The Cambridge Student, for example, one Jon Booth went so far as to say that they “infect students’ minds”with romanticised middle-class images of heritage, antiques and such clueless “asininity”.
Still, most Cambridge folk (students and especially academics) approach tradition with a semblance of straight face, if not outright respect. They probably realise that the trappings of privilege are seldom just symbolic. Besides, tradition has a way of making us feel we are part of something much larger than ourselves.
Which is why I find myself uncomfortable with certain Maltese attitudes to tradition. When I joined University in 2002 I couldn’t understand why the tribal chiefs insisted on holding graduations at the sports hall, for example. (Happily, they are now back where they belong.) It felt as if the institution had no history, as if all that mattered was the individual student and their diploma.
Still, there are risks. The usefulness or otherwise of tradition depends on keeping the right attitude at all times. It’s easy enough to describe the wrong attitude, the one to be avoided.
There are two things that the Cambridge type of tradition isn’t, or at least isn’t necessarily. The first is a traditionalist conservatism, by which I mean a rigid and fuddy-duddy Toryism, which in any case would probably be a caricature of the present-day Conservative Party.
Put simply, and perhaps a tad sweepingly, the elaborately-gowned scholars who say Grace in Latin and fret over the alignment of the college silver aren’t necessarily conservatives, politically speaking. They may or may not think that class hierarchy is essential to keep the masses in their place, that there is such a thing as a universal natural law, and that culture comes in ‘high’ and ‘low’ varieties.
Very often they don’t. Rather, they tend to think for example that universities should properly represent a range of class backgrounds, that values and laws are rooted in history and location and that graffiti can be a serious art form.
Which will probably come as a bit of a surprise to a Maltese person. In Malta, tradition and conservatism are all but inseparable. We simply don’t do a playful and no-strings-attached traditionalism. Tradition here usually means that one is stuck in the past, mind first.
If there is a single virtue about Oxbridge and its quirks, it is that they are done gracefully
A few exceptions aside, the Maltese people who value tradition tend also to think that newborns are actually nine months old, that Renzo Piano has deflowered a baroque city, and that tattoos are the work of the devil. That’s probably also why Mintoff the self-proclaimed moderniser thought it necessary to brush away the cobwebs of tradition. Irony of ironies, the Labour Party’s forthcoming monument shows him “during his intellectual upbringing in Oxford” (Joseph Muscat’s words not mine).
The second thing that the Cambridge type of tradition usually isn’t is pompous and self-important. In part that depends on individual character, of course. But as a general rule, I’ve always found the dons to be approachable and self-critical, sometimes bordering on the world-weary.
I will never forget when, as a new student, I was introduced to the then-William Wyse Professor of Anthropology, Dame Marilyn Strathern. “Call me Marilyn”, she had told me, and proceeded to some self-deprecating joke involving chiefs in Papua New Guinea.
The clue is in the last bit. The thing that absolves traditionalism of self-importance is humour and in particular self-deprecating humour. Most British people I know who take pageantry seriously are also avid readers of Private Eye.
Once again this leaves the average Maltese quite clueless. We have our own ways of keeping ourselves amused of course, but they tend to involve tongue and cheek as quite separate players. To ‘make it’ (whatever that means) in Malta is also to construct a tremendous edifice of an ego and to be constantly on the lookout for the slightest hint of offence.
A Maltese Private Eye would collect so many law suits it wouldn’t make it past the first issue. I can imagine all the “nirriserva d-dritt li nieħu passi” and such grand gestures.
Problem is that without humour and scepticism, tradition quickly becomes a bloated self-caricature.
It gets even worse when it comes with a baggage of conservatism. If there is a single virtue about Oxbridge and its quirks, it is that they are done gracefully.
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