Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Shirley Tart was once at an open day at the Magnolias, talking to Percy as he leaned on a gate with his pipe and an air of Salopian contentment. She spotted a man with a plastic bag and secateurs, looking furtive.

  ‘He’s nicking cuttings from that plant!’ she told him in a do-something tone of voice.

  ‘I shouldn’t bother about that too much,’ replied Percy. ‘How do you think I got it in the first place?’

  July 2012/November 2013

  37. Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

  CAMBRIDGESHIRE

  A chill January evening: the kind of night when Evensong at even the most famous cathedrals becomes more contractual obligation than tourist attraction, let alone a joyous affirmation of faith. This, however, was not a cathedral, merely a college chapel. Yet outside there were maybe 150 people, huddling against the cold by the ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs, awaiting admission.

  ‘Gratifying attendance?’ I remarked to the usher as we filed in.

  His reply had an airy smugness rarely seen in an English house of worship since Anthony Trollope’s time. ‘Quite normal for a weekday,’ he said. ‘Weekends we have about 800.’

  ‘Cathedrals get about ten!’

  ‘Our choir does seem to attract them.’

  I spent the entire service in King’s College, Cambridge, trying to puzzle this out. After all, Ely Cathedral up the road is one of the wonders of the nation, and my inexpert ear actually preferred the harmonies on offer there. And it didn’t look as though my fellow congregants – mostly young and foreign – were obvious connoisseurs.

  Perhaps they were drawn by the unique appeal of the candlelit chapel, with its architectural consistency and its Rubens and its fan vaulting and its rather cosy kind of grandeur. More likely it was that we were in Cambridge, with a lot of tourists slopping about and nothing to do between the shops shutting and dinner time: King’s College Chapel gets a lot of stars in the guidebook.

  Maybe there was something else too. Cambridge is a city of locked gates and ‘Members Only’ signs and forbidding head porters guarding mysterious archways and quadrangles, leading on to more archways. And here we were, admitted free of charge, not just to any college but to the ultimate Cambridge college – the home of Keynes and Forster and Turing – enabling us to bask momentarily among the elite of elites, the rarest of rarefied minds.

  And afterwards it was possible to cross the road and peer into the college’s window on to the workaday world: the Shop at King’s. What could such an august institution display to give us an insight into the thinking of the truly first-class brain? The answer was a choice of mugs, mouse pads and tote bags, all with a KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON motif. What genius! What originality! How can your average, humdrum tat-seller compete?

  King’s was somewhat besieged that month, and not just by tourists. There was a Wages not Wine demonstration following revelations that, of all the Cambridge colleges, it had both the highest wine budget (£338,559) and the highest number of workers paid below the living wage of £7.65 an hour (123). The college argued that it was important to take into account fringe benefits, such as car parking. You have to be quite clever to think of that one.

  If Oxford is an uneasy coalition between town and gown, in Cambridge the order of priorities is much clearer: almost everything feeds directly or indirectly off the university, and its dominance is accepted with much less demur. The city centre is smaller, less fascinating than Oxford’s, less riddled with intriguing alleyways before it dwindles into suburban terraces, largely in the grim local yellow-grey brick. I sometimes think of Cambridge as an ugly city with beautiful buildings. It is certainly the more open city of the two, in the sense that several of the colleges are more exposed to public gaze: ‘Welcome to the zoo,’ a King’s don remarked to a friend of mine.

  However, the buildings are guarded not just by the locked gates but by the porters, the magnificent breed of salt-of-the-earth, more-than-my-jobsworths epitomised by Skullion in Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue. The only implausible aspect of the novel is that Skullion, with all the power that attends a head porter, would ever accept demotion to become mere master of his college.

  The city is the university. Here even the river has been co-opted and rendered semi-private. The only ways to see the Bridge of Sighs, perhaps the second most famous structure in Cambridge, are either by kind permission of St John’s College, which requires either an invitation or payment, or by punt. Yet I could not detect the level of tension that still lurks below the surface in Oxford. The 800-year town v gown conflict is over and gown has won, largely by hiding away gowns, scarves and all other badges of overt superiority.

  Allan Brigham – BA (Sheffield), Cambridge roadsweeper for thirty-five years, tour guide, historian and now honorary MA (Cantab) – remembers a graffito soon after he arrived saying ‘Bash a Grad in’ 78’. That would be unthinkable now, he says. ‘You wouldn’t know who they were. The students look like everyone else. They speak like everyone else. They probably go to the same clubs.’ As at Oxford, the growth of a second-division institution (‘Home of Anglia Ruskin University’ say the signs on Cambridge station), plus dozens of sometimes dodgy third-division colleges and language schools, has narrowed the divide, evened up the gender balance and made it easy to tell the folks back in Shanghai that you studied at Cambridge.

  The real University of Cambridge has always been the Avis of British universities: the no. 2, so it has to try harder. It is never Cambridge and Oxford, which would make alphabetical sense, always the other way round, and Oxbridge not Camford. It is an upstart, dating back only to 1209, a spin-off. To be fair, the two have marched in lockstep pretty much ever since: the Old Firm. Their prestige and reputation and lead over all other British universities are as great as ever, maybe greater – it being much harder to gain admission on the old pals’ act and doss around getting a pass degree in land economy and first-class honours in puking and practical jokes.

  It is a crazy way to run a university system, with two teams and hundreds of also-rans, but there we are. Like other ancient but enduring British institutions – Eton, the monarchy, the City of London – Oxbridge has thrived by responding rapidly to societal change, backed up by being exceedingly rich. And yet there is always this slight air of Oxonian superiority over its rival: Cambridge (to oversimplify wildly) was always Roundhead rather than Cavalier; Low Church not High; turned out labcoated scientists not high-minded aesthetes. Oxford has provided nine of Britain’s thirteen post-war prime ministers, Cambridge none. Cambridge politicians have tended to get within sniffing distance of 10 Downing Street before bumping their heads on the political ceiling: Rab Butler, Willie Whitelaw, Ken Clarke, Nick Clegg too (one assumes). ‘Oxford has produced prime ministers and bishops; Cambridge, poets and mathematicians,’ sums up Dr Elisabeth Leedham-Green, author of A Concise History of the University of Cambridge.

  The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Oxonian to the core, was exiled to Cambridge as Master of Peterhouse and called it ‘a torpid introverted village … surrounded by dreary Fens’. One recent incomer I know has found it most unwelcoming: ‘No one speaks to you in Cambridge. They’re too snooty, either because they’re upper-class, or because they’re not and have moved heaven and earth to get there. Or they’re from the Fens and too shy to say anything.’ This is not Allan Brigham’s experience. ‘I’ve always found Cambridge very friendly. Sometimes on my barrow I felt like a Catholic priest. People would recognise me but didn’t know me. And they would tell me all sorts of things.’ And it is hard to ignore the advantages of living in a walkable city with the cultural advantages of somewhere far bigger.

  There is another way of looking at Oxford v Cambridge. It was expressed by the nineteenth-century economist H. S. Foxwell in a letter to John Neville Keynes, father of the more famous John Maynard, after Keynes senior had been offered a chair at Oxford:

  Pray don’t go. Think of the effect your move might have on your son. He may grow up epigrammatical and end by becoming
flippantly the proprietor of a Gutter Gazette, or the hero of a popular party; instead of emulating his father’s noble example, becoming an accurate, clear-headed Cambridge man spending his life in the valuable and unpretentious service of his friends, venerated by the wise and unknown to the masses, as true merit and worth mostly are.

  And, indeed, Cambridge has specialised in fields of which the masses have minimal comprehension. Introverted, though, is not the word.

  The old Cavendish Laboratory was housed in mock-Gothic splendour in Free School Lane, just round the corner from the Eagle, where Francis Crick interrupted the drinking one lunchtime in 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had discovered the secret of life. (There are always know-alls in pubs, whether or not they have just cracked DNA.) Its replacement is a soulless but functional 1970s building surrounded by a science park two traffic jams out of town. There is a single external grace note – the quotation above the door: ‘The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’ (Psalm 111). Trust the scientists to find something incomprehensible.

  I had as personal guide Professor Malcolm Longair, astrophysicist and Jacksonian Professor Emeritus. The Jacksonian chair, dating back to 1782, is considered a touch inferior to the physics department’s other great title: the Cavendish Professorship. Five of the eight eligible Cavendish profs have won a Nobel Prize, compared to just three of the Jacksonians. (Between them they are level with Spain.) Still, I was most honoured by his attention, and Longair is a wonderfully zestful advocate for physics in general and Cav physics in particular, which for him is essentially experimental rather than theoretical.

  There was the small drawback that I took in only a fraction of what he told me. I just about understood that the Cav had discovered neutrons, electrons and pulsars. It was a little harder to grasp the full implications of the SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) and the SLUG (Superconducting Low-inductance Undulatory Galvanometer). ‘The bread and butter of condensed matter physics,’ the prof said helpfully.

  He also said there had been three great boom-times for Cambridge science. The first derived from Isaac Newton; the second came in the late Victorian era, when engineering and physics started to march hand in hand; and the third is right now. Although I had no idea what all the huge expensive clobber in the Cav actually did – in computing the machines get ever smaller, in physics it goes the other way – I could see the boom clearly enough. It was all around us, in the labs and office buildings that have shot up round the Cav and across the flat countryside now known as Silicon Fen; and in a surge in house prices (perhaps 40 per cent in three years) that has made London look like a sluggard: million-pound flats; half a million for bog-standard bungalows.

  This has everything to do with Cambridge being Cambridge. In 2013 the pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, an Anglo-Swedish mutation of what was once dear old ICI, announced that it was closing its research and development operation in Cheshire and moving it into the biomedical gold-rush area next to the new Addenbrooke’s Hospital, transferring a thousand jobs from where they are needed in the North to where they are absolutely not. ‘Our people will be able to rub shoulders with some of the world’s best scientists,’ said the chief executive.

  And like microscopic particles in a laboratory experiment, money oscillates between the tech startups, the multinationals and the university, sometimes landing large piles on the lap of whoever happens to discover something commercial. All of which is more pleasing to government than funding bachelor claret-glugging dons to sit round old quadrangles translating Sanskrit.

  What worries Elisabeth Leedham-Green is that as Cambridge’s scientists get further and further from the core of the university – a huge new cluster is planned north-west of the city – they will commune less and less in the university itself. ‘People won’t be coming in to lunch as often as they used to. It seems to me a real hazard.’ More than half a century ago the novelist C. P. Snow, a Cambridge physicist himself, very publicly worried about the gap between the two cultures, arts and sciences. It is getting more extreme than ever.

  I drove out to Great Kneighton, a ‘brand new community’ with 2,500 homes, being flung up close to Addenbrooke’s. The architecture is no more attractive than that of the Cav, but one salesman I met was in raptures: ‘People are coming from everywhere. Local, outsiders, China. Cash buyers. Buy to let. I had one woman in who said she didn’t really want to live here, she wanted to live out in the country. But she said she’ll do that in ten years’ time because she didn’t expect the same capital growth out there.’ This is not a recipe for community.

  And the biggest local player wants its share of any action that’s going. Already the richest university in Europe, Cambridge has been using American-style methods to bump up its war chest nearer to those of Harvard and Yale. It manages its £5 billion endowment with great seriousness, and has just created another fifty jobs in the fund-raising department for people to harass the graduates by cold-calling and begging.

  But how would a postgraduate working in the Cav, living in a rented house in Great Kneighton with a pushchair in the hall and minimal connection with a college, gain any part of the traditional Cambridge experience? Intellectually, this place is a powerhouse. In other respects, it did feel a bit like Slough.

  Cambridgeshire was always a feeble county, small but disunited. Its northern half, the Isle of Ely, was under the control of the Bishop of Ely until 1837 and had its own county council until 1965. Nine years after that Cambridgeshire was changed again, bloated by the inclusion of Huntingdonshire, the old Soke of Peterborough and a sliver of Essex, because that fitted Whitehall’s idea of what a county ought to look like. The new version had even less identity.

  As a county, Cambridgeshire’s major claim to distinction is, as you might expect, educational. Henry Morris became the chief education officer in 1922, when rural education right across England meant confining children – barring a handful who won scholarships to the grammar schools – in frigid village schoolrooms until they were fourteen and could be released on to the farms. Morris stayed in his job for more than thirty years and set up a string of ‘village colleges’ that were both pioneering comprehensives and community centres: he talked about raising the school leaving age to ninety. Sawston Village College, the first of the breed, still boasts of its public facilities for adult education, sport and culture; it even has a cinema run by the kids.

  In the nineteenth century Cambridgeshire was also the main centre for the quarrying of coprolite, or fossilised shit, which had commercial value as a fertiliser. Perhaps one day university scientists will find a similar use for KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON mugs.

  The dominant feature of the county’s landscape is not specific to Cambridgeshire. The Fens stretch across south Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk and a bit of Suffolk. But the heart of them lies here. Take out the city and a doughnut of rich but decreasing countryside that surrounds it, and Cambridgeshire is Fen. It is hard for a modern traveller to understand what that once meant: a vast bog, uninhabitable except on the bumps.

  Theoretically, this is dry country because rainfall is low, and Fen farmers are as obsessed with water as if they were grazing the Australian outback. But not in the same way: here the perpetual danger is not too little water, but too much. It does not normally arrive from the sky, at least not directly. Were it not for the sea wall, it would arrive from the North Sea every high spring tide. And it does arrive from the big Midland rivers that snake their way into the Wash. If it pours in Northamptonshire, the water heads into the Nene and Great Ouse, and potentially all over Cambridgeshire.

  Historically the Fens were remote, sickly and, to outsiders, primeval. The inhabitants, clustered on whatever slightly higher ground was going, made a patchy living catching wildfowl and summer-grazing cattle on the flood plain; they never starved because they could always live on eels. Everything changed in the seventeenth century when Charles I asked the Dutch engineer Cornelius
Vermuyden to work out how to drain the Fens. The locals hated him. Capital took a different view: what emerged was a vast new area of fertile, if still vulnerable, agricultural land, with the inestimable advantage for the new owners that you could make money without having to live in the bloody place. They were, in effect, inland colonists. ‘The Fen people,’ as Allan Brigham put it, ‘were the Red Indians.’

  In the new Fens there was work, and Vermuyden’s network of drains and washes – canals and flood meadows basically – enabled the ‘Fen Tigers’ to maintain vestiges of the old way of life into the twentieth century. They remained a breed apart: silent and mysterious in outsiders’ estimation; down to earth, tough and resilient in their own. I was lucky enough to find Rex Sly, who carried on his family’s 400-year tradition of farming the Fens until settling into semi-retirement as an author, producing a fine history of the place, From Punt to Plough. He agreed to escort me. Alas, in the midst of a very mild, very wet January, we picked the one day of ferocious freezing fog.

  I drove from Chatteris to meet Rex on the dead straight yet rather alarming back road that runs only inches from Vermuyden’s Forty-Foot Drain. One false move and the car’s a goner: it’s a regular occurrence after closing time. Rex took me on past Whittlesey Washes, which was now – after the downpours – a vast inland sea. Or so he said. Visibility was down to a few yards and for all I knew, there were vast herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the horizon. It all added to the mystique of the place. But even when the fog lifts, there is almost nothing to give any definition to the landscape; a miserable wind turbine or a pile of sugar beet comes as a relief. Sly can get lyrical about the big skies, as a Kansan or a Nebraskan might. But it is an acquired taste.