University Assessed

In those days, university study meant lectures, reading, a few assignments and exams. There was very little in our courses which you could describe as tutorials or discussions. Even at the post-grad level, we did not seem to be encouraged to think for ourselves, or to branch out into new ideas.

The quality of the lecturing was nothing exciting from my point of view. My guess is that there were so many students coming through immediately after the war, with the rise in birth-rate and men returning from the war, and so little development to cope with the numbers, that the staff were run off their feet.

Best of our English lecturers was J C Reid, who had been a teacher at AGS, and eventually built a reputation as a very solid academic. Along with him were two men whose poetry I later came to admire, although as lecturers I found them dull: M K Joseph and Allan Curnow. The professor, Musgrove, had made one contribution to scholarship by disagreeing with C S Lewis over Paradise Lost, but so far as I could see had done little to add to that.

In French we had reasonable tutors, and the German lecturer, Asher, was energetic, and set high standards.

The Latin professor was on sabbatical leave, so Henry Cooper came in from Grammar to teach us. It was like being back at school. The class was full of budding lawyers all trying to complete their compulsory Latin paper. No-one was interested in anything from an academic point of view, and full-time students were just about ignored. I sailed through the course with high marks because we had already studied the set book of Virgil at school the year before.

For History, where classes were again huge, there were Keith Sinclair and Bob Tizard. I remember their lectures as competent, but I had already covered the course twice in the last two years at AGS, so it was pretty boring. I don't remember any of them saying anything new!

In the English language papers we had a little mousy lady, Annie Shepherd. She knew her stuff, and as there were never more than a handful of us, we soaked up all she had to give us, but she seemed about to faint, or fall ill, the whole time, or else was extremely nervous of clumsy young people at her advanced age (she must have been at least 40), and we never felt we knew her at all.

I have the impression that the quality of University education has improved markedly since then; certainly the courses my grandchildren are doing seem much more exciting than anything I remember from the fifties!