The Fountain Issue 31 Summer 2022

Page 20

IN PRAISE OF A GENTLEMAN’S THIRD by Professor Cleveland Stewart-Patterson (1952)

Looking back 70 years, Trinity was a different place than it is now. I thought readers might be interested in a perspective from that time, which may be shocking to more recent graduates! It has been observed by one graduate that ‘Cambridge is not primarily a place of learning or a place of examination. It is a place where you live for three years.’* My three years of Cambridge life were formally acknowledged by the granting, with great ceremony, of a ‘Gentleman’s Third’. My tutor was sadly disappointed in me. I was not disappointed, for the outcome was not, I assured myself, the just reward for stupidity or sloth; it was the result of choice. I arrived at Trinity from Canada in 1952 with outstanding school marks and a Dominion and Colonial Exhibition. After graduation, I pursued a successful business life, obtained an MBA and a PhD in Management from McGill University and retired as an Emeritus Professor of Finance at a respectable

The Cambridge University ski team (likely 1955) included O’Donnell Redfern (1952, 2nd from left), Chris Gladstone (1952, 3rd from right), and me (2nd from right).

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university. I like to think that my tutor would have softened his disapproval had he been alive. However, in my three years at Trinity, I was a miserable failure if assessed by the formal criteria of the Natural Sciences Tripos. All I managed to salvage from my unfocused studies was a joyous, mind-expanding, life-changing, educational experience. It has also been observed that ‘a man learns his job after he has got it, and not before; what is required of him is not knowledge, but the capacity to learn’. At Trinity, I may not have acquired enough knowledge of the kind required to excel in exams, but I did acquire a lifelong joy in learning about the wonders of the world in which I worked and lived. I retained little scientific fact but owe much to the rigorous scientific way of thought that I absorbed from my tutors and fellow students. It would be tedious to expand on my Trinity experiences at any length except to highlight a few that led me to the deliberate pursuit of my inglorious Third. I came up to Trinity full of carefully prescribed book learning from school and a year as an undergraduate at McGill but woefully ignorant of the wider world. The freedom that Cambridge offered to allocate one’s own time, to attend or not attend lectures in one’s subject, to attend any lecture one wished in unrelated subjects, to roam the stacks of the University Library, and to ’rub brains’ with outstanding tutors one-onone, was extraordinary. I attended labs and dutifully carried out my tutors’ assignments but spent the bulk of my academic energies wandering through the unexplored territories which beckoned me from outside my official field of study. I remember attending exhilarating lectures by Pevsner on architecture, Needham on Chinese civilisation, Joan Robinson on economics, Kitson-Clark on British history, and many


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