A gentleman’s third

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 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

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).

At Versailles in August 1955, with our trusty 1927 Rolls Royce. Left to right: Michael Whitehead (Christ’s 1953), John Buxton (1952), Fred Warwick (Christ’s 1953) and me, taken by the fifth member of our expedition, Richard Oliver (1952).

others. To the extent that I remained interested in science, I was more fascinated by the deep questions raised in lectures by Dirac, Hoyle, and Bragg than I was in the nuts and bolts of doing physics. I spent many happy hours in the Library and in bookstores, and with friends more knowledgeable than I, exploring the ideas that emanated from these luminaries.

Much of my most valuable Trinity experience was non-academic and was enjoyed away from Great Court. The three long vacations allowed me to travel with good friends the length and breadth of Europe, from Trondheim to Istanbul, generally hitchhiking and camping or hostelling, but on one occasion driving around Spain for six weeks in a 1927 Rolls Royce (see us above!). Travelling in the early 1950s was quite different from touring today, and I have many fading slides of my companions standing in the middle of an empty Parthenon, sleeping on the ground in the shadow of the Lion Gate at Mycenae or the pillars of Paestum. We did the Grand Tour but we also met many people in all walks of life and from many cultures.

Winter also took me away to Europe. I won a half Blue in skiing and was a member of the British Universities’ team for three years. This required me to spend six weeks each Christmas break training and racing against teams from France, Italy, Austria, and other countries, as well as against Oxford. I also gained valuable management experience as a member of the committee which organised the transportation and housing of some 400 Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates and hangers-on at a resort each year.

Finally, of course, were the many friends that I made at Trinity and in other Colleges. These too took up much of the time that I should have been spending on my Tripos, but perhaps I learned as much from them as I did in any activity. They, like my other wonderful College experiences, have had a lasting influence. I can sum up Trinity as a wondrous place, where even a so-called third-class degree gives you a first-class education.

Graduation day.

Hitchhiking through Europe; with Michael Whitehead in the empty theatre at Epidaurus, Greece, in 1954.

*E. C. Pearce, Master of Corpus Christi 1914–1927.

Dr Cleveland Stewart-Patterson is Emeritus Professor of Finance, Concordia University, Montreal.