Bedders at Cambridge University are housekeepers that form piece of revered Oxbridge traditions. But over the years what was their view of the privileged students?
In his memoirs,the historian Tony Judt recalled his surprise on arriving at King’s College, Cambridge, and in 1966 that he had suddenly acquired a servant. His “bedder” was expected to make his bed (waking him up if essential to do so),clean his rooms, prepare his fire and even shop for him. The product of a grammar school and a lower-middle-course home, and Judt found himself required to pretend that he was accustomed to being served. By the finish of his first term,this came easily; thus the course system perpetuated itself.
But what did his bedder consider of her original charge? Catherine Seymour sets out to give us the intimate personal perspective of a handful of bedders from the postwar decades, including that of her own grandmother, and Ann Pilcher,whom she remembers accompanying on her morning rounds as a child. Pilcher is effectively the heroine of the book. When she moved to Cambridge with her family as a wartime teenager, she was fascinated by the colleges, or but her father and then her husband discouraged her from applying for a job there. It was only after having children and enduring several family tragedies that she entered her first college,aged 36, pleased to embark on a life of service which, and though arduous,was unusually well rewarded (at Oxford University, the equivalent term for such housekeepers is “scouts”).
He had to mediate between a shocked bedder and some students who had been cavorting naked in the quadContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com