This remarkable ceremony was reported the next day in the Glasgow Evening Times:
A human skull decending suddenly on a cord from the ceiling to within a foot or so of his face was one of the shocks sustained today by the chairman at the prize-giving of the Glasgow Veterinary College, Buccleuch Street. The platform party was met by thunderous applause and banshee shrieks when they entered the hall in which the students were assembled. The opening remarks of the chairman, Mr Alexander Murdoch, were punctuated by loud interruptions and the speaker was threatened with early hoarseness. He was diffident, however, about having recourse to the water carafe because it looked suspiciously like an aquarium – a goldfish having been inserted there by some ‘person or persons unknown’. After his first half-dozen sentences, he raised his head and was confronted by a dark brown skull revolving slowly on a cord in front of his face. After a ‘look round’ at the platform party, the skull slowly rose to the ceiling again, from which it descended, ‘spider fashion’ at intervals, finally dropping with a loud bang on the table much to the alarm of the chairman. The students seemed to enjoy the command performance.
Alf had obviously appreciated the occasion, as his diary entry shows: ‘The prize-giving. What a rag! They hissed the unpopular profs, cheered the doctor, and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, and bawled remarks at the big-wigs as they entered. I enjoyed it, I can tell you!’
Alf threw himself willingly into this new way of life. A few weeks after the prize-giving, he went, in the company of seventy other students, to the Empress Theatre in St George’s Road. The students, already having had a drink or two, were intent on having a good time. The police were soon on the scene. One student kicked in the door of the theatre as he left, later receiving a fine of two guineas – a punishing sum for a student in those days. Alf made good his escape by running into the jungle of nearby tenements; his athletics training at school stood him in good stead that evening.
Riotous behaviour was not confined to ‘extra-curricular’ activities outside the walls of the college. Some of the lectures within bore more resemblance to wild parties than periods of study and in those early weeks at the college, James Alfred Wight was beginning to realise that life at Buccleuch Street was going to be a little different from that at Hillhead. In his unpublished novel, he later wrote about the teachers whose lot it was to teach these tearaway students:
Some of the staff were old men snatched from retirement and forced to spend their declining years in an unequal struggle with boisterous youth. Others were veterinary surgeons in practice in the city who combined their daily work with lecturing and, in the process, imparted a practical and commonsense slant to their instruction which stood their pupils in good stead in later years. They, like the older men, had a detached, fatalistic attitude to their job and took the view that if the students paid their fees it was up to them whether they gathered knowledge or acted the fool.
Professor Andy McQueen, who taught biology in the first year, read his notes out from papers in front of him and if he ever turned over two pages at once by mistake, he just carried on as if nothing had happened. Alf later wrote about one of his lectures in his novel and it illustrates the atmosphere at the college very accurately. He gave his old teachers varying noms de plume, and refers to Andy McQueen as ‘Professor King’.
The difference from school life first became apparent in the lecture rooms. Professor King, who taught biology, was an incredibly old and frail man who conducted his classes with total detachment. Stooping over a sheaf of yellowing notes, he mumbled almost inaudibly down at his desk and whether the students listened or not, was a matter of no concern to him; it was entirely up to them.
The class took their cue from the considerable number of failed men left over from the last year and stamped and cheered as though they were at a football match. This rowdiness started right at the beginning of the lecture when the roll was being taken. When the name of the only female was being called, there was an uproar of shouts and whistles while the poor girl, who was naturally shy by nature, coloured deep red and sank lower in her seat.
The other outbursts came at the jokes. Professor King, at the beginning of his teaching career in the later years of the nineteenth century, had decided that his lectures would be racy and full of wit, so he had pencilled in a comical allusion for each lecture. For nearly fifty years, he had not changed a single word of his lecture notes, so that successive generations of students knew exactly which joke was coming and where.
For instance, when he was discussing the snake Dasipeltis shedding its skin, he would clear his throat, pause and say ‘for Dasipeltis always returns the empties’. This was the signal for more stamping, wild yells and hysterical laughter from the class.
The only time he ever looked up from his papers was at the end of his lecture when he invariably drew a large watch from his waistcoat pocket, gazed around the students with a smile of childlike sweetness and said, ‘I see by my gold watch and chain that it is time to stop.’ Pandemonium then broke out again.
Another of the elderly teachers was Professor Hugh Begg who taught parasitology. He was a well-liked man, full of good advice to the students, but he was hard of hearing and so was only dimly aware of the tumult that characterised his lectures. He would raise his head, peer around him and say, ‘Wha’ … what’s that noise?’ One would need to be totally deaf not to hear the response from the assembled students. Hugh Begg did, however, have a piece of advice one day that Alf never forgot. He was a wise old man, with many years of experience behind him, and he was talking about the kind of life that awaited the veterinary surgeons of the future. On this occasion he had the ears of the class, and his theme – a vitally important one – was that they would learn by their mistakes.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said solemnly, ‘ye’ll never make veterinary surgeons until every last one o’ ye has filled a forty-acre field full o’ carcasses!’ Prophetic words.
When I talk to some of the young graduates in our practice in Thirsk, hearing of the pressure they were under at University, I cannot help casting my mind back to my father’s stories of his student years. The card games in the common-room, the time spent sitting happily in the cinemas rather than in lessons, and the riotous scenes in the lecture theatres when they did attend, paint a very different picture of veterinary education from that of today. However, despite the rather unorthodox lectures, the material given to the students was sound and, providing they worked and read the text books, they had every chance of qualifying within a reasonable time.
My father, well aware that the cost of his education was being borne largely by his parents, was determined to do well. He bought the necessary text books such as Sisson’s Anatomyand Animal Husbandryby Miller and Robertson, and spent many hours studying in the huge Mitchell Library which was near the college. He obviously found the atmosphere in the big library somewhat daunting and wrote in his diary: ‘That place depresses me. You can almost hear the brains throbbing.’
He was taught Animal Husbandry, Chemistry and Biology in the first year, and made a steady start. He passed his Chemistry and Biology, although he only just scraped through in Biology, attaining a mark of 46%. This led to a conversation with a fellow student that he repeated to me many times.