Nicky Woolf: Goes way back
It seems that those who would prophesy doom are entirely wrong - students at the University of York are, in fact, getting cleverer by the year! That is, if the age-old institution known as University Challenge is anything to go by. Since the beginning of term, our lads and lasses have resoundingly thrashed both Harris Manchester College Oxford and Brighton University at Jeremy Paxman’s famously tricky quiz show. Congratulations all, on a stunning victory. It’s a pity, though, that our parents’ generation here at York couldn’t achieve such heady heights.
Forty years ago, our student predecessors were, according to Nouse of 26 October 1967, viciously torn limb from intellectual limb by students of Cardiff University. The extent of our defeat was absolutely spectacular. We scored fifteen points to Cardiff’s one hundred and sixty - a record-breaking whitewash. I can almost hear Paxman sneering. But according to the Editorial of that edition of Nouse, the fault is not (prepare for elderly smugness) entirely attributable to advances in student intelligence.
The Editor, who had obviously taken the embarrassment of York’s defeat deeply to heart, was quick to point out furiously that, unlike the 2007 team forty years later, York’s 1967 foursome contained not one History or English student. Furthermore, the team was apparently cursed with poor organisation from the start by the infamous (at the time) Desmond Fitzgerald, who, according to the editorial “is the first person to admit that he takes very little seriously except his golf.” He was decried for having only seen the program “a couple of times!”
What a mess. But you have to admire that sort of cavalier attitude. Remember, at this time the University was only a couple of years old, while Cardiff students had had since 1893 to cut their University Challenge teeth. Despite the time constraints, sixties York’s miniscule student body and any number of setbacks (including, we are told, Desmond’s personal devotion to perfecting his swing, and his congenital apathy) we still managed to break a record - even if it was for failure. Still, to be fair to Desmond, he stuck by his team through their shame; insisting despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that his team “could beat any proffered from within the University.” Sure they could, Desmond. Sure they could.
