In February 2007 I received an unexpected email from Selwyn College Cambridge inviting me to attend a formal, black-tie dinner and give an after-dinner speech. I had at it happens spoken at an array of Cambridge Colleges, including a formal lecture at St John’s, but only to deliver standard sociological fare. This was different. I replied that I was willing to wear a suit, at a push, but drew the line at anything beyond that. That’s fine, came the reply. So I put a few notes together and headed off, initially to a ‘champagne’ reception in the senior common room at 7pm on Saturday 17 Feb.
The reception itself was enlightening. I got into conversation with a Fellow of Selwyn College who, I noticed, was sporting a small enamel badge on his lapel. ‘What does that indicate?’ I asked. ‘It confirms that I am among the top ten tiddlywinks players in the world’, he replied, straight-faced. And it did. In fact Selwyn College was apparently home to seven of the top ten. I cannot even now find the words to expand on this.
‘Is everything tickety boo’, asked our Chair prior to introducing me. I had decided on a theme that I hope I might improvise around for the requisite 20 minutes or so: ‘Who is the deviant?’ Deviance is not only a social relation, it depends on context. I told about the UCL medical student from Eton who was offended enough to make a formal complaint when I made a joking reference to young Etonians being ‘out of the ordinary’ (there were no repercussions). I explained how as a sociologist I was for many years a deviant in London Medical Schools. Indeed, wearing a mere dark suit in such distinguished and exquisitely dressed Selwyn company was I not at that very moment a social misfit, possessed of a mild if ultimately excusable stigma?
I then settled on a theme, the sociologist as deviant. I used two sources, a mock A-level paper in a 1974 issue of Punch, and some anonymous quotes from medical students’ essays dating back to my days at the Middlesex HMS.
I won’t reproduce all nine Punch questions here, but these four will give the flavour:
• ‘Sociology is the study of people who do not need to be studied, by people who do.’
‘Somebody introduced the Black Death, Somebody introduced Income Tax. Somebody introduced Sociology.’
‘All the Golden Ages of man, all the Belles Epoques, were characterized by one thing: an absence of sociologists.’
Which is these hostile assessments do you find most wounding? Which
Of them comes nearest to the truth? How would you attempt to improve the public image of sociology, while covertly furthering its subversive aims?
• State which of the following you consider the ultimate in obscenity: (a) an unearned income of £50,000 a year; (b) Oh Calcutta; (c) anyone over 30 enjoying sex; (d) the headmaster of a comprehensive school who dismisses his ‘D’ stream as ‘a shower of dummies’; (e) the Young Conservatives. Give reasons for your choice.
• Compose a short Pop Song embodying either The jubilant cry of an unmarried father who has broken his bourgeois shackles; or The lament of a Sixth Former who sees for the first time his classroom as the nursery of a counter-revolutionary ideology.
• What are the epistemological problems involved in the tying of academic sociology, and in particular structural-functional theory, to a ‘conservative’ ideological standpoint, with its temptation to treat man as homo sociologicus? And do you think that people with white stone balls on their gateposts deserve everything that is coming to them?
They may be products of their time – and I graduated in 1968 and started teaching medical students around 1972 – but you get the drift. I’ll limit myself here to two remarks: we were clearly feared, maybe more than currently; and this is likely because we were encouragingly oppositional!
Among the essay quotes were the following:
‘The illegitimacy figures are a common cause of misconception.’
‘The eskimo who did not offer his wife to his host would probably not be asked to dinner again.’
‘A typical, most likely suicide would be a man, who came from a large family, who was rich, had no kids, just divorced, was Protestant in religion, who lived in a worm temperate zone, and committed suicide at 4 o-clock in the afternoon of a sunny day in the middle of summer.’
‘At the beginning of the century, amongst the upper classes, work for women was still frowned upon; but with the introduction of many light industries, where physical strength was not needed, along with production lines, where brains weren’t needed, women came into their own.’
‘There are two things to know for the questionnaire as they are to be posted: firstly, is the house still there? (it may have been demolished). And secondly, do the people still live there? (they may have died).’
‘It can be proved that while sociology generally conforms to being a science, what we regard as a science may be a wrong assumption, and that the ‘real’ science, which we do not know about, can prove all science not to be a science, which will include sociology.’
‘It has been pointed out how the central pivot of the extended family, the ‘mum’, has now been taken over by the National Health Service.’
‘There are five social classes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.’
A bit of fun, but pegs to hang a few ‘educational’ jokes on that, sadly, I can no longer remember.
I ended with a series of unusual encounters when I was out conducting research interviews, of which I recall this trio. Visiting the home of a young adult with epilepsy in the early 1970s I was greeted by her mother, introduced to my interviewee, and I sat down, turned on my cassette recorder (remember them), and asked my first question. ‘She won’t answer you dear’, interjected mum, ‘she’s a deaf mute’. Nobody, most notably her GP, hadn’t thought to tell me. I improvised and all was well. The second encounter I’ve relayed in a previous fragment, so will be brief. Mr. M, who also had epilepsy, used to work for the Kray twins before his ‘canaries’ (seizures’) rendered him unreliable and so terminated his criminal career. While I interviewed him he fixed me with a slightly worrying gaze whilst continuously doing press-ups, first with one arm, then the other. Finally, I told about interviewing a London sex worker in a flat she shared with another worker. We’d just started the conversation when her flatmate wandered into the room, dressed only in G-string and wellingtons. ‘I’ve got to go to a client in his hotel room and he wants me to ride him like a horse. Do you think this looks ok?’ Lost for a sensible response, I think I commended a flat course rather than one over jumps. Such is the life, I explained, of a data-collecting sociologist.
Somehow or other I linked all this ‘fertile’ material to the theme – ‘who is the deviant?’ The punchline was a familiar one: it all depends on context, though there is a hint of the universal, and contexts are themselves invariably moulded by social structure and culture. Agency can also intrude, but it too is hemmed in by structure and culture.
It seemed to go down well, and in retrospect I quite enjoyed myself.