It's a Don's Life (6 page)

Veils, turbans and ‘rivers of blood’

9 October 2006

Controversy about how other cultures and religions dress is centuries old – stretching at least as far back as ancient Roman
anxieties about the flamboyantly coloured costume of the eastern priests of the goddess Cybele (also known as ‘the Great Mother’).
It’s odd that most of those who have recently huffed and puffed on either side of the Jack Straw ‘veil debate’ seem to have
forgotten the almost equally fierce arguments in the 1960s about a quite different article of religious clothing: Sikh turbans.

When I was a child growing up in the West Midlands, one of the big issues of multiculturalism (though we didn’t yet call it
that) was whether local Sikh bus drivers and conductors should be allowed to work with long beards and their traditional headdress.
It provoked national debate and banner headlines no less doomladen than what we have seen and heard. Panic intensified after
one Wolverhampton Sikh threatened to burn himself to death unless the prohibition was relaxed. There were rumoured to be many
more prepared to follow his suicidal example.

Opinions were, of course, divided. Many Sikhs felt that their religion was being insulted by a prohibition on turbans. Others
were uneasy about the hard line stance, worrying about the ‘worsening of community harmony’ that it might cause. But the problem
was resolved when in 1969 the Wolverhampton Transport Authority gave in to the pressure. I cannot now remember what had caused
their opposition in the first place. But, apart from the old-fashioned assumption that men on the buses would not be the same
without peaked caps, I imagine it came down to some version of (in Straw’s words) ‘separation’ and ‘difference’.

Forty years on, Sikhs are still threatened by the endemic racism that even now affects the lives of anyone in this country
who is not ‘safely’ white. And, since 9/11, there has been some unease in the New York transport department about traditional
Sikh dress. But no one in Britain, apart from the lunatic fringe of the BNP, would surely think anything odd about a bus driver
wearing a turban (and most of us would be only too delighted to have conductors back, whatever they were wearing).

It is hard at the distance of almost 40 years to recollect the intensity of feeling generated by this particular controversy.
But it lay directly behind Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in Birmingham in 1968. Towards the
end of this, he quoted the words of the then Labour MP and government minister John Stonehouse, decrying the stance of the
local Sikhs and their campaign for the right to wear the turban.

‘The Sikh communities’ campaign,’ said Stonehouse, in tones no better than Powell’s, ‘to maintain customs inappropriate in
Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept
the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous
fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker: whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly
condemned.’

This was no straightforward party political issue.

Uncharacteristically, Powell seems to have overlooked the way the quotation might contradict his own arguments. True, the
Sibyl was referring to the bloodshed that would result from Aeneas’ attempt to found his new city in Latin territory, integrating
his own line into that of the native population. But that bloodshed would lead to a strong and proudly mixed community of
Trojans and Latins. And Aeneas’ Rome in due course would become the most successful multicultural society of the ancient world
– granting full citizenship to the inhabitants of its imperial territories, and eventually seeing Spaniards, Africans and
others on the Roman imperial throne.

Sikh turbans or not, Powell should have thought a bit harder about the implications of his clever classical allusion.

Comments

An analogy from a different epoch offers other morals: When the king of Hungary was doing badly in the then war on terror
(aka crusade against the Ottomans) in 1463, he tried to divert attention by accusing his neighbour the prince of Wallachia
of cruelty. The famous bit is that this guy (known to posterity as Vlad the Impaler) impaled his victims on stakes; a lesser
known piece of spin against him was that when Italian ambassadors came to see him they took off their hats but not their turbans
– yes, Italians wore turbans back then – and that Vlad, angered at this discourtesy, allegedly nailed them down to their wearers’
heads. Back then, intolerant response to strange customs was something shameful to accuse your rival of doing, not something
to be boasting about to the press.

SW FOSKA

Where is your spleen?

13 October 2006

This week I started my lectures on Ancient History to first year students. Following a tradition invented by one of my colleagues
20 years ago, I kicked off the very first lecture by handing round a skeletal map of the Mediterranean – and asked them to
mark several key places (including Athens, Sparta, Troy, Crete, Rome and Pompeii). The results are collected in for scrutiny,
but entirely anonymously. No names are required.

The idea is to demonstrate to the freshers that they really do need to get an atlas out before they start sounding off about
the Peloponnesian War, or whatever. The accuracy this year was no better or worse than usual. Most of my 100 or so clever
first years could place Rome and Pompeii, but Sparta wandered dangerously (from time to time popping up in modern Turkey)
while Alexandria was a mystery to many, and one at least appeared not to know that Crete was an island. Are they pulling my
leg? I wondered ...

Over the decades this little exercise has given the new students a wonderful feeling of shared ignorance. The dons, on the
other hand, have enjoyed shaking their heads at the very idea that a student with straight (classical) As at A level still
doesn’t know where Sparta is.

For centuries, dons have combined a loving over-commitment to their students with a rhetoric that deplores the ignorance of
those they are teaching. The ‘Can-you-believe that-they-have-never-heard-of-Pericles?’ line is one of the most primitive and
powerful of all donnish bonding rituals.

This struck me very strongly this week when I rushed from that first year lecture to steal an hour of work in the University
Library. I was there to look up some of the pamphlets of the 1860s written at the height of Victorian debates about what should
or should not be taught in schools and universities. If anyone now thinks that education is over-politicised, they should
try the nineteenth century. Those Victorian gurus debated even more furiously than our own the rights and wrongs of the curriculum.
And they were just as ready to blame the ‘government’.

‘I will now give you a catalogue of things which a highly educated man may be in total ignorance of,’ he wrote. ‘He probably
will know nothing of the anatomy of his own body. He will have not the slightest idea of the difference between the arteries
and the veins, and he may not know whether the spleen is placed on the right or the left side of his spine. He may have no
knowledge of the simplest truths of physics and would not be able to explain the barometer or thermometer.’

Sounds familiar? My first thought was to get a new questionnaire up for next week to see how my students did on these central
issues of basic science. Until I realised that I would be hard pressed myself to say on which side of my spine my spleen lay.
In fact it was probably the likes of me (though you would have to change the gender) that Lowe had in mind.

As these Victorians saw, there is an issue here not just about what facts people should know, but about what education is
for, and who is responsible for it. Our generation tends to think that we are the first to have wondered about this. Far from
it.

A captive audience

23 October 2006

Classics offers more interesting speaking opportunities than you might imagine. In addition to the talks at schools, colleges,
breakfast clubs, museums and the like, I occasionally get a more surprising gig. Some recent favourites have been pre-performance
talks at the Coliseum (engaging the audience with the myth of, say, Semele before they see what Handel did with it) and a
guest appearance at the wonderful ‘Treasury Women’s Group’ (though that was more in the guise of female academic than strictly
classicist).

But most memorable of all have been the couple of occasions I have gone to lecture to the inmates at a high-security prison.
It’s an extraordinarily electric kind of teaching. Partly because it’s one of the few (relatively) free opportunities that
they have for face to face interchange with the outside world, they give it far more attention than your average audience
– half of whom are worrying if they’ll make the bus/ have time to get to the supermarket/meet their girlfriend when you’ve
finished speaking. No chance of that for these guys.

A captive audience, as colleagues couldn’t resist – a bit predictably – joking.

On one of these occasions I talked to them about Roman gladiators and the blood and guts of the Roman arena. It wasn’t long
before some bright spark observed that the horrors I was describing would have been their own fate, as convicted criminals,
had they lived in the ancient world. True. But what really surprised them was the fact that the Romans did not, by and large,
use detention as a punishment. Roman prisons were for holding people before trial or before execution. In fact, much the same
was true in Europe until the eighteenth century, when punishment-by-detention became the norm.

I resisted the temptation to say to them what I really thought – that in two thousand years’ time our contemporary obsession
with incarceration will seem as weird to future historians as the gladiatorial games now seem to us. Sure, they will observe,
some criminals presented a real danger to the rest of the population. But what on earth drove a sophisticated society to bang
up even those who presented no physical danger at all, in an over-crowded community of other criminals – out of which some
75% emerged (surprise, surprise) to commit another crime within two years? How could they not have seen that it was a mechanism
for the repetition (not prevention) of crime, and an extremely costly one at that? It takes considerably more than the average
annual wage to keep a prisoner inside for a year.

This isn’t primarily the fault of those who work in prisons. The people I have met staffing education departments are doing
a heroic job in trying to give some of their charges a leg up, and out of crime. But they are terribly under-resourced, and
the frequent moving of prisoners from one gaol to another makes any continuity of instruction really hard. In general, the
prison service seems to be doing its best, as you sense if you look at the literature they issue for prisoners and others
– even if the rhetoric occasionally misfires. (I thought that the phrase ‘in-cell television is being gradually introduced
as an earnable privilege, but it may not be available in your prison’ sounded uncomfortably like one of those airline notices
‘we apologise if your first choice of meal is not available ...’)

Things will only change when the public and the tabloid press have been convinced that incarceration is not the answer. And
that will take a Home Secretary with more muscle and vision than any we have had for decades.

What did the Romans wear under their togas?

27 October 2006

If you teach at Oxford or Cambridge, you get used to the regular bursts of outrage about ‘the Oxbridge interview’. I posted
a few months back about the myth that we are all a load of upper-class twits who use the interview to pick students just like
ourselves. Wrong on both counts.

What did not get headlined was the fact that the survey that had brought all these questions to light had been commissioned,
and then hyped, by a company which specialises in helping potential students prepare for their Oxbridge interview – for a
fee. There’s nothing like a bit of media panic to send frightened kids (and their over-anxious parents) rushing off with their
cheque books to get some ‘specialist’ advice.

My thoughts on this will, I hope, be reassuring. More than that, they are free.

The first thing that any student going to an interview needs to remember is that we are wanting to let people in, not keep
them out. Of course, it may not feel like that to the kid on the receiving end. And, of course, we have many more applicants
than there are places. Not everyone can be successful. That said, we are trying at the interview to get each candidate to
show themselves at their very best. We want to see how good they are, not how bad.

Sometimes this takes surprising forms, as with those odd questions. Everyone who conducts these interviews will tell you that
over-preparation is as damaging to a candidate’s chances as under-preparation. I have often sat and listened to some hopeful
reeling off, unstoppably, a prepared speech on the perfection of the Virgilian hexameter or why the Spartans won the Peloponnesian
War. Bowling them a googly (‘So what do you think the Romans wore under their togas?’) is sometimes the only way of throwing
them a lifeline – of giving them the opportunity to show that they can think independently, not from the prepared script.

So if I was giving one piece of advice to those preparing for an interview in my subject? Much cheaper than being professionally
‘groomed’ – I would go out and buy (or borrow) a book about any aspect of the ancient world that interests you and one that
is not a mainline part of your school syllabus, or takes you beyond it. Read it; know its title (you’d be surprised how many
interviewees can only remember the colour of the dust jacket of their favourite reading matter); and be prepared to talk about
it if you are asked – but no prepared speeches, remember.

By the way, I don’t think I shall be interviewing this year. So please don’t anyone go wasting their time trying to find out
what Romans did wear under their togas. Anyway, sorely tempted as I have been, I have never actually asked the question. In
fact, I don’t think we know the answer. But if I were to ask it, the point of the question (apart from stopping the unstoppable
prepared script) would be to see if the candidate could begin to think through the limits of our ignorance about antiquity,
as well as imagine how you might go about filling in the gaps. It wouldn’t be a ‘trick’ at all.

Comments

DAVID KIRWAN

MARY

BINGLEY

Surely, if you rule the known world with an iron fist, you can wear whatever you damned well please underneath your toga.

BENJAMIN WARREN

Don’t you see, the question of what is worn under the toga is precisely what is unfair about the interview!

Having codified the actual line of inquiry (‘What are the limits of our knowledge about the antiquities and how can we overcome
them, to some extent?’) in an off-puttingly flippant remark, you leave it up to luck whether the candidate will dare to climb
down from their anxiety about the situation and engage with your very insensitive tone at complete ease.

How many clever, creative, talented students would simply go, ‘Oh Christ, that’s one of those Cambridge Questions that you
can’t have an answer to!’ How many would be blasted off their stride?

For goodness’ sake, the Finals aren’t written in that kind of paracryptic style, so why on earth should you so phrase the
questions given to students who are at a Sixth-Form level, who will be thinking that they are arrived at one of life’s most
defining and important moments (regardless if this is true)?

The ridiculous distinction between your paragraph-length explanation and your glib example cry out for the simple response:
‘Just ask them the bloody question you had in mind!’

UTTERLY DISGUSTED