Living
Inside
Cirencester's Royal Agricultural University
It is a university like no other, teaching its often privileged students essential skills like land management and ensuring the food supply for future generations, but recently it has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Sophia Money-Coutts reports...
By Sophia
Money-Coutts
18 May 2016
https://www.tatler.com/gallery/inside-cirencesters-royal-agricultural-university
I am sitting
in a large hall surrounded by wholesome-looking boys in fleece waistcoats and
girls in fur-lined parkas. On the stage in front of us is a mock-up of Take Me
Out, the ITV dating-game show in which a man picks a date from a line-up of 30 women. Tonight, students from the
Royal Agricultural University (RAU) in Cirencester are staging their very own
version.
A
second-year student nicknamed Chipsy is our host for the evening. He is wearing
a leopard-print suit, a pair of Wellington boots and a signet ring.'What do you
look for in a woman?' Chipsy asks Ed, one of the male contestants. The girls on
stage smile nervously.'Good childbearing hips,' roars Ed. The hall erupts in
laughter. So far, so ordinary student antics. 'Let's get shitted!' shouts
Chipsy at the end of the show, encouraging everyone into the Tithe barn, the
campus bar where they serve £2 pints.
But 'Ciren'
isn't your typical university. It never has been. It has only recently become a
university, for a start, having been upgraded from college in 2013 when the
number of students tipped over 1,000. It has also been in the headlines this
year for a rape case, with four former students charged with assaulting a woman
on the night of the May Ball in 2014. The university's official position at the
time was to immediately suspend all four and comment simply that it was a
police matter. Meanwhile, the university's vice-chancellor, Professor Chris
Gaskell, kept its president, the Prince of Wales, updated on the legal
proceedings. 'We work on a no-surprises basis, so he knew all about it,'
Gaskell tells me during my three days as an honorary student there. The four
students involved were cleared after the trial collapsed in April, but cases
like this have affected various British universities in recent years and there
are increasing concerns about the sexualised atmosphere on campuses across the
country.
Gaskell,
however, says he believes that student behaviour is changing with the
introduction of higher university fees: 'There are shifts, which other
universities have noticed too. The £9,000 fee has induced a different behaviour
pattern. There is a greater concentration on work now, because you're paying
for it and the graduate market is more competitive. Come out with a 2:2 these
days and you're going to be bottom of the pile.' Not that you can study degrees
like PPE or history of art here, though. Instead, the RAU offers more than 30
courses like agriculture and farm management, real estate and equine studies
(nicknamed 'pony-patting'), traditionally to dukes' sons in line to inherit
half of Devon, but today also to women and increasing numbers of foreign
students, with 48-plus countries milling about on campus. 'We had a guy who
owned the biggest sugar plantation in Zimbabwe last year,' one student tells
me.
The next
afternoon, I visit one of the university's three farms, a few fields across
from the main campus. Because who wants to be sitting in a boring old library
when you can be outside in the bracing spring air inspecting tractors? 'We go
down lower than milk prices,' says a sticker on the back of a Discovery, one of
dozens of muddy student cars parked in the farmyard.
A group of
about 60 first-year students in beanies and tweed coats, one with a small
dachshund on a lead (students can bring their dogs to university with them;
they're just not allowed on the main campus), gather around two tractors - a
red one and a blue one. The blue one has tyres taller than me and is controlled
by an iPad Air.
'What's it
worth?' I ask Tom Overbury, a lecturer at Cirencester for 30 years and a farmer
himself, much loved by his students for his fruity sense of humour. 'Ooooh, 80
or 90 grand,' he says before talking to the students about something called
black grass. Not, I learn, a grass that is black, but a prolific weed causing
British farmers trouble with their crops. Other classes include hands-on
lessons in vocational skills like sheep-shearing, chainsaw-wielding,
drystone-walling, blacksmithing and equine dissection. Which is perhaps not so
fun with a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, I go to a local pub called the Wild
Duck Inn on my second night to meet not one but two double-barrelled Hugos,
both second-year agriculture students.
'Here, have
my seat,' says Blond Hugo, leaping from his bar stool. Brunette Hugo talks me
through his week of lectures and student nights: 'Monday morning's a
write-off. Thursday morning's a write-off. In fact, I have 9am lectures most
days and they're all write-offs,' he sighs. Brunette Hugo is 23, lives on a
farm in Worcestershire and went to London for the first time a few months ago.
He also owns nine Schöffel waistcoats
- the £130 fleece gilets that are the
unofficial uniform of the male Ciren student - along with jazzy socks and
colourful trousers. Brunette Hugo lives with Blond Hugo, 21, and four other
boys (who aren't called Hugo) in one of the most sought-after student houses,
Bartonbury. He shows me a picture on his phone. It's a yellow-stone Cotswolds
manor house with a charming arched doorway - the sort of place a Goldman Sachs
banker would be chuffed with. 'Plus it's only 500 feet from campus,' he says,
'although I still drive there.''Can I come and see the house?' I ask. 'No,' say
both Hugos at once, because it's apparently in a 'chronic' state of untidiness.
They went through a phase of trying to keep one room clean at all times but it
didn't last.
Blond Hugo
mentions a club called the Hedgehogs, Cirencester's equivalent of the
Bullingdon Club, whose members are prone to drinking many bottles of Muddy
Wellies, the cider and ale brand started by enterprising former students and
stocked in the campus shop (alongside prominent bottles of Famous Grouse). The
Hedgehogs also play games of rugby in shooting socks and Wellingtons, with
matches being started with the firing of three double-barrelled shotguns.
Sam
Guinness, 21, is another second-year agriculture student. Over a cup of tea in
his sitting room, with a clock made from a bottle of Jägermeister on the wall,
he talks me through other nightlife options. Cirencester has one club, ReVA,
and another bar called Seventeen Black, popular on Mondays, when you can buy
four Jägerbombs for a fiver. 'Weekends here are completely dead,' says Sam,
because students are away shooting or hunting. He shows me a photo of three
pheasants hanging from a washing line in the garden of another student house.
There's also a popular pub called the Tunnel, frequented by students because
it's fairly remote, so there are no neighbours to upset.
According to
Fred Dawes, a Masters student who lives half an hour away from the university
with his uncle, Detmar Blow, some years ago there was a group of students who
decided that it might be cheaper to club together and buy a pub rather than
spend three years paying someone else for their pints. So that's exactly what
they did. We are chatting in the atrium, where students convene on leather
sofas between lectures, eating their hangovers away with paninis. Sitting on a
neighbouring sofa is Dick Charteris, Lord Elcho - son of the Earl of Wemyss and brother of Mary Charteris.
Another Masters student, he is working towards a dissertation about Scottish
land reform.
'What will
you go on to do with your degree?' I ask Fred. 'Work on an estate,' he says.
'Any estate.' And he'll almost certainly have a job before leaving the
university thanks to its impressive employability rating, with over 98 per cent
of students walking straight into a job (in comparison, Cambridge had an
employability rating of only 88 per cent last year). Because, despite all the
high jinks and jokes about pheasants and red trousers, the university has
always churned out graduates who go on to play major roles across Britain and
beyond. Whether that's managing estates (their own or someone else's), working
for a stud farm or becoming a property developer, an environmental officer or
even a cheese buyer for Waitrose.
The
university was set up in 1845, when 25 young men (it was boys-only until 1979)
enrolled to learn about farming methods. The 25-acre Cotswolds site was leased
by the local landowner, Earl Bathurst, and an approving Queen Victoria gave it
a royal charter. One member of the Royal Family or other has been a patron ever
since. Sepia photographs show Queen Mary grimacing in front of the main
building, a big gothic house that now contains offices, meeting rooms, student
bedrooms and a Hogwarts-esque dining hall. The Prince of Wales has just donated 30 apple trees
from Highgrove for a new orchard.
Reading a
list of alumni is like flicking through Debrett's: dukes, marquesses, earls,
viscounts, a cluster of baronets, even a Hawaiian prince called Jonah who
attended at the turn of the 20th century. In more recent times, graduates have
included Captain Mark Phillips and Britain's richest MP, Richard Benyon, plus
Jonathan Dimbleby, the trainer Nicky Henderson and the Grand National-winning
jockey turned journalist Marcus Armytage, who studied here in the Eighties.
'My lurcher
and I learned a lot more about poaching from my housemate than rural estate
management from the RAU,' says Armytage. 'One night, he and a friend retrieved
a deer and we were raided by the police the next morning. We had to get the
stiff carcass out of the cottage while they started their search. We managed to
hide it in the garden and they never did find it. Apart from venison, we did
not want for trout too much either.'
'For me, the
greatest part was a group of like-minded souls and the great lasting
friendships that were made,' says the Duke of Argyll, who studied here shortly
afterwards. 'Of course, work had to be done in the lecture hall - but also out
in the fields, woods, deer forests, grouse moors and salmon rivers. I have a
great deal of respect for a place that can instil such passion and respect for
the world that we live in.' It's hardly surprising that 'Ciren' has been
labelled a 'finishing school for toffs' - but that, I'm told, is unfair
nowadays.
'It used to
be like a medium-sized public school without the rules,' says James Walker, a
former student and union chairman in 2000, and currently the director of
Savills Country Department. 'But it's a very different place now, much more
academic. Which is exactly what's required for the UK to lead rural economies
across the globe.' This is also a particularly significant year for the
university because Professor Gaskell, a veterinary scientist, is retiring and
making way for the first ever female boss, another veterinary specialist,
Professor Joanna Price. The university is keen to point out that it's more
egalitarian and more relevant than ever, given the various challenges that
farmers face in Britain and across the world.
One morning,
I sit in on a Masters class about sustainable farming in Africa, the classroom
decorated with posters about organic apples and lettuce. Dr Richard Baines, the
lecturer, talks about a method of farming that could revolutionise the
situation for emerging farmers in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Afterwards, I have a cup of tea with Jackie, 31, from Namibia, who finds
Gloucestershire a bit cold and will return home later this year to work for the
corporate-responsibility department of a bank. The next day, I go to a 9am
livestock lecture and listen to a lively debate about which cows to crossbreed
for maximum milk output. There is even talk of 'female semen', something I was
certainly never taught about at university.
'There is a
major opportunity - indeed responsibility - for the university as society
tackles the global issues of food production and land use; issues made all the
more crucial by a growing world population, constraints on energy and the
challenges of climate change,' says Professor Gaskell, adding that he'll miss
the day-to-day interaction with the students when he leaves in the summer.
'Occasionally it has its challenges,' he says wryly, 'but it is a fairly
vibrant environment.'
'Does
everyone sleep with one another?' I ask a second-year student, wondering just
how vibrant things get. '100 per cent yes,' the student replies. Which doesn't
single Cirencester out from other universities (it's been steadily increasing
its female-to-male ratio in recent years - currently 47:53); the only
difference here being that because of its relatively small size, everyone knows
one another's business, and campus gossip spreads quickly.
'You might
not go home one night,' says another student. 'But before you even get back to
your room the next morning, everyone knows about it because it's been all over
WhatsApp.' An app called Yik Yak, which allows users to post anonymous messages
and others to vote and comment on them, also encourages campus gossip. 'Fittest
fresher on campus?' asks a Yik Yak user to various replies, including one wag
who simply replied, 'Your mum.'
On my last
day, I stand on the sidelines of one of the rugby pitches, watching a group of
male and female students play a peculiar hybrid game - part rugby, part
netball. There is a lot of running up and down and shrieking, mud streaked all
over the players' faces, one boy in neon-pink socks, another with fluffy
leopard-print earmuffs. The university's motto is a Virgil quote - Avorum
Cultus Pecorumque, which means 'Caring for the fields and the beasts'. To which
Virgil might have added - 'while having a bloody good time'.
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