Granta now means ‘a magazine of new writing’, literary and (I guess) left-leaning. We think of its discovery of great young novelists across the globe. Maybe a tad precious in the eyes of some, but nevertheless overall a jolly good thing.

That is not how it started out in life. It began as a Cambridge student magazine in 1889, was very popular for several decades, but then struggled in the 1970s until it was rescued by Bill Buford, Pete de Bolla and others — when it became what we now have.

The very early days in the 1890s were nothing at all like this. It was typically ‘studentish’ — and what that meant at the time was very blokeish, full of satiric short essays, cartoons, squibs in verse, and attacks on women. The possibility that women might have an established place in the university was something which brought out the purest form of bile in these student journalists.

Along with my assistant, Debbie, I have been searching out the “women stuff”. It’s quite a time consuming process, partly because there is a lot of it (back to the old days before word searches), but partly because is is so easy to get distracted by all the other stuff: often silly, sometimes nasty, but a fascinating glimpse into a past university world.

Sometimes it seems wildly different from our own, sometimes painfully familiar. Yesterday Debbie came across this, a poem which offers vivid proof that the idea that university teachers are lazy bastards is not a new one. It’s called ‘The Mere Don’ and come in 9 verses:

O timely happy, timely wise,

Dons that extremely late arise,

Resolved to carry out the plan,

To work as little as they can;

******

First for the toils of the day prepare

By lounging in an easy chair,

Then in the class-room gabble o’er

The lecture oft rehearsed before

*********

Old lectures, coming round again,

Save us a sad expense of brain;

Dished up anew, demand not toil,

Nor cost a waste of midnight oil.

*******

The lecture o’er, with joy we munch,

With conscience clear, the solid lunch;

The gather up our weary toes

To take our well-deserved repose.

********

The afternoon this nobly spent,

We wake with infinite content,

Once more to face at Hall the work

That none can truly say we shirk.

********

The trivial talk, the audit-cask,

Will furnish all we ought to ask;

Room to enjoy ourselves, and drink,

Till we imagine what we think.

********

Thus lightened passes soft away

The memory of the toilsome day;

We say, as wearied we retire,

“The labourer deserves his hire.”

**********

If on our daily course our mind

Be set to shun the tasks assigned,

New pleasures shall our hearts possess

The joys of utter laziness.

*******

Our prayers to-night (effect of port)

Will be (as usual) very short:

O help us, this and every day,

To work as little as we pray.

********

I found myself wondering as I read this whether the don’s life in the late nineteenth century was as leisured and port soaked as the poem suggest. Or whether they worked just as hard as us, but had to take this cr*p anyway.

I, by the way, haven’t drunk port at high table for at least 30 years.