The Wooden Spoon

Rank (dis)order in Cambridge 1753-1909

Introduction

The central role of mathematics in Cambridge in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries has been described and explored in a number of studies.1 Prompted initially

by the fame of its local hero Isaac Newton, but supercharged from the early

nineteenth century by the importation of French algebraic methods, it made the

university into a powerhouse of research, carried out in a distinctive style which was

rooted in an institutional tradition of pedagogy and examination. In striking contrast

with Oxford, the leading centre of classical scholarship, Cambridge saw mathematics

as its exemplary and defining knowledge. The contrast was reflected in the examining

practices of the two universities: while Oxford operated a relaxed regime of oral

examination with minimal distinction between candidates, Cambridge developed a

system of increasingly rigorous and minutely-graded numerical ranking.2 There were

from 1753 three classes of successful candidates in the honours examination (the

Senate House Examination, later known as the Mathematical Tripos): Wranglers,

Senior Optimes and Junior Optimes. The titles derived from the system of oral

disputations (‘wranglings’), ‘optime disputasti’ being the verdict on a candidate who

had performed very well. The first recorded use of ‘Wrangler’ in print was in 1751,

when the author of a pamphlet addressed to the Vice-Chancellor commented that ‘The

Wranglers, I am told, on the first day of their Exercise, have usually expected, that the

young ladies of their Acquaintance … would wish them joy of their Honours’.

1 W.W. Rouse Ball, A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge, 1889),

J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from

the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989); A. Warwick, Masters of

Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003). 2 C.A. Stray, ‘From oral to written examination: Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin 1700-1914’,

History of Universities 20.2 (2005), pp. 76-130; id., ‘Non-identical twins: Classics in

nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge’, in id., ed., Oxford Classics: Teaching and

Learning 1800-2000 (London, 2007), pp. 1-13.

2

Apparently feeling that the term ‘Wrangler’ needed glossing for some of his readers,

he added in a footnote that ‘When the Scholars take their first Degree in Arts, they are

distinguished according to their different improvements, by several marks of Honour

and Disgrace. Those, to whom the first Honours are given, are appointed to perform

certain Disputations, and are from thence called Wranglers’.3 Though the writer felt

the need to explain the term, presumably for a readership beyond Cambridge, the

relaxed tone of his explanation suggests that the informal title was not a new one.

The intensity of competition and grading led to the bestowing of a distinctive

title, Senior Wrangler, on the highest scorer in the first class, who was idolised as a

local hero. In the graduation ceremony in the university’s Senate House he received

his degree first, and quite apart from his fellow-graduands.4 The competition between

individuals was reinforced by college loyalties: in his diary for 17 January 1834,

Joseph Romilly, university Registrary and fellow of Trinity College, wrote, ‘Our

champion Birks is beaten: Kelland of Queens is the Hero of the day.’5 For much of

the nineteenth century, the hero’s triumph was celebrated with a dinner and toasts in

his own college, and speedily reported in both national and regional newspapers. The

prestige of the Senior Wrangler was such that a volume listing all the holders of the

position was published in 1907.6

3 Friendly and Honest Advice of an Old Tory to the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge (London,

1751). The anonymous author remarks that his text was written in November 1750.

4 See the frontispiece to vol. 1 of W.A. Huber’s English Universities (London, 1843), which

shows the ceremony of 1842. The commissioning of two artists in that year to portray such

scenes in itself indicates an awareness of the symbolic importance of and public interest in the

examination. 5 J.P.T.Bury (ed.), Romilly’s Cambridge Diary 1832-42 (Cambridge,

1967), 45. In an entry for the previous September (ibid.,38), Romilly had

declared that Birks ‘is to be Senior Wrangler’. 6 C.M. Neale, Senior Wranglers of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1907). This was doubtless

prompted by current discussions of reform, which led to the 1909 Senior Wrangler’s being the

last of his kind, and was thus the product of a kind of proleptic nostalgia. In the Historical

Register of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1917), the names of the Senior

Wranglers of each year are, uniquely, printed in capitals.

3

Modern scholarship has reflected the attention focused on these men in their

own time, and on the coaches (private tutors) who trained them – the ‘wrangler-

makers’.7 Much less attention has been paid to the other end of the honours list; but

here too, the intense concern with gradation in Cambridge generated both speculation

and invented terminology. In a sense the Senior Wrangler’s status was unproblematic,

since he had no superiors. At the bottom of the honours list, however, a line had to be

drawn between the lowest scorer and his unclassed inferiors. Those who failed to

achieve honours but were not failed outright were said to have been ‘gulphed’: the

gulph being a kind of limbo between the Wranglers and Optimes, and the failures

whose names can be recovered with difficulty, if at all.8 The last of the Junior

Optimes, placed at the edge of the Gulph, stood out as the recipient of a mixture of

applause and derision: he had achieved honours, but only just. He was an academic

success – but within the world of honours, the occupant of a humiliating position. To

this man, the bearer of a powerfully ambiguous status, was given the title of ‘Wooden

Spoon’.9 The term is first attested in 1793, two years after the first recorded use of

‘Senior Wrangler’,10

but it seems clear that both had been in use for some time.11

In

the following century actual wooden spoons appeared, and by the 1870s outsize

decorated spoons were being presented to the sometimes proud, sometimes

embarrassed holders of the position.12

The tradition came to an end in 1909, when the

single rank order of the Mathematical Tripos (as the examination was then named)

7 Warwick, Masters of Theory; A.D.D. Craik, Mr Hopkins’ Men: Cambridge Reform and

British Mathematics in the 19th Century (London, 2007) 8 Below them again stood the Polloi (many), who had sat separate examinations for ordinary

rather than honours degrees. The top of this list (the ‘Captain of the Poll’) had his own

distinctive status. 9 As will be explained below, there were not, and could not be, female Senior Wranglers or

Wooden Spoons. 10

In an undated letter which can be assigned to January 1791, William Gooch wrote that ‘I

did above three times as much as the Senior Wrangler last year’. Gooch papers, Cambridge

University Library, Mm.6.48.11; cf. C. Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae: Some Account of

the Studies at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1877), 323. 11

Similarly, references to private tutors (known from the 1830s as ‘coaches’) are found from

the 1760s, but ‘pupil-mongers’ had been referred to in the first half of the century. 12

To avoid confusion, I refer to the person as the Spoon, to the material object as the spoon.

4

1909, when the single rank order was abolished; though not, as we shall see, before it

had spawned mutated forms in the USA.

[Plate 1: The last wooden spoon, awarded in 1909 to Cuthbert Holthouse of St John’s

College.]

The Spoon phenomenon has always been seen as interesting and amusing, but

it is in fact also important and even central to the life of Cambridge in the long

nineteenth century. Such phenomena have tended to be relegated to lists of ‘facetiae’,

as if the humorous could never be important. It is easy to find collections of university

jests whose contents are often or preponderantly feeble as jests.13

It does not follow,

however, that they are feeble as evidence; and it is well established that jokes are

useful clues to lines of stress in social and institutional life.14

The aim of this paper is

to survey the history of the Wooden Spoon, and to explain its development, its

varieties and its institutional significance.

The Wooden Spoon: from Cambridge to the world

The phrase ‘the wooden spoon’ is familiar all over the English-speaking world as a

jokingly critical (or self-critical) label for outstandingly poor performance. It has been

applied to ministers whose voting record in parliament is exceptionally poor, and to

the rugby teams at the bottom of league tables; indeed the Wooden Spoon charity was

founded in the 1980s as a result of the rugby results. In fact, it refers to anybody who

is the least competent at anything. When Cole Porter wrote ‘I’m the bottom, you’re

the top’, he might have added to his list of inferior terms, ‘I’m the Wooden Spoon’ –

13

A late example is T.S. Henrey, Good Stories from Oxford and Cambridge (London, 1918).

For Cambridge, the published collections include The Cambridge Tart (London, 1823), R.

Gooch, Facetiae Cantabrigienses (1825), id., Nuts to Crack: or, quips, quirks, anecdotes and

facetiae of Oxford and Cambridge scholars (London, 1834), and In Cap and Gown: Three

Centuries of Cambridge Wit (London, 1889). The Cambridge antiquarian J.W. Clark collected

about 200 ‘squibs and crackers’ now held in Cambridge University Library (Cam a.500.9,

uncatalogued); other such material is held in Cambridge Papers, MP (unpaginated).

14

See, for example, the classic studies of joking relationships by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown,

reprinted in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London 1952).

5

especially as he was a Yale man, and thus attended one of the few institutions other

than Cambridge which had a Wooden Spoon tradition. But as his long list of ‘tops’

shows, he was concentrating on the best, not the worst. That is just what we tend to do

more generally – and one of the things to be explained about the Spoon phenomenon

is how it emerged in an intensely competitive environment, the prime site of written

examinations in Europe, where one might have expected the dunces to be left in the

shadows while the spotlight fell on the top scorers. In an institution where it mattered

so much whether one was in the first or the second class in honours, why should the

lowest member of the third class receive any attention at all?

One might assume that ‘the Wooden Spoon’ was a widely-known phrase

which came to be used within the narrower Cambridge context at a particular period;

taken from a national or regional stock and elaborated within an individual institution.

In fact the converse is the case: the phrase ‘the wooden spoon’, so well known in a

variety of different contexts in English usage, derives from this specifically

Cantabrigian usage of the late eighteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary

offers earlier examples, though not much earlier: its first citation is from a 1788

glossary of Yorkshire dialect, in which ‘gobstick’ is glossed as ‘wooden spoon’. Early

English Books Online takes the record back to the 1560s. But these references are all

to real wooden spoons; the word ‘spoon’ originally meaning a chip of wood, so that

‘wooden spoon’ is in a sense redundant, rather like ‘River Avon’, where ‘Avon’ is a

Celtic word meaning ‘river’.

As I have mentioned, the first known use of the title ‘Senior Wrangler’ comes

from 1791, the first mention of the Spoon occurring two years later in 1793.15

Both

phrases occur in the title of James Plumptre’s play of 1793: The Senior Wrangler or

the Wooden Spoon; upon the plan of the Greek Drama. Plumptre had then just

graduated from Cambridge, and went on to become a successful comic playwright.

This play, which was never published, concerns a peasant, Hobus Rusticus, who has

15

The 1795 mention, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January, p.19, suggests that the term

was by then well established, though it does not appear in the initial list given in the previous

(December) issue of the magazine.

6

three sons: Classicus, Mathematicus and Otiosus. The play is set in Degree Week, the

action takes place in front of the Senate House and the Chorus consists of

Questionists, those about to be examined, and Sophisters, those of the following year.

The three sons had been tempted from home by a mysterious stranger from

Cambridge, revealed to be the god Minerva (Athena, goddess of learning). She had

offered them, according to their natures, a purse of gold, a golden medal and a

wooden spoon (line 166). (Presumably Otiosus, the lazy son, took the purse; the

medal represented the Chancellor’s medal for classical composition, awarded

annually since 1752.) The Senior Wrangler is referred to several times (lines 655, 685,

730). The earliest mentions of both terms suggest that they were well-established; but

in the absence of earlier references, all we can say is that the terms were invented at

some point in the forty years after 1753.

The spoon and late-eighteenth century slang

The decade of the 1790s, when the terms Senior Wrangler and Wooden Spoon first

appear, was a time when a wider efflorescence of slang terms and interest in slang can

be seen. The emergence of new wealth during the industrial revolution threw

established social hierarchies into confusion. Wealth could be used to purchase the

trappings of status – a country estate, a grand house, a gentleman’s library. The way

people talked offered clues to their status: accent, vocabulary, syntax. The most

famous example was the dropped H, the damning aspirate in the speech of the socially

aspirant.16

In the late eighteenth century several glossaries of slang and canting terms

were published. Some of them incorporated undergraduate slang, which was listed

alongside that of gypsies and of the criminal classes; the universities and the rookeries

of London were alike in being relatively closed and independent societies, and both

were tapped for contributions.17

This practice seems to have begun in the 1780s, with

16 L. Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as a Social Symbol (Oxford, 1995).

17 See J. Coleman, A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, II: 1785-1858 (Oxford, 2004).

Several dictionaries drew heavily on Grose’s Classical Dictionary; one of them, the Lexicon

7

Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). An interesting

exchange appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the winter of 1794-5, beginning

with an enquiry from a reader who had visited Cambridge and had, he claimed, been

puzzled by the slang vocabulary employed there. The list of slang terms he gave did

not include ‘wooden spoon’, but a later correspondent highlighted what he called ‘this

very remarkable personage [who was] … annually the butt and laughing-stock of the

whole Senate-house’.18

A similar word first appeared in 1795, in Humphrey Potter’s

Dictionary of Cant; this was ‘spoony’ meaning a fool or simpleton, at this point it was

a noun, but was later used as an adjective.19

One of the correspondents hinted at the

extent of contemporary slang usage when he complained of ‘that inundation of new-

coined fantastical phrases, which are continually meeting our ears’.20

By 1811, the use

of slang dictionaries could be referred to in Samuel Beazley’s The Boarding-House, a

comedy which unlike Plumptre’s was both performed and published, and which

incidentally showed the spreading fame of the Senior Wrangler . One scene is based

on an imagined obsession with boxing (‘milling’) which has driven out academic

pursuits. As one character remarks,

Milling's all the go now. In London, it occupies the heads and hands of dukes,

lords, apprentices, and blackguards; while, at Cambridge, it is not who is

senior wrangler, but who is the best boxer. The Lexicon is forsaken for the

slang dictionary – we cut prize poems for prize fighters – Aristotle's logic for

Balatronicum of 1811, was subtitled A Dictionary of Buckish Wit, University Wit, and

Pickpocket Eloquence. 18

The original enquiry, by ‘An enemy to all ambiguity’, dated 1 September 1794, appeared in

the magazine’s December issue, pp.1084-5. Two replies were published in the January 1795

issue (pp.18-22: quotation from p.19). 19

H. T. Potter, Dictionary of Cant, edn 2, (London, 1795), s.v. ‘spoony’. Potter had died in

1790; hence perhaps the conventional dating of the first edition (which does not survive) to

that year. ‘Spoony ‘as adjective is attested by OED from Vaux’s Flash dictionary of 1812.

‘Ladle’ was used in the same way but seems to have faded from sight. 20

The letter from ‘E’, dated 17 February 1795, appeared in the February issue, pp.126-9. ‘E’

pointed an accusing finger at ‘silly, affected women, or persons of mean education’.

8

Mendoza's knock-down arguments – and Horace, Homer, Demosthenes, and

Cicero, for Cribb, Gully, Molineaux, and the devil.21

It is worth noting that Beazley refers to London and Cambridge, but not

Oxford; and though I have so far referred to undergraduate slang as if it were a

monolithic phenomenon, a comparison of the two ancient English universities shows

that Cambridge was markedly richer in slang than Oxford.22

The explanation is

probably that Cambridge was less like English society as a whole than Oxford was. In

the decade of the French Revolution, Oxford showed itself to be nervously

conservative. Catholic priests fleeing France went to Oxford and were welcomed, and

the examination statute of 1800, which founded the modern system of university

examinations in Oxford, was conceived as a disciplinary measure, to control clever

young men whose thoughts might otherwise turn to political or religious radicalism.23

Cambridge, while not lacking in reactionary dons, was markedly more liberal

overall.24

The contrast between the two universities was echoed in their curricula. In

both places, college teaching included a great deal of Classics, and so followed on

from the teaching of the public schools. But in Oxford this college system was

transferred by the 1800 statute to the university level, and while mathematics and

science were examined, they were very much minority subjects. Cambridge, in

contrast, was dominated by mathematics, and had been for a century or so. If we

compare the two places with English education and society in general, we find that to

a large extent Oxford reflected them, while Cambridge in many ways did not.25

Oxford was also nearer the heart of English society in another sense: in a period when

21

S. Beazley, The Boarding-House; or, Five Hours at Brighton. A Musical Farce, in Two

Acts, line [c.] 223-8. The play opened at the Theatre Royal, Lyceum, on 17 August 1811, and

was published in the same year. Cribb et al. were well-known champion boxers. 22

See C.A. Stray (ed.), Slang in Nineteenth-Century England, 5 vols (Bristol, 2002), 1: v-

xviii. 23

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford (London, 1965), 1-20. 24

A comparison of regional intakes also suggests that it took more poorer boys from the north

of England than did Oxford. Class, regionality and curriculum interacted. 25

Stray, ‘Non-identical twins’ (n.2).

9

most long-distance transport was by coach, it was a major transport hub,26

standing at

the intersection of several coaching routes, while Cambridge was more isolated and

less well connected. The word ‘coach’, meaning a private tutor who crammed

students for examinations, and was spoken of as ‘driving a team’ of pupils, occurs

first in the mid-1830s in Oxford, spreading to Cambridge soon afterwards.27

In the

political, curricular and geographical aspects of Cambridge, then, we have the

preconditions for the development of an introspective slang culture in the Fens.

Throughout the nineteenth century no dictionary of Oxford slang was published, but

Cambridge had more than one. The first appeared in 1803: this was the Gradus ad

Cantabrigiam, its title modelled on the well-known guide to verse composition

Gradus ad Parnassum which had been in existence, in several versions, since the 17th

century.28

Just as that book claimed to lead the student up the steps to Parnassus,

home of the Muses, so the slang dictionary offered to initiate the reader into the

mysteries of Cambridge slang.29

One of its entries began, ‘The wooden spoon for

wooden heads’; the next (and final) entry was headed, ‘Wranglers (Senior Wrangler)’.

It is striking that the Spoon had its own entry, but the Senior Wrangler did not.

In the 1790s the Senate House Examination, the only honours examination in

Cambridge, was becoming increasingly rigorous. The tense atmosphere of

competition reflected an increased focus on rank order and merit, as oral gave way to

written examination. The vivid account of the examination published in the University

Calendar for 1802 captures the atmosphere in the Senate House:30

26

The railway system began to expand in the 1830s, but reached Oxford and Cambridge only

in the following decade. 27

Its first appearance was in Edward Caswall’s Pluck Examination

Papers for Candidates at Oxford and Cambridge (Oxford, 1836), 28. 28

The book was written by ‘A Pembrochian’, i.e. a member of Pembroke College, but has

been ascribed more precisely (in an annotated copy) to William Paley (3rd

Wrangler 1802),

son of William Paley of the Evidences. A second edition (so called) was published in a larger

format in 1824, expanded and illustrated. 29

For the Gradus ad Parnassum, see D. J. Butterfield, ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’, in Stray (ed.),

Classical Dictionaries, Past, Present and Future (London, 2010), 71-92. 30

[B.C. Raworth,] Cambridge University Calendar (1802), p. xx. See the discussion in

Warwick, Masters of Theory, 124-5, and in Stray, ‘From oral to written examination’, 89-90.

10

Immediately after the University clock has struck eight, the names are called

over ... The classes to be examined are called out, and proceed to their

appointed tables, where they find pens, ink, and paper provided in great

abundance.... The young men hear the propositions or Questions delivered by

the Examiners; they instantly apply themselves .... All is silence; nothing

heard save the voice of the Examiners; or the gentle request of some one, who

may wish a repetition of the enunciation.

The combination of silence and writing was surely emphasised in order to contrast

this large and well-oiled machine with the small-scale public oral examinations at

Oxford, which had begun in the previous year.31

The reference to the university clock

is worth noting: until the 1840s, when ‘railway time’ became standard, colleges had

individual time regimes tied to their own clocks; in Oxford, the nearest to a standard

time was taken from Great Tom, the bell at Christ Church.32

While the use of the

university clock is not surprising, it underlines the extent to which the university

played a larger part in assessment in Cambridge than it did in Oxford. The account

above implies a sharp contrast between a rigorous written test of merit and the more

relaxed and gentlemanly debates between examiner and undergraduate in Oxford.33

Oxford was the home between 1831 and 1865 of the ‘honorary fourth’, an experiment

which followed the addition of a fourth class of honours in 1830, and which

consisting in rewarding candidates for pass degrees who had shown exceptional

31

Only a handful of candidates were examined in Oxford in 1802, while in Cambridge 44

men gained honours in the Senate House Examination. 32

Railway time was introduced by the Great Western Railway in 1840,

and was widely adopted by 1860. In 1851, Great Tom had two minute

hands in this period, for local and railway time (D. Howse, Greenwich

Time and the Discovery of Longitude (Oxford, 1980), 111. In the early

years of the century, the clock had had no minute hand at all. 33

The only Oxonian reference to a ‘spoon’ I have found relates to William Spooner, Warden

of New College 1903-24 and famous for his ‘spoonerisms’. He was an albino, his brother a

blond, and they were known as ‘Silver Spoon’ and ‘Gold Spoon’. W. Hayter, Spooner

(London, 1977), 67.

11

merit.34

The tension between intellectual merit and social status had not been lacking

in Cambridge, however. Four of the senior members of the University were by

tradition entitled to nominate Honorary Senior Optimes, who were inserted in the

tripos list without being examined. We find them listed from the early 1770s; but it

was in the 1790s that the practice came to an end. Several appeared each year in the

tripos list from 1773 to 1792, but there were none in the following few years and only

a final solitary name in 1797: Dewhurst Bilsborrow of Trinity.35

Concessions to

noblemen and their sons continued into the mid-nineteenth century, including the

relaxations of some rules on entry to examinations. But in the Senate House

examination itself, the 1790s mark the final expulsion of any criterion except

intellectual merit.36

It was this apotheosis of finely-tuned merit ranking that provided

the soil from which the Spoon emerged.

The Wooden Spoon was not the only spoon. In theory the other classes also

had their spoons (golden and silver for the first two classes, leaden for the Polloi, the

pass men), but the Wooden Spoon was always the most prominent, and the only one

34

M.C.Curthoys, ‘The examination system’, in M.G. Brock and

M.C.Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford VI: The

Nineteenth Century, Part I (Oxford, 1997), 345. One might also mention

in this context the Harvard tradition of the ‘Gentleman’s C’, a moderately

respectable grade given to students from the social elite who were likely

to be future donors to the university. This tradition in turn can be usefully

contrasted with the pioneering analysis of grades as the product of

negotiation between faculty and students at the University of Kansas: H.

S. Becker, B. Geer and E. C. Hughes, Making the Grade: The Academic Side of

College Life (New York, 1968). 35

His promotion is mysterious. He was a sizar (poor student), and did not belong to the same

college as any of the senior members who had the privilege of nominating in 1797.

Bilsborrow seems to have qualified as a doctor, and was first a pupil and then a friend of

Erasmus Darwin, to whose Zoonomia (1794) he contributed panegyrical verses. On 6 Aug.

1809 he paid £100 as a bastardy bond, as the father of a child born to Sarah Lightfoot of St

Breock, Cornwall. 36

The almost identical chronology of the award of honorary (1773-97) and aegrotat (1772-

98) senior optimes perhaps indicates a reaction against the failed attempts of John Jebb to

introduce university-wide examinations irrespective of social status in 1772-4. On Jebb’s

proposals, see P. Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge Vol. III, 1750-1870

(Cambridge, 1997), 163-6.

12

to have a material manifestation. Similarly, there were joking names for groups of low

scorers (e.g. the ‘Elegant Extracts’, the ‘Apostles’), but they were coined for the fun

of invention.37

The Senior Wrangler at the top, the Wooden Spoon at the bottom of

the honours list: these were the positions and terms which carried enduring symbolic

weight. I have referred to the Polloi or pass men, and we need to remember that in a

university where less than half the student population took honours, the Spoon stood,

as it were, in a circle of hell which was not the lowest. There were three circles below

him: first the Gulph, which as we have seen contained the men who, while unworthy

of honours, were not failed.38

Then came those who failed to obtain honours; and

finally, the men who did not attempt honours, but took pass (poll) examinations.

There were those who thought that the Spoon was less deserving than the highest pass

men, in particular the top scorer, the ‘Captain of the Poll’. Thus the focus on the

Spoon derived in part from his location, not just at the bottom of the honours list, but

at the boundary between the honours men and their inferiors.

To sum up the argument so far: the title of Wooden Spoon, like that of Senior

Wrangler, emerges in the early 1790s, at a time when the Senate House examination

was becoming ever more rigorous and the route to a degree via social status was being

blocked, leaving intellectual merit as the sole criterion. The examination, and the

mathematical domination it embodied, distinguished Cambridge from the

37

Cf ‘academic notions’ at Winchester College, slang terms invented for intellectual fun.

Stray, introduction to C.G. Stevens, Winchester Notions: The English Dialect of Winchester

College (London, 1998), 1-15. 38

The phrase ‘The Gulph’ seems to have changed in meaning. The Cambridge University

Historical Register (1917) claims (p.352) that in the late eighteenth century those who were

put in the first two classes on the basis of disputations (and so were likely to be wranglers)

could ‘gulf it’ by claiming sickness, avoiding examination and becoming ‘aegrotat senior

optimes’ (the recorded examples are all in the period 1772-98). No reference is given, but the

probable source is J. M.F. Wright’s Alma Mater, or, Seven years at the University of

Cambridge (London, 1827), II.60. Wright’s definition was called ‘strange’ by Christopher

Wordsworth, in a note in his copy of Gradus ad Cantabrigiam (1803) (Bishops’ Wordsworth

Library, Lancaster University Library, A/2). For Wordsworth, to be ‘gulphed’ was to be

placed in limbo between honours and pass men, while being, in the official phrase, ‘allowed a

degree’. The almost identical chronology of honorary (1773-97) and aegrotat (1772-98)

senior optimes perhaps indicates a reaction against the failed attempts of John Jebb to

introduce university-wide examinations irrespective of social status in 1772-4.

13

conventional school and college traditions which were by contrast pursued in Oxford.

The greater geographical isolation of the university reinforced this and made it a

fertile site of slang creation. The slang which emerged, and which was

commemorated in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, included both Wooden Spoon and

Senior Wrangler; the latter very much a university term, the former influenced by a

wider slang use of ‘spoony’ = foolish.

The Spoon family: at home and abroad

As we have seen, the Wooden Spoon was one of a family of spoons (golden, silver

and so on) though they never rivalled it in popularity. From the mid-1820s, it also

acquired a distant cousin: the Wooden Wedge.39

When the Classical Tripos was first

examined in 1824, it too had three classes of honours. The lowest score in the third

class in that year was that of Hensleigh Wedgwood, a member of the famous pottery

family, and related to the Darwins. In his honour the position was named the Wooden

Wedge; but like all such imitations its life was a shadow of the real thing. The Wedge

was imaginatively portrayed, together with the Spoon, by John Louis Roget in his

Cambridge Scrap-Book of 1859. The Wedge never received the ironical public

honours of the Spoon; and indeed hardly could, since for over thirty years the

Classical Tripos was not a basis for honours, but a voluntary examination taken only

after mathematical honours had been gained.40

[plate 2: The Spoon and the Wedge, by John Louis Roget (1859)]

Half a century after its birth, the Spoon phenomenon migrated to the USA. In

1847 it appeared at Yale University, apparently as a parody of the official recognition

39

The family relationship in fact has firm etymological foundations, since the word spoon,

'piece of wood, splinter' (OE spón), is cognate with the Greek word for 'wedge', σφήν. See

Brent Vine, ‘Greek σφήν, English spoon – a note on ‘Eichner’s Law’, Münchener Studien zur

Sprachwissenschaft 62 (2002), 289-99. 40

The Wedgwoods scored a unique family double: in 1860, Wedgwood’s son Ernest was the

Wooden Spoon.

14

of merit, when in Yale terminology ‘appointments’ and ‘orations’ were awarded.41

The programme for the first spoon award, in 1847, began with a verse:

When a junior without application

Gets into a bad situation

And loses his hoped-for oration,

Then give him the wooden spoon.

The ‘oration’ was a speech at the degree ceremony, allotted to the outstanding student

of a year.

As this indicates, the Yale spoon at first denoted the lowest academic

performer, but it soon became an award recognising the most popular man in the

class. The Cambridge ideology of merit was quickly replaced by the American focus

on social skills.42

In 1870 the spoon celebrations were cancelled by authority as being

too elitist, or rowdy, or both; they were revived in 1918, when the award regularly

went to the chairman of the junior prom committee. The custom vanished in the

1980s, when the junior prom disappeared from the university’s winter programme.43

Various theories were later advanced about the origin of the event. Some claimed it

derived from an early nineteenth-century event in which a spoon (material

unspecified) was given to the man who ate the most; a related prize of a jack-knife

was given to the homeliest (in other words the least handsome). Others suggested that

the custom was derived from ‘an English university’, though whether this was more

than guesswork is unclear. The Yale spoon tradition might be seen as no more than a

charming byway, but it has some notable features which make it an interesting

41

The terms are explained by Charles Bristed, Five Years in an English University [1852], ed.

C. A. Stray as An American in Victorian Cambridge (Exeter, 2008), 332, 334. 42

On the contrast, see Bristed, American in Victorian Cambridge, 328-

36. 43

J.A. Schiff, ‘The secrets of the spoons’, Yale Alumni Magazine Feb.

1995, 96. Yale University Archives hold eleven of the spoons, all about

30” long and finely carved, most with commemorative metal plaques.

15

comparative case. One is that the events were run by the undergraduates, as public

social occasions to which both sexes were admitted. Another, perhaps related to this,

is that a strong visual tradition grew up alongside the spoon celebrations. This is most

evident in the surviving engraved tickets, most of which come from the 1860s, which

seems to have been the peak era of the Yale spoon. The importance of female

participation is shown by the printing of separate tickets for ladies, in which spoons

feature amid elaborate decorative detail.

[Plate 3: An engraved lady’s ticket for the Spoon ceremonies, Yale University,

1869]

The first record of the award of a spoon at the University of Pennsylvania

dates from 1861; six spoons survive, ranging from 1883 to 1936, in size and style

resembling the Yale spoons. The first award seems to have had the character of a

mock award, but from 1865 it became an ‘honor award’. The nineteenth-century

spoons were carved by Daniel Pabst, a celebrated local wood-carver. At Oberlin

College, Ohio, spoons were presented during a brief period in the 1890s.

The history and taxonomy of spoons

A series of contemporary references indicates the embeddedness of the Spoon in

Cambridge undergraduate life in the early nineteenth century. In his Phantasm of a

University (1814), Charles Kelsall refers to it (p.31) as ‘that splendid badge of literary

distinction’. In 1816, a mock examination paper at ‘Utopia University’ included the

question, ‘Find the whole area of the wooden spoon’.44

In the following year, a poem

about the Spoon appeared in an Ipswich newspaper; it was subsequently reprinted in a

44

CUL, Cambridge Papers, MP [facetiae], unpaginated.

16

collection of facetiae, The Cambridge Tart.45

In the following year, a writer in a

Cambridge journal denounced the Junior Optime list as

The vilest of all vile schemes for giving local rank … As it is now, and has

been framed, it is frequently as much a mark of disgrace as a sign of

acknowledged merit… The remedy we would propose…let the names be

placed alphabetically [as does] Oxford, in its wisdom. Cambridge tutors

should inculcate it as a maxim, that it is better to be drowned in the Gulph

than to swim away in a wooden spoon.46

In 1826, an interesting discussion of the Spoon appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine.47

The author claimed to have been part of a Spoon bracket, where two or more

candidates were ranked together – a phenomenon which did not appear till 1832. In

the following decade, a slim volume of etymological fancies referred to the Wooden

Spoon as ‘one of the most prominent terms in our vocabulary’, while indicating that

the phenomenon itself had become traditional, its origins lost in the mists of time:

No living man’s recollections can carry him back to a time, when the

candidate for honours, who has been least led astray in the ways of

mathematics, was not distinguished by the title of Wooden Spoon. The term is

a legacy from past generations; year after year it has been presented to us, and

given us on each occasion, an inscription, as it were, for the pedestal of the

tripos. … an empty title, of which the true history is unknown.48

By 1837, then, the year in which this was written, the Spoon had become

45

The Cambridge Tart : Epigrammatic and Satirical-Poetical Effusions; &c &c: Dainty

Morsels, Served up by Cantabs, on Various Occasions (London, 1823), 98, with notes on

pp.284-5; reprinted in Whibley, Cap and Gown, 169. 46

Review of the memoirs of E.D.Clarke, Cambridge Quarterly Review 2.1 (October 1824),

p.24, n.5. Clarke had been a Junior Optime in 1790. 47

A Bisset, ‘The tripos day’, Blackwood’s Magazine 20 (1826), 180-2. 48

Alpha, Cambridge Crepuscular diversions and broodings before bed time (Cambridge,

1837), 23-5.

17

something which in effect had always existed. Its informal status and the shortness of

undergraduate generations combined to veil its history, in a way characteristic of such

institutional phenomena.49

The spoon materialised

In 1804, after Clare College had provided the Spoon for three years in a row, a large

spoon was left at the college gate, and this began the physical manifestation of the

title.50

It has been suggested that this was a malting shovel, and that this implied

drunkenness as the reason for the Spoon’s feeble performance in the examination.

Perhaps so, but we should remember that this was the most easily available form of

large spoon. In those days, colleges brewed their own beer, and their audit ales, served

at the feast, following the annual audit of the college accounts, were famous for their

quality and potency. The malting spoon may have been simply the large spoon nearest

to hand.51

Apart from the spoon left outside the gate of Clare College in 1804, the first

actual spoon we hear of is a small one in 1832. The Senate House examination of this

year was notable for producing the first ever spoon bracket. Two men shared the

honour of Spoonship: Richard Shilleto and Matthew Chapman, both of Trinity. It was

later claimed that when they came up to receive their degree, when about to kneel

before the Vice Chancellor, Shilleto stopped, and said:

Ligneus haud ego sum spoonus, neque Chapman; Uterque dimidium capiat,

nos sumus ergo pares; which for the benefit of the Vice Chancellor and the

ladies I will give in the vernacular:

49

Stray, ‘Unseen university: remembering and forgetting Cambridge’, Cambridge Review

118 (Nov. 1998), 46-54.

50

J. M. F. Wright, Alma Mater (London, 1827), ii.28. Wright had been at Cambridge from

1815 to 1819. 51

Later suggestions – e.g. that the Spoon was fit only to cook, or stir porridge, as in J. C.

Hotten, Slang Dictionary (London, 1859), are simply elaborated guesses.

18

I am not spoon, nor Chapman; I beseech

Take half, we thus are equal each to each.

Whereupon, pulling a wooden spoon out of his pocket, he broke it (already

split lengthwise) and handed one half to Chapman, keeping the other half to

himself.

This account dates from 1906, and comes from a friend of Shilleto who

claimed that Shilleto had told it him in 1875, the year before he died.52

The leap from

1832 to 1875 to 1906 is a nice example of the way such memories can be transmitted

over long periods. This does not, of course, guarantee that the transmission is

accurate, though the learned wit described is typical of Shilleto.53

Shilleto’s was a considerable achievement. At this time the Classical Tripos,

first examined in 1824, was only open to those who had achieved honours in

mathematics. The aim of classical men was therefore just to scrape through the

mathematical Tripos, and then on to their chosen subject. For such men, the Spoon

position was not the worst, but the best: it gained the necessary mathematical honours

with a relatively economical effort. It also constituted a small target, hard to hit

accurately, between failure (the Gulph) and the unnecessary success represented by a

52

J. D. H. Dickson, Cambridge Review 6 June 1906, 449. A letter followed (ibid. 477-8)

from W. W. Rouse Ball, the historian of Cambridge mathematics (see n.1). There were also

letters to The Guardian about the story, discussed in correspondence between the Cambridge

antiquarian Christopher Wordsworth and the Regius professor of Greek Henry Jackson. These

are preserved in Wordsworth’s copy of his own Scholae Academicae (Bishops’ Wordsworth

Library, Lancaster University Library, B5/10). Jackson believed Shilleto had used ‘cochlear’

(spoon) not ‘spoonus’. ‘Cochlear’ is rare, but Shilleto was known for using rare words, and he

provided a translation. The reference to the Vice-Chancellor would have made no sense in the

1830s, and must be a later elaboration. (In 1873 the retiring Vice-Chancellor

addressed the Senate in English instead of the traditional Latin,

and was hissed: Cambridge University Reporter, 4 November 1873.) 53

Such stories were often subject to elaboration and reshaping: cf. those told of the Oxford

scholar Thomas Gaisford discussed in my ‘Thomas Gaisford: legion, legend, lexicographer’,

in Classics in Britain 1800-2000 (forthcoming 2012).

19

higher position in the Junior Optimes.54

It was well known in Cambridge that the

examiners of the Mathematical Tripos tended to be lenient to those candidates aiming

for low mathematical honours en route for the Classical Tripos examination. As

Harvey Goodwin complained in a critical pamphlet of 1845, ‘The consequence has

been … that the low mathematical honours have lost their value: to be placed among

the Junior Optimes is not considered as an honour at all’.55

The only other glimpse we have of a small spoon (literally, the ordinary or

kitchen variety) is in 1863, in Robert Farren’s splendid oil painting of the Degree Day

of that year. Outside the Senate House, the small world of the University is gathered

on King’s Parade. Towards the left, a tall figure stands with a small wooden spoon in

his hand. He has been identified as Charles George of Christ’s College, a mature

undergraduate who had previously graduated at Trinity College Dublin, and because

of this, perhaps, a popular figure in the social life of the university. To his right are

three Trinity (Cambridge) men, Henry Coore, Thomas Crampton and Arthur Ainger.56

Crampton was the Wooden Spoon of 1863, and the painting shows him downcast as

he hears the news from Ainger, to his right, who holds a copy of the published

examination list in his hand. George, to the left, is about to hand the spoon to

Crampton.

[Plate 4: Thomas Crampton learns that he is the Wooden Spoon. A detail from

Robert Farren’s Degree Day, 1863.]

The scene depicted by Farren was low-key and at most semi-public. Very

different scenes had, however, been witnessed in the previous decade. In his diary for

28 January 1854, the university registrary Joseph Romilly wrote that ‘A Trinity man

54

Cf. Charles Bristed’s discussion in his Five years (n. 37), 201 <check>. 55

H. Goodwin, Considerations Respecting he Exercises in the Schools … (Cambridge, 1845),

5. (Copy in Cambridge University Library, Cam. c .845.22.) Goodwin had been 2nd

Wrangler

in 1840. Cf. Charles Bristed’s discussion of the topic: American in Victorian Cambrdige, 190-

8. 56

Coore and Ainger were second-year men, and graduated the following year.

20

(Rokeby) was wooden Spoon:- A gigantic one was dangled from the gallery by a

string’.57

This is the first reference to the spoon-lowering ceremony so far discovered,

and as there are no previous references to it in Romilly’s diary, it is safe to conclude

that the 1854 event marks the beginning of a tradition which lasted for over fifty

years.58

In a story published in 1844, ‘Demetriades Finney’ is Wooden Spoon,

something he resents, though his family in their ignorance are pleased with his

‘success’. The narrator comments that the spoon has no material form, yet people say

that Finney carried off the spoon.59

The author was more familiar with Oxford than

with Cambridge; but the idea of a material wooden spoon is clearly not present. It

might be thought that the Yale spoon exerted a reverse influence, though its physical

form and institutional setting were both very different. Another possible inspiration is

the first known drawing of a Spoon, in Roget’s Cambridge Customs and Costumes of

1851 (a precursor of the drawing of Spoon and Wedge shown in Plate 2). Here the

spoon and the Spoon, uniquely, are one. Perhaps a reading of this little book gave

someone the idea of bringing a real spoon into the Senate House in 1854.

[Plate 5: Lowering the spoon, from a postcard of the 1900s.]

The high Victorian period: decorated spoons and indecorous struggle

Nothing is known of what the 1854 spoon looked like, apart from its great size, and

Romilly says nothing of its being decorated, as perhaps he might had it been painted;

but the decoration of the spoon constitutes the next step in its history. The dated

57

M.E. Bury and J.D. Pickles (eds), Romilly’s Cambridge Diary 1848-1864 (Cambridge,

2000), 167. 58

Bury and Pickles, as they make clear, include only a selection from Romilly’s original MS

diary, which has also been consulted. It dates from 1818, and was kept in full from 1829

(Cambridge University Library, Add. Ms. 6804-42). Warwick, Masters of Theory 210,

suggested that the spoon-lowering began ‘in the mid-Victorian era’, but without reference to

Romilly. It is presumably a coincidence that the decision to sever the ties between the

Mathematical and Classical Triposes was taken in 1854 [ref]. 59

‘Suum Cuique’, ‘The election’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany 1 (1844), at

p.475. The author was J. T. J. Hewlett, who had written several other university-based stories,

including Peter Priggins (1841) and Great Tom of Oxford (1846).

21

spoons which survive, or of which we have a visual record, range from 1889 to 1909

and usually bore college, university or boat club arms. They belong to the final phase

of the spoon’s evolution, which we might call the heraldic phase. It is unclear when

the decoration of spoons began; there is no mention of it in Romilly’s diary, which

comes to an end with his death in 1864. The earliest evidence of decoration comes

from 1872, when the Spoon was William Carrel of St Catharine’s College. According

to a newspaper report of the ceremony:

…when the time approached for the last Junior Optime to receive his degree

the signs of excitement in the galleries betokened something extraordinary…A

strong cord was fastened across the Senate-House from gallery to gallery, and

when this gentleman, who is of St Catharine’s, appeared, a malting shovel,

emblazoned with the Catharine wheel, the coat of arms of St Catharine’s

College, was suspended from the cord and lowered just beyond his reach, at

the end of the shovel dangling a toy doll. This was received with shrieks of

laughter, but ultimately the shovel and its appendage were seized by the

University Marshal and by him borne off in triumph. After this little episode

the remainder of the proceedings passed off in nearly dumb show…60

From another newspaper report we learn also that the spoon, here called ‘an ordinary

barn-shovel’, was painted in the college colours. The report adds that as the Marshal

carried the spoon away, ‘a live pigeon, with a wooden spoon attached, was thrown

from the gallery, but it did not fly, as it was intended to do.’61

On other occasions, proceedings were altogether more relaxed. 1871 was a

notable year on two accounts. First, the Senior Wrangler, John Hopkinson of Trinity,

was a nonconformist and so could not gain a fellowship in his college despite his

mathematical success. (The repeal of the Tests Act later the same year put an end to

this embarrassment.) But at the other end of the rank order, there was a triple bracket

of spoons; and we learn that as the candidates

60

Leeds Mercury 30 Jan. 1872, p.7. 61

Belfast News-Letter 30 Jan. 1872, np.

22

stood in front of the Vice-Chancellor to be admitted to their B.A. degree, a

string was drawn across from one gallery to another, and three wooden spoons

hanging from it were gravely lowered down to the Vice-Chancellor’s feet.

That reverend personage could scarcely retain his gravity, and the proctors and

Esquire Bedells] joined ostensibly in the general laughter which ensued.62

This triple bracket, one of only two in the history of the Spoon (the other was in

1907), must surely have posed problems of sheer physical handling. It was alarming

enough, in 1983, to suspend the 1909 spoon from the galleries in an empty Senate

House for an exhibition.63

Some occasions, then, were relaxed, perhaps because they were relatively free

of hisses, boos and thrown objects from the gallery, [this needs explaining] and also,

in part, because of the personalities of the proctors of the year. And while we are

thinking of the influence of individuals, we should remember that the Spoons

themselves were not mere puppets, but human beings who in some cases may have

felt resentment or embarrassment rather than pride in their position. We catch a

glimpse of the down side of being the Spoon in a memory by Thomas Thornely, who

had been at Trinity Hall in the 1870s:

If its recipient was a man of sense, he would seize upon it joyously, and,

brandishing it over his head, march off with it as a valued trophy; but if, as

sometimes happened, he was timid or nervous and shrank from it as a symbol

of shame, it would, as like as not, pursue his retreating rear with sounding

smacks.64

1882: the year of two spoons

62

Ipswich Journal 7 Feb. 1871, p.1. The two proctors were the disciplinary officers of the

university, the bedells (commonly known as ‘bulldogs’) their assistants. 63

The occasion is remembered by Elisabeth Leedham-Green, then Deputy Keeper of the

University Archives, who with a helper, but still with difficulty, suspended the spoon from the

galleries. No visual record survives, but a catalogue of the exhibition was printed: D.M. Owen

and E.S. Leedham-Green, The Senate House Inside and Out (Cambridge, 1983). 64

T. Thornely, Cambridge Memories (London, 1936), 146. Thornely was at college from

1873 till at least 1877.

23

If 1871 was a notable year, 1882 was even more so, and not just because the unusual

decoration on what must be called the first spoon of 1882: for there were two that

year, and not in a bracket, but awarded on separate occasions. As this suggests, 1882

was a unique year in the history of the Wooden Spoon. This was the year in which

changes in the Mathematical Tripos regulations came into effect. The Tripos was split

into three parts, and it was widely assumed in Cambridge that in the absence of a

single order of merit, the titles of Senior Wrangler and Wooden Spoon would

disappear. At the same time, the timing of the examination was moved from January,

when both candidates and ink had in some years been reputed to freeze in the Senate

House, to the summer months. As a result, two degree ceremonies were held in 1882:

the last under the old regulations in January, the first under the new rules in June.65

Contemporary newspaper reports make it clear that the former passed off happily:

The ‘wooden spoon’ – which will, of course, disappear with the senior

wrangler – was duly presented, but the article on this occasion was an

unusually large one. It was about five feet long, with the college arms of the

recipient gorgeously emblazoned on one side, with a brilliant sunflower on the

other, with the words ‘Quite too little’. The good humour with which the

‘spoon’ of the year received the award of his prowess elicited loud cheers.

Thus the Birmingham Daily Post of 30 January 1882 (p.4); but in fact the Post got the

motto wrong: it was actually ‘Quite too utter’.66

This is confirmed by the cover of the

sheet music for a runaway hit of 1881, Robert Coote’s song ‘Quite too utterly utter’, a

parody of the aesthetic movement. Here we see, in a painting by Alfred Concanen, the

aesthete with his favourite flower, the sunflower, Japanese pottery, bamboo and

wallpaper. The words of the song were taken up by Gilbert and Sullivan, whose

65

Leslie Stephen’s article ‘The senior wranglers of Cambridge’, Cornhill Magazine (February

1882), 225-34, was clearly designed as a valedictory account. Similarly, in the following

month a writer in the Cambridge Review commented that ‘Whether the institution of the

wooden spoon is of as early a date as the time of which we are speaking, and how it

originated, should both be interesting questions, now that the Old Tripos has given way to the

New’ (1 March 1882, 195). The predicted end provoked interest in the beginning.

66

Thus reports in the Daily News, 30 Jan. p.2; the Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 30 Jan.

p.3; and the Belfast News-Letter, 31 Jan. p.7.

24

Patience, or Bunthorne’s bride, had opened in April 1881. Bunthorne himself is

portrayed as an aesthete; indeed he has been thought, though probably wrongly, to be

based on Oscar Wilde.67

Thus though the spoon of January 1882 is not known to survive, we do have

an account of its size and decoration – and since the Wooden Spoon on that occasion

was William Morley of Clare College, we know which college arms were painted on

it. This is an intriguing case, since it looks ahead to the heraldic spoons with college

arms which become standard in the following decade, while also showing a more

outward-looking engagement with national cultural fads. In the history of the

Mathematical Tripos, this ceremony also marked a notable transition, though one

which would not have been visible at the time: the Senior Wrangler was Robert

Herman, who was coached by Edward Routh. Routh had followed William Hopkins

as the most successful senior-wrangler maker of his time; Herman was later to occupy

the same position.68

The scene witnessed by those who attended the ceremony of June 1882, the

first held under the new regulations, was a very different one. The proctors, who

clearly thought they had seen the last of the spoon-lowering, were alarmed to find it

reappearing, the titles of Senior Wrangler and Wooden Spoon being transferred

informally to the highest and lowest scorers in Part I of the Tripos. A vivid account

appeared in the Times:69

The spoon was smuggled into the galleries, and in an attempt to lower it it fell,

striking a lady rather violently. It was thereupon taken by an official and

placed in a side room in which the Vice-Chancellor robes. It was, however,

again taken into the galleries and the proctors intervened. A fight ensued for

67

Anne Anderson, ‘“Fearful consequences … of living up to one’s teapot”: men, women, and

“cultchah” in the English aesthetic movement c.1870-1900’, Victorian Literature and Culture

37.1 (2009), 219-54.

68

Herman became dominant on the retirement of Webb in 1902, and coached the eight last

Senior Wranglers. See Warwick, Masters of Theory, 282-3. 69

Times 21 June 1882, p.12. Cf. Warwick, Masters of Theory, 211, drawing on a report in the

Cambridge Independent Press of 24 June 1882.

25

its possession, and all the proceedings were stopped. At last the galleries were

cleared, but the undergraduates burst in the main entrance and a great

disturbance arose which took some time to quell. At the conclusion of the

ceremony the Junior Proctor was hustled on leaving the building and great

uproar prevailed.

The scene was depicted the following year in a whimsical book of college stories

(Plate 7).

[Plate 7: The battle of the spoon, June 1882. From Paulopostprandials: Only a Few Little

Stories after Hall (Cambridge, 1883). The text was by Owen Seaman, later editor of Punch,

and Horace Monro; the illustrations were by Lancelot Speed.]

It appears that the proctors themselves were partially responsible for the

disorder. In a letter to the Times a week later, ‘Baccalaureus Recens’ claimed that

The spoon fell and hit the lady, not in the attempt to lower it, but because a

proctor cut the string which supported it; and this, too, when undergraduates

have been criticised for throwing coppers from the gallery and endangering

visitors’ safety! If the wooden spoon had been left unmolested no disturbance

would have arisen, an innocent custom would have remained to amuse visitors

throughout the decidedly uninteresting proceedings, and the proctors would

not have gratuitously gained the ill-will of the great majority of those who

usually respect and esteem them.

He was followed by ‘T. B.’, who complained of what he called ‘the intolerable

puerility’ of university regulations, and suggested that ‘the whole system of proctors

is onerous to the freeborn Englishman’.70

The June 1882 events were unusually violent, but not without precedent. On

the occasion of the spoon’s first physical appearance, in 1854, Romilly had noted in

his diary that

70

Letters column, The Times 28 June 1882, p.12.

26

The principal imitative sounds were the barking of dogs, crowing of cocks, &

mewing of cats (for the Catharine Hall men and the Puseyites). – One

blackguard young man gave 3 cheers for the old woman in Scarlet, i.e. the VC.

The reference is to the Vice-Chancellor, who was dressed in scarlet robes. This was in

the early days of the restored Catholic hierarchy in England, when Papism was widely

feared and reviled, and the Church of Rome was often referred to as the woman in

scarlet (i.e. a prostitute).71

In 1854 there was noise without violence. But the disturbances of 1882 were

not the only ones involving physical struggles. In his diary for 1 February 1875,

Joseph Ward of St John’s College recorded that

I find that the authorities without any previous warning bagged the customary

spoon on its way to the Senate-House but another was extemporized out of the

wainscoting of the gallery, & dangled triumphantly in mid air in spite of the

jumps of the senior proctor from below, or the attempt at cutting the string

made by a bulldog stationed in the gallery for that purpose. The latter

succeeded once before his designs were known but was then speedily put out

of the reach of further mischief.72

Memories of this event probably lay behind a proposal put forward by the Senate

House Syndicate (committee of Senate) in December 1875, as it made plans for the

next degree ceremony in the following month, ‘that steps should be taken to prevent

the repetition of the practice of suspending any object from the galleries during the

ceremony of conferring degrees at this congregation’.73

The motion was put to the

Senate, but defeated. In January 1881, however, the Syndicate commissioned a report

on the state of the Senate House galleries, for which 1250 tickets had been issued for

the degree ceremony. The advice they received was that there was no danger at

71

Romilly’s Diary (n.54), 167. The Catholic hierarchy had been restored in 1850; Edward

Pusey was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, and had previously been a Tractarian

ally of Newman and Keble. Katharine Hall changed name to St Catharine’s College in 1860;

it was familiarly known as ‘Cats’. 72

Joseph Ward diary (St John’s College Library, special collections, W2), entry for 1 Feb.

1875. 73

Syndicate meeting of 7 Dec. 1875: Cambridge University Archives, Min.VI.16, p.4.

27

present, but that if a crack were started in the timber trusses and a rush made, many

lives would be lost. Some years later only 600 tickets were being issued. Doubtless

the Syndicate’s motives were of the purest, but they may have realised that they were

killing two birds with one stone. A less crowded gallery was not only safer, but

quieter and easier to police.74

It should be apparent by now why the title of this article refers both to rank

order and to rank disorder. The problem of undergraduate misbehaviour was a more

general one; banishing students from the Senate House gallery would effectively

destroy the tradition of having a university community assembled for the degree

ceremonies, as well as admitting that the disciplinary authorities were ineffectual.

Here the Spoon played a key role in acting as a focus for the informal social order at

the heart of the formal social calendar.75

At such ceremonies, the dignitaries, MAs and

their guests occupied the ground floor of the Senate House, the undergraduates being

relegated to the role of secondary audience in the two galleries above. Such vertical

segregation, however, not only encouraged a sense of student solidarity, and hence at

times unruly behaviour; it also made it possible for coins and other objects to be

thrown down and ribald remarks to be made with relative impunity.

A good example is provided by the ceremony of 14 February 1870, at which

the scholarly Archbishop of Syros and two of his archimandrites were presented with

honorary degrees. The exotic potential of the occasion was heightened by the splendid

vestments worn by the honorands, faithfully described in press reports, but also by the

unprecedented use of modern Greek as well as Latin by the Public Orator, Richard

Jebb.76

At one point the Archbishop bent to pick up a handkerchief, prompting the

undergraduates to applaud ‘the Grecian Bend’, a contemporary female dress fashion

in which the body was bent forward, and which was the subject of several popular

74

Syndicate meeting of 17 Jan. 1881, Min VI.16 p17. Cf. Owen and Leedham-Green, Senate

House, item 21, p.13. 75

On undergraduate disorder in Cambridge, see D. A. Winstanley, Early Victorian

Cambridge (Cambridge, 1940), 417-20.

76

For a detailed report of the occasion, see ‘Visit of the Greek Archbishop to Cambridge’,

Cambridge Chronicle 19 February 1870, p.8 cols 2-3.

28

songs.77

The Archbishop interpreted the outcry as applause and bowed, thereby

provoking further mentions of the Bend. Not long afterwards ‘a Master of Arts who

was present in the Senate House on 14 February’ proposed that MAs and their guests

should be placed in the galleries, and undergraduates on the ground floor; but nothing

seems to have been done about this sensible proposal.78

Such scenes of disorder were not peculiar to Cambridge. Oxford too had its

local difficulties at its public ceremonies; for example at the presentation of honorary

degrees in 1843. On this occasion one of the honorands was Edward Everett, the

ambassador of the USA to the Court of St James; the American Charles Bristed, then

at Trinity College Cambridge, reported that

The scandalous conduct of some members of the other University to

our distinguished countryman when the same degree was conferred on him

there … is unhappily notorious.79

In fact, as appears from the memoirs of Goldwin Smith, the undergraduate hooting

which marred the occasion was directed not at Everett but at William Jelf, an

unpopular proctor.80

As this suggests, the degree ceremonies were not only

opportunities for undergraduates to indulge in undisciplined fun; they also allowed

them to comment on, and take revenge on, the instruments of university discipline, the

proctors.

The final phase

77

A fine album of contemporary caricatures and texts is held in Columbia University Library,

Rare Books, B396 G79. The Grecian bend perhaps survived longest in popular memory through

its mention in the song ‘The garden where the taties grow’, made popular by the Irish tenor

(Count) John McCormack. 78

Cambridge University Library, University Papers, UP47.80. The proposal is ascribed in a

MS annotation to Jebb himself. 79

Bristed, American in Victorian Cambridge, 103-4. 80

Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences (New York, 1910), 66. On Oxford disorder, cf. M.C.

Curthoys and C.J. Day, ‘The Oxford of Mr Verdant Green’, in M.G. Brock and M.C.

Curthoys, eds, History of the University of Oxford VI: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. I (Oxford

1997), 268-86.

29

We have now reached the last chapter in the history of the Wooden Spoon. Wiser

counsels seem to have prevailed among the university officers, and the spoon’s

appearance was greeted with humour rather than alarm. In 1883, an article in a

popular magazine describing Degree Day at Cambridge gave an account of the spoon

ceremony which suggests a relaxed occasion and gives some interesting detail:

While the other degrees are being conferred a string is passed round from hand

to hand along the gallery, until it can be drawn tight across the hall. From this

is suspended a huge wooden spoon, ornamented with bows of Cambridge blue

and the arms of the college to which the recipient belongs. Gradually this is

lowered amidst deafening cheers, till, just as the last of the Junior Optimes

leaves the Vice-Cancellarial stool, it is dropped within his reach. The owner

must be prepared to seize it quickly, and as he cuts the string and shoulders his

trophy, it would be hard to say whether the first man or the last in the list gains

most applause.81

If such popular accounts demonstrate a wider public interest in university ceremonies,

internal interest can be seen in the mention of the Spoon in the tripos verses, which

had been composed since 1565 as satirical comments on contemporary issues in both

Cambridge and the wider world. The Spoon is referred to in verses of 1876 and 1887;

in 1876 the second poem, by a well-known Cambridge comic writer, H.R.Tottenham

of St John’s, was entitled ‘Kochliarion paradosis’ (choral ode of the spoons). The first

poem for 1887 was by Hercules West of Trinity, an Irishman known for his wit; it

closes by referring to a man called Baker being joint Senior Wrangler, while another

man called Baker was wooden spoon, and also cox of the victorious boat-race crew.82

As we approach 1890, we also come to the first of the spoons known to

survive. The Emmanuel College spoon bears neither name nor date, only the college

81

R.E. Johnston, ‘Degree day at Cambridge’, Cassell's Family Magazine, 1883, 205-6, at

p.206. 82

J.J. Hall, Cambridge Act and Tripos Verses, 1565-1894 (Cambridge, 2009), 301. It is

unsurprising, of course, that an assiduous rower should be placed at the bottom of the honours

list. The best-known example is the last Spoon, Holthouse of St John’s (1909), whose oar was

made into his spoon.

30

arms. But the only Emmanuel undergraduate to be Wooden Spoon from the first

appearance of a spoon in 1854 to its last bow in 1909 was Howard Cooke, in 1889.83

The Emmanuel spoon can therefore safely be dated to that year. It was bought by the

college in 1976, when the seller reported that it had been owned by a descendant of

the Colchester artist Charles Head (1850-1926). Head was a pupil of Sir Edward

Poynter and specialised in painting panels for churches. He seems to have painted the

Emmanuel spoon of 1889 and the two Corpus spoons of 1895 and 1907.84

The

Emmanuel spoon was presumably never used, since it bears no name and stayed in

the artist’s family. What Cooke actually received in the Senate House is unknown.

Surviving newspaper reports are very variable – in the following year, for example,

the occurrence of a spoon bracket is hardly noticed because of the sensational success

of Philippa Fawcett of Newnham College in coming out ‘above the Senior

Wrangler’.85

Women play almost no part in the history of the wooden spoon (except, as we

have seen, to be hit by it). From 1882 their examination results were published, but

quite separately from those of the men, so that a woman could never become Senior

Wrangler or Wooden Spoon. There was however an indirect link in 1870, in a spoof

magazine produced by Gerald Davies of Christ’s College called The Moslem in

Cambridge. This imagined the university of 20 years hence, overrun by non-

Christians and women. In one issue Davies announced the success of the first female

Senior Classic (top of the first class in the Classical Tripos), Zuleika Spooni, who of

course combines both his targets, being both not Christian and female. But in addition

83

There had been Emmanuel College Spoons in 1839 and 1849. 84

Head was active till at least 1920; his son Mark, who worked with him, was killed in action

in 1915. The CCC wooden spoons are described by Oliver Rackham in an appendix to his

book on the college plate, Treasures of Silver (Cambridge, 2002). 85

This was one of the milestones in the acceptance of women at Cambridge. The tension

between the local meritocratic ethos and persisting gender assumptions is reflected in the fact

that the women were listed separately from the men, yet in a way which enabled their

performances to be compared.

31

her name, which is meant to suggest that she is silly or lovesick, may have been

inspired by the Wooden Spoon.86

To return to the artist Charles Head: what was the link between his decorative

painting in Colchester, and the spoons in Cambridge? Almost certainly the answer is

the firm of A.W. Crisp, who opened a heraldic device establishment on King’s

Parade, only a few yards from the Senate House, in 1887.87

Among the predictable

commissions for shields, scarves and notepaper, Messrs Crisp in effect operated a

kind of spoon factory. Since the degree ceremony followed the announcement of

examination results quite closely, the factory must have been geared up to provide

spoons with appropriate decoration at short notice. This is suggested by the reference

to the Spoon ceremony in a memoir of Cambridge by an Indian student, designed to

inform his fellow-countrymen:

The Wooden Spoon presentation is THE event of the occasion. On the

previous day, the arms of the college and of the University are put on it for the

Wooden Soon. The spoon is lowered, then the winner cuts the cords with his

penknife and takes it.88

Crisp’s preferred form of spoon resembled a giant teaspoon. In the array of

spoons shown in Plate x, four out of five are of this shape. Those who could not

afford this kind of spoon, which might be seen as a de luxe model, could order an

ordinary wooden shovel and have a device painted on it. The Marriott spoon at

Corpus Christi College is of this kind, and came from Crisp’s shop.89

A report of the

1895 degree ceremony in fact states that ‘Mr Marriott received the Wooden Spoon

supplied by Messrs A.W. Crisp of King’s Parade and as he walked off with his trophy

86

Her rudimentary knowledge is suggested by the book she is carrying: The First Latin Book.

On Davies and the Moslem, see Stray, ‘Zulu and Zuleika’, The Book Collector 42.3 (Autumn

1993), 429-31; id., Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England

1830-1960 (Oxford, 1998), 163-4. The Archbishop of Syros, whose visit to Cambridge took

place earlier in 1870, was of course a leader of a Christian church; but the relatively exotic

nature of his position and his dress may have influenced Davies. 87

The shop closed in 1973, on the death of last surviving family member. 88

S. Satthianadhan, Four Years in an English University (Madras 1890), 71-2. [check

wording] 89

Crisp’s trade label is pasted on its reverse.

32

he was vociferously applauded’.90

The continuing variation in style is evident in a

splendid single-page article in Harmsworth’s London Magazine in 1902: ‘The Order

of the Wooden Spoon’ (Plate 8). Here we have at the top Everard Roe of Pembroke,

one of the two bracketed Spoons of 1901, holding his spoon and that of his co-Spoon

Douglas Buchanan of Trinity, who had gone to the battle-front in South Africa and so

was unable to receive it in person.91

Below are the Spoons of 1898 and 1899. The

1898 spoon, at bottom left, belongs to the less elegant genre, with broader blade and

functional handle. The 1892 spoon is of intermediate shape, with working handle and

elegant blade. Clearly Crisp were able to offer several permutations, doubtless at

different prices. The triple bracket of 1907, only the second of its kind, was captured

in a photograph which shows three spoons of the dominant teaspoon shape. The

enterprising alternative adopted for the last spoon in 1909 was to adapt an oar by

adding a bowl to the unbladed end. This was the time when the claims of athletics

overshadowed those of intellect in the public schools, and often at the ancient

universities. Nor was it surprising that a man who devoted his time to rowing should

end up at the bottom of the honours list. In some colleges, athletic skill counted for

most if not all. That this kind of spoon did not appear more often is perhaps to be

explained by the hold Crisp had on the market with their genteel giant teaspoons.

[Plate 8: ‘The Order of the Wooden Spoon’. The Harmsworth London

Magazine, 1902.]

The last spoon

The last spoon of all, that of 1909, was given to a member of St John’s College:

fittingly, since St John’s was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the great

90

Leeds Mercury 19 June 1895, p.3; cf. Penny Illustrated Paper 22 June, p.395, where we

learn that ‘The college dons and University officials permit all this, well remembering the

time when they as young men relished the fun’. The 1892 Queens’ College spoon, last heard

of in 1998 in Godalming, Surrey, has a similar bowl but a common or garden handle.

91 Buchanan was born in Cape Colony, and later practised law there; his spoon bears the arms

of the Colony.

33

mathematical college in Cambridge, and despite being considerably outnumbered by

Trinity, still managed to produce more Senior Wranglers than its rival.92

In 1907 it

had been decided to abandon the long-established numerical ranking of candidates.

This effectively abolished both the bottom of the tripos list (the Spoon) and the top

(the Senior Wrangler), and Cuthbert Lempriere Holthouse of St John’s was on 22nd

June 1909 the last Spoon of all. This helps to explain why his spoon (the oar-based

spoon mentioned above) is the largest and grandest of its kind. It is painted in the

scarlet colour of the Lady Margaret Boat Club, of which Holthouse was a keen

member. Along with the college arms and the boat club motto, it bears a Greek

inscription announcing (in translation):

In Honours Mathematical

This is the very last of all

The Wooden Spoons which you see here;

O you who see it, shed a tear.

Behind this glamorous spoon lurks a country cousin, painted in the same

colour and bearing the words ‘Mathematical Tripos 1909’ but without a name. This

spoon was apparently commissioned by Holthouse’s friends, but then rejected. It was

bought from Crisp’s shop by Lancelot Fleming, Dean of Trinity Hall, and in the late

1950s was hanging in the college chaplain’s rooms. At about this time Holthouse

called on the chaplain and urged that the spoon be given to St John’s. But five years

later, when St John’s enquired about the spoon, it could not be found.93

The final spoon ceremony, as we might expect, received considerable

attention, and several photographs survive. Holthouse took his spoon with him when

he left Cambridge for a career as a clergyman, but when he was away in Canada in the

92

The overall score, calculated from the University calendar lists of 1753-1909, is 54:50.

These figures, however, conceal a shift in the balance of successes over time: 1753-1800,

15:8; 1801-50, 21:16; 1851-1909, 18:26. These in turn must be evaluated in relation to the

relative size of the two colleges. Trinity’s undergraduate numbers exceeded those of St John’s

from the 1780s; in 1850 the numbers were Trinity 525, St John’s 348; in 1909, Trinity 700, St

John’s 253. 93

The chaplain until 1958 was Tony Tremlett, later Bishop of Dover; the spoon may have left

with him but remains untraced.

34

1930s, lent it to St John’s for display. It subsequently returned to the college in a very

curious way. In the 1960s Holthouse put his house in Winchester up for sale so that he

could move into a retirement home. One of those who came to inspect the house was

another St John’s oarsman, Guthrie Easten, who on looking through the window

immediately recognized the spoon. The upshot was that Easten drove the spoon to

Cambridge in his small car, with one end sticking out of window covered in a plastic

bag.

The stories of the two St John’s spoons show how fragile the survival of such

artefacts can be. How many other spoons lurk in undeserved obscurity we simply

cannot tell. The Queens’ College spoon of 1892 was photographed in 1998, but has

not been traced.94

In 2010, however, another spoon came to light: the second Selwyn

College spoon of 1906. [pic] This had been held in the honorand’s family for several

decades, and is to be bequeathed to the College.

CONCLUSION

In 1888, an article on the Wooden Spoon appeared in the Cambridge Review.95

Tongue firmly in cheek, the anonymous author argued that it was harder to become

the Spoon than the Senior Wrangler: the Senior Wrangler had only to build a huge

pile of facts, like a child’s sandcastle, while the Spoon had to regulate his material

with great skill – one mark more or less and he would miss the cherished position. As

we have seen, this had been a serious point from the 1820s to the 1850s, though it is

unlikely that the author realised it. He ends by urging the composition of a history of

the Wooden Spoon:

This would be an extremely interesting work, illustrated with engravings,

perhaps coloured, with biographies of the afterlife of the Spoons. Here is a text

94

Patrick Cowley of Godalming, great-nephew of Bradbury of Queens’, the 1892 Spoon:

Queens’ College Record, 1998, p.18. Cowley claimed then that he knew of at least four other

spoons; but neither he nor they have been located. 95

[Anon.,] ‘On wooden spoons’, Cambridge Review, 3 May 1888, 290.

35

for some aspirant in search of a subject;… it would be something to have

produced in one’s time ‘The Wooden Spoons of Old Cambridge’.

The antiquarian work desiderated by the writer would have been very much part of its

period – a nostalgic volume reflecting the calm before the storms of 1882. As I hope

to have demonstrated, however, the Wooden Spoon deserves better than this kind of

antiquarian cataloguing, for several reasons. First, it is a striking and long-lasting

symbol of a uniquely intense competitive environment based on mathematics, a totem

of intellectual merit and its measurement in a system of teaching and examination in

which the bottom was celebrated alongside the top. Second, it was for more than a

century an important part of undergraduate social life. The permeation of the

Cambridge student world by the ethos of competition meant that the Spoon resonated

powerfully with their hopes and fears. If the Senior Wrangler was the king of the

realm of Cambridge mathematics, the Spoon was its jester. For more than 50 years the

material spoon was ordered or made by friends for the incumbent, lowered to him,

sometimes fought over with the university authorities. As we have seen, the Spoon

was not only part of undergraduate social life, it also took centre stage in the annual

degree ceremonies. Here its history intersected that of discipline and disorder, and as

we have seen, the tussles in the Senate House expose the tensions between community

and division within the University. The Yale spoon phenomenon was strikingly

different in its autonomy, part of a student subculture which operated at a distance

from official events. In addition, the Spoon reminds us of a crucial institutional

linkage which lay at the heart of the Cambridge system from the mid-1820s to the

1850s. As we have seen, the compulsory linkage between the mathematical and

classical examinations rendered the whole third class suspect as a class of ‘honours’,

while throwing into high relief the achievement of those who achieved a minimum

qualifying score for entrance to the Classical Tripos. This linkage encapsulated the

anomalous position of Cambridge, a university dominated by mathematics in a

country whose educational provision was by and large dominated by Classics. Third,

36

it produced a series of physical objects, often highly decorated, artefacts reminding us

of past glories and shames which have their own history of commissioning, creation

and distribution.96

Fourth, the Spoon offers a striking example of the way in which

local custom and local terminology can be generalised beyond their original

boundaries. Fifth, the silliness – indeed the ‘spooniness’ – of the subject reminds us

that the trivial and facetious deserve serious study by historians of institutions.

In his pioneering analysis of failure in nineteenth-century Oxbridge, Sheldon

Rothblatt suggested that rituals attached to examination failure represented a

solidaristic resistance to the culture of grading; more recently he has argued that they

belonged to the re-emergence of an eighteenth-century ideology of character in

response to the expansion of examinations.97

This analysis works better for Oxford

than it does for Cambridge, where the centrality of the Senate House Examination

created a merit-based culture.98

The Wooden Spoon belonged to this culture, and in

my view symbolised the grading system which produced failure, rather than a

resistance to that system. But there is more work to be done on the interaction

between intellectual and social evaluation in these two complex institutions.

96

For an interesting survey of US and European university maces, an official symbol of

authority but as little studied as the Spoon, see W.S. Heckscher, Maces:An Exhibition of

American Ceremonial Academic Scepters, Duke University Museum of Art, 1970. 97

S. Rothblatt, ‘Failure in early nineteenth-century Oxford and

Cambridge’, History of Education 11 (1982), 1-21, revised as p. 179-228

of his The Modern University and its Discontents (Cambridge, 1997); the

theme is pursued in his Education's Abiding Moral Dilemma: Merit and

Worth in the Cross-Atlantic Democracies, 1800-2006 (Didcot, 2007), 49-

63. 98

The ‘Cambridge observer’ quoted in Rothblatt’s Modern University,

186-7, Augustus Hare, was in fact an Oxonian (brother to the

Cantabrigian Julius Hare). For a recent discussion of student solidarity in

early 19th-century Oxford in relation to examinations among other things,

see Heather Ellis, ‘Young Oxford: Generation Conflict and University

reform in the Age of Revolution’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University,

2010.

37

Acknowledgments

I offer my thanks to those who have helped in the exploration of the world of the

Spoon: in Cambridge, Sarah Bendall, David Butterfield, Amanda Goode, John Hall,

Jonathan Harrison, Jonathan Holmes, Ted Kenney, Elisabeth Leedham-Green,

Kathryn McKee, Robin Myers, Mark Nicholls, Mike Petty, Becky Proctor, Robert

Runcible, Sue Slack, Jonathan Smith, Sarah Stamford, Elizabeth Stratton and

Malcolm Underwood; in the US, David Southern (Duke), Ken Grossi (Oberlin), Mary

McConaghy (University of Pennsylvania), Joshua Katz (Princeton), Chris Kraus,

William Massa and David Milne (Yale).

Information sources

Wooden spoons are held in Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, St John’s and Selwyn

colleges, Cambridge, and at Oberlin College, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale

University. Collections of textual and visual evidence are held at the above, and at the

Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge City Libraries (classmark V.WS) and the

Cambridgeshire Folk Museum. A collection of visual images derived from the

exhibition on the Wooden Spoon held there in June 2009 is held at St John’s College.

Permission to reproduce images from this collection has kindly been granted by the

Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Pics:

5 spoons from SJC

Selwyn 2nd

spoon

Spoon ceremony

38

Last spoon

Roget 19 – spoon and wedge

Farren pic detail

Harmsworth mag

Z Spooni

39