Yanks at Cambridge

Yanls at Cambridge

It was well past curfew when a Cambridge University proctor, making his dignified, unhurried rounds in search of undergraduate truants, spotted two G.I.s emerging from a pub. The "bullers" (proctor's legmen) got set to grab their silk hats* and give chase. But the Americans held their ground. When he was close enough to speak without raising his voice, the proctor tipped his .mortarboard in greeting and put the traditional progging question: "Sir, are you a member of the University?" One of the G.I.s nudged his companion and demanded loudly, beerily, and in approximately these words: "Say, Eddie, who the rut is this rutting guy?"

That settled it. For the sake of proctors' dignity, there had to be a way to distinguish G.I.s studying at Bull College, Cambridge, from mere G.I. sightseers. Soon the Bull boys were wearing a special patch on their lower right sleeves--a coat of arms featuring the Stars & Stripes, the Union Jack, the Cambridge Lions, the American Eagle and the Bull of Bull College. Master Sergeant Al Kohler, an inveterate doodler, hit on the design.

White-haired Dr. John T. Sheppard, Provost of King's College, had given the G.I. College its name. Noting that most of the G.I.s had been quartered in the famed old Bull Hotel, because Cambridge's colleges were overcrowded he told the students and U.S. Army Major George Dewey Blank, their boss: "As the word 'Hotel' sounds so very undignified, I just call you simply 'Bull College.' And you, Major Blank, I refer to as the 'Big Bull.' "

Major Blank liked the names, and so did the 149 students, from private to colonel, who attended the Army's first eight-week session at Cambridge. By the second term, Bull even had its old school tie (royal blue with embroidered gold bull's head). Last week, at graduation, the Army announced that there would be no third term: men could no longer be spared from depleted ETO forces. Also closing: the G.I. paradise, Biarritz American University and the G.I. Swiss University.

Bull alumni, who had been in on a good thing, were sorry to be the last of their line. They came, like the Army itself, from all over the U.S.--whites and Negroes, officers and enlisted men, and one nurse and one WAC (TIME, March 11). There was no saluting; all ranks were billeted together, first in the Bull Hotel (run by the Red Cross) and the colleges, later in Army huts.

They got to saying "rather" and "actually" and succumbed to the English habit of afternoon tea--though without altering their G.I. dinner time, so that 5:30 dinner followed 4 o'clock tea with indecent and indigestible haste. They went punting on the Cam, played rugger with Cantabrigians (and lost), American football (and won), debated in the Cambridge Union Society and acted in the Amateur Dramatic Club.

Last week, as old Bull Collegians prepared to "go down" from Cambridge, they ate a final dinner with Provost Sheppard and other masters. Main course: Southern fried chicken.

* At Oxford, bullers wear bowlers. In both universities, they operate as teams, "a distance runner and a sprinter." A curfew violator may make a run for it, but if a buller gets close enough to say "Good evening, sir," in a conversational tone, the jig is up.

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