Like many things in College the origins of Freshers’ Week are lost in the mists of time. This of course is a fancy way of saying that no one really knows when Freshers’ Week as we know it today really started. According to the University Calendar in the 1962 there were 39 societies and 25 sports clubs active at the time. Presumably all of these organizations sought members at some stage of the year and what better time than when people were registering at the beginning of Michaelmas term.
The trouble with many annual events in college is that there is often the assumption that the way that it is done now is the way that it has always been done. Often people involved in the organization of a particular event or week do not write down what it is they are doing for posterity, so there is no record of previous attempts.
Certainly Freshers Week did look different in the past. Stalls were set up under Front Gate and ran all the way back from the gate itself along the central path between the lawns in Front Square. Freshers trying to join societies were said to be “running the gauntlet”, they faced society committee members who were shouting about their wares like deranged fish wives wanting to hand out their society’s Cheap Personalized Sunglasses to anyone who was willing to take them. With the passage of time the number of societies and clubs grew to the point that the gauntlet extended all of the way to the Campanile and there was no longer space for everyone.
Several years ago a second year student suggested, at a meeting of the CSC, that setting up Freshers’ Week stalls rather like a market square would mean that everyone could fit in and Freshers would be less intimidated. There was a great deal of huffing and puffing from students who were far too conservative for their age and much rhetoric about tradition but the decision was taken to set up the square as it is today.
Freshers’ Week remains what it was always meant to be about. The Societies and Clubs out in the square exist because students who have gone through College over the years have realised that College should not be all work and no play – they exist because students want them to exist.
Becoming involved in societies, clubs, publications and the political activity of the Unions is a path to a greater experience of College, to building friendships which will last far beyond College years and to finding a niche in the College Community. Freshers’ Week is the birth place of Collegiality.
