A Bursar of the old Set

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One's heart bled very slightly for Robert Page (62) the "trusted bursary manager of Sidney Sussex College" who has just been given a suspended prison sentence for pilfering £56,000 from the college's student bar.

First, one inevitably feels sorry for anyone who has to live in Longstanton and commute daily into Cambridge to a relatively dreary job.

Secondly, one has to admire someone who has the tenacity and patience to build up such a nest-egg while surviving (even in Longstanton) on the kind of pay doled out by Cambridge colleges. The total of his appropriation is approximately three years gross salary for a senior college servant.

Thirdly, one cannot help but sympathise with the poor man. To even reach the eminence of bursary manager involves decades of subservience in the Gormenghastian sculleries and cellars, climbing the greasy pole of the local 'networks' and contributing, through them, to the local community and economy. It involves being patronised the while by generations of the academic upper classes and their hackling offspring and it involves putting up with the taunts and tantrums of the lower servants. Robert Page had probably earned his nest-egg many times over.

The tradition of college servants using college property for the benefit of themesleves and the townspeople has a long and distinguished history. When faced with vast wealth and significant inequalty in its distribution, this is not only natural but, one might argue, necessary and proper. They sometimes also have a better sense than the College masters of how to preserve our cultural heritage.

Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity from 1700 to 1742 embarked on an extravagant and insensitive building campaign but was opposed by the more prudent and conservative fellows, backed by a cabal of college servants. I note from G M Trvelyan's "Historical Sketch" of the college that when the Master ordered the removal of a fine Tudor staircase he was opposed by the Bursar.

"The Master appeared on the scene, agrily bade the workmen proceed and shouted at the Bursar 'I will send you into the country to feed my turkeys'"

When he was later censured for his extravagence he defended himself by boasting that he had created:

"An elegant Chymical Laboratory, where the Courses are taught by a Professor, made out of a ruinous Lumber-Hole, the thieving House of the Bursars of the old Set, who in spite of frequent Orders to prevent it, would still embezzle there the College-Timber"

So, as I say, spare a thought for Mr Page as he begins (as if he had ever stopped) his service for the community. On the other hand, if it had been a black teenager in South London who had appropriated £56,000, he'd already be banged up in gaol without the benefit of clergy, so let not our hearts bleed too much.