December 21st – Deck the Halls

Today’s advent door opens onto winters of yesteryear spent in University Hall, the University of St Andrews’ first residence for women students. The records of the “Dinna Forget” club, an informal social group of ‘Kerls’, as club-members were called, at University Hall in the 1890s, provides an insight into life as experienced by the women living in University Hall in its earliest days.

The Kerls’ minutes highlight the important relationship between Warden (in their case Louisa Lumsden) and students, reveals winter fun, strict rules and the perils of crossing your Warden:

“Thursday: Again Kerl Mellor and Kerl Gregson occupy the afternoon agreeably by skating. The warden has so far thawed to the Kerls as to have asked them to dine at her table.

Kerl Mellor drinks cocoa with Kerl Cunningham; they discuss weighty matters; time flies unheeding: a knock at the door; enter the irate form of the warden; a scathing remark or two; exit the warden […] Kerl Mellor and Kerl Cunningham are in deep disgrace again.”

This close policing of the rules did not preclude a sense of affection for the Warden, as illustrated by these charming calendars produced by Hall residents as a gift for later Warden Mildred Dobson in the 1920s.

Each year between 1921 – 1924, the students crafted a hand-made calendar featuring pen sketches and watercolours of scenes around St Andrews to present to Miss Dobson. We only have to turn to some scandalous accounts of Raisin Weekend to see that this warden had to deal with her fair share of student high jinks, so these beautiful calendars were certainly a well-earned reward for navigating day-to-day life with these spirited scholars.

Today’s rhyme was likewise written by an anonymous student, though at the University of Aberdeen. The carol was originally published in in “Alma Mater”, the University of Aberdeen undergraduate magazine, in the series “The jack daw of rhymes” which ran between November 1888 – February 1894:

“In Chapel”

“Silent, grand, majestic chapel,

where I’m always sleepy

Where divines with dogmas grapple –

Sometimes waxing weepy”

(Extract taken from “College carols”, by John Malcolm Bulloch, p. 35)

For St Andreans, too, Chapel – in this case St Salvator’s Chapel –  loomed large in the student imagination, and features several times in the University Hall calendars. While I may be showing a little home-team bias, in my book the illustrations by the St Andrews ladies of University Hall win this artistic talent contest, hands-down.