FROLICSOME UNDERGRADUATES

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 114, 5 July 1911, Page 5

FROLICSOME UNDERGRADUATES

For many years the undergraduates of Cambridge have liorne a high re- & illation for the thoroughness of ieir “rags,” the best-remembered of their practical jokes in recent times being the infliction on the town of a visit from the bogus “Zanzibar potentate,”, who had a royal progress, and hoaxed the authorities completely. A few weeks ago the students seized an opportunity to show that the traditions of the University are as powerful as ever. A lively encounter with a proctor led to the icstication of an undergraduate, and his sympathetic friends organised a “funeral” in his honour with all due regard for the rites associated by ancient custom with the sudden departure of a popular comrade from the university world. A cold collation was served for a large party of mourners in a friend’s rooms, and early in the afternoon the funeral cortege wended its solemn way to the railway station. At the head rode the master of ceremonies, astride of a donkey and attired in the dingy panoply of a Cambridge janitor. Next came the “corpse,” pedalling along in vigorous fashion on a rickety prehistoric tricycle, which was upholstered richly in crape, and the chief mourner followed in a hansom cab, flanked by two jockeys on doubtful-looking steeds. Some twenty vehicles, swathed in the black habiliments of woe, carried the remaining mourners, who were a motley crowd of Boy Scouts, Homan centurions and Territorials, wearing crape puttees. A young man whose six feet of stature were by no means covered by a baby’s costume, a clown doing tricks on a bicycle, and an equestrian attired in sackcloth, and ashes completed the procession. A halt was called outside a popular hostelry, where the baud massed on a coal cart joined the mourners, and the cortege resumed its progress to the mixed accompaniment of a funeral march and the familiar strains of “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” At the railway station there were numerous soeech.es and an impressive funeral elation before the “corpse” was interred in a train. The only hitch in the proceedings was the failure of an attempt to fix a/Catherine wheel to the guard’s van in order that the “deceased” migli depart in an appro? priate odour of sanctity and saltpetre.