College rivalries are harmless fun, not a public menace

Just don’t be a nob about it


College rivalries are tremendous fun, and to prove it I have an anecdote.

It was Matriculation, and it was drizzling. Someone made a joke about it “raining more than the Queen”.

It was me. No one laughed. I died a little inside.

Having just posed for our freshers’ photo, the first-years of Castle were standing on the Great Hall steps and making the excruciatingly forgettable small-talk strangers have no choice but to make to each other.

We were all bored and miserable. But just then an older student grabbed a microphone and changed the course of history. For a bit.

After having apparently consulted a Gordon Ramsey-commissioned dictionary for the lyrics, he led us in chanting about Durham’s other colleges. And it was brilliant.

A trophied Hatfield banner proudly displayed in Castle’s Great Hall

 

Among other things, we chanted what the Pope said to Hatfield college – “who the fuck are you”, swiftly followed by “fuck off” – and that Hilde Bede is populated by “wankers”.

It has been rumoured our obscenities even carried across the October air all the way to the Bede wankers themselves.

Durham’s college rivalries are a peculiar thing. They have an ugly side – we’ve all heard the rumours of rivalries going too far and someone getting beaten up for a decision they basically made because of a fit rep at the open day.

Van Mildert, the supposed enemy of St Aiden’s

Trophying – nicking items from your rival college – is a bit of a grey area as well. Rumour has it, it used to be an actual thing, and all trophied items were returned first thing the other morning, until a priceless piece of artwork was left out on Palace Green… in the rain.

But it would be wrong to take an altogether dim view of college rivalries. For a start, they can be quite fun. They certainly provide Yik Yak with a healthy amount of material: “You know you’re in Hatfield when passionate verbal abuse from outside North Bailey serenades you to sleep every night” is one recent gem that accrued over 100 up-votes.

College rivalries have infiltrated our smartphones, too

They also provide a healthy spark of competition for sports events: the Castle-Hatfield rugby friendly in Freshers’ Week, for example, was rendered a fiery occasion by two teams at absolute loggerheads.

And, for Castlemen, who are the only rightful Hatfield-haters, nothing screams Thug Life more than rebelliously humming anti-Hatfield chants while walking past it, an act usually edgy enough to get you that rush you need on your way back from another mind-numbing day of learning stuff.

For those who think the whole Hatfield hate thing is getting a bit old, fear not: Grey and Collingwood have got a similar thing going on. In fact, Collingwood first-year Ben Walker remarked there is both a sport rivalry and a bar rivalry – at a recent sport social, for example, a game of Never Have I Ever resulted in a showcase of collegiate competition, with suggestions like “never have I ever had a college bar not voted to be the best” being particularly prevalent.

Here’s a group of freps who presumably told their freshers to hate Grey…

There is also, apparently, a form of animosity between Van Mildert and St Aiden’s: Psychology fresher Talor Hanson, of Mildert, explained to The Tab ‘it’s literally because they’re close and we have to have a scapegoat.’

Surely there must be something between John Snow and Stevenson, but who really knows? John Snow presumably doesn’t… he knows nothing, doesn’t he?

And why not? This may be stretching it a bit, but it’s certainly better to light-heartedly verbally abuse someone for their college than to do so on the basis of their race or gender. College rivalries bring us together as communities, knowing who we are against, helps us to understand who we are.

Sure, people have taken it too far in the past. Drunk people. Drunk people take everything too far, from drinking, to sexual advances, to humankind’s capacity to retain dignity.

The problem, therefore, is not college rivalry, but booze – a seemingly inevitable feature of every university.

And once freshers is over, and you realise Freps were bullshitting about the strength of the college rivalry, joking with someone from Grey that they’re ‘Grey in nature, Grey in name’, or asking that bloke from JoBo how his walk was, is a great ice breaker.

Not every university has the pleasure of internal banter like we do. As one proud trophyer of a Hatfield banner puts it: college rivalries are ‘harmless tradition,’ and are ‘what make Durham great’.

College rivalries are what makes Durham an adjective. Own it.