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Magazine
Social codes
BILL KIRKMAN
reuters
Historical reasons ... for ceremony.
LOOK in the Cambridge University Pocket Diary for May 29 and you will see that it is a Scarlet Day. If you are unfamiliar with the arcane ways of the ancient university, this information is likely to be puzzling. You may perhaps wonder idly whether it is a day on which people are expected to paint the town red, or possibly one on which some historic communist victory is celebrated.
Consult the Reporter, the official university publication, for enlightenment and you will learn that on Scarlet Days the Vice-Chancellor requests that doctors wear scarlet. If you are a visitor you may still be none the wiser.
Guided by an insider, however, you will learn that Scarlet Days are the major Christian religious festivals (the medieval universities are Christian foundations) and important university occasions, such as degree days (or, if you wish for further puzzlement, Days of General Admission). You will also learn that on these days, holders of the major doctorates are expected to wear their ceremonial scarlet robes.
There are good historical reasons for all this and for those in the know it is normality rather than mystery.
We all take many things for granted, and in some circumstances we make it easy for strangers to know what normal behaviour is. Anyone visiting a mosque, for example, as I did in Kuala Lumpur last week on my way to Australia, will not fail to be aware that you are expected to remove your shoes, because there is a polite notice requesting visitors to do so. Having visited mosques on a number of occasions I did not need the notice but a first visitor would find it a useful safeguard against giving offence.
Some guidance, indeed, is generally helpful for those visiting places of worship of religions other than their own, I frequently take Hindu and Moslem friends to visit our local cathedral, for example, and it is clear that if they were alone they might hesitate, wondering whether they were allowed to enter. I had an experience of unfamiliarity myself a few years ago when attending a Jewish funeral. I knew that in synagogues men wore hats, and bought one for the occasion. When I arrived, I was lent a small cap; my hat would have been conspicuously different.
Sometimes assumptions about dress habits can seem no more than assertions of a kind of superiority: "Surely you know what is expected; if you don't, you portray yourself as not being one of us — and we are not going to tell you unless you ask". How, for example, could anyone unfamiliar with English social customs know what was implied by the words "black tie" on an invitation? Yet for those who are familiar, the two words say all that is necessary about the form of dress expected by both men and women. Or why should a visitor know that even on a hot day he would be expected to wear a jacket and tie when taken to a London club? The hypothetical question is all the more pointed given the ostensible reason — that you behave in your club as you do in your home — if the visitor is well aware that jackets and ties are no longer the norm in many homes.
For of course expectations change. My wife recalls a notice at a cinema she attended as a child, half a century ago, which read: "Patrons are requested not to carry knives". (The cinema was near the docks.) The notice would be unnecessary today, when carrying knives is a criminal offence.
My own favourite notice from the same era was one written by my Oxford College authorities, doubtless with tongue in cheek. "Gentlemen", it read, "are requested to remove their rugger boots before entering the bath".
Given the idiosyncratic nature of many of the purely social dress codes, I should not have been as surprised as I was by a French student who came to see me when I was a careers adviser. At the end of our conversation, as he got up to leave, I was puzzled to see that he was wearing a woollen waistcoat that I had hung on the door. "I think that is mine," I remarked, with English understatement.
"I thought I was supposed to wear it," he explained. It seemed an odd thing to assume — but when I thought about it later it occurred to me that he may simply have thought that his visit was taking place on some kind of careers service Scarlet Day.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, U.K. E-mail him at wpk1000@hotmail.com
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