After 6 days of intense driving (on the left side of the road) in Ireland, we decided to take the next 2 weekends easy doing day-trips from London by train. Our first trip was to the university town, Cambridge.
The only thing we knew about Cambridge was that it’s one of the 2 major university towns in the UK. Luckily, we found a really interesting free walking tour where they told us many interesting facts:
- Cambridge is made up of 31 colleges.
- Students in the UK are only allowed to apply to either Oxford or Cambridge. If your application is rejected from one, you aren't allowed to apply to the other.
- Apparently Prince Charles got rejected from Oxford but Queen Elizabeth managed to get him admitted in Cambridge anyhow.
- Henry VIII founded Trinity College, the now richest college in the UK, owning the O2 Arena in London as well as a large part of Tesco
- Many students claim that Trinity College is the birthplace of the famous dessert that they call "Trinity Burnt Cream".. more commonly known as "Crème Brûlée"
- Girton was the first female college to be established in Cambridge in 1867, but women students were not considered full members of the university and could not receive degrees. After several attempts, it wasn't until 1948 that the vote finally passed allowing women to become full members of the university.
- Our guide told us that in the past, women could be arrested and thrown in jail if they were caught talking to male students (even if the man had approached her). The grounds for arrest was "distracting men from their studies", and they could be held indefinitely without any proof being required
- Most of the colleges in Cambridge were men-only and refused to allow women admissions until around the 1970-1980s. Magdalene College was the last - in 1988 they were forced to admit women, resulting in their male students protesting in the streets. Apparently they wore black and carried a coffin labelled "the death of education".
Our guide was quite opinionated about the difficult history for women at Cambridge. We were pretty surprised to later find out that Cambridge actually still has 3 colleges that only admit women. Apparently they're now re-assessing their stance on admissions for transgender students who identify with the female gender.
