On Pink

Joshua Loo

№1, Volume V

The following article is in part based on incomplete memory and illegible notes. Responsibility for any errors remains, of course, that of the author and the editor, who are in this case the same person; the editing of this article, but not the responsibility therefor, was delegated to another person.

Few publications in recent memory have caused such an uproar as the latest issue of Pink; The Elizabethan has been tamed by the forces of professionalisation, Hooke and Camden are sufficiently detached and specialised to avoid controversy, and The Librarian has such a small readership that even the most divisive articles have not attracted very much comment.

Pink prompted the largest unrest in the school since protests on the prohibition of Yard football; the protest was timed such as to be viewed by the entirety of the school, who were halted on the way to Latin Prayers. Yet the headmaster equally skillfully appears to have defused the situation. The Librarian understands that, after a meeting called by the headmaster during morning break, the headmaster indicated that there was to be no punishment for the creators of Pink, his desire that this should be communicated to those who wrote it, and that the editors of Pink be made aware of this indication. Almost all unrest has halted; there was in some quarters a feeling of jubilation, at their having halted action on the part of the headmaster.

Yard was at 8:30 completely empty. Noöne, apart from those scurrying about to and from houses, and so on, was present; this remained the case until about 8:41, when a large banner was unfurled from the window of Grant’s. It appeared that the organisers of the unfurling of the banner had not accounted for the wind; we assume that Dr. Smith personally organised astrophysic forces such as to precipitate the foiling of their plan. An initial attempt to attach almanacks or some other weight to the bottom of the poster in order to, in turn, foil the foiling, was halted by increased vigour on the part of the wind. At some point, it is understood that a member of staff halted the deployment of the banner; one source who was present at the event claimed that it was impounded, though this may be school practice (we understand that a banner with ‘Free Tibet’ was impounded after the Bursar complained of its being hung out of the Sargeaunt room before the signing ceremony of the Chinese schools agreement.)

A number of people in whose calling distinguished members of the school community we feel justified, viz. Messrs. Page, Fair, Feltham, Walsh, and (a momentarily present) Wurr were spotted in Yard, in various different groupings; Dr. Smith, Mr. Kemball, and someone whom a source with less than certainty believes to be Mr. Sharp initially attempted to disperse the crowd, with little or no success. By this time, a large number of people had entered Yard, and were looking on. Norm Yeung was seen attempting to video the situation; Freddie Poser took the opportunity to use a proper camera. When asked whether any policies applied to the gathering, one teacher said that ‘you [we] should all [have] be[en] in Latin Prayers’, and that there was a ‘behaviour policy’; strictly speaking, one should note that we were not required to have been at Latin Prayers, for the gathering ended before 9:00. (Further conversation with the teacher in question suggested alternative recollection on the part of the teacher; it is probably true that we should have all been ‘going’ to Latin Prayers, with the exception of a few who inhabit College.) We have reprinted the policy at the end of The Librarian; readers may judge the conduct of participants accordingly.

A source present at the scene says that the most prominent chants were ‘Oh Westminster’, followed by ‘Jaya Yaya’ (or ‘something to that phonetic effect’), some sections of Pater noster, and ‘[w]e love you Pink, we do’. A number of people emerged in pyjamas; we also have not heard news of any punishment related to this. Others wore some sort of pink somewhere; some correspondents of The Librarian inscribed their almanacks with ‘Solidariność’. Very little was thrown; there was certainly no violence. The most threatening projectile was probably a piece of cardboard, which found its way into a bin.

By 8:54, a number of people were induced to go into Latin Prayers. Noöne who had strayed from sumptuary orthodoxy entered Latin Prayers; it is not clear whether their absence was caused by prohibition of entry or boycott. The gathering started to disperse after 8:55; many took their places in Latin Prayers, initially slowly, but soon increasingly rapidly. The headmaster commenced Latin Prayers by immediately addressing the situation: words to the effect that there exists no greater believer in the concept of loyal dissent than he were uttered, to much genial laughter. He continued, reminding pupils of his love of 19th century radicalism. The headmaster suggested that the protest was initiated by a false rumour. The Librarian understands that at some point, the editors of Pink were divided as to whether they had been identified, and that they believed that an ultimatum from the Under Master had been issued. Whatever happened, it was known by lunch-time that there was to be no punishment. Some rumours said that the school was prepared to expel the editors of Pink, and to report these expulsions to universities; The Librarian has heard nothing more to confirm these rumours. It may be that these were the ‘false rumours’ to which the headmaster was referring.

Prayers commenced. These prayers were in particular graced by thoroughly spirited singing on the part of he who is out of all of us perhaps the most sonorous (and soundly dressed), viz. Mr. Page, whose slight mistiming of the end of his cry precipitated further laughter. The organist, perhaps moved by the general excitement of the pupil body, proceeded to play even more erroneously than usual, though the singing of Pater noster proceeded without further amusement, perhaps due to the saturation of our capacity to cause further disturbances. One source said that the errors were deliberate, and that Mr. Kemball ‘began to berate him—if not directly accusing him of activities related to [the] dissent then stirred up’; there is no suggestion of wrongdoing, especially in view of the normal standard of playing in Latin Prayers. We calculate that the statistic significance of his playing was approximately 0.6; consequently, there is no reason to suspect the organist.

One Theology and Philosophy candidate said that he was there to protect our ‘God-given right to free speech’; he may have forgot that he already has an offer. An observer, who refused to be named, noted that, as the number of legitimate avenues for satire has decreased (we assume that he meant legitimate avenues with a readership greater than four), the general desire of the school for satire manifested itself in an underground Pink. After Latin Prayers, some pupils commented that the protestors had been ‘slapped down’ (or used words to that effect); your correspondent overheard at least one saying that she was glad that there had been a ‘riot[sic]’ at her time in school. One person who had not even been to Latin Prayers was unaware of Pink in general until he was informed of the events of the morning by others who were more eager to attend. There are still many members of the school who have not seen copies of Pink; The Librarian has uploaded a scanned copy to its website.

Amidst the furore, two questions are pertinent. First, whence, and why—now, and at all? Second, was Pink any good?

Whence Pink? Ben Brind OW wrote to me after I asked for an old copy of Pink for Chaplain’s breakfast that, at some time before February 2014, he ‘took on Pink … in one of the oddest processes ever established. The entire edition had blown up in the previous year when Sandy Crole tried to do an edition with Will Stevens and Lucy Fleming Brown. Dr. Boulton vetoed it at more or less the last minute … Dr. Smith then announced that he would set up a version of Pink when I was in sixth form. I turned up to the meeting slightly puzzled as to how this state-sponsored version would work but in a state of curiosity.’ He writes that many issues of Pink before largely consisted of teachers superimposed on page three of The Sun, and ‘ill-judged comparisons to authoritarian régimes’—they were ‘of extremely poor quality’. This Pink continues the tradition of publication without censorship from the school, anonymously, which was interrupted temporarily by the Dr. Smith-approved issue in 2014.

That is an answer in one sense, but it feels insufficient. Why now? That is to say, we have answered the question in the same way that we may attribute a mugging to a specific set of events—‘I thought to take the bus instead of the train, having been made aware of delays’—but nothing more—‘I was more likely to be mugged due to a reduction in police attention’, and so on. It is more interesting to ask why in the second sense—which factors conspired to make the events as they occurred more likely?

A few say that Pink is a product of moral decline. In the past, we studied classics, used the faculty of memory as God ordained, and respected hierarchy. Now, we take undemanding examinations in analytic languages, reliant on the computer for memory, and no longer respect hierarchy of any sort. To some extent, there has indeed been a reduction in respect for hierarchy. Yet it is doubtful that those of the past Westminster truly believed in the hierarchy which was imposed upon them. In the same way in which those in future generations should not be convinced by the school’s outward commitment to social justice of any commitment on the part of pupils, amongst whom there exist a vast array and quantity of prejudices in spite of, or perhaps because of, campaigns for their eradication, we should not assume that in that past world everyone was committed to these values.

The change, therefore, is not one of moral decline, so much as one of expression. Even then, it is not clear that our willingness to mock in public has declined; past issues of The Elizabethan were often somewhat satiric, even to the eyes of one unaware of Westminster’s past. Hence the change is really in the mode of expression. At present, there exists not even a School Council; when the School Council existed, it was relatively clear that for the most part there was very little activity—infrequent meetings, poor attendance, and a poor reputation (whether justified or not) hampered its ability to act. Complaints must be privately communicated, in private conversation online and in real life. None of the school publications are satiric.

Even in the 1990s, there was still a sense of humour in The Elizabethan; readers continued to ‘employ the medium of’ the august pages thereof. One could attribute this to the editorship: in the 1870s, it appears that pupils edited it, in the early 1990s, Mr. Pyatt, now, Mr. Page, and so on. However, it is not clear that the decline in quality was due to to the editors. Rather, it was perhaps due to a change in what was viewed as acceptable. This is most visible in the decline in the number of letters sent to The Elizabethan; at present, there are no letters whatsoever, and there have not been for over two decades. Letters used to be sent with witty Latin pseudonyms and contained complaints about a vast array of issues facing the school. It is apparent that in the 1870s there were more legitimate avenues of public protest than there are now.

Hence the true reason for the propensities which produced Pink was a decline in the number of legitimate avenues of public protest. Perhaps there were protests and satiric issues of Pink in the past, in which case this hypothesis is somewhat invalidated. Nevertheless it is apparent that the popularity of Pink, and the change from a normal state of Westminster apathy (manifest in what we described in the editorial of the latest issue of The Librarian Supplement) to an attitude of active protest suggest that even were there to have been some publications à la Pink before these trends, there is still something to the hypothesis that expression has been diverted.

The most pertinent question is, however, whether this Pink was any good. Some parts were rather entertaining. Very few would not be amused by page fourteen, for example. Some parts were lost on others—the parody of the open letter sent to the headmaster in re the opening of schools in China, for example. Many were somewhat in between—the couples section was not particularly humorous, but, if as one teacher suspected, the couples referenced were based on specific couples, it may have been rather crueller, though perhaps more entertaining to those suitably acquainted with the material for the page.

Some suffered more than they should have. Mr. Lynch, the head of security, is generally agreed to have been unfairly victimised. Though, just as with anyone else, one cannot completely rule out the possibility that he was as described, there is no reason to suspect him more than anyone else. The defence of the editors—that it was so obviously satire that noöne would actually believe it (or, indeed, believe the opposite), is, to some extent, true. However, that an accusation is ridiculous, or is not to believed, is insufficient to prove that it is acceptable to make such claims. The defence of Ben Brind, that it was difficult to mock the teachers who deserve to be mocked, because they were more likely to object, does not apply in this case, because Dr. Smith was not in charge¹ during the drafting process, and so there were no constraints.

The production quality of this issue of Pink was relatively high. It appears that external printers were used.² This issue of Pink has proved remarkably resilient to the pressures of a schoolbag; the stapling seems to have worked, in that none of the pages have fallen apart yet.

Nevertheless, there remain several possible æsthetic improvements. The use of ‘straight’ quotation marks, for example, is a regrettable oversight; some of the margins ought to have been increased, especially in the letter. The double hyphen in the ‘profile’ of Simon Lynch ought to have been an em dash, preferably without a space. Of course, some of these decisions presumably were in conscious imitation of their subjects—the order sheet, for example, was an excellent imitation of the poor design of the Intranet.

Some of the humour was overly crude. The foreward, whilst having broadly successfully imitated the tone of the headmaster, was rather tone-deaf in ‘Helping Poor People’; the provision of assistance to the poor cannot be said to, per se, be an evil, and was overly broad as a criticism of a policy which is, out of all school policies, certainly not the most egregious. Similarly, the insertion of ‘yuck’ after ‘state schools’ may say more about the editors of Pink than the headmaster.

Given that Chinese Britons are superior to their counterparts (on the flawed measure that is the examination for the GCSE)³ in not only ‘quadwuple maths’ but English, and that the affliction of mathematic overreach affects pupils of all ethnicities at Westminster, ‘Parent 1’ seems to have been somewhat unfairly targeted.

The target of the letter has not complained; it managed to emulate the style of the original letter to the headmaster on the opening of schools in China quite well.

The ‘couples’ page was not particularly original; it could probably have been omitted without significant loss. The principal problem with the page is that, because they seem to be based on particular couples, they are likely insufficiently general to be humorous to a broader audience.

The target of the preview of Caberet, which was reviewed in this issue of The Librarian, and who need not be named, is no less likely to either sue or have grounds to sue for libel by the erasure of his or her name; we are insufficiently aware of events in the Millicent Fawcett Hall to comment on whether this criticism was deserved.

The Order Sheet was particularly praiseworthy for its use of proper quotation marks; it seems sufficiently light-hearted to not deserve any particular criticism. Over the page, the staff photo competition was a little cruel; watching VHS documentaries about the Abbey is certainly a superior hobby to taking pictures of oneself or whatever else it is that we are expected to do now. ‘EGO JOHN FALL’ is crueller than it is a good pun.

Pink is, despite its faults, still, at heart, humorous; it hits some of the right targets, but may not have struck the balance between humour and decency.

What is the alternative to this procedure? Perhaps Dr. Smith had the answer, with his school-approved Pink. The conundrum is perhaps this: a school which would tolerate the editors of such a publication would almost certainly not need it, for it would be sufficiently self-reflective not to require such a mirror. Schools which do require such mirrors tend not to be particularly supportive of freedom of expression, as far as internal matters are concerned.

Policies

Few of the General Regulations appear to be relevant here; the regulations concern, inter alia, what might once have been termed vices (drugs, alcohol and so on), timetabling, bounds, and so on. Most relevant is the twelfth regulation, viz. ‘[p]upils in Yard are expected to be sensible and considerate at all times.’

The ‘code of conduct’, to which our adherence is ‘expected’, also may be relevant. One must ‘[s]how good manners to members, guests, and neighbours of the School …[and] show regard for legitimate authority’.

None of the other policies appear to be particularly relevant to the protest; this may be because most schools do not find that they require a particular policy on mass unrest.⁴