Many members will be aware that the Billygoats Society was founded in 1948, and this is recorded in the below article which appeared in the 1949 Journal. I was interested to see that one of the key activities of the newly founded society was to hold a dinner in London on Boat Race night. I wonder if current members would like to resurrect this idea?
John Adams provided the Journal entry and the following commentary.
Billygoats Society – formation and first set of Rules
The June 1948 issue of the Fitzwilliam Magazine, which was written and published by the students, included the following –
Billygoats Society
Oarsmen past and present, who have raced for Fitzwilliam House, are invited to join a new dining society now being formed to support and give continuity to the traditions of the Boat Club.
The social functions of the Society will be two dinners annually, one in London on Boat Race night, and the other in Cambridge on the night of the Fairbairn Cup race.
Further details may be had of the Joint Organizers, J Hunter and F J Willett at Fitzwilliam House.
In the Fitzwilliam Journal of December 1949 the formation of the Society and its activities in its first year were reported as follows.
The author failed to mention John Willett’s part in the formation of the Billygoats and as a result the omission has been repeated in John Cleaver’s history of Fitzwilliam.
As Walter Grave noted in his History of Fitzwilliam, in its first year the Society “treated its Rules with a cheerful disregard, for at its first meeting, in appointing Mr Wayper (a former member of St Catharine’s B.C.) to be its Secretary, it did not remember that candidates for the secretaryship had to be past members of F.H.B.C.”: Rule 4 was broken.
Further, the election of two Vice-Presidents at the first General Meeting created an anomaly. The Rules make no mention of the position of Vice-President. The committee membership (Rule 3) does not include Vice-Presidents – but Rule 6 states that the Boat Club President “shall be an honorary Vice-President” of the Society. (At the time the Club was, like CUBC, led by a President not a Captain – F.H.B.C. changed in 1955.)
The anomalous situation of Vice-Presidents remained unchanged for 15 years. The original Rules with only minor modifications (such as amending the reference to ‘the President of F.H.B.C.’ to ‘Captain of Boats’) remained in force until 1963 when rewritten by a sub-committee of the Society chaired by Bill Williams, then Billygoats President.
It might appear that the newly adopted Rule 5 was also ignored by that first meeting as the University Rep recorded in the Journal as being elected was ‘Mr E.F.R. Stearn, B.A.’. Clearly not an undergraduate! But it seems likely that Ted Stearn was indeed an undergraduate when elected, as he matriculated in 1946 and went down in 1949.
My final comment on the first year of the Billygoats is to draw attention to the involvement of four senior members of Fitzwilliam in a society established by two undergraduates – the Secretary (Leslie Wayper) was a Tutor and the Treasurer (Bill Williams) was Assistant Censor and Bursar, the Censor (Thatcher) and a Tutor (Norman Pounds) were Vice-Presidents,.
John Adams
2 Feb 2021