A teacher like Michael Tanner would never survive in today’s university climate

I came up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a rain-sodden October evening in 1976. I’d flown from spring sunshine in South Africa to this misery – the weather having turned abysmal after the best summer of the century, just as one would expect. I didn’t know what a Cambridge porter was meant to do as I plonked down my bags at the lodge, anticipating assistance. The porter, a stocky, tough military type, hardly gave me a glance, saying ‘Pick ’em up and follow me’. This, I was soon to find out, was the legendary Jaggard, the porter with the most fearsome reputation in the university, upon whom Tom Sharpe’s Skullion in Porterhouse Blue was based. As I heaved my bags across the dark and dismal New Court, up two flights of cold stone stairs, I resolved to leave as soon as I could get a flight home.

But then everything changed.