Farrukh Dhondy | Of May Balls in Cambridge as Titan adventure' leads to tragedy

“O Bachchoo why do we believe

That God wants to be flattered.

I thought such vanity only mattered

To fools who demand and receive

Meaningless titles like King and Lord.

The creator of all is surely above

This vainglorious need. Yes, give him love

With hymns he’s probably just bored…”

From The Lota Rota, by Bachchoo

Photographs of the salvaged wreckage of the submersible vessel Titan, in which five people died when it imploded, are all over the world’s media. We are now told that the passengers, all billionaires, were warned very specifically that the vessel was untested in the depths where the wreck of the Titanic lay. It could be disastrous.

When the debris is examined by submarine experts, we shall probably know how the disaster occurred.

Gentle reader … I am sure you’ve read all this and seen the pictures. The reason I recall the events here is that a related but possibly irrelevant and embarrassing fact has come to my attention. The London Times newspaper reported that on the day the Titan started on its journey down and lost all contact, Pembroke College, Cambridge, was celebrating their annual May Ball with a theme entitled “Nautilus into the Depths”.

The theme was specifically inspired by the fact that one of the victims of the tragedy was Hamish Harding, a billionaire businessman who graduated from Pembroke College in 1987. As an undergraduate he studied Natural Sciences, the Cambridge title for physics, chemistry, crystallography, biology, etc.

The reason I repeat the fact here is that 20 years before Mr Harding, I graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and like him, I “read” (the Oxbridge word for “studied”) Natural Sciences. Unlike him, I didn’t go on to become a billionaire.

And yes, in my time there, I attended the May Balls which, for some obscure reason, take place in June.

For these balls, the colleges hire bands, charge exorbitant sums from their undergraduates to attend and specify formal dress, which for me meant hiring a dinner jacket for the night.

The university drinks and dances from 8 pm to 5 am. My memory of the final year’s May Ball is vivid as its aftermath began, by sheer luck, my paid writing career.

The tradition at the time, which probably persists to this day, was that friends from different colleges met after the 5 am conclusion and hired punts and boated down to Grantchester.

Our gang in that year consisted of perhaps 15 people and we hired three punts and were poling our way under the bridges across the narrow river Cam when we spotted a young man on one of the bridges photographing the boats as they passed. One of the girls in our punt, as high on champagne as the rest of us, stood up, bared her breasts as we approached the bridge with this young photographer and shouted to him that if he wanted more, he’d have to pay.

Someone from our punt asked him what he was doing as the punt hesitated in front of the bridge. He said he was doing an article on Cambridge madness. We said he’d found the right crowd, and someone asked him if it was a photographic article. He said he was looking for a writer who could write the accompanying prose but hadn’t found one. Someone in our punt said he just had and pointed to me. We invited the young man to breakfast that morning after the punting and he turned up and hired me to write for the agency he worked at.

I don’t think the May Ball that year was “themed”. This one in June 2023 must have been planned and its props of submarines and underwater wonders, with a replica of some vessel overgrown with glowing deep-sea flora, suggestive of the wrecked Titanic, were commissioned and constructed months before. Alas, the organising committee heard of the Titan’s fate that morning. The search for it had immediately begun. The searchers said that at that depth and expanse there was only one per cent chance of finding the Titan whole and saving its passengers.

What was the student committee to do? Could they cancel the ball? Could they strip the college of all the nautical paraphernalia they had commissioned to commemorate the achievements of one of the lost souls?

There was a lot of soul searching but in the end the May Ball committee concluded that cancellation or stripping the courts and hall of its nautical decorations and paraphernalia of diving to view the wreck of the Titanic wouldn’t save the Titan or its passengers. The billionaire’s toy may be in precarious waters or doomed -- but the revels of the college would go on.

Obviously, the media each day report on tragedies all around our world. The world is what it is and hundreds die in wars, in train crashes, in small boats crossing the Mediterranean or the English Channel in desperation. The five explorers regrettably died while indulging the ambition of billionaires like Elon Musk and others who feel their pastimes, destinies or, in fact, “toys” are the conquest of space or exploring the depths of the oceans -- quests that were hitherto left to the agencies of the State.

Their expeditions are not what Nasa or Yuri Gagarin’s space flight set out to achieve. They are the indulgences of the super-rich, but their fates are no less tragic for that.