Rooftoppers, Night Climbers, and May Day at Magdalen

‘Flora’, wall painting from a villa near Pompeii, 1st century CE

In her biography of Donne - whose verse I first encountered at university when a friend introduced me to his suggestive metaphysical conceits and raffish early portrait - Katherine Rundell calls the poet an 'infinity merchant’. ‘To contemplate his work, she says, ‘is to grapple with a vision of the eternal’, and when I finished Super-Infinite, The Transformations of John Donne it was not too difficult to make the leap to one of her imaginative bestselling books for children, Rooftoppers, which is about Sophie, a young girl recovered from a shipwreck as a baby floating in a cello case, who is taken in by Charles Maxim, the scholar who found her. It is said that her mother drowned on the shipwreck, but as she grows older, Sophie begins to question this assumption and wonders if she is still alive. Charles has always told her ‘never to ignore a possible’, and based on a single clue, Sophie persuades him to take her to Paris to find her mother when they are forced to flee from the authorities after Charles is declared to be an inappropriate guardian. In Paris, Sophie meets Matteo, a strange boy who lives alone on rooftops to avoid orphanages and the police, and the story gathers momentum when, at night, Sophie joins him there and they begin the search.

It is unsurprising that Rundell relishes and describes so well Sophie’s nocturnal escapades when you consider that she is also a ‘rooftopper’ who began ‘night climbing’ at Oxford with friends, crawling out of windows and up drainpipes to explore the city from a height. Successful ‘night climbing’, she has said, ‘works on the joy of quick and necessary decisions, on improvising in the two seconds in which your stomach and brain are in conflict. It is unmooring your sense of fear and self-preservation from your sense of hope and danger and adventure’. The pastime, which appears to have developed at Cambridge in the 1930s, is amply described in a contemporary book on the subject that contains photographs of young men in conventional shirts and trousers, usually wearing ordinary leather shoes or plimsolls but occasionally barefoot, climbing many of the more imposing walls in the city. Its commentary, detailed and specific, offers a guide and advice for those coming after them: ‘Your feet are on slabs of stone sloping downwards and outwards at an angle of about thirty-five degrees to the horizontal, your fingers and elbows making the most of a friction-hold against a vertical pillar, and the ground is precisely one hundred feet directly below you’, writes ‘Whipplesnaith’, whose real name was Noel Howard Symington. Explaining why he and his friends put themselves at such risk, he remarks that ‘There is a kind of fear which is very closely akin to love, and this is the fear which the climber enjoys. It is, to use a contradictory term, a brave fear; a fear which announces its presence, perhaps very loudly, but raises no insuperable barrier to achievement’.

Most of the early ‘night climbers’ first developed this thrill by clambering into their colleges through windows and over railings when gates were closed in the evening, but while many undergraduates did so, either out of necessity or choice, only a few were more ambitious and went on to learn how to scale and master sheer walls and spires. The main ways to get up onto high roofs were to shin up drainpipes or to climb parallel walls using a mountaineering technique called ‘chimneying’, and ropes were rarely employed. There were two challenges to face: the climbing itself, with all its physical dangers, and the risk of bring caught. The penalties were considerable; there was always a chance of serious injury, and if a climber was identified half way up a wall or apprehended on a roof, he was likely to be ‘sent down’ from the university .

In my time, there were many who enjoyed finding their way into colleges after gates were locked, but I wasn’t aware of ‘night climbers’, although they may well have existed. There was a brief period during one of the summer terms when a small number of undergraduates, often stoned, took to ‘dawning’ on our college roof in order to welcome sunny mornings, but what I most vividly recall, with regard to Oxford heights, are the occasions when I went to the May Day celebrations, which began at the top of Magdalen Tower at six in the morning, following prayers, with the College Choir singing the ‘Hymnus Eucharisticus’ and a madrigal, ‘Now Is the Month of Maying’. Students and Oxford residents gathered below, along the High Street and on Magdalen Bridge, while senior members of the College took their places in the cloisters and on top of other nearby towers. After the ceremony some merrymakers took to punts on the river for a festive breakfast, but the crowds quickly dispersed. These days, however, despite the hour, the singing is usually followed by general revelry, which includes a parade, Morris dancing, and music, as well as the modern ‘tradition’ of students, sometimes formally dressed after spending the previous night at a May Ball, jumping into the river from Magdalen Bridge, which was an occasional occurrence in the past but is now habitual. There are precedents for these ungodly festivities. The Magdalen ritual was first documented in 1695, when it was noted that ‘the choral ministers of this House do, according to an ancient custom, salute Flora every year on the first of May, at four in the morning, with vocal music of several parts’, so it appears that May Day observances in Oxford were not originally Christian. Flora, the goddess of flowers, was at their heart, and garlanded maskers, mummers and other kinds of revelry were part of May Day celebrations many years before the hymn singing on Magdalen Tower.

For further exploration:

A review of Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/28/super-infinite-by-katherine-rundell-review-a-deft-portrait-of-john-donne

Katherine Rundell introduces Rooftoppers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp3u8fY4v7c

Katherine Rundell on ‘Night Climbers’ (limited access): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/katherine-rundell/diary

A review of Night Climbers of Cambridge: http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/01/27/review-night-climbers-of-cambridge/

John Bulmer’s photographs of Cambridge ‘Night Climbers’: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jan/21/john-bulmer-cambridge-night-climbers

May Morning, Oxford: https://maymorning.co.uk/426023492/

Image on index page: detail of photograph by John Bulmer

Magdalen on May Day, 2007