Morphy Day tomato and flour fights

Bob Schroeter (Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology 1962, PhD 1963) recalls the Morphy Day tomato and flour fights.

Morphy Day traditionally consisted of the constituent colleges, particularly the Royal College of Science and the City and Guilds College, having a bit of a flour and tomato fight on the towpath whilst the three constituent colleges rowed out the Morphy and the Lowry races along the river.

The years before I had actually been rowing on the river, but this year as President of the City and Guilds College, I had to take part in the fight along the towpath and I always remember that there was a young policeman on one of those early Noddy motorcycle things who thought he was going to stop this rampaging on the towpath, so he very foolishly rode his motorcycle into the middle of the foray and got totally, but totally, plastered in tomatoes and flour. I think in those days a student could get away with making a monkey out of a policeman. You couldn't do that today.

I was petrified about what might happen and I saw at the edge of all this foray his boss - the superintendent - was there so I went over to him and said I am awfully sorry about all of this, that we would obviously pay for all the cleaning up. The policeman's response was: "Well, I think he has learnt to deal with crowd control". He wasn't worried but it was still a great fear for us and when I went back to College I went and talked to the Rector (Linstead) about it and said: "Look I am sorry. We may have had an incident which is not going to reflect well." I explained it all to him and he was very sympathetic, he was perfectly happy and said: "Oh that's alright they've respected it".

We then somehow got onto his student days and what is classed as irresponsible life here. For them they used to go and play football in Hyde Park, and I think in the College archives somewhere is a photograph of Linstead playing football in Hyde Park. So you see this eminent Rector in shorts kicking a ball around. But to get to Hyde Park and back again of course they had to cross the main Kensington Gore and they tend to do that in crocodile and cause chaos for the traffic. So of course causing chaos in the 1920s is just as bad as doing it today. Even eminent Rectors have had a misspent youth.

Bob Schroter (Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology 1962, PhD 1964)