55. 1958-1960: My Gap Years



The term 'a gap year' had no currency back in the nineteen fifties and sixties when I was a student and I have been unable to find exactly when it first came into general use. In the UK the practice of taking time out of study for a year between school and university became established in the 1960s and this led at some point to this particular year being called a gap year. Later a year out of the work force between university and starting full time work also became known as a gap year. Now the term gap year seems to cover a range of possibilities and programmes run by charitable and commercial organisations for those looking for a sabbatical or a working holiday or a programme of extended overseas travel.

In Australia about 2% of school leavers take a year off before starting tertiary education, either travelling abroad (generally to Europe or South East Asia) or backpacking around Australia. I have no comparable figures for NZ where OE (Overseas Experience) usually follows after university studies have been completed. Interestingly Denmark discourages students who might think of taking a gap year after leaving school; since April 2009 the Danish government has given a bonus to school leavers who go directly into tertiary study.

The year I left school (1958) was the year in which VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) was set up in the UK. VSO was a charity set up to provide an educational experience overseas for selected school leavers before they started university. Volunteers, initially only boys, offered unskilled help in a poor African or Asian community in exchange for basic accommodation and some pocket money. In 1962 VSO opened up to qualified volunteers and by 1980 unqualified volunteers had been phased out. Now it is one of the largest organisations of its kind in the world (see http//www.vso.org.uk/about) and more than 40,000 volunteers have worked with it.

I left Wells Cathedral School in the summer of 1958 with two years to fill before taking up a place I had won at Selwyn College Cambridge. As I have indicated, there was no concept then of a gap year between school and university let alone two ‘gap years’. The reason for my delayed entry to university was the discontinuation of compulsory National Service in the UK. Since the end of World War Two healthy 17 to 21 year old males had been called up for two years of national service. This only applied for those born before 1^st October 1939 so I missed conscription by about nine months. However it did mean that those older than I were coming out of national service into university and pushing everyone like me down the queue for places.

These two years proved to be among the most important of my life, particularly in terms of my social, intellectual and political development; and they gave me an opportunity to work in different jobs, to travel and to abandon study curricula and read anything that took my fancy. 

I lived at home for most of my two gap years and worked in a number of different jobs. In 1958 jobs were plentiful and I had never given any particular thought as to what I might do after university. In the meantime I did have romantic notions of working at Lord’s (the MCC cricket ground) or the Old Vic Theatre in Waterloo but my enquiries about jobs in those two places came to nothing. Longer term I had hazy notions of becoming a journalist on an international daily paper. My Dad put me in touch with Marco, someone he knew at Reuters in Fleet Street. I visited Marco at work and he advised me to learn shorthand and touch typing. I did learn to touch type during my gap years but never went far with the shorthand.

Marco played a role in the original publication of Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago. Rejected by the authorities in the Soviet Union and not published there until 1988, the novel first appeared

'... in an Italian translation in 1957 and was largely responsible for Pasternak's receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he had to refuse (if he had left to collect, he was given to understand, he would not have been allowed to re-enter the Soviet Union). (The prize was eventually awarded posthumously to his son.) All these events provoked a storm of criticism of Pasternak, who was expelled from the Writers' Union (he had been a member since 1932; no one who did not belong to the Union could make money as a writer or translator, or publish any literary work), harassed by former friends and colleagues, attacked in published letters and articles, and even disturbed by anti-Semitic mobs of strangers outside his dacha near Moscow. The stress he and his family experienced must have contributed to his death in 1960. He is buried in the cemetery near his dacha, in Peredelkino.' (Source: go to www.swarthmore.edu and search for Dr Zhivago.)

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