Hey — it’s land economy, stupid: Prince Williams’s new class at Cambridge
Prince William caught a train to the Fens yesterday morning to start a bespoke Cambridge course in agricultural management. The Duke of Cambridge is going to study there for 10 weeks, preparing him for his future role in charge of the vast Duchy of Cornwall estate and for his general moral stewardship of the Great British Countryside.
Commuting most days from London, Wills will be excused most of the tiresome imposts of Cambridge social life. But one little quirk he’ll discover in the next few days is that for the coming term he will be treated as a member of an idiosyncratic Cantab breed: the land ecs.
Distinctive to the university and the subject of both gentle ridicule and envy, the land ecs (students of land economy — a version of which has been laid on for the prince) are a kind of Barboured Cambridge sub-set: pretty public school girls and hard-drinking boys who use the spare time afforded by their famously light workload to prop up the university sports teams and party at each other’s family piles.
Back when Prince Charles studied history at Trinity, land economy was regarded as a training course for the running of one’s father’s estate. A student of that era remembers girls with flicky hair and young men in faux-Edwardian get-up. Nowadays the only estates most land ecs attend to are the properties they handle in their plush graduate jobs at Savills. The land economy course demands the same grades as any other, but its slightly less intimidating ratio of applications to places entices the ambitious. It sounds as if the Duke has a more strenuous programme than his undergrad peers, with 20 hours a week of lectures and seminars.
Among the land ecs’ number there are often an eyebrow-raising contingent of sporting stars — England rugby chief Rob Andrew is one notable alumnus. Of the XV who started at Twickenham for last month’s Varsity match, four were land ecs, which counts as a relatively intellectual rugger vintage. There have been years where more than half the light blue Boat Race crew were esteemed scholars of the land.
“I mean, there’s posh blokes getting into Cambridge because they impressed the Master at fly-half,” says one student, “and then there’s getting into Cambridge by being the Duke of it.”
Welcoming Wills, Mary Beard says she hopes he “will take the opportunity to meet some of our more ‘ordinary’ students, struggling with making ends meet”. To do that, he’ll need to break out from the lads and ladies of the land ec rat pack.
