Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

The staff food area at Henley Greenlands was once a place to load up your plate with free goodies and then jostle for a seat, often next to someone you wouldn’t normally meet, at lunchtime. For all sorts of reasons, those days are gone and it is much more of a hit-and-miss as to whether the canteen area and adjacent seating will be populated by a great number of people.

Yet it can still be a really diverting and informative time of the day. Our lunchtime conversation today, for instance, allowed for some banter across the tables and covered quite a lot of topics (some internal gossip, some about the weekend’s football). We got round to trying to piece together the extent to which Henley used to have all sorts of (what now seem to us) very odd customs.

Apparently, a while ago the College did not shy away from creating different classes of employee, and had a number of ways of making these differences manifest. Certain rooms were reserved for the “A list”, who enjoyed tea and scones in the Blue room in the afternoon, a glass of sherry with their lunch and, best of all, had silver napkin rings with their names engraved on them. Female members of faculty or staff were not expected to enter the Blue room without reason, and certainly not wearing trousers. Those on the “B list” enjoyed some privileges but these did not extend to preferential treatment at lunch (where, so I’m told, senior staff ate early, even before the clients). Televisions were banned from the accommodation in order to maintain the position that these were study rooms. I could go on…

All of this you might think ended in the 1950s or 1960s, but apparently these things did not change here until the mid 1990s!

The way working practices and social attitudes have changed in Britain is the subject matter of a great series on BBC, with which I’m playing catch-up on iPlayer, called “The British at Work”, presented by Kirsty Young. In the fourth and last episode, I noted that our former Dean, Chris Bones, is interviewed, including in an exchange on the widening gap in multiples of wage level between lowest and highest paid employees in organisation. Whether Chris was arguing for or against this I wasn’t 100% sure.

Kirsty’s programme is pretty good and I am shamelessly taking notes to add to my repertoire of ways of talking about the way in which careers are changing, which is part of the Personal Development agenda at Stage 2 of the Henley MBA.