Students Plotting For Capping Week

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30426, 28 April 1964, Page 8

Students Plotting For Capping Week

Something is brewing. There is talk in the city of mysterious meetings, plot and counterplot, unrest and stealthy preparations. A fpw well-documented facts emerge.

Students at Canterbury University and Lincoln College institutions which erupt with autumh madness every year—are ready to leave their studies and invade the city next week. Some will be in the guise of beetles, scurrying . here and there, others competing in apparently pointless contests.

The purpose is thought to be to soften up the citizens for Wednesday, May 6. the day of the capping week procession and intensive collection of money for this year's charity, the Hohepa Homes for intellectually handicapped children. An assault is to be made on the Guiness Book of Records. A “rockathon” will start in Friday at 7.45 p.m., with two rocking chair athletes in rockers and another on a rocking horse, all aiming to exceed Mrs Ralph Weir’s endurance record of 93hr Bmin, set at Truro, Nova Scotia, in 1957. On Sunday at 3 p.m. an attempt will be made on the coffin water-speed record over a measured mile at Kerr’s Reach, and at 8 a.m. on Monday four girls will appear in Beath’s window to start knitting blankets for charity with the idea of breaking the Bristol University girls’ record of 48hrs set in 1960.

Next Saturday morning has been earmarked for a students’ outing to New Brighton. About the same time 12 students from Lin-

coin College will start walking from Dunedin carrying a coffin in which will be the dreaded Scotch thistle. When they reach Cathedral square, perhaps on Tuesday afternoon, the thistle will be ceremoniously destroyed to prevent it spreading on to the fields and meadows of Canterbury. On Friday or Saturday, depending on the weather, the s.s. Charity will set out on its maiden voyage, across Cook Strait. Nobody seems sure where the trip will start, from the North Island or the South Island. There is even more uncertainty about where it will finish. Her hull will be a bathtub and her crew two science students. Other baths will make a traverse of the Avon river from Carlton Mill bridge to the sea at 1 p.m. on Sunday. There will be eight of them paddling off from what is promised to be “a full Le Mans start” from the bank.

On the day before procession. namely Tuesday of next week, the popular annual bike race in the Avon river, beginning at 1.10 p.m., will bring the preliminary skirmishes to a close. The students’ collection will be held on procession .day. The money will be used to establish first one and later more home schools for the curative education of intellectually handicapped children.