Foundation of Students' Representative Council, 1884

Clearly it would be embarrassing if such scenes confronted the visitors in 1884. The authorities thus welcomed the initiative of a group of senior students who formed a Students’ Representative Council [SRC].38 Its aims were submitted to the Senatus in December 1883. In conflicts with the police, it could help secure justice for the students; but this problem should disappear once the SRC was there to ‘aid in maintaining order and academic tone among them – loyalty to their Alma Mater’. The SRC would also foster social life and ‘a wholesome esprit de corps’, and organise student participation in the Tercentenary.39 The SRC held its first formal meeting in January 1884, and proved its worth by maintaining order at Northcote’s inaugural address and at the torchlight procession which followed.40 This was the first procession to be officially approved, and was escorted by the police to protect it against the town element. It passed peacefully. A spontaneous and potentially violent rite had been tamed and turned into a spectacle for the general public, and the students, once the cause of violence, were now seen as a respectable part of the community to be defended from it. During the Tercentenary, there was much relieved comment on the students’ unprecedented good behaviour. There was friction at first over the limited place for students in the official programme, but this was appeased by encouraging the SRC to organise its own events, of which there were eventually five. The torchlight procession, modelled on that in January, was the most spectacular. The others were a ‘dramatic representation’ of a play based on Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel, a reception where the foreign guests had a chance to address the student audience, a formal ball, and a Symposium or informal smoking concert on the last night. Speaking at the Symposium, Grant thanked the students for their contribution: the week brought out

The SRC used its success in 1884 to launch an appeal for its first priority, a Student Union, and this opened in 1887–8. The SRC was soon imitated in the other Scottish universities, and given a formal role by the 1889 Act. It also developed international links: Bologna students established contact in 1884, and the SRC sent a delegate to the 1888 jubilee there, an event which was important in spreading ideas of student corporate life throughout Europe.45 The Tercentenary was thus a landmark in the development of student life.