Glimpse into Another World

When she first heard about the scheme, a lady magistrate in the sleepy little (pop. 180) village of Spennithorne, England became so agitated that she was moved to sound off one day on a public bus. The Rev. Joseph N. Jory, it seemed, was about to bring some inmates from Her Majesty's Borstal Institution at Hatfield (one of the 18 Borstal reformatories in England and Wales) to his Spennithorne boys' camp. He was also bringing along some Oxford students to live with them. The lady magistrate did not mind the Oxonians, but the idea of having a gang of wild delinquents around was just too much. "Borstal boys," she shouted in the bus, "should never be let out!"

This British-style experiment in integration really started last spring. Anglican Jory, who has long run a camp for boys from the slums of Leeds, got a letter from the chaplain of Oxford's Pembroke College explaining that a group of Christian Fellowship undergraduates had offered to serve as counselors. The letter gave Jory another idea. Perhaps, he reasoned, the Oxonians might be just the people to give Borstal boys a glimpse into a world they had never known.

When the boys first arrived at camp, both groups were ill at ease. "I thought these Oxford students," said one Borstal boy, "would all be poshy types. And I dare say they thought we'd all come in carrying choppers [razors] and machine guns." As the days passed, suspicion melted away. From the moment the camp's cooks of the day lit the stove to fry the breakfast eggs, the two groups worked and played together, soon developed the camaraderie of foxhole cronies. They toured nearby castles and monasteries, gradually began to unburden themselves. Says one Oxonian: "When you sit over the same potato pan, peeling, you get to know a man. The most important thing is that as regards authority we are on the same side of the fence that they are."

The Borstal boys showed a surprising curiosity about university life, an equally surprising willingness to talk about their troubles. At nightly bull sessions, the Oxonians managed to offer sympathy and advice without seeming to patronize. "We can talk to them," said one Borstal boy, "like they was our own." Says an Oxonian: "If we can give them some inkling of what the rest of the world is like, we will have done our job."

By last week not only the lady magistrate but most everyone else in town had changed their minds about Jory's experiment. Living as equals with equal freedom, the Borstal boys got along so well with their Oxford contemporaries that not a single one tried to "scarper" (run away). The villagers even took them on in cricket matches and invited them to tea. Among their hosts was the objecting lady magistrate herself, who last week took a bunch of the boys off on a sightseeing tour of some local Roman ruins. Concluded Albert Clarke, a retired police superintendent and unofficial camp "commandant," who had come along to enforce discipline in case of trouble: "I thought it would be bad to mix the fortunates and the unfortunates. It had never been done before. But it has worked out fine."

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