Hello! I’m Connie, the trainee for The Oxford Union Society. I graduated with a BA in Classical Studies from Reading University in July 2023. Throughout my final years of university I worked in my local public library, first as a volunteer, then as a Saturday assistant.
I love working for the Union, although it is not what you might call a normal library, though there are some aspects which are standard: our library, like the Bodleian, has many smaller libraries within it – the Old Library, the Poetry Room, the Goodman, the Gladstone Room and the President’s Office. We classify our books by the Dewey Decimal system or versions thereof. This is, however, where normality ends. The Library Committee, a group of all-powerful students, decide which books we will buy and which we will remove. We have fiction books for those who want to read for pleasure and famous Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Old Library which illustrate the story of King Arthur, from adolescence to death, in ten hard-to-see paintings. These faded because the artists, which included Dante Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, did not prepare the wall first. Honestly! Didn’t they know what they were doing? The answer is no, definitely not – they were in their 20s (except Rossetti) and were paid in “tonic” (really gin). Meaning a group of young men were up ladders, possibly drunk, on the very narrow and rather high gallery (yet it is out of bounds today for health and safety reasons). On my first day the kitchen was being refurbished and, on taking up the floor, a ‘mysterious void’ was found with only a chair at the bottom. What the pit is, no one yet knows, although my co-worker insists that it is an oubliette. Unfortunately, we do not know if the chair had straps.
The Union has been described by Harold MacMillan as “the last bastion of free speech” and the variety of people who speak in debates is testimony to this. In fact, in my third week at the Union, the Prime Minster of Pakistan came to visit so we had security and police officers crawling around the building. The Union has also invited celebrities including Jack Gleeson, Michael Gambon and Stephen Fry as well as controversial figures such as Jordan Peterson, Ricky Gervais, and Katie Hopkins. In fact, in the no-platforming debate of 2019, the Society voted by vast majority not to support no-platforming.
