Note 457 — Chapter VI · GIRTON AND NEWNHAM

This was in 1882. First class honours in this tripos did not become usual until women came up better prepared from schools. A Cambridge man, however, writing in 1873 declares that a man may be a wrangler when his mathematical knowledge was contemporary with his admission to the university, but that “no one was ever placed in any class of the (classical) tripos who came up to the university knowing only the elements of Greek grammar.... The classical man, if plucked,” (i.e. in mathematics) “loses 10 years’ labour”—the time spent in classics from early school days. Women, nevertheless, belied this dictum from the first; many have not known even “the elements of Greek grammar” when they came up, and few indeed have 10 years’ Greek studies on their shoulders when they take the tripos.