Note 167 — X SIR GEORGE DARWIN [152a]

The voting at University elections is in theory strictly confidential, but in practice this is unfortunately not always the case. George records in his diary the names of the five who voted for him and of the four who supported another candidate. None of the electors are now living. The election occurred in January, and in June he had the great pleasure and honour of being re-elected to a Trinity Fellowship. His daughter, Madame Raverat, writes: “Once, when I was walking with my father on the road to Madingley village, he told me how he had walked there on the first Sunday he ever was at Cambridge with two or three other freshmen; and how, when they were about opposite the old chalk pit, one of them betted him £20 that he (my father) would never be a professor of Cambridge University: ‘and’ said my father, with great indignation, ‘he never paid me.’”