The Bettencourt Society has existed since 1875. The Bettencourters are also known as “the Franciscans” because a man gets elected to this society on the basis of his having sufficient charisma to tame both bird and beast. Just like Francis of Assisi. Each year at the end of Lent term the society hosts a dinner at its headquarters, a pocket-sized palace off Magdalene Street that was left to the university by Hugh Bettencourt with the stipulation that it be used solely for Bettencourt Society activities. If you’ve heard of the Bettencourters you may already known the following facts: No woman enters this building unless a member of the Bettencourt Society has invited her, and no Bettencourt Society member invites a woman into the building unless it’s for this annual dinner of theirs. And getting invited to the dinner is dependent on your being considered exceptionally attractive.
The Homely Wench Society has only existed since 1949. The women who were its first members had heard about the Bettencourt Society and weren’t that impressed with what they heard about the foundational principles of these so-called Franciscans. As for their annual dinner . . . hmm, strangely insecure of intelligent people to spend time patting each other on the backs for having social skills and getting pretty girls to have dinner with them. But people may spend their time as they please. No, the first Homely Wench Society members didn’t have a problem with the Bettencourt Society until Giles Rutherford (Bettencourt Society President, 1949, Ph.D. Candidate in the Classics Faculty) was writing a poem and got stuck. What he needed, he said, was to lay eyes on a girl whose very name conjured up the idea of ugliness the same way invoking Helen of Troy did for beauty. Luckily for Giles Rutherford’s poem, the first wave of female Cantabs working toward full degree certification were on hand to be ogled at. Rutherford sent his Bettencourt Society brethren out into the university with this task: “Find me the homeliest wench in the university, my brothers. Search high and low, do not rest until you’ve sketched her face and form and brought it to me. Comb Girton in particular; something tells me you’ll find her there.”2 The Bettencourters looked into every corner of Newnham and Girton and found many legends in the making. They compiled a list of Cambridge’s homeliest wenches, a list which later fell into the hands of one of the women who had been invited to the Bettencourt’s annual dinner. This lady stole the list and sought out other women who’d accepted invitations to this dinner. Having gathered a number of them together she showed the list of homely wenches around and asked: “Is this kind of list all right with us?”
“No it jolly well isn’t,” the others replied. “This is Cambridge, for goodness sake—if a person can’t come here to think without these kinds of annoyances then where in this world can a person go???”3
They hesitated to involve the women whose names they’d seen on the list. Some of the Bettencourt dinner invitees were friends with the homely wenches, and didn’t want to cause any upset. Who wants to see their name on such a list? But in the end they decided it was the only way to gather forces that would hold. Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end. Moira Johnstone, the first of the homely wenches to be informed of her place on the list, had to suspend a project she’d been working on in her spare time—the building of a bomb. She’d been looking for an answer to a question she had regarding the effects of a particular type of explosion, but the temptation to test her model on a bunch of fatheads was too strong. The others had similar responses, but soon settled on a simple but emphatic riposte. As they worked through this riposte, the Bettencourt dinner invitees and the homeliest wenches discovered that, by and large, they liked each other and were interested in each other’s work; they thereby declared themselves a society and gained the support of new members who hadn’t been featured on either list. Nonetheless the members of this new society dubbed themselves Homely Wenches one and all.