During your first few weeks as Cambridge students, you’ll often encounter situations like losing a key or card, needing a taxi, searching for directions, or craving a cup of tea and a chat to ease homesickness. The heroes who assist in these moments will always be our fantastic Porters. Porters are gatekeepers, first-aiders, security guards, wellbeing officers, receptionists, wranglers, tourist information officials, police officers, and fire wardens. Perhaps best of all, they are proper grown-ups and, for students who have just entered adulthood, this is certainly a comfort.

At Homerton College, you will find Sarah, who has been a porter for 12 years. She calls herself a “student wrangler,” and explains that this is not an exaggeration; the most challenging part of the job is “getting covered in and cleaning up other people’s vomit,” she says. Yet, students are not the only species that Sarah wrangles with. She describes that, “something about the job that was not on the job description is dealing with wildlife; pigeons in rooms, muntjacs stuck in railings, picking up angry peregrine chicks. Squirrels have zero chill”. I was recently emailed that someone had been seen chasing a fox on the college grounds.

“Porters are prone to herding tourists too, especially in the central colleges”

Porters are prone to herding tourists, too, especially in the central colleges. Foot traffic flows outside the Porter’s Lodge at Emmanuel College, where one porter describes helping members of the public who have fallen over outside. These are the rainbow colours of the job: not just the diversity of tasks, but the range of relational contexts in which they are performed. Customers include my own mother, who called the porters to send out a search party when I took too long to reply to a text; a High Court judge, broken out of the bathroom by a porter, “smashing the door in, only to discover nothing wrong with the lock!”; and “three visitors at night near our grounds and gardens, all wearing balaclavas and one holding a two-foot crowbar”. And, of course, an active avian community: Sarah reports “lots of birds in rooms”.

Speaking to the porters themselves, a commonality between them is that they all have had a broad range of life experiences, which have helped equip them for any situation. I spoke to a former bar-worker at Downing, a retail Christmas temp-turned-manager and factory-owner at Homerton, a cruise-ship theatre technician at Christ’s, and two porters from Emmanuel who started in different departments of the college. At Churchill College, Sandie tells me that, “before becoming a Porter, I worked 20 years as a Teaching Assistant in Primary Schools and before that, 20 years in Royal Mail”. The range of backgrounds and previous of careers among college porters is seen as a positive, with Sarah expressing that the “diverse range of experience and personality […] is good for the Plodge and the students”.

“The Porter’s Lodge is an institution”

Ask a porter for help and watch the swivel-chair slide as they consult a colleague behind the scenes. The Plodge runs on teamwork: “We constantly rely on each other, and sharing of information is paramount. We are a team!” says Sean. Before becoming a Homerton Porter, he ran his own construction business for over 35 years. Encouraged by his Police officer daughter, he became a porter following the pandemic and describes the job as “very fulfilling”.

For Cambridge students, the Porter’s Lodge is an institution, but the changes of modern life break through. The most significant difference Sarah has noticed in her time on the job is the improvement in student welfare. She praises her college, Homerton, which is “particularly good with a dedicated Wellbeing team”. Likewise, a Porter at Christ’s College reflects on the “shift towards more mental health aspects of the job […] dealing with students’ mental wellbeing rather than just their physical wellbeing”. For Sean, the biggest change has been technology, but “the basics of the job have remained the same”.

“They all have had a broad range of life experiences, which have helped equip them for any situation”

For both Sean and Sarah, the best part of being a porter is helping the students in any way they can.

When asked what he loves most about being a porter, Martyn Saunders, from Selwyn College, says, “It’s the variety for me. One minute you have a fire alarm test and the next you are helping a student tie a bow tie.” At the same college, deputy head porter, Lee Scott, says, “It is seeing people flourish and being part of that journey. We are always here and always available”.

“We all pride ourselves on being there in any way we can to support our students in what can be stressful and challenging times for them. We love to see them flourish!” says Sean. One Emmanuel Porter highlights that the most unexpected part of the job was “how emotional graduation day can be […] we really try to get to know students”. Sarah says that the “best part of being a porter, apart from biscuits, is forming friendships with students and having a chat”.

Being a Porter encompasses many aspects often carried out in quite unexpected ways. Porters are a crucial part of the Cambridge ecosystem. They serve a diverse clientele, from pigeons to parents to High Court judges. Students depend on the steady hand of the porter-wrangler. Seeing the same smiling face approaching the lodge, whether we come for a parcel, have lost our Cam cards, or simply want a friendly chat, always makes Cambridge feel more like home.