The magnificent Seven - student prank perpetrators reunited at Caius

On Sunday 8 June, 1958, early risers strolling down King’s Parade were astonished to see an Austin Seven van perched on the apex of the Senate House roof, looking for all the world as if it was driving along the Cambridge skyline.

The authorities swung into action. Police, Fire Brigade and Civil Defence units combined in an attempt to remove the offending object. Finding some suspicious-looking scaffolding poles on the roof, they deduced correctly that they had been employed to lift the car into position.

So they tried to use them to bring it down again, to the amusement of a large crowd of onlookers. Five days later, they admitted defeat and cut the vehicle with oxy-acetylene torches into six pieces, which they then lowered to the ground on a rope.

Fifty years on, the team of a dozen engineering students from Gonville & Caius College who were responsible for the stunt, now respectable septuagenarians, gathered again at the College for a celebratory dinner and to share some memories. One, David Fowler, had died and was represented by his widow, Denise.

They were welcomed and joined at the dinner by the President of Caius, Professor Yao Liang, Director of Studies in Engineering, Dr Julian Allwood and Director of Development, Dr Anne Lyon, who observed that “Many of these renegades of yesteryear have become very generous benefactors to the College in later life!”

The leader, Peter Davey, recalled that there were three groups, the lifting party, who erected the derrick he had designed on the roof and hauled the car up on steel rope borrowed from the gliding club, the bridge party, who set up a plank bridge to ferry the lifters to and from the College, across the notorious 'Senate House Leap', 70 feet (21m) above Senate House Passage, and the ground party, who manoeuvred the van into position for lifting and warded off the attentions of curious passers-by and patrolling policemen.

Another conspirator, Sir Gilbert Roberts, remembered that his then-girlfriend (now wife) Ines, joined the ground party with instructions to distract anyone whose gaze lifted skywards while the car was aloft, by edging up her skirt to reveal more leg than was customarily seen in 1958!

The Dean of Caius at the time, the late Revd Hugh Montefiore, insisted that no-one knew the identity of the miscreants, while sending congratulatory champagne to their staircase.

This remarkable feat lives on in popular mythology, as one of the favourite anecdotes told by every tour guide to Cambridge’s many visitors. The only regret felt by those attending the reunion was that the car had not been left in place!