The Repainting - 1973
These photos from writer and musician Rob Chapman, the author of Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, show the lamppost from the town side, as it was circa 1971/72.
It was looking very grubby, the plain grey already providing a blank canvas for graffiti and fly-posters.
Photos: Rob Chapman @rcscribbler
On 27 October 1973 the Cambridge Evening News reported that five students, led by brothers Sandy and David Cairncross, had decided the Four Lamps on Parker's Piece needed brightening up and had repainted it in bright colours.
A group of people found an unusual way to spend an afternoon on Saturday – using paint to pick-out the detail on a Cambridge lamp-post. The lamp-post which stands at the paths junction in the middle of Parker's Piece has for many years been painted plain grey. Now after some hard work by five friends part of it is resplendent in blues, yellows and red. The friends who are all students were led by brothers Sandy and David Cairncross. They obtained permission of the City Surveyor's department before beginning.
Sandy Cairncross is now an eminent professor of environmental health, but back in 1973 he was a research student and reaching the end of his time at Cambridge, where he had arrived in 1966 as an undergraduate. I tracked him down and he tells me he had always fantasised about painting the fish on Parker’s Piece but had "never had the courage to do so as the mid-Anglia Constabulary HQ looked out onto the Piece". It was, he says, a fantasy he shared with his brother David; so he put me in touch with him.
David explains how he wrote to Geoffrey Cresswell, the City Surveyor, whose name was familiar to him from student tales (now forgotten). In his room at King’s College, he showed Sandy the letter he had received back, granting him permission to repaint the lamppost. As Sandy recalls, the reply ended with a thinly-veiled threat: "If the exercise is not a success, the lamppost is due for re-painting anyway."
Inspired by this, the two brothers went to King’s College library and consulted a large encyclopedia. They opened it at the letter F for "Fish". David pointed to a page with an illustration of innumerable tropical fish with amazing colouration. "There was one fish species which outshone all the others," says Sandy. "‘With one voice we both said (as enthusiastically as library acoustics would allow), 'That’s our fish!'."
David Cairncross, 1974. Photo: David Cairncross
"Any Colour You Like"
Pink Floyd (1973)
The brothers went out to buy some Humbrol paints, even receiving a reduction on the price when they told the shopkeeper what they proposed to do with their purchase. One Saturday afternoon in October 1973, they took their paints to Parker’s Piece. To ensure the event did not go unnoticed – and to dissuade the Council from immediately covering over their efforts – Sandy phoned Michael Deaves, then the University Correspondent of the Cambridge Evening News, to make sure someone was there to record the favourable comments of passers-by.
When they had finished, the lamppost was, as the newspaper put it at the time, "resplendent in blues, yellows and red". "The results of our labour were widely appreciated," Sandy says. After the redecorating, David received another letter from Geoffrey Cresswell, informing him that the job had been "inspected" and that the report was satisfactory, and that he offered his thanks.
So, were the Cairncrosses’ companions really students from the Cambridgeshire College of Arts & Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University), as is claimed on Wikipedia? Apparently not. "The rest of the labour force were mainly girls whom my brother seemed to be able to summon like magic," says Sandy. "I don’t remember anyone from the CCAT being involved." David concurs: "I’m hazy on who or how many collaborators we had, though like Sandy I’m pretty confident none of them were CCAT."
Geoffrey Cresswell, City Surveyor 1966‒89. Photo: Cambridge Evening News, taken from Allan Brigham and James Ingram, Donkey's Common and Adjacent Land, Mill Road History Project, 2017