Missing Cambridge College clock hand returned nearly a century after student prank
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A large clock hand stolen in a student prank has been returned to a Cambridge university after almost a century.
Under cover of darkness on one night in the 1930s, prankster Geoffrey Hunter Baker – a modern language student who studied in Cambridge from 1934 to 1937 - and an unknown undergraduate student replaced the hands of the chapel clock at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, with cardboard replicas.
Baker kept the hour hand, while his accomplice held onto the minute hand.
Baker's daughter, Trixie Baker, inherited the hour hand from her father when he died in 1999.
'These worked very well until it rained,' Trixie Baker said, referring to the cardboard replicas.
Late last year she returned it and the hand now sits in the College Archive alongside other tales of student pranks – known as 'rags'.
College archivist James Cox said: "Learning of student escapades is part of the College's long and varied history."
"While we don't encourage students to take part in such pranks, I am happy to learn about them years later, when no-one has been hurt and no permanent damage has been done - and they've graduated!"
The minute hand remains missing and Gonville and Caius College has asked that anyone who has any information about its whereabouts should contact the College Archive.
Where's the minute hand?
Gonville and Caius College
Gonville and Caius was first founded as Gonville Hall by Edmund Gonville, Rector of Terrington St Clement in Norfolk, in 1348. It was re-founded in 1557 by John Caius as Gonville and Caius College - and it's had its fair share of jokers.
Other daring pranks include the 1921 gun caper, which saw Gonville and Caius students remove a German artillery gun from a nearby square and display it in Caius Court. Then there's the 1958 van debacle, when enterprising engineering students from the college placed an Austin Seven van on the roof of Senate House - Cambridge University's ceremonial building where graduation ceremonies take place.
'A' for effort.
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