Not a university and not for old people

On a beautiful, hot afternoon in July of this year I was in the churchyard of a small village in south-east France called Seythenex. It’s on the side of a steep valley, with a mountain and a pine forest behind it. I had been in the village a few times before because my grandson goes to the tiny school (77 pupils) there, but although I’d seen the church countless times from the other side of the valley, where Max lives, and had promised myself that one day I would go inside it, I’d never done it. Today we were putting that right.

The church did not disappoint. It’s like very many rural French churches: beautifully decorated “up at” what Philip Larkin called “the holy end”, but otherwise plain off-white apart from the Stations of the Cross in frames on the walls. The churchyard is large because, although the village is small, people have been dying there for donkey’s years.

As I stood with my back to the church, looking across the marvellous view over the valley towards the spot from which I had so often looked at this spot, my daughter approached and said, “Dad, come and look at this”. She led me to a particular plot that I had passed a few minutes earlier without noticing the thing that had attracted my daughter’s attention. As well as the ornately inscribed headstone, there were various items on the ground in addition to a framed photograph of the deceased. One of them was a small rectangular plaque bearing an embossed picture of a church with a spire and the words Club du 3e Age: Club of the Third Age. Moving along, I found another a few graves away, this one with a picture of a spread hand of cards: Club du 3e Age.

A year or so before that afternoon in Seythenex I was on the morning walk “round the block” with my dog when we met a lady who lives nearby and used to walk her dog at about the same time every morning. We met often, walking in opposite directions, and usually paused for a brief chat. As is often the case with dog walkers, we knew the names of each other’s dogs, but not of each other.  I’m writing in the past tense because neither dog is any longer with us, so now I only ever meet the lady by chance and at random. I still don’t know her name.

One morning when we and our dogs met she asked what I would be doing that day. “I’ll be going”, I replied, so it must have been a Thursday, “to the u3a drop-in”.

“Oh”, she replied, “u3a. That’s not for me”.

“Oh, why not?” I said as pleasantly as I could in the circumstances.

“It’s the name”, she said.

“Oh, the ‘university’ bit”, I suggested. I knew that some people had been put off by that.

“I haven’t got a problem with that”, she said. “It’s ‘third age’. I am not third age”.

When Le Club du Troisème Age was founded it must have seemed quite natural for the word ‘university’ to become attached to it. The very first meeting was led by Pierre Vellas, a professor of Social Sciences at the University of Toulouse, in 1973. This new thing soon became a movement which spread rapidly through France, and the model there has always been for branches to have close links with a neighbouring university. The emphasis is on academic learning.

From the moment in 1981 when the organisation succeeded in doing what Napoleon Bonaparte had failed to do nearly two hundred years earlier – to stride across la Manche and establish a foothold in Britain - the ethos was markedly different. The University of the Third Age would be founded on the principles of self-help and collaboration, and so it became and still is.

Over the past six months I’ve gatecrashed getting on for thirty of the u3a groups in the Pocklington & District branch. I started to do this for a few reasons. One of them is definitely not, despite what I tried to make clear at the outset, and despite what some tend, or pretend, to think, to check up on people. Rather my aims were to meet people; to discover all the vastly varied things they get up to in houses and village halls and fields and churches and huts of various descriptions and on riverbanks over a very large geographical area; and perhaps to enable group leaders and members to put a face to that potentially anonymous thing called “the committee”.

Among the many things I’ve learned is that u3a is not a university (I knew that already, of course) and is definitely not a club for old people.

In Pocklington & District we have 66 groups. The range of activities is extraordinary. So is the range and depth of experience, knowledge and expertise among the branch’s 713 members, largely but not exclusively as a result of their professional experience. And we’ve seen that where there’s a will to cater for an activity or interest that isn’t already covered, we can make it happen, because the impetus comes from within the membership.

As I’ve said, when I visit a group it is absolutely not to “do an OFSTED”, “report back to Head Office”, or to “see what the natives are up to”. All of these are phrases I’ve heard, though they are usually said (at least partly) humorously. The visits are never on committee meeting agendas, and only ever discussed on the rare occasion when the committee might be able to help a group that might be struggling to sustain itself.  

I do, though, keep in mind those three words of the u3a motto: Learn, Laugh, Live, and I do a sort of mental checklist. All three of these things occur at all the groups that I’ve visited.  It’s just that, inevitably, the balance of the three varies depending on the activity of the group. And that’s great.

A few examples.

At one group there was a tiny bit of laughter but a very great deal of learning. After about fifteen minutes I realised it was going way over my head and that if I continued to try and catch hold of it the head in question would very soon be very sore. And that was fine because the members who were there had come for the learning.

There are two groups that do what I anticipated would be very similar things involving needles, in the same village hall. One of them was full of laughter and chatter - some of it even relevant to the activity – and the other was virtually silent for the whole two hours. In both cases, everyone there was, as far as I could tell, very happy to be there, and getting what they wanted from their membership.

There’s another group that learns a foreign language. I personally know nothing of the particular language, but I could tell that the range of ability in the language within the group is wide. It was lovely to see how the more accomplished were, unselfconsciously, helping out those who were closer to the ‘beginner’ level, all aided, of course, by a sensitive group leader.

I also like to find out how many of our members go to more than one group, and how many just to one. It doesn’t really matter. One of the things I liked about u3a from the outset is that it can be and do whatever each individual member wants it to be and do. But I do find it interesting, perhaps because until recently I myself was in only one group, and that’s the one I lead. My statistical sample is relatively small, of course, but it does show that a considerable majority are multi-groupers.

Another thing I’ve learned is that a group’s leader doesn’t necessarily have to be the most knowledgeable or “expert” member of the group. In fact in many cases (including the group that I lead) this is very clearly not the case. The knowledge and expertise emerge from within the group, and one of the group leader’s challenges is to create an environment in which this can happen. This is a key way in which u3a differs from a university, where the person at the front of the room is there because they have more knowledge or expertise than everyone else in the room, and everyone else in the room knows it.

One overwhelming discovery is something I sort of knew before, but now realise is the all-encompassing value of every single group: the social aspect. It’s impossible to ignore how strong and important this is. For very many members their membership of u3a is integral to their social life. I would go as far as to say that for some it pretty much is their social life.

The ‘third age’ bit is, to my mind, a bit more problematic. When does ‘third age’ begin? My anonymous dog walking friend is (I would guess – I’m useless at this sort of thing) about the same age as me. That is, neither of us would have to show i.d. to prove that we’re past the minimum age of fifty. But she was adamant on that Thursday morning that she is ‘not third age”.

On the other hand, when we held an outdoor games day at West Green in the summer of 2023, we were approached by an inquisitive young (by our chronological standards) woman who wanted to know what we were all about and told us she would love to join at least three of our groups if she were old enough. And my next door neighbour, whose father is a member, has told me that one of the few things he’s looking forward to about being fifty (he’s got six years to go) is joining u3a and starting a Poker group, but only if they could play for money. I’ve made it clear that this is highly unlikely to get past the committee!

The serious point is that nobody is ever too young or too old to Learn, Laugh and Live. There has to be a qualifying age, and fifty it is. But the really serious point is that I’ve seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that there are many, many people who are not as “old” as they might otherwise be if they didn’t have u3a in their lives.

And that’s why I say: u3a – not a university and not for old people.