Notions (Winchester College) - Pempe Sunday

Pempe Sunday

The Pempe was formerly a practical joke perpetrated in Commoners. A junior boy was asked to obtain a book called "Pempe ton moron proteron" (send the fool further); each person he asked for it would refer him to someone else, often in a different house, until someone took pity on him. A similar joke, involving an "important letter" with the words "send the fool further", was practised in Ireland on April Fools' Day.

In College this was formalized as Pempe Sunday, held on the third Sunday of Short Half. The tradition was in abeyance from 2000 until 2002, but was restarted in 2003. It was also not held in 2005 or 2006. Each new first year was told to find a person with a given notional name and ask him for a "Pempe". That person would give him a "half vessel" (piece of paper of prescribed dimensions), and send him to someone else, also by his notional name, and so on. The penultimate person in the series (the College Matriarch) would write on the piece of paper the Greek sentence "πἐμπε πἐμπε τὸν μὥρον πρὀτερον", and the last person (the College Patriarch) would add the accents: the new man is expected to keep his "Pempe" throughout his school career.

The new men are then allowed to throw any top-year into Logie, the stream which runs past the College. Formerly they were allowed to roll top-years down the steps of College Hall unless they could produce a completed Pempe from their first year; this practice was already obsolete by the 1970s, but was apparently revived for a time in the early 1990s. The notions books refer to it obscurely, by saying that it is a personal notion of juniors "to brock (bully or tease) four-year men without Pempes".

Examples of notional names include "Classicus" (the junior man in the senior classics form), "Ecclesiasticus" (the senior man in the junior classics form), "The Cryptic Copt in the Coptic Crypt" (the occupant of a tunnel-like study in Vth Chamber), "The Keeper of the College Ugly Sister", "The College Co-founder of J&J Incorporated" and "College Dorothy with Pickaxe in Spinal Column".

By tradition, a notions book may not define a "Pempe" except for calling it "A necessity for all new men".