Reeling spires

Cambridge students marked the end of final examinations with a drunken binge which caused chaos at the city's renowned Addenbrooke's Hospital.

A male nurse was assaulted, other staff threatened, and everyone present subjected to a torrent of foul language. "Suicide Sunday", as the day set aside for celebrations is wittily known, culminated in a vast drinking session at Grantchester Meadows. Every available ambulance was called to the scene and nine people were taken to hospital, eight of them Cambridge undergraduates and one a student from Bristol who was the victim of an assault. Police made a number of arrests.

The director of accident services at Addenbrooke's, consultant surgeon Howard Sheriff, said, "Getting drunk and nasty in Marseilles has its parallel in Cambridge, irrespective of education. They threatened staff and assaulted one of the male nurses. Their language was unforgivable in front of young children already in the department." Mr Sheriff was equally unimpressed by the attitude of some of the students' parents whose attitude, he said, "was no less irresponsible when we contacted them. They wanted us to find rooms for them to stop them wandering the streets or ending up in police cells."

The welfare officer of Cambridge Students' Union, echoing the excuses put forward in certain quarters for the criminal soccer thugs in France, said that "hard-won exam results are a justified cause for celebration in every university at the end of the year." Condemning the drunken students, in what some of those at the receiving end might regard as half-hearted and contradictory terms, Elliot Vaughn added that "actions which impact (sic) on the whole community in this way are wholly indefensible and regrettable."

A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said that it "very much regrets the inconvenience and distress caused by the drunken behaviour of the students."