“A Worthy and Highly Respectable Student Newspaper” — Highs, Lows, and Halos: The Saint and Its Archives

“I used to consider The Saint a worthy and highly respectable student newspaper […] however of late, things seem to have gone into a bit of a decline,” wrote Noel Burbank in 2003. “I’m sorry, but I understood The Saint to be a newspaper, not the editor’s personal diary for recording his own deranged dribblings.” With a huff, Burbank declared, “I cannot quash the sinking feeling that, these past weeks, my money and time have [...] been wasted.” 

Was it not ever thus? 

Derision of the humble Saint is as old as the paper itself. As at home on Fessdrews in 2024 as it is in The Saint in 2003 — the critique that the paper is not quite up to scratch is an old one. 

Yet Burbank’s letter is perhaps more a record of change than it is of continuity. The Saint back then took on — more or less — the qualities of a social media forum. The Saint was St Andrews’ own agora — where opinion, events, and news could, in some meaningful way, be discussed. 

The Saint was also, as Burbank’s letter points out, an item that one could boycott with some effect. Costing 50p, Burbank wrote with the ire of the licence fee payer, arguing with some effect, that if he pulled his cash, The Saint might change its ways. 

The Saint’s archives are a particularly compelling record of the town’s past life. Far from just a newspaper, or indeed a student newspaper, it is perhaps mostly a reflection of student life which is ordinarily consigned to memory. 

Some articles are particularly striking. In a 2002 edition of this very newspaper, a correspondent from The Saint interviewed Britney Spears. A megastar then even more so than now, the story then was just about as much about how the correspondent managed this coup as the interview itself. 

“Marie-Louise Gumichian is a Slave 4 U, the reader — she spent 14 hours on the train and got an essay extension just to spend twenty minutes with teen pop sensation Britney Spears.” 

That the interview happened at all was quite extraordinary — and that it happened with not a sniff of nepotism — a little miracle. Instead, The Saint, at the time new, exciting, and award-winning amongst British student papers, “had been handpicked.” Britney “was in the country” and her PR team had wanted a student paper to have a “preview of Britney Spears’ new movie.” 

That interview is now consigned to The Saint’s archives. The one copy that exists there may be the only remaining physical copy — and given that the paper is from 2002, there is no complimentary digital paper. 

Gumuchian’s interview became a St Andrews event. She relayed that “most of St Andrews was volunteering to assist me,” offering to act as her “photographer, assistant, bodyguard and even lawyer.”

Strangely, it’s not the only case of superstars being interviewed by the paper. Two papers prior, The Saint interviewed both Jay Kay from Jamiroquai and current BBC Scotland DJ Vic Galloway. 

Yet, to draw attention to just these admittedly amazing interviews — perhaps the equivalent of our little paper scooping Taylor Swift today — would do The Saint an injustice. The Saint was founded as a paper to liven up St Andrews. That meant having fun — but, perhaps, more importantly, it also meant being pugnacious, dogged, and witty. 

That has informed its strong investigative bent — which perhaps, more than anything, has defined the legacy of this paper. 

In a 2006 front page, The Saint attacked the Union for asking students to lie in the National Student Survey (NSS) to maximise St Andrews’ prestige as a university. In a 2002 front page article, The Saint attacked “cash for cronies” — with £1,000 being distributed by Mermaids to the ex-President and the then-President’s girlfriend.

And it's not just institutions — at other points, The Saint has been the first to call out students’ own practises. A 2014 expose about a “Mr St Andrews” competition, in which female members of the AU were expected to strip to their underwear, asked searching questions about misogyny in the town. 

Yet, sitting down, reading The Saint from only a few years earlier, one wonders whether the paper itself was one of St Andrews’ worst offenders. This is embodied in Halo!, an insert to the paper, the section acted as bit-part Daily Mail, bit-part student chat room. Every week the section would run for three or so pages, taking photos of drunken students at house parties or at the Union. In Halo!, reporters took pictures of girls in only their underwear, people snogging on a night out, and students taking class-A drugs. Typical is one 2002 issue, where students are photographed with a joint, captioned “Grade ‘A’ skunk.” Worse still, right next to this photo is one of a girl doing a line of cocaine on her bedroom dresser, captioned, “Dude, this is good s***.”

In this era, The Saint played on the ambiguity between the outer limits of social acceptability and having fun with the paper. Halo!’s bi-weekly ‘Ziggy’s Blind Date’ involved two consenting students, whose dinner date was paid for in exchange for answering a few questions before and after. The Saint’s writers provided the astonishing comment, “We’ve heard this girl will shag anything, which — let’s be honest — doesn’t say much for nice guy Dave.”

More uncomfortably, perhaps, its ‘Filly of the Fortnight’ section involved a picture of an attractive looking girl with a sexual, crass comment. It’s unclear how these girls achieved the honour, but one wonders whether it was as simple as catching the eye of the then Halo! staff. 

Critics often wrote into the paper, pointing out that The Saint acted on the worst impulses of the 2000s tabloid press. In one edition, a writer for The Saint was given £40 and a camera and asked to see how many people they could convince to take their clothes off. 

For “£10 worth of spirits,” you could make three men “strip down to their undies.” For another £10, the paper managed to get pictures of a boy kissing a girl, a boy kissing a boy, and a girl kissing a girl. And for another £10, the paper recounted, The Saint managed to get a girl to strip down to her bra.

However, there’s a twoness to Halo!. It certainly did stretch the mores of acceptability at a historical moment where attitudes to privacy and sexism were quite different to the present. Yet, it also acted as a relatively honest reflection of what student life was to the students that lived in this town. Certainly the section that those writing into the paper seemed to engage with most — it seems little coincidence that The Saint stopped charging less than two years after Halo! was scrapped.  

Most notable, however, looking back on all these articles, is just how well many of the writers seem to be doing today. Gumuchian, the author of the Britney piece, went on to become a journalist for Reuters. A cartoonist from the mid-2010s has become Features Editor for The Spectator. Another Saint alumni is The Telegraph’s Film Editor. Perhaps, Burbank was wrong — maybe this paper isn’t so bad after all. 

Collage: Peter Napier