Tag: Jonathan Marks

A Crossroads Twixt BBYO & Keele University, 17 to 24 November 1980

Reading my diary references to Caroline’s visit to Keele in late November 1980 gave me a memory flash of an event earlier that term.

Caroline Freeman (now Curtis) was a good friend, through BBYO, of mine and of Simon Jacobs . Caroline chose not to go to university, although from memory she had as many UCCA points from her A levels as Simon & I had put together from ours.

I had long been the beneficiary of Caroline’s mum’s cooking on the many occasions I found myself in North-West London doing BBYO stuff in the year or so before heading up to Keele.

“That poor boy needs a good meal” – c1979

Anyway, I think Caroline must have got it into her head that Simon and I might struggle to feed ourselves properly at the weekends. Keele provided refectory meals to freshers Monday to Friday but at the weekends we had to look after ourselves.

Frankly, I don’t think the self-catering element of student life was a challenging aspect for either me or Simon…

…nor was I in want of food; I was just burning calories at a furious rate back then…

…but early in our time at Keele, Simon and I both received, through the post, from Caroline, an emergency food parcel styled in the mode of a Red Cross jobbie as depicted above. I don’t recall exactly what was inside the parcels, but I suspect it was more like “boarding school kid tuck” than “genuine emergency rations”. Simon and I were both amused, I certainly remember that.

Hawk-eyed readers (especially those with cipher-cracking skills) might have spotted the 17 November entry: “Jay was supposed to come – “did he heck”. Goodness only knows what that visit from Jay Marks was supposed to be for and why it went awry, but it will have been part of a BBYO National Executive unravelling towards the end of our year which makes the last 74 days of the Trump presidency…

…well, on reflection, it was bizarre (but in the grander scheme of things trivial) stuff around resignations, unresignations, with some of us trying to keep the show on the road with sufficient dignity to hand over to a new committee over the new year holiday. So nothing at all like the last 74 days of the Trump presidency.

Meanwhile my diary keeping was temporally awry that November – hawk-eyed cipher-crackers might also spot the reference to a Teardrop Explodes concert in the 19 November entry. That concert actually took place on 5 November; yes, really I am sure.

The Teardrop Explodes supported by The Thompson Twins, Keele Students’ Union Ballroom, 5 November 1980

Anyway, Caroline’s first visit to Keele is quite well documented in the diary:

Friday 21 November 1980 – Not bad day. Met Caroline at Stoke. Went to Lindsay, Union & coffee lounge.

Saturday 22 November 1980 – Simon & Roy popped in early hours. Got up q late. Found Simon., lunch there…

So far so sensible. Simon had met Roy and started going out with him almost as soon as we arrived at Keele. I’m pretty sure Caroline stayed in my pokey room, which was tolerably fine back then and would be unthinkable now considering the size of those student beds and bedrooms. “Lunch there” I guess was in Simon’s block in Barnes (D if I remember correctly), where the facilities for weekend self-catering were marginally better than those in my Lindsay block (F I recall most certainly).

I have used sophisticated computer-aided techniques to decipher the next bit and am pretty sure it must say:

…romped in lakes. Simon left. Spiff dinner (over top) -> over to Roys.

The Lakes at Keele is a rather charming wild garden beyond the ornamental gardens of Keele Hall. Originally planned to be a network of seven substantial artificial lakes, money and/or motivation must have run out for the Sneyd family in the early 19th century as the more far-flung lakes are more like puddles and only two or three have any scale to them. Still, they are pleasant enough to walk around and I dread to think what romping entailed on that occasion. Whether “Simon left” in disgust or simply to go over to Roy’s place is lost in the mists of time. Almost certainly the latter.

No idea what the sentence “Spiff dinner (over top) -> over to Roys” actually means. I sense an in-joke long since forgotten.

Sunday 23 November 1980 – Lounged around all day. Roy, C & I met Simon, went out for dinner. V nice.

Monday 24 November 1980 – Not bad day. Caroline left at 3:00 pm. Relaxing evening.

It would have been helpful if I had noted where we went out for dinner. There were a couple of passable restaurants in Newcastle-Under-Lyme and I suspect it was one of those. The Sneyd Arms didn’t qualify as going out for dinner. Nor did the Union and nor did The Golf. So Newcastle it almost certainly must have been.

Caroline will surely remember every detail and help fill in all the blanks. After all, she was the one with more UCCA points than me and Simon put together.

Mind you, she was almost silent about my write up of her visit the following term, which for reasons of happenstance I wrote up before this one:

A Short Visit From Caroline To See Me And Simon At Keele, 20 to 22 February 1981

The Day I Left (Alleyn’s) School, 27 June 1980

Robert Cutts, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

I am writing this up in January 2021, in part as a response to a couple of “exam questions” set by friends Nick Wahla & Rohan Candappa, ahead of a gathering of the Class of 1980 in the “Virtual Buttery”.

In Rohan’s words:

Nick Wahla’s suggested a question to ponder: “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”

It’s a good question, and one which I am obviously going to claim credit for. But I’d also like to twist it around a bit. My question is: “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?”

So, the day I left Alleyn’s was not, by my own account, a good day for me. That whole final week doesn’t read brilliantly in fact:

To transcribe that final day:

What a horrid day!!! Chem (I) -> In comm -> Econ II -> Fox after and got pissed.

I’m guessing that “in comm” means “held incommunicado”, presumably because I took the Chemistry exam before others had taken it…or others had taken the Economics exam before I took mine.

There are three mentions of going to “The Fox” that week, not just the “getting pissed” session after the exams.

Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0g

The Fox On the Hill, Denmark Hill, was the hang out of choice for Alleyn’s boys like me and Anil Biltoo. I don’t think they had twigged that these fresh-faced besuited youngsters were often well below 18…or if they had twigged, at that time they didn’t care.

That “got pissed” session on my final day would doubtless have included Anil and I suspect a few others who finished their exams that day. Anyone out there remember?

The diary even for that final week of school is peppered with BBYO stuff. I was on a small National Executive with a large portfolio that year. A lot of difficult stuff had kicked off that spring, not least our sole full timer, Rebecca Lowi, was leaving on 30 June. I had agreed to run the office temporarily over the summer, while a successor was recruited, so started work on the Monday after leaving school to have a handover day with her.

It seems I spent the weekend in between leaving school and starting work with Ivor (Heller), Simon (Jacobs) and Caroline Freeman (now Curtis) on the Sunday.

But my ire that last week was mainly directed at the unreasonable requirement for me to do ‘A’ Levels while all of this other stuff was going on. Needless to say my A Levels did not go well and it was only the good offices of Keele University via Simon Jacobs that helped me dodge the bullet of my resulting dodgy A Levels.

Getting In To & Starting At Keele University, 8 October 1980

But at the “day I left school” stage, that Keele element of my past was still in the future.

So, to answer Rohan’s question, “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?” I think the nub of my answer is that I would advise myself to be more reflective and thoughtful about the moment.

Yes, I had a lot going on at that time. Yes, I was psychologically in a rush to move on to fresh challenges. But I think I should have paid a little more heed at that time to the significance of the moment and reflected on that major, albeit natural, transition. And reflected on what those seven years at Alleyn’s had been about.

I have reflected on it since. Frankly, I’m not sure that reflection would have been all that profound at the time. I think it was much later that I started really to appreciate what that Alleyn’s education and those friendships, some enduring, others that resumed oh so easily, had done for me. Partly that appreciation came from growing up and partly from re-engaging with friends from school decades later. People like Rohan, Nick and many others.

But still I think that, at the time, I missed out on a “life moment” to which I can never return, by rushing away from the school that day and not looking back for years.

So, to answer Nick Wahla’s question, “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”, I’d simply say, “read this piece about the day I left Alleyn’s and try not to do it my way.”

A Weekend In Manchester Straight From School, 7 to 9 March 1980

My memory for this piece was triggered by a very enjoyable reunion with Mark Lewis at Simon Jacobs’s album launch in September 2017.

Mark Lewis is now one of the top media and libel lawyers around – a man who did not fear taking on the Murdoch Empire in the Millie Dowler phone hacking case, nor did he fear Katie Hopkins in the Jack Monroe Twitter libel case.

So I’d better be very careful indeed what I say…

…and agree in advance to amend any part of this Ogblog piece at Mark’s request…

…and use the word allegedly at frequent intervals, even though I know that the addition of that word serves no defensive purpose whatsoever if the statement to which it refers in libellous…

…but I digress.

At Simon’s launch, Mark and I had roughly the following conversation, from which I have recovered some memory (and the relevant diary pages):

Mark: I remember the first time I met you. I had recently joined my local BBYO group in Manchester and you came to stay at our house for for the weekend. You were on the National executive, so it felt to us that you were a visiting dignitary…all the more so, because you came straight from school and you were wearing a three-piece suit when you arrived. Were you wearing tails too?

Me: Was I heck wearing tails. I’ll confess to the three-piece suit though; that was the school uniform for sixth-formers.

Mark: We thought you must be incredibly posh.

Ian: I wasn’t incredibly posh. I was just a scholarship boy at Alleyn’s School…

The conversation continued. I promised to dig out the trusty diaries and try to establish exactly when that weekend happened and see what else the diary might reveal.

So here it is:

I’ll transliterate the relevant bits for any reader who doesn’t read the rarefied script otherwise known as my handwriting:

 school OK, -> Euston -> Manchester -> Prestwich, Mark Lewis, stayed up till all hours -> shule -> lunch -> open house -> Nat Exec meeting -> party -> bed -> North v South soccer -> lunch -> Installations -> Piccadilly -> home (exhausted).

…and who wouldn’t be exhausted after that. I feel exhausted now just typing those words and thinking about it.

I like the Monday message too, by way of echo: “school OK”.

I’d just like to reflect for a moment on the early part of that adventure. The bit where I left school in my three piece suit, went to Euston and up to Manchester. The easiest/quickest route would have been to take the train from North Dulwich to London Bridge and the tube from there to Euston.

But that would have meant me venturing, more or less alone, on the Billy Biro’s (pupils of William Penn School) side of the station/platform, which, while wearing an Alleyn’s three-piece suit, would have been a form of attempted suicide. I don’t remember doing that.

More likely, I left school a little early, probably with Anil Biltoo, most likely (if with Anil) stopping at his house for a couple of cigarettes and an earful of some trendy music served up by his rock chick older sister Benita. Or, if Bi wasn’t around, we’d have probably listened to Innervisions by Stevie Wonder. Then, I guess, on to Euston, either by bus or by picking up the train from the relative safety of East Dulwich.

At no point in this trek from school to Mark Lewis’s house did it occur to me to change clothing. I must have had changes of clothing. But perhaps not a suitable suitcase/bag for my three-piece whistle.

Based on Mark’s 2017 description and my reflections on how I came across, I must have seemed like a Judaic Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Postscript: I have subsequently found a picture of me in my Alleyn’s three piece suit a few month’s later – written up and linked here & through the picture below:

Me And Wendy Robbins On Westminster Bridge

I’m not sure whether that visit was my only stay at the Lewis house or whether I stayed there again on subsequent visits to Manchester that year. I certainly do remember discourse late into the night.

I recall Mark’s sister, Mandy, introducing me to the delights of the Manchester music scene, at least to the extent they were represented in her record collection and narrative. I think her main thing was Joy Division, but I might be mistaken.

It was only decades later I learnt that Joy Division weren’t Manchester at all, they were Macclesfield. I also recall hearing Spandau Ballet a few months later and confusing them with Joy Division, much to the derision of friends at the time. I don’t think I needed to confess that foible – I think it might have vanished without trace if I hadn’t raised the matter again. Perhaps Mandy talked about Spandau Ballet, but I think they came later and were quintessentially London. Perhaps none of us knew what we were talking about – I certainly didn’t – I only went to my first proper gig a few weeks later – click here for that debacle.

I hope this piece triggers some of Mark’s memories about that weekend. Or indeed memories of other subsequent weekends if I did stay more than once. I don’t know why, but I think the Joy Division (or whatever “Manchester scene” stuff it was) conversations might have been a subsequent visit.

January 2018 postscript: I have found the second visit and tried to disambiguate the two weekends here:

A Second Weekend Visit To The Lewis Household, Towards The End Of My BBYO Days, 20 & 21 December 1980

Back to the March 1980 weekend:

The National Exec meeting would then, I think, have included Jay Marks, Ivor Heller, Paul DeWinter, Raymond Ingleby and the late, great Jeffrey Spector. We must have discussed matters of enormous import; I’m sure one of the others can fill us in on the details, all of which for some reason have slipped my mind.

I also have no recollection of the North v South football match – but that sounds like fun – perhaps someone out there does recall the match and can provide a match report and/or photographs.

This picture from a different BBYO football match, in Portsmouth. a year or so earlier, but the March 1980 one in Manchester will have looked a bit like this

The installation ceremony cannot have been for Mark Lewis’s new Sunnybank group – that was far too new. So perhaps it was the Sale group or more likely the larger Whitefield Group. Again, perhaps some people reading this can chime in with their own memories and/or diary notes and/or photographs…

Correction: David Nispel has written in to confirm that Sunnybank BBYO had actually been going for 2-3 years by that time and that this weekend was their inaugural installation weekend. Mark confirms that he was a newbie but the group wasn’t. David Nispel has also posted several pictures in the BBYO Facebook Group – members of which can see the chat and pictures by clicking here. One quite extraordinary feat of memory comes from Jay Marks, recalling the score as a 1-1 draw and describing the football match as, “an undignified kick about in 70s terrace attire…” and that…”wherever the party was in north Manchester later it would have been far more successful.”

If any of my old mates from Alleyn’s School are still reading this and had been wondering why I often looked so wrecked on a Monday morning during my last year at school – this piece explains a fair bit.

Anyway, Mark, I have done my worst (as lawyers tend to say) and now rest my case. Over to you.