Why?
Why did several of us go to the middle of the M62 for a JSoc do on a Wednesday evening?
Because we could, presumably. Of the few Jewish students we had at Keele, two or three had cars, making us more mobile than most societies. But “because we could” doesn’t really help much, as I write forty years later.
Nor does my late 1980 diary help much. It was certainly suffering from the dual problems of belated and inebriated writing up by the time we got to mid November 1980.
There is a little bit of extra help, though, as the black ink scrawl goes on to say:
JSoc Do Exit 22 Ram’s Head Pub enjoyed
OK, The Rams Head is indeed a well-known inn, very close to Junction 22 of the M62 at Denshaw, near Oldham, described in glowing terms here. (or, if anything ever goes awry with Visit Oldham, try this scrape here).
I’m sure The Ram’s Head did and indeed does (once it is allowed to open again post-2020-pandemic) offer fine fare and an excellent range of ales at an historic location in a stunning part of the country…
…but 70-odd miles from Keele to find that? Surely there was something similar, closer?
My guess is that the purpose of the expedition was to meet up with some J-Soc folk from other universities; those in Manchester and/or Leeds. Those places had plentiful J’s, whereas Keele, to be frank, had a veritable J shortage. There weren’t very many of us and those Js who were at Keele tended to be…as I soon became…fairly reluctant J’s.
In my case, at that time, I was still heavily involved with BBYO, soon to be finishing my National Executive tenure but reluctant to give it up at a time of BBYO crisis. My 9 November diary entry probably doesn’t need translating and says it all.
Anyway, if we are to get chapter and verse on what that Ram’s Head Denshaw evening was about, I need help from my old friends.
The bowels of my mind have dredged up some names. Nigel Lloyd, who I think was the leader of the J-Soc pack at that time. Lloyd Green, who was an old friend of mine from the haim (Streatham).
Both of those fellas were surprisingly easy to trace in 2020, forty years on, by Googling their names together with the word Keele. Nigel Lloyd claims to be a lawyer with a sense of humour (we’ll soon find out), while Lloyd Green appears to be the sort of person one might go to if one wanted to find someone forty years on and all you knew about them was their name and alma mater.
Anyway, let’s see if either of those two can (and/or wish to) provide some additional detail to this story…or possibly the names of some other people to “tap up” about it.
The only other names that come to my mind about this are Hilary Kingsley, who I think was there but who does not pop up on a simple search, plus Simon Jacobs who I’m pretty sure wasn’t there that evening but I shall ask him.
The only other thing I remember about the evening, weirdly, is the back gate route we used to return to Keele that evening. In those days, as I recall it, if you were travelling south on the M6 and came off at Keele services, there was a “back gate” that was sometimes left open and which allowed drivers to cut along a track to the Keele University road, shaving several miles and a good few minutes off the journey. Why that small detail sticks in my mind, I have absolutely no idea.
Postscript
Nigel Lloyd claims to recall little or nothing about the evening, but Lloyd Green provided this helpful recollection:
I remember travelling there as part of our attempt to integrate into the Jewish North scene ; my clearest recollection was that my old girlfriend at the time was there with her new boyfriend, who I met for the first time. We have remained close friends to this day…it helped he was a Chelsea supporter!!
By way of reciprocation to Lloyd, I discovered a piece of his juvenilia in the January 1981 issue of Concourse. For some reason, Lloyd chose to write a scathing review of a re-released album by The Average White Band:
