I cannot leave behind my first full calendar year at Keele, 1981, without talking a bit about money.
Students were always short of money back then, much as they are now.
For most of us, there was no “Bank of Mum and Dad” (BOMAD), but there was a student grant (and a strange “signing on the dole” rule for the non-term weeks, that meant an element of direct financial support from the state far greater than students enjoy today.
But no student loans from the state. If you couldn’t make the grant go far enough, you needed to be a rare BOMAD-ista, or find a source of income.
Bad Example: The Rise & Fall Of David Perrins
I remember David Perrins getting into financial difficulties quite early in our time at Keele (probably around the middle of the second term). He told me and Simon Jacobs that he was going to see the bank manager to explain that he needed a loan so that he could continue to live in the style to which he was accustomed.
I remember Simon and I doubting whether this approach would work.
David returned from his meeting looking a little crest-fallen. The bank manger had told him that he would have to become accustomed to a less salubrious style.
Better Example – Me
I just about managed to keep myself afloat financially, but this I did through the expedient of working during holidays. I had worked all summer, before starting at Keele:
It was an unprecedented, interregnum arrangement. I asked for £30 per week, which had been my previous summer wage in 1978, but after a couple of weeks, my boss (Werner Lasch if I remember correctly) insisted on increasing my wage to £40 per week, which he considered fairer. Especially as the deal included board and lodgings in Hillel House’s student digs, that felt like a good rate back then, from which I was able to save.
But still, even with some savings and an absence of extravagance, I knew I would need to supplement my grant, hence my Easter…
...and then summer working arrangements in 1981.
In short, I “washed my face” financially by dint of holiday working and limiting my spending (once Halls fees had been paid) to essentials – drugs (mostly legal ones), rock ‘n’ roll (gigs and discos), and a few other small matters such as food, transport and books.
Two Sets Of Accounting Books
There is an adage in forensic accounting, which is to search for the “other” set of books of account whenever dodgy accounting is suspected yet absent from the visible books of account.
In my Ogblogging of old diaries, I can assure you that there is no intention to conceal, but I have recently, forty years on (Autumn 2021) discovered a second diary in which I kept financial records.
First, have a look at the main diary from which my forty years on ramblings about 1981 have been derived:
For those Keele students “of the right” who were convinced that I must be a Soviet Commie spy, the above image must be gold dust. But in truth my father, who was no Soviet and no Commie, had simply made a commercial decision in the 1960s that his shop in working-class Battersea near Clapham Junction (yes, really, back then) should specialise in cheap, sturdy, reliable, well-serviced equipment, which happened to come from the Soviet Union.
How or why I got a TOE diary that year, I cannot remember. Until then I had always received a Letts Schoolboy diary at Christmas (who didn’t?). Dad might have been sent two that year and handed down his second, as he always used one of those TOE diaries.
But it seems I did also receive a Christmas gift diary – a rather inadequate little Collins thing…
…in which I kept accounts of sorts for the whole year. Here is a link to all of the accounts pages from that little book.
I have just a few additional observations about the money aspect of being a Keele undergraduate in 1981:
- I had forgotten about the existence of the £1 note and the fact that you could configure your drawings from a campus ATM to a specific number of individual £1s in those days;
- Even with my savings trove, I sailed close to the wind in my second term, with the little book stating “balance at 19-3-81 £10.52” just before I started my Easter holiday job…
- …but the next entry reads “balance at 10-4-81 £189.32“. I was only keeping notes of the detailed drawings and occasional top-ups when the dosh was running low.
- To that end, I didn’t keep records at all during the summer term of 1981 – I presumably knew that I’d be alright and started keeping records again during the summer to keep tabs on that top-up;
- No sign of drawing to the individual £1 in the autumn of 1981 – possibly I had simply got into the habit of drawing money from the ATM to the nearest £5 or possibly the campus machines were reset at that time;
- I drew out £65 in the first week of October 1981 – a princely sum back then – it was a long time ago. That will have been for textbooks no doubt – mostly law ones.
