This current piece shows H Ackgrass’s third column, which was published in May 1984. Somewhat irritatingly, I have the carbon copy of this one, which was more or less reproduced in full, but not the second, pruned one. I set out my grievance in excruciating detail at the start of this third column. Quentin chose to publish the grievance in full.
Here it is, firstly in its published form, from Page 11 of Concourse May 1984, then in its unexpurgated (not that it was much expurgated) carbon copy form.
If by any chance some readers want to know what Steve Cleary had to say in complaint about my second column, here is a copy of the letter as published in the same edition of Concourse:
Amongst my Keele papers I also have the original of Steve Cleary’s letter to Concourse. I cannot fathom how that came into my possession. Either Steve placed a copy in the “Ha” pigeon hole for Hackgrass to pick up or possibly genial Uncle Quentin gave it to me as a souvenir once I outed myself as Hackgrass in the summer of 1985. Steve might know…and Steve might, by now, have forgiven me.
The extract from Concourse that follows contains the second published column. Unfortunately, I either failed to keep or mislaid my carbon copy of the submission. That second column was cruelly edited, as my whinge in the third column (May 1984) attests.
Unless I find the carbon copy misplaced amongst other papers (vaguely possible but unlikely 40+ years hence) we shall never know the detail of the scurrilous scribbles that were edited out, nor shall we discover which good jokes were cruelly pinched and inserted into other people’s articles in that March 1984 edition of Concourse. Naughty Uncle Quentin (Quentin Reubens, then editor of Concourse).
Anyway, here is the column that did get published on Page Seven of the March 1984 Concourse.
I was a reluctant candidate for the union sabbatical post of Education and Welfare officer. I thought I had done a grand Machiavellian job of ensuring that the 1984/85 committee would be just fine. The last piece of the jigsaw, in my mind, was to persuade Bobbie Scully to run for Education and Welfare.
Unfortunately, Bobbie was quietly more Machiavellian than me (the fact that she was studying politics as well as law probably helped), so I found the tables turned and I somehow succumbed to peer pressure to run myself.
Here is the manifesto, now in pieces but thus scan-able in three parts.
It is not easy to fool WordPress into more or less presenting the thing as it looked. I probably could make it look a bit better, but for now the above presentation will have to do.
Intriguingly, in similar context, I believe my manifesto was the first ever union manifesto to be word-processed. Hence the bold lettering etc. It was a devil of a job using the University mainframe’s text editor software. If my diary is to be believed, we spent serious chunks of four or five days to get this seemingly trivial job done; it was a non-trivial task back then.
My friend and campaign manager Malcolm Cornelius deserves all the credit for the idea and the hard yards to get the job done. I believe that Malcolm went on to a glorious career in IT consulting; perhaps his work on my manifesto was an important staging-post in his career.
Here’s the supplementary manifesto, which was similarly word-processed and formed part of that multi-day task. Another innovation was the use of DL size for these supplementaries. People tended to go for A5 two-sided and ration their allocation of one ream of A4 accordingly. I thought that DL, yielding 1,500 rather than 1,000 leaflets, was a good idea.
At some stage, I’ll pull some memories and diary notes together on the election campaign itself. Suffice it to say at this stage that the campaign succeeded and I was elected.
Alan Gorman. “You can call me Al…but please don’t call me Pudding”
Keen to add some spice to the elections, I surreptitiously put my flatmate, Alan Gorman, down for the presidential election under his nickname, “The Great Yorkshire Pudding” (Alan was skinny and from Lancashire).
My behaviour (forging a candidacy) was unbecoming for the chair of election appeals committee, I do now realise.
Alan was really furious when he first found out about it – understandably so. I went out that evening wondering if I had gone too far and permanently messed up a good friendship. When I got back to the flat, Alan had gone to bed but had left a piece of paper on the table.
I laughed a lot – partly because it was very funny and partly the relief of learning that he had decided to go along with the wheeze. The following two scans are that “supplementary personifesto” as it appeared in its published form. Connoisseurs of my doodles might recognise Schlock in the top right corner of the first page. Connoisseurs of 1980s culture might like to identify the personalities on the second page – no prizes but lots of kudos if you populate the comments section with some answers:
The main manifesto is lost in the mists of time; probably just as well. It wasn’t a patch on the above supplementary. I did also keep a copy of the little “Relayer” messages from that election; see the following couple of pages:
Mercifully, rather than Pudding, the delightful Kate Fricker won that election – she was excellent and working with her was such a pleasure.
1983/84 was my finals year. I was Chair of Constitutional Committee that year (somewhat press-ganged into running I might add), so I was strangely on the inside of the students’ union politics without really being part of its core.
I thought it would be fun to have an anonymous gossip column, so came up with the idea of H Ackgrass, or “Hackgrass”. Many myths about that column spread in the years following about the column’s antiquity, but I know I made the name up myself. There had been others, such as Molesworth, in earlier years, but this name was new, as was the somewhat visceral nature of the humour. I know the name was subsequently re-used by others. I am flattered.
I knew the Concourse (and Union Committee) lot would want to know who H Ackgrass was and I thought I’d be a prime suspect. Thus I was rather harsh on myself, in this first column and subsequently, in order to try and divert attention. This approach pretty much worked.
I had a spare old portable typewriter, so battered about that I didn’t really use it any more; it was very obvious in its idiosyncratic type, so I thought that using it would add to the mystery and might put people off my scent, as long as I kept the offending machine hidden. Indeed, I know at least one Concourse person sneaked into my flat at one time to check out my (regular) typewriter, only to conclude that Hackgrass couldn’t be me.
Quentin Rubens, the Concourse editor at the time, hardly edited anything out of that first piece. I thought he would tone it down a lot; there were certainly a couple of edgy lines I expected would go. Surprisingly, Quentin did edit out one descriptive phrase I made about myself, “arch lefty”. I don’t know whether that reflected his feelings about my politics or his own sense of what is an insulting term. In later pieces, he got the redline pen out a lot more. Deservedly so in several cases.
Anyway, here is the very first column, both in published form and then its original submission form. My submission copies are clearly photocopies but I know they were originally carbons. I must have made photocopies just before I left Keele and disposed of the carbons.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the “Film Star Makes President” edition of Concourse, I have republished the whole paper in the form of high-quality scans in a Flickr album – click here or the embedded image at the bottom of this page.
Dave had generously given me a great deal of editorial control over the political pages, so the front page and the next two pages were very much mine, content-wise.
Presentation-wise, I think it was entirely down to Dave that we went for an audaciously eye-catching front page – big headline, big photo and election results table only. This was not the regular Concourse way but I think it did help us sell.
I was very proud of the headline; a nod to Ronald Reagan’s recent election and the fact that Mark Thomas headed up the Film Society.
I realise also on re-reading the paper that I interviewed almost all of the protagonists from that early part of the election season: Mark Thomas, Frank Dillon, Anna Summerskill, Ric Cowdery, Steve Townsley, Vince Beasley, Jon Rees…
…I already knew some of them reasonably well and got to know most of them a lot better as the next year or three went on.
Other highlights include:
Dave Lee editorially eating his own liver over the previous editors’ resignation scandal and the Katy Turner column faux pas, on Page 4 and then again at length on Page 13;
Jon Gorvett & David Perrins fret-piece about fire risk, following a Dublin disco fire, on Page 7;
Some Concourse memorabilia on Page 11, looking back 10 years (which now is 50 years), including a snippet about Neil Baldwin from 1971;
A couple of damning gig reviews on Page 17, including the Krokus one by Simon Jacobs which I have Ogblogged about here and the Rob Blow & Di Ball one from deadline night;
I rather like Phil Avery’s hockey team review on the back page, not least because I had to read the entire thing to the end to work out which sport he was reporting. If only his weather forecasts were so suspenseful.
If you want to browse/read the whole thing, simply click the link below and you will find all the pages in high quality digital form, easy to read/navigate on most devices and for sure downloadable.
I didn’t write a lot of album reviews for Concourse, the Keele Students’ newspaper, but I did write this one, in March 1981. I think my neighbour in F Block Lindsay, Paul, had bought the album; I’m sure I didn’t buy it.
I ended up writing a great deal of that beleaguered March 1981 issue of Concourse, as I shall explain in another post, but clearly I had been commissioned to write this review before the hoo-ha that led to interim editing and all hands to the pump for the paper deadline.
Anyway, my hatchet job on The Stranglers sits next to an equally acerbic review of The Steve Gibbons Band by my good friend Simon Jacobs, without whom I, for sure, would not have ended up at Keele. But that’s another story.
In our first term at Keele, Simon Jacobs and I signed up for a drama workshop thing, run by Brian Rawlins. Brian helped make drama great fun and gave us a great deal of freedom to do what we wanted to do in this extra-curricular group.
I’m not entirely sure who else was part of the group, other than Jonathan (Jon) Rees whose name helpfully appears in my diary and on the single relic I have from the experience.
That first term of ours also coincided with a big debacle over Princess Margaret’s invitation (or lack of invitation) to the students’ union ball. We decided to parody that debacle with a piece of street theatre as our contribution to the debate and as the culmination of our term’s drama work-shopping spree.
My memory of the whole thing is fairly hazy, but the diary and relic provide some help. Here are the relevant extracts from the diary:
11 November – decided to write play
13 November – met Simon and Jonathan in evening to write play
18 November – drama rehearsal good fun
25 November – rehearsed skit in evening – good fun
2 December – easyish evening – drama rehearsal
…and there the references cease. I know the intention was to perform the skit in front of the union on the day of the ball, but my diary is entirely silent on the matter so I wonder whether our skit was scuppered at the last minute. Simon might remember and I am due to see him very soon indeed at the time of writing (April 2016) and so shall update if his memory adds anything to the pile.
Meanwhile it seems from the relic that it was Jon who preserved a copy of (most of) the script and ensured that I had a copy in my memory box. The hand-written skit itself looks like Simon’s writing if my memory serves.
It reads as juvenilia, which is what it is – heck we were all just 18 at the time – but looking back I think we were quite plucky in our first term tackling this particular political debacle head on in this way.
Anyway, here’s the script. You can drill into the pages to make them bigger/legible size. Unlike my handwriting, this stuff is actually legible. I should add that the character Katy is Katy Turner, the President of the student’s union that year, Mike is Mike Stevens, the Union Secretary that year.
Geoffrey Withers – he is strictly for the unsquare
I’m not entirely sure when Paul Deacon and I came up with the character “Geoffrey Withers”, but it was a long long time ago when we were very small.
For sure it was at my house, because the nonsense started when I played this track to Paul and we started riffing on the idea that an uber-old-fashioned DJ might consider the piece to be “strictly for the unsquare” and use it as his signature tune:
I’m pretty sure that Paul himself “christened” the character “Geoffrey Withers” and gave him his pompous voice. Paul has used this character on his radio shows, sporadically, for at least four decades.
I should get a few bob each time Paul uses the character but heck, life is too short and anyway it’s probably best to save up that potential law suit material for a big one downstream.
With apologies to those who believe in Santa and who believe that there really is a piece of music named “Strictly For The Unsquare”, but this piece is actually named “Pop Sequence” and is from an album named “Cine Mood Music”. How cool is that?
Well, it’s unsquare, anyway.
I’m not sure that Geoffrey was really born on 14 April 1977, but the diary says…
…Paul in afternoon…
…so it might well have been that day. I’ll guess it was around about then, anyhow.
Who’d have thought that such a mucking around session aged 14/15 would have led to a character who still (writing in 2018) pops up from time to time on Paul’s radio shows?
I started keeping a diary in January 1974. So exhausting must have been the process for eleven-on-twelve-year-old me, I took a sabbatical between May and late November that year.
The 1970s diaries cover my secondary school years, at Alleyn’s School. I shall write them up fifty years after the event, in the same way as I have been writing up my Keele University years of the 1980s as a “Forty Years On” series.
The juvenile writing needs some interpretation, both in terms of deciphering the strange symbols that comprised my handwriting back then and in terms of matters stated and omitted. I’ll try to explain and interpret as best I can, fifty years after the event.
I apologise for my atrocious spelling back then. Spellcheck has spared my blushes incalculably often in the IT era that followed my school years, while also drumming in some improvement to my ability at spelling.
Here’s that first page in all its glory.
Tuesday 1 January 1974 – …”Dined At Schmidt’s”…
Dad was at home. Dined at Schmidt’s. Chocolate moose was nice. In evening watched a film. P.S. Traditional walk 6th year.
Schmidt’s was an extraordinary place on Charlotte Street. It was a German Restaurant trapped in time from the early part of the 20th century, operated by an aging gentleman named Frederick Schmidt and his moustached sister, Marie Schmidt. I knew them as Mr Schmidt and Miss Schmidt.
We ate there quite often, mostly when Grandma Anne was not with us, as she was kosher and Schmidt’s was quintessentially not so. I recall that Grandma would occasionally come there with us and eat fish there, while dad would choose his favourite dish, eisbein, a Berlin style of schweinshaxe, with dad pointedly asking for the “VEAL knuckle” as he pointed at eisbein on the menu. Naughty daddy.
I would almost certainly have gone for the liver and onions or the schnitzel as my main course. Both of those dishes came on a platter with some pease pudding and sauerkraut as well as potatoes and vegetables. More or less everything came on such a platter, now I come to think of it. The fact that I comment on the chocolate moose suggests that it might have been a new one to me, but whatever desert I chose there, I would insist on lashings of whipped cream, which, at Schmidt’s, was a highly aerated form of whipped cream which I absolutely loved, both in its look, its taste and its texture. Mum loved that stuff too, on her coffee.
We would sometimes see Esther Rantzen in the delicatessen section of the establishment, where we would usually spend some time after eating, perhaps choosing some delicacies to take home with us or just browsing. When I met Esther properly some 20 years later, I mentioned that I remembered seeing her in Schmidt’s several times and we had a joyous reminisce about that lost world.
The traditional walk was something I did with my dad over the festive season every year for many years – initially I suspect it was mum’s way of getting a bit of peace for an hour or so and giving us the chance to walk off all the food we’d eaten. I think of Boxing Day as the usual day for that event, but it seems it was held back until 1 January that season – perhaps a weather-related change.
Wednesday 2 January 1974 – …”bought 5 History Books”…
Uneventful yet bought 5 history books. I cannot quite reconcile those two phrases.
I can, however, identify the books. They were from the “Everyday Life” series. I still have them:
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that there are nine books from that series depicted above, but the diary entry reports me buying five books. The even-more-eagle-eyed amongst you might be able to spot that the five “Everyday Life” books to the right of the picture look considerably more thumbed than the four to the left, which I’m sure I purchased at a later date.
I suspect that I spent my own money on those books (I’d have been flush with Christmas money or Hanukkah gelt at that time of year). The list price of the five books I bought that day comes to the princely sum of £1.45, but I’d wager a good few bob that these books were discounted after Christmas and I might have scored the batch of five for around £1 in W H Smith. I loved those books, which is why I have not been able to part with them, even when I cleared out most of my childhood books.
I especially loved the two about life in the stone ages. These related to the period of history we were being taught that year at school.
In both of the Stone Age books, I have written:
Ian Harris 1.S.
If found please return to 1.S.
I must have been taking these books to school with me on history days – possibly leaving them at school overnight sometimes. Only those two have that inscription, but inside the one about Roman Times, I discovered…
…an ancient, small piece of blotting paper, with one quite large blot on it, marking the place between pages 64 and 65 which, judging by the spine of the book, is as far as I got with that one 50 years ago. This discovery felt like a bit of a Pompeii moment, my juvenile reading trapped within a moment of time many years ago, providing evidence of reading interrupted and never resumed. I feel a relentless desire now to finish reading the book, which I think, fifty years later, will require me to start again from the beginning. I’m guessing that I’ll be able to whizz through the 130 or so pages quite quickly. But again I have put off the task to another day. It won’t be another 50 years, that’s for sure.
…”Saw Tommy Cooper”…
The Tommy Cooper Hour will have been this one – Episode 3 – click here. It will have looked a bit like the vid below, an episode from the same series, shown a few months later:
Thursday 3 January 1974
Went to dentist. No fillings yet. Drawn darts match. 5p Kalooki. 2 Rons [The Two Ronnies] good.
The dentist will have been Harry Wachtel, a slightly eccentric Austrian-Jewish refugee dentist who practiced in Streatham for several decades.
How a darts match ends up drawn I have no idea. Neither do I know who I played in that drawn match. Can’t have been one of my parents (dad would have gone back to work and mum would never go near my dartboard…come to think of it, nor did dad). Possibly Andy Levinson came round. Ot possibly I had a game of my own devising which enabled me to play against myself and secure a draw.
Kalooki probably did involve my mum and it seems that I got lucky, skilful or both, making 5p (that’s a shilling in real money).
The Two Ronnies was this episode. Interesting that I was allowed to watch TV that late at that age – it was possibly my starting secondary school that got my bedtime shifted towards and beyond the watershed.
Friday 4 January 1974
1×2 + bull at darts. Saw Fantasia for a third time – it is great.
I’m guessing that Fantasia was not shown on TV that week, so it would have been a visit to the cinema. I don’t say who I went with, but that might have been with mum (she loved Fantasia too) as I think I would have named my companion if I had gone with a friend or even if I had gone with Grandma Jenny. Probably local, at the Streatham ABC or Odeon.
My burgeoning darts career tails off soon, at least in the matter of diary mentions. I suspect that the dart board was a new toy for Christmas 1973.
Saturday 5 January 1974
Mum bought coat £22 reduced to £9.95. Went to Lytton’s. Played Striker with dive goalies.
Striker with dive goalies. That sounds amazing. I have re-established contact with Steve Lytton in the 50 years since that epic event. I wonder whether he still has his Striker set and is up for a rematch.
