…it was time for me to settle in to my fourth term at Keele. The first term of my actual degree studies, Economics and Law, as I had taken the Foundation Year (FY) the previous academic year.
I seem to have steeled myself to the task a bit more at the start of my P1 year. Phrases such as “hectic day”, “quite a full day”, “busy day” and even “work” appear.
Tuesday 13 October: …Went to see Flash in evening.
I’m pretty sure that means Flash Gordon, which came out the previous year, so would have been ready (i.e. available) for Film Society by October 1981.
The following day Andrea Dean arrived and stayed for a few days:
…Andrea arrived in evening-> Simon [Jacobs]’s & Sneyd…
I don’t remember much about that particular evening. The Freshers’ Ball was on that night with Gary Glitter supported by The Chefs. Dave Lee’s book The Keele Gigs! has a laugh-out-loud review of that concert.
I know that I did see Gary Glitter at Keele and Dave Lee’s words coincide with my recollections of Glitter on that Keele Ballroom stage, but I have a feeling I saw Glitter at Keele a year or two (or three) later.
I have a feeling that we (as in Simon Jacobs & I) were displaying deliberate indifference to Freshers’ Week activities, including the ball. After all, we were not freshers, we were 19 years old, for goodness sake, far too adult for the fresh stuff.
Thursday 15 October: Rose quite late. Went round lakes in afternoon. J-Soc party in evening.
Going around the lakes with visitors was one of those “must do” things at Keele, especially when the weather was favourable. The J-Soc party would have been a relatively low-key affair…relative to some of the other evening activities Andrea enjoyed with us on her visit.
Friday 16 October – Work OK today – took it fairly easy. Went to film in evening – The Kids Are Alright -> Lindsay disco etc.
I’m not too sure what Andrea did while I worked that day – I doubt if she remembers either.
Saturday 17 October – Rose late – shopped – did some work – dinner early evening – went to David [Perrins] & Amanda’s in evening.
David Perrins
Not sure where David lived that year, but i have a feeling he’d moved into a Barnes or Hawthorns flat…presumably sharing with said Amanda. Simon might remember – I’ll update/amend if he has any intelligence on that matter. I think it would have been a relatively small-scale party.
Sunday 18 October – Andrea went home in morning – worked in afternoon – Marriage of Maria Braun -> David & Amanda – came back, early night.
Monday 19 October – Busy day – preparing tutorial etc. UGM in evening – v good.
Tuesday 20 October – Hard day – went to see The 39 Steps in evening.
Fassbender and Hitchcock could be mistaken for euphemisms to describe activities in the aftermath of Freshers’ Week. But in reality I genuinely was, at that time, steeping myself in movies by great film directors, thanks to the excellent Keele Film Society.
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” “Puns are the highest form of literature.”
Thanks again to the Keele website for unwittingly lending me this Lindsay picture.
The Easter holidays of 1981 was the one and only time I worked a Keele Easter vacation. It had not been a very effective way of replenishing the coffers, although it had helped a bit. In any case, I had enjoyed myself in the matter of seeing lots of old friends and spending most of my earnings.
I had even bumped in to one of my new friends, John White, while strolling through John Lewis’s (which backs on to Cavendish Square, where I had been gainfully employed).
Hello John, Got A New [insert name of John Lewis purchase here]?
I remember excitedly telling my parents about my chance encounter with John, only to be told by my mum that she bumps into friends of hers in the shops all the time. But her friends all lived in Streatham and shopped in Streatham. John was a friend from Keele who lived in Hertfordshire – that had genuinely been a chance encounter. Parents just didn’t get it in those days.
Anyway.
On Good Friday (17 April) I:
Went to shop with dad to clear up robbery damage…
Not yet a proper law student, I failed to distinguish the crime that had occurred, a break-in (which is a burglary) from a theft with menaces or violence (robbery); the latter crime was, mercifully, not what had happened.
Dad’s shop – a relatively tranquil place…normally.
What a mess, though. Broken glass everywhere. And blood stains to mop up.
Strangely (and unusually for such a crime), the case was solved by the police rapidly, indeed before I returned to Keele a few days later. The culprit, who I think was on short-term release from a psychiatric institution, had presented himself at Bolingbroke Hospital (a few hundred yards from Dad’s St John’s Hill, Battersea shop), with blood-drenched arms, clutching several items of stock from Dad’s shop window. Sherlock Plod managed to put two and two together. Impressive.
The diary also talks about tape swaps and taping, which I have written up at length in recent weeks. My friends Graham Greenglass and Paul Deacon both “went to town” producing tapes as part of a tape swap with me. Their tapes became much of the soundtrack of the Summer Term of My Foundation Year. Those of you who like wading through such mix tape playlists, I have upped the six of them from March/April 1981, three from each of the lads. I’ll just add one example of each as links here – you can find the others easily enough by clicking through these links. Here is the first of Graham’s:
According to the diary, Paul came over and we swapped tapes on Easter Saturday (18 April). The diary also suggests that I spent a fair amount of time taping for the rest of the holiday weekend.
Paul’s tapes came in the form of reel-to-reel spools, so they needed “ripping” (i.e. re-taping) onto cassette for Keele purposes. I also can tell from my notes that I made some other tapes, from my own albums and stuff. I’ll need to do a bit more archaeology to see if I can find notes on what was on those. Watch this space. I can see from my listings that I did tape the following albums from my own collection, which were also part of the soundtrack of that summer for me:
Armed Forces by Elvis Costello & The Attractions;
New Boots & Panties by Ian Dury & The Blockheads;
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon by Paul Simon;
Donovan File.
Actually, “my soundtrack” was inflicted on many other people, especially once I moved room from the little side room that was Lindsay F1 to the far more salubrious Lindsay F4, which looked out on rolling Staffordshire countryside and outside which I could sit on a sunny day with the window wide open and my Phillips ghetto-blaster blaring. Everyone in E and F blocks who had south-facing rooms, plus G block across the way, was treated to my music choices.
One abiding memory I have of “getting a response ” from Paul Deacon’s wonderful 60s collection, was when I was blasting the above mix tape. I remember “ABCD” Hemsley marching across from G Block in a manner that only the OTC (Officer Training Corps) lot who occupied that block could muster.
I imagined that I was about to get a dressing down about the noise, but instead Dick informed me that he adored The Doors – Light My Fire is on that mix tape – so Dick wondered if I had any more of The Doors to play…which at that time, I didn’t.
It was a rare civil interlude with someone from that G Block crowd, to be honest. Jon Gorvett was unfortunate enough to find himself in that block for our first year. I can’t imagine why Jon didn’t engineer an escape from there. He could have had Lindsay F1 after I moved out of it. I don’t suppose that would have felt like a complete escape, though. Come to think of it, Jon could have satisfied “ABCD” Hemsley in The Doors department as Jon had a liking for (and at least one or two good records of) The Doors music at that time too. Spooky.
The diary notes document my return:
Wednesday 22 April – Returned to Keele (met Lewis [Sykes] on way). Went to Union – David’s [Perrins] for coffee till late.
Thursday 23 April – Fairly early start. Bust moving room etc. Many people back. Revised. Went out for quick drink.
I’m not sure whether my meeting with Lewis Sykes (then National President of BBYO) was a coincidence or not. I suspect not. I had spent time at Hillel House 10 days earlier – JPMP whatever that might have been (sounds important) – so perhaps we engineered it to travel on the same train – me to Stoke and him on to Manchester.
It doesn’t seem to me that I put much into my FY exam revision on 23 April, given that I spent the morning grabbing the more salubrious room, the afternoon having “many people back” and still found time for a quick drink in the Union ahead of exam day. FY students – oh really!
Frankly, writing up my early days at Keele University forty years on, I was baffled when I read, in my diary for that day:
No law, Molly Badcock’s instead.
To be honest, my diary is not especially helpful for that November/early December period of my life. It’s pretty clear from the scrawl and my own graffiti, that I was writing up several weeks later, in some manner of inebriated state.
But in truth I couldn’t remember who Molly Badcock was, so I tried Googling her. I am sorry to report that, at least initially, this only made matters worse, as Google did that, “surely you mean Lolly Badcock” thing, allowing me to discover that Lolly Badcock is a porn actress; Molly’s less appetising twin, perhaps.
Clicking (or rather, mostly not clicking) very carefully indeed by this stage, I tried Molly Badcock Keele as a search term and found Molly Badcock’s diaries on the Merchant Taylors’ Alumni Network site – Item 30. There I learnt that Molly was a cultured girl, who became a biologist, teaching ecological science at Keele.
Ah, yes. Now I remember.
Although Molly Badcock didn’t teach me at Keele, I was allocated to her for “pastoral care”, I believe as something known as a “resident tutor”. She lived in an academic’s house or apartment in Lindsay Hall, near to my humble fresher diggings in F block (long gone; possibly her place has also gone).
I think Molly had set up a series of “pop around for tea and a chat” slots for her fresher charges. I believe I met (amongst others) a lovely lass named Mary Keevil that day; another of the people who became a chatting & nodding acquaintance for many years. I certainly didn’t hike the Appalachian trail or discuss Uganda with Mary. I do remember running into her in London mid to late 1980s by which time she was working for SportsAid. I also have a funny feeling I first met Rob Whitehead there that day; we subsequently became work colleagues at BDO Consulting.
My visit to Molly Badcock’s that day might have been my only resident tutor encounter that year, although I have a vague memory of returning at the end of my first year for another informal session at Molly Badcock’s.
Fascinating to learn that Molly, like me, kept diaries as a school kid. But look how neat and tidy Molly’s were compared with mine. She was 12 in 1934 (roughly the same age as I started) and 15 in 1937.
Postscript To My Molly Badcock story: Karen Walsh reports on the KUSU Facebook Group that:
I was a biology student so had molly as a lecturer – and escort for a field trip to aberystwyth where she patrolled the corridors to ensure there was no “mixing” 😂😂”
Enough said.
Concourse Needed Me
Although it is not mentioned in my diary, I recall that I (along with Simon Jacobs) responded to the above shout out in the October 1980 issue of Concourse, the students’ union newspaper.
There I met, for the first time, John White. I recall that John was sitting on a bar table looking rather sinister with a football scarf around his neck (Tottenham Hotspurs for some reason; he has been relentlessly Leyton Orient for decades) and Doc Martin boots.
I now realise that John was somewhat shy or at least introverted back in those very early Keele days. The problem was, his look fitted the exact stereotype I had been warned about; racist (or at least very right wing) students who seek to disrupt student life, often by getting involved in student politics and student journalism. I so clearly remember thinking, “be careful of him”.
I now know, of course, that John is a gentle fellow; we worked tremendously well together in student politics and have been firm friends ever since. Actually it didn’t take long for my “John stereotype” to collapse in a heap, as John had been quick off the mark to sign up for the Labour Club and for Concourse – he was already credited although not bylined in the October edition that contained the shout-out:
In fact none of us new arrivals got bylines until the January 1981 edition, apart from David Perrins, who coincidentally was Simon Jacobs’s next door neighbour in Barnes, who was so quick off the mark he had become the “Arts Correspondent” on arrival, presumably by dint of dressing in a dandified fashion and talking in an Oscar-Wilde-stylee…
David Perrins – the first of our batch to get a big column (as it were) – October 1980
…or perhaps because no-one else put their hand up to review the drama.
Anyway, I must have made a huge impression when we were asked if we had any previous experience of journalism by admitting that I had edited the national magazine for BBYO – an organ with a circulation in the hundreds or low thousands, much the scale of Concourse – albeit a much simpler style of publication – Gestetner printed rather than “proper” letterpress printing.
But I could type fast with two fingers (still can) and was credited in the next issue which came out in early December…
…by which time John White had dropped off the chart, although just for one issue…and Simon Jacobs hadn’t yet got a mention. Like me and John, Simon got his first byline in January 1981. But that part of my past is still in the future, as far as my Ogblog write-ups are concerned.
Meanwhile, returning to 6 November 1980, the other thing I remember doing that evening (although the diary is silent on this point) is queing up for ages to get a turn on one of the handful of payphones and calling home to speak with my parents. It was a hugely onerous, time-consuming and expensive routine, which lives long in the memory of those of us who had to put ourselves through all of that just to make a phone call. A phone call is now so cheap, so casual, so simple…
…anyway, the reason I know that I subjected myself to that routine on that evening is because 6 November 1980 was my parents’ silver wedding anniversary and I couldn’t let an occasion like that pass without a phone call.
