I have no idea why Princess Margaret loomed so large at Keele University, but throughout my time at Keele our titular Chancellor was the source of countless controversies in absentia…which is indeed the manner in which I chose to receive my degree in 1984.
I knew nothing about this when I signed up for Keele. I knew more or less nothing at all about the place, other than the fact that Simon Jacobs had been to visit Keele in August and liked the look of it.
Indeed, it was along with fellow fresher Simon Jacobs that I took my seat at my first Students’ Union UGM…the first of a great many as it turned out…on 20 October 1980.
I don’t remember all that much about that first UGM, other than the hoo-ha that was the Princess Margaret controversy.
There were no doubt student political machinations involved in the matter dating back to before our time. But in short, it seemed, the new union sabbaticals had invited Princess Margaret to the Union’s Christmas Ball without seeking approval for such a manoeuvre from the whole committee nor from a UGM which is (or at least was) the sovereign body of the union.
Trying to recall how I felt about it, looking back on the event almost exactly forty years later, I don’t think I saw the matter as especially newsworthy or even all that controversial on the night itself. It just felt like good debate with some political theatre thrown in…and we even got to vote. The argument that the student ball would be far more restricted if HRH attended and that anyway she probably didn’t really want to come to our student ball seemed the most convincing to us and indeed to the majority of those who bothered to turn up, listen and vote.
The Daily Mirror saw it a little differently. We’d been at Keele for less than a fortnight and already we were “bolshie students” and “little devils”. Yay!!
A week or so later, the student newspaper, Concourse, covered the story in a far more balanced manner:
The controversy rumbled on and had an impact on several of my activities in the first couple of terms, as my unfolding story will reveal. Within a few weeks, Simon and I and others were lampooning the whole affair through a street theatre skit which I wrote up a year or two ago – click here or below:
Not even two weeks after coming through those Keele gates for the first time, I felt that I’d well and truly arrived by the night of 20 October 1980!