The Business End Of My Autumn P1 Term At Keele, 22 November to 5 December 1981

Photo by Jonathan Hutchins / Keele University Library

I needed to get some work done towards the end of my first term of P1, studying Law & Economics, with subsidiaries in Psychology and Applied Statistics/Operational Research.

The words and symbols in my diary suggest that I did indeed get my head down during that period, while still finding time for some fun.

I’d better translate some of that:

Sunday 22 November 1981…went to Alexander’s. Did some work. Asian supper & disco in evening.

I think Alexander was one of my law friends from the Chinese-Malaysian community, as was the lovely Tina, who gets a mention on the Thursday. I’d started to get involved in some of the cultural societies around Keele; keen for combining forces as most were really very small groups when standing alone.

Justice for all?

It will be difficult for modern students to get their heads around this, but, back then, some of the published resources we wanted (or even needed) to prepare our tutorials and write our essays were rare and in very short supply. We were expected to buy our law textbooks of course (quite a large chunk of the grant went on those) but there was also material – such as the detailed law reports on cases or journal articles on specific topics, that we had to borrow from the library’s tiny stock of copies and share amongst our friends who all needed to see the same stuff around the same time of year.

Forty years on, I simply Google the names of key cases I learnt about then and can read the full law report of “slug in the ginger beer” Donoghue v Stevenson, finding it in 10 seconds. Even without fully remembering the case names, forty years on, it took me 30 seconds to lay my hands on detailed accounts of Candler v Crane Christmas and Hedley Byrne v Heller.

No doubt I could also find on-line the old journal articles that tutors such as Michael Whincup, Philip Rose and Mike Haley were so keen for us to read to enhance our understanding. I especially remember hunting around for a journal article that supposedly would contextualise the High Trees House case for us P1 students -there were three library copies for the whole year to share.

Philcrbk at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 My Uncle Harry lived in that very block.

No wonder, forty years on, Mike Haley, who is still at Keele, is beaming in his Keele mugshot:

“Just log on and read up about it all, nowadays”

Monday 23 November 1981 – …went to Int Aff meeting -> Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I think “Int Aff” stood for International Affairs and that was the group that had been established to oversee the Anti-Fascist day and follow up on it’s activities. Joe Andrew was the lead protagonist on the academic side and very good at that he was too.

Joe Andrew – also still at Keele forty years on, also now beaming

I do remember those early meetings concerning themselves rather too much on “assumed” rather than actual problems. In particular, I remember the chaplains worrying about possible strife between Chinese-Malaysian and Malay students, and/or between Jewish and Muslim students, whereas the reality “on the ground” was that those groups tended to get along just fine.

A major upshot of that focus group, once it focussed on accentuating the positive, was the hugely popular Keele International Fairs, which became a twice-yearly feature of Keele campus activity and I believe still features on the calendar today. One of my proudest, lasting achievements; just being involved with the early stages of that development.

Thursday 26 November 1981 – Usual busy Thursday. Went over to Tina’s in evening till late

Friday 27 November 1981 – Work OK – did Economics essay afternoon & eve – went to Simon’s party later ***

Saturday 28 November 1981 – up late – went to town – wrote law essay all evening

Sunday 29 November – latish start – wrote Psychology essay today lazy evening

That’s a lot of essays in a short period of time. No wonder I tailed off for a couple of days, then:

Wednesday 2 December 1981 – Worked quite hard during day. Went to Alexander’s for dinner -> UGM

Thursday 3 December – Busy day – doing odds and ends, meetings etc. Lazy evening in

Friday 4 December – Worked reasonably hard today. Went * to * Lindsay * Party ** in evening – late night.

I don’t remember UGMs being any day other than a Monday, but perhaps some strange circumstance had led to that particular UGM being unusually scheduled for a Wednesday.

I can’t remember or recognise what the symbols in my diary entry for the Lindsay party might mean, so I suspect that the girl or girls in question similarly remember little or nothing about it forty years later.

Saturday 5 December 1981 – up late – went into Newcastle – lazy day – played cards in evening.

I remember playing cards with some of the guys on my block (F Block Lindsay), including Richard van Baaren, Bob Schumacher, Simon Ascough, Malcolm Cornelius and especially Benedict Coldstream.

Never gambling, although I think we might have played some poker and never bridge, although I think we sometimes played whist-based games.

The game I especially remember learning from Ben Coldstream was piquet, which I found fascinating and which we played quite a few times, especially at that tail-end of the autumn term in 1981.

I am fascinated now to look at the game of piquet again, learning that it is a very old game, dating back to the Renaissance or earlier. This sits neatly with my more recent interests in real tennis and Renaissance music:

Quite a complex game with some byzantine scoring rules and asymmetry to the playing, is piquet – again, reminding me of real tennis in those regards.

It is even reminiscent of my own (rather unusual) real tennis serve which is, coincidentally, called the piquet – (in truth normally spelled piqué or pique for tennis).

Returning to playing the card game piquet – unfortunately we have so few photos from our time at Keele, but I have managed to find an artist’s impression of F Block Lindsay folk “at piquet”, supervised by appropriate academics – I’m sure I have identified each of the characters correctly:

Seated left to right: Malcolm Cornelius, Bob Schumacher, Ian Harris (at cards), Simon Ascough, Benedict Coldstream (at cards). Standing left: Mike Haley & Philip Rose adjudicating. Crouching centre: Joe Andrew. Standing right (sword in hand): Richard van Baaren.

I’d love to give piquet another try some time. Anyone out there up for it?

In The Absence Of Glittering Prizes…Stardust Memories, Keele Freshers Week, 12 To 18 October 1980


AVROCC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t hang around long after getting to Keele and enjoying my first few days.

I was still on the National Executive of BBYO and spent my first weekend in Glasgow. Travelling to and from Glasgow from Keele for the weekend is not a brilliant idea but according to the diary I got back to Keele early enough on the Sunday evening to show up at the Union bar. Yes, really that is what the Sunday entry (below) says.

Monday 13 October – First lectures – OK. Went to Union in evening. Quiet day.

Tuesday 14 October – Lectures OK, Politics OK. Went to drama workshop in eve – good.

I was doing the Foundation Year (FY). In those days most Keele undergraduates did four year courses, starting with FY. It is was a wonderful course which helped me to learn how to learn and also enabled me to decide what to study for my degree. Politics was one of my two sessional courses (the other was History).

Simon Jacobs did a three year degree without FY. Simon and I threw ourselves into the drama workshop in our first term.

Simon Jacobs throwing himself into something, 1979

The brains behind that drama workshop group was Brian Rawlins, whose picture and cv nearly 40 years later can be found through this web link…

…or, if anything ever goes awry with the above Wirral Festival link, click here for a scrape thereof.

Several of us who had enjoyed doing drama at school wanted to do a bit of performance stuff without getting involved in the formalities of the drama society and full scale productions. This group proved to be just the ticket for us. We were very lucky to be led by someone of Brian Rawlins’s quality for such a group. That story ends with this piece of street theatre…

…but I’m getting way ahead of myself there.

Wednesday 15 October 1980 – dull lectures today. (??) Pleasent [sic] afternoon. Went to J-Soc & Freshers Ball till very very late.

Didn’t take long for the novelty of foundation year lectures to wear off, did it?

Our Freshers Ball was supposed to be headlined by Gary Glitter, but apparently he fell ill, so Alvin Stardust was wheeled out at the last minute as a replacement. This event was long before Gary Glitter’s infamy as a child sex offender, of course. Indeed Glitter did show up at one of the balls I attended some time later in my Keele journey. Unlike Glitter, there was nothing edgy about Alvin Stardust, neither in performance nor, as far as we know, in real life.

There are two Concourse pieces about the Freshers Ball. The first one a damning news piece with no byline…

…the second a rather more upbeat music review by Dave Lee. Do you know who wrote the first piece, Dave? If so, do tell.

Dave Lee talks highly of Glass Torpedoes. I certainly recall enjoying the warm up act more than the Alvin gig. Embedded below is the Glass Torpedoes Peel Session from earlier that year:

Dave Lee also talks up the Tour de Force gig in Room 14 upstairs, which I also vaguely recall enjoying more than Alvin. I have managed to find some interesting material on the former, including a rare recording on the following embedded vid.

Thursday 16 October 1980 – V tired today. Law v good. Got some letters written, received some letters as well. Went to bar with Simon in evening.

Law was a four week topic with Michael Whincup. We needed to do several such topics during FY. So inspired by that law topic was I, that ended up switching to study law (along with economics) as my degree the following three years.

Going to the bar with Simon in those early weeks/months of Keele not only included beer drinking but invariably a few games of table football. I have no pictures of me playing table football with Simon, sadly, but more than a quarter of a century later, when visiting Jinka in the South Omo Region of Ethiopia, I learnt that I hadn’t mis-spent that aspect of my youth at all; I was able to call on the skills acquired in those all-too-frequent games in the Keele Students’ Union to great effect:

Friday 17 October 1980 – Not bad lectures today. Disco in eve, bad.

Saturday 18 October 1980 – Easy day. Went to disco in eve, good.

How was I assessing the discos in those days? I doubt if I was doing the “disco aficionado” thing at that stage. Admittedly, I had experienced an Ian Levine special at Mecca in Blackpool by then…and a few good ones in London no doubt. But my guess is that “bad” and “good” would have been determined by the extent to which I had managed to perk up any interest among the female freshers who were still in the market by the Friday and Saturday of that week.

Not that I had really worked out what to do about it when I got a bit lucky. As much as anything else, I was committed to traipsing up and down the country for the rest of that term still. I do recall getting friendly that week with a pretty girl with a turned up nose from the North-East named Jo. Her father was a vicar and she was even more shy with that sort of stuff than I was. We didn’t get far. I think we went back to her place for a cup of coffee and had…coffee. But we remained smiling, nodding acquaintances for several years at Keele. Bless. That pleasing non-event might well have been after the “good” disco.