…which is probably worth reading before reading the following response…
…Mark responded with some fascinating reflections of his own about that music “forty years on”, along with his thoughts on what the follow-up mix tape should have been. I shall try to replicate that “thought-experiment mix tape” within this guest piece.
Ah Ian,
Every one of those tracks still gets a regular airing in my household! For me they have never aged because I’ve never gone through a prolonged period not listening to any of them. Anything by Grace Jones in that early eighties period always brings back memories of six in the morning in Freehold Street, Newcastle in the spring and summer of 1982 after a night at the 141 Club in Hanley with the likes of Anna Summerskill, Mark Bartholomew, Vince Beasley and Jan Phillips, amongst others. Invariably all of us stoned / tripping and / or speeding. The ‘Nightclubbing’ album just tailor made for the wee small hours after a long night out just as everyone was coming down. It was THE album I most associate with that crazy summer term when I went through that cathartic metamorphosis!
The Grace Jones version of ‘She’s lost control’, originally by Joy Division, on that tape I made you was one of the more eccentric covers I’ve heard. Back in 1994 I had the good fortune to meet the great lady when she was booked to play at The Fridge in Brixton. It was touch and go whether she’d make it onto stage - she was several hours late I recall before the show eventually started - but I did ask what had prompted her to cover such a track by such a band. It transpired she knew nothing about the band, knew nothing about Ian Curtis’s suicide and had merely heard the original track before deciding there and then to do her own version. It ended up as the B side to her single ‘Private Life’. She was rather horrified when she found out about Curtis’s demise and that the song was about epilepsy - a condition he suffered from.
The Roxy Music track ‘Both ends burning’ (from 1975) is etched into the memory because of their performance on Top of the Pops promoting it. Bryan Ferry dressed up as a GI with an eye patch dancing awkwardly as two heavily made up women, also dressed up in military garb, swung their hips behind him - looking vaguely glassy eyed in the eyeball department.
‘Violence Grows’ by the Fatal Microbes was always being played by John Peel. The singer was 15 year old Honey Bane, a schoolgirl who’d been signed up on the strength of her already provocative stage performances. This was a howl of rage from a time when there really didn’t seem much hope for young people as unemployment skyrocketed. Her indifferent tuneless vocal delivery for whatever reason just resonated.
‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division arguably my favourite track released just after Curtis’s death a fitting tribute to the man’s genius. He was only 23 when he died - just imagine what might have come later on in his career had things been different. I wonder how ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order might have sounded had he gotten his teeth into it. I still recall John Peel announcing his death on air and playing ‘Atmosphere’ and being quite shocked. No one then could have imagined the cult status they would 40 plus years later enjoy.
‘Typical Girls’ by the Slits just a wonderful piece of pop-punk-reggae by the original riot girls. Ari Up the singer (alas she died of cancer some years ago) was John Lydons (nee Rotten) stepdaughter. John married Ari’s mother Nora, a German heiress, back in the eighties. It’s a track that despite its 43 years of existence still sounds like it could have been recorded in 2022.
Mark then went on to suggest a follow-on mix tape:
Had I made a second tape for you that year it would have undoubtedly included the following. All from that 1982ish period.
‘My face is on fire’ - Felt
‘Fireworks’ - Siouxsie & the Banshees
‘Temptation’ - New Order
‘How does it feel?’ - Crass
‘Torch’ - Soft Cell
‘The back of love’ - Echo & the Bunnymen
‘Second skin’ - The Chameleons
‘Persons unknown’ - Poison Girls
‘Hand in glove’ - The Smiths
‘Treason’ - Teardrop Explodes
‘Requiem’ - Killing Joke
‘Dead Pop Stars’ - Altered Images
‘Alice’ - Sisters of Mercy
‘Eat y’self fitter’ - The Fall
‘Painted bird’ - Siouxsie & the Banshees
‘Let’s go to bed’ - The Cure
‘Capers’ - The Birthday Party
‘Nightclubbing’ - Grace Jones
‘The look of love’ - ABC
‘Being boiled’ - Human League
‘Pissing in the river’- Patti Smith
‘Walking on thin ice’ - Yoko Ono
OK, let’s give that mix tape a go. I have really enjoyed listening to these tracks and hope readers enjoy them too. Many thanks, Mark, for your kind note and further selections forty years on.
With thanks to Rachelle Gryn Brettlerfor snapping us in Rossmore Road, preparing to do our FoodCycle run on a wet winter’s day
We don’t get out much in Lockdown 3.0, other than to buy food and do our charity work.
That is giving me a chance to crack on with my retro-blogging; I’m working through 1995 & 1996 to cover the Ged & Daisy (Ian & Janie) “25 years ago” story. I’m needing to give more thought, though, to the formerly less well-documented, “40 years on” story of my early days at Keele University.
Strangely, 1981 and 2021 seem to have collided, forty years on.
…mentioning the superb tapes Graham Greenglass used to make for me, including quirky numbers such as Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews. I still hum it or sing it more often than not when Daisy and I do FoodCycle from there:
Dreamy use of sax and double bass on that track.
Last week, I wrote up the very weekend during which several visitors descended on Keele and Graham presented me with a few cassettes, including that very track. The piece below is a thumping good read, even if you weren’t there, including an excellent undergraduate recipe for spaghetti bollock-knees:
On Wednesday, before Daisy and I did our FoodCycle run, I did an NHS Responder gig to collect a prescription. Strangely the prescription was to be collected at the Tesco Hoover Factory in Greenford. Strange, because also on that little collection of quirky recordings given to me in February 1981 was the song Hoover Factory by Elvis Costello:
So, by some strange quirk of fate, forty years after being given recordings of those two rather obscure (but wonderful) recordings about lesser-known places in West London, I found myself doing charity gigs from those two very places.
I have already written up the ear worm I got from Hoover Factory a few months after first hearing the song:
But the early 1980s connection this week does not stop there.
While I have been cracking on with the NHS Responder/GoodSAM app as well as FoodCycle, Daisy has been training to become a Samaritan and this week moved on from being a course trainee to becoming a mentee (i.e. doing real sessions with real calls under the supervision of a mentor).
Towards the end of her course, Daisy had been waiting with a little trepidation to find out who her mentor might be. Mentors work closely with their mentees for a few weeks. She knew that it might be one of her course trainers or possibly someone she hadn’t encountered before.
A couple of weeks ago Janie announced that her mentoring instructions had come through and her mentor was a new name to her: Alison Shindler.
GED: Oh, yes, I know Alison Shindler.
DAISY: What do you mean?
GED: She was a leading light in BBYO towards the end of my time there.
DAISY: Might not be the same person…
GED: …Ealing BBYO – bet it is!
Of course it is.
What a pleasant surprise.
Less of a surprise though, after their first session together, is that Alison & Daisy seem to be getting along really well. I’m confident that the mentoring partnership should be a very good one.
Meanwhile Alison has furnished me with a photo from so far back in the day, the biggest surprise is that we were in colour back then:
With thanks to Alison Shindler for this photo
That’s a c17-year-old me turning around, next to me Simon Jacobs who was central to my “going to Keele” story and part of the “cooking weekend”. In the red scarf I thought was Jilly Black (who has remained friends with me, Daisy and Alison throughout those decades – in fact it is a little surprising we haven’t overlapped before now )…but it turns out to be Emma Cohen disguised as Jilly. Opposite Simon is Lauren Sterling plus, slightly upstaged by Simon’s head, Caroline Curtis (then Freeman) who visited me and Simon at Keele the February 1981 weekend following the “cooking” one.
But now, after all that excitement, Daisy and I are in temporary exile at the flat. The replacement of the Noddyland boiler has over-run by a day, making Daisy right and me wrong, as usual.
Stock boiler image: neither the actual old nor the actual new boiler
I’ve been grasping for a quirky early 1980s musical connection for a boiler replacement. So my earworm for the tail end of this tale is by that early 1980s mainstay, The Human League – Being Boiled:
When I reviewed last week’s virtual gathering, I forgot to mention Paul Driscoll’s anecdote about the optional “prefect’s blazer” available to those of us who attained such giddy heights at Alleyn’s School. The blazer was emblazoned (pun intended) with the school crest and motto.
That motto was God’s Gift. Edward Alleyn no doubt meant that motto to symbolise education. But the phrase has a sarcastic meaning in modern parlance; e.g. “he think’s he’s God’s gift.” And as Rohan Candappa so ably puts it, “We are Alleyn’s. If you cut us we bleed sarcasm.”
Unsurprisingly, very few of us took up the offer of this optional, distinguishing garment. Beyond the sarcasm, such an emblem had every chance to land us in a heap near North Dulwich railway station, where the Billy Biros (pupils from William Penn School) needed little excuse to isolate an outlier from the Alleyn’s herd, taking severe retribution for invented sleights and offenses.
The main senior school uniform was a two-piece or three-piece suit. I have only one picture of myself wearing mine:
Me And Wendy Robbins, Autumn 1979, Westminster Bridge
In the late 1980s, just a few years after a left Keele, when Guinness had a particular advertising slogan on the go, some fine folk in the University of Keele Students’ Union produced the following tee-shirt.
It dawned on me that I am a very rare example of someone eligible to wear not only the Alleyn’s God’s Gift blazer but also the Keele Pure Genius tee-shirt underneath the blazer.
In the dying moments of the Trump US presidency, this suitably modest mental image should be shared with the world and saved for posterity.
It’s just a shame I was unable to model the two garments together back then. I would have looked magnificent; indeed it would have been the best look ever, anywhere, for anyone.
With profound apologies to lovers of 1970s & 1980s popular music who clicked this page under false pretences; I just couldn’t resist the headline. But I am talking about the day I went to Keele and met Dr Eddie Slade while seeing Professor Mike Smith for the first time. Later, I had dinner and stayed over with Mike Smith and Marianna, at their house in Church Plantation.
It happened like this. My business partner, Michael Mainelli, had worked with Mike when Michael first came to The British Isles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coincidentally, mostly while I was at Keele.
Michael and Mike had kept in touch. Mike Smith went on to become, in 1990, Professor of Health Informatics at Keele in the departments of Computer Science and Medicine. He concurrently held the position of Director of Information at North Staffordshire Health Authority.
Our business, The Z/Yen Group, was starting to thrive. I was looking after the civil society side of the practice and was starting to itch for bright resource, around the time that Mike was starting to look for opportunities to mix some fresh commercial activity in with his academic work.
Michael suggested that Mike and I meet. Knowing that Keele was my alma mater, Michael suspected that an excuse to stop off at Keele the next time I was heading north would be an attractive proposition for me.
So, between client appointments near Euston on the Tuesday morning and client appointments in Manchester on the Wednesday morning…
…Mike Smith said he would be delighted to see me on the Tuesday afternoon & evening, insisting that I should stay with him and Marianna at Church Plantation.
I think that first house might actually have been The Smiths’ house!
Mike also asked if there was anyone still at Keele that I would especially like to see, as he had time that afternoon to wander down memory lane with me.
I suggested Eddie Slade. I had seen most of the people who had taught me and were still active at Keele on earlier visits, but had not seen Eddie since my Education & Welfare sabbatical year, some 10 years earlier, when Eddie was Senior Tutor.
I recall that Mike didn’t rate our chances of getting in to see Eddie, commenting that he didn’t think he’d ever had an audience with the Director of Studies (as he was now titled).
But when I arrived at Keele, Mike told me that, to his surprise, Eddie had remembered me and said that he would like to have a meeting with both of us.
It was great swapping stories with Eddie from the distant past…9 to 10 years earlier. We’d not seen eye-to-eye over everything, but on the whole had got on very well and had worked together to resolve some “little difficulties”. Some of those tales might yet emerge in my write ups; some might best remain unwritten.
We also discussed how the Students’ Union had changed in those 10 years. I was delighted to learn that the Real Ale Bar was one of the union’s great commercial successes, as that had been one of our 1984/85 innovations.
I then asked what turned out to be a daft question about the television rooms. In our day, there had been three television rooms and the addition of a fourth TV channel (Channel 4) had caused some consternation. I asked Eddie how they regulate the television rooms now that there are multiple channels…
…Eddie laughed and explained to me that any student who wanted to watch television in the 1990s had their own TV. The former TV rooms had long since been repurposed.
With thanks to Mark Ellicott for this 2016 picture of the Students’ Union
After saying goodbye to Eddie, we had time for me to have a look around the Students’ Union, so I could see for myself the fate of the former TV rooms and far more besides.
This was also interesting for Mike, who confessed that he had never been in the Students’ Union building before, so it was my turn to give him a guided tour for the most part. It hadn’t changed all that much.
In 1995, there were still quite a few staff in the SU from my era. For sure Pat Borsky was there to be seen in the Print Room, for example; I think Barbara also.
Disappointingly, though, nobody said…
…”cards please”…
…as we entered the Union, although I did have my dog-eared life membership card with me, just in case.
Wally…where were you? Thanks to Mark Ellicott for this 1985 picture
Anyway, after having a good look around the union, we retreated to Church Plantation where I met Marianna for the first time, we three ate a hearty meal, enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation and the rest, as they say, is history. Mike and I worked together and became friends for 25 years, until his sudden death so sadly intervened.
I have no idea what must have gone wrong with the earlier correspondence, unless it turns up in a pile I have not yet excavated. I got on well with Les, both in my capacity as a student and as a students’ union officer. He was, in my experience, a wonderful lecturer and steward of his undergraduate students. So my comment about the long-forgotten faux pas would have been tongue-in-cheek on my part, as would Les’s rebuttal have been on his part.
Of course Petra didn’t “enter the stage” on 8 November 1984, but that date is her first mention in my diary.
My Education & Welfare portfolio had two key voluntary assistant posts – Academic Secretary & Welfare Secretary. Annalisa de Mercur subscribed for the academic one and was incredibly helpful, both during the late summer when resits and appeals were all the rage…
I have a feeling that someone had subscribed to take up the 84/85 welfare secretary post but needed to withdraw before the autumn 1984 term started. Perhaps it was unfilled all along. But for sure it would have been too much for Annalisa to fulfil both, although she did a sterling job of the pastoral support role with the resit/appeals community and also the early days/weeks of term.
I advertised the welfare secretary role at the start of term and I’m pretty sure Petra, who was an FY fresher, put her hand up quite quickly. She had been helping out in the welfare office and proving her considerable worth in that role for some two or three weeks before…
Thursday, 8 November 1984 – Worked hard today – rushed about – election count [to fill the controversially vacant VP External position] then Petra came over for dinner – stayed till quite late.
One thing led to another.
I was living in the resident tutor’s flat (that was basically two study bedrooms and the end of a corridor combined) on the ground floor of K Block Horwood; Petra’s room was very nearby (H Block I think).
Friday, 9 November 1984 – Union committee in morn and then busy afternoon – Ali’s [Ali Dabbs’s] birthday – all got drunk in union (after chasing assurance!!).
Saturday, 10 November 1984 – Went shopping in morning – went to office in the afternoon – Petra helped and came back for food and stayed late.
Sunday, 11 November 1984 – Rose late – went to office and worked in fairly leisurely style. Early night.
I have no idea what “chasing assurance!!” means – I can only guess that it was a Union Committee in joke at the time. Perhaps a John White-ism or a Hayward Burt-ism for trying to get University officials to commit to a course of action.
You might notice that I was putting in the hard yards – tending to work some (although not all) weekends. I’m sure Petra remembers, as does John White, that my catch phrase was:
I’m very busy!
(Janie might complain, 40 years later, that I still take on more than I should and still bark, “I’m very busy!” with alarming regularity.)
Who? Me? Trying not to look busy, Autumn 2024
John Martyn Gig, Keele SU Ballroom, 12 November 1984
Monday, 12 November 1984 -Busyish day – did quite a lot of work – meetings etc. Went to see John Martyn in evening – latish night.
For some reason, I still have the flyer for that concert. Perhaps it amused me then, as it does now. Perhaps I kept it because I was very keen to see John Martyn again (having seen what was, to me, a less memorable gig of his in October 1981). Or perhaps I’d simply used that piece of paper as a place marker in something I ended up keeping.
Well done Pady Jalali for getting John Martyn at a good price and enabling Keele folk to see him for less than half the price of anywhere else. And well done Pady for emphasising that pricing point. The messaging is SO YOU.
I’m listening to some John Martyn while writing this piece, to get me in the mood.
He played quite a lot of stuff from his more recent albums, not least Sapphire which he was releasing in conjunction with the tour. But he also played a lot from his canon. I remember getting very excited when he played this favourite of mine:
The following video was recorded less than two weeks after the Keele gig, with the addition of percussionists who weren’t there at Keele but with Foss Patterson who was at our gig on keyboards and backing vocals:
If the first piece reminds you a bit of Nick Drake and the second one reminds you a bit of Phil Collins, you’re not far wrong. John Martyn was a bit of a style magpie (in a good way), who hung out with, amongst many others, Nick Drake in the early 1970s and Phil Collins in the early 1980s.
I remember the gig being rather different from my expectation (my knowledge of him was stuck in the 1970s) but I still remember very much enjoying that gig.
In my vague memory Petra was with me at that gig, but that might be a false memory. The diary is silent on that point.
Back To Reality…With A Bit Of A Bump
Tuesday, 13 November 1984 – Not feeling at all good today – went home (sent home in afternoon). Much fuss made and Liza [O’Connor] came over in evening to cap it all.
Wednesday, 14 November 1984 – Pretty wretched day – Senate dragged on and on – not feeling too good – went home for an early night.
Thursday, 15 November 1984 – Hard day – work – met solicitor [John Cheetham] in afternoon. Went to Leo [Hamburger] & Sarah’s party in evening – Petra came back after.
…I was still prone to the occasional “feel absolutely terrible for no apparent reason” spell. Actually, reviewing my diaries 40 years on, I think I can observe a pattern, suggesting that a late night after a bit too much to drink usually preceded such a day or two. I can certainly vouch for the fact that, 40 years on, it only needs to be “a tiny bit too much” drink the night before to make a mess of the next day.
I love the phrases “went home (sent home…)” and “much fuss made”. I don’t really remember it, but I can imagine Kate (now Susan) Fricker and Pady Jalali going into matronly mode, even in their young adulthood. John White would have supported them. Petra too, no doubt.
The home visit from Liza O’Connor (my ex from 82/83)…
…probably did not go particularly well. I cannot imagine that it was anything other than a coincidence that Liza was around to pop in on such a day. I’m pretty sure she was in Manchester studying that term, so presumably had briefly come home (to The Sneyd Arms) for some reason and tracked me down to my new bijou pad. “As if my life isn’t getting complicated enough”…was probably the subtext of my phrase, “to cap it all”.
For the Wednesday, “Senate dragged on and on” and “not feeling too good” gives me a clears sense of how I felt sitting there that afternoon. Kate Fricker had campaigned hard with the University to allow me to be the second SU representative on Policy Staffing & Development (PS&D) committee, which was the place where all the decisions tended to be made. Senate was more of a “rubber stamp or posturing” chamber for most matters…certainly those which had already been discussed in detail and approved by PS&D. For that reason, when PS&D approved items came around at Senate, my heart tended to sink even at the best of times if someone (usually a Professor who had lost a debate at PS&D) went over old ground, loquaciously, for a second and futile time at Senate.
The solicitor visit on Thursday 15th November would have been about the impending Employment Tribunal, scheduled for mid to late December. John Cheetham was the University solicitor – Kate and I had felt unconfident with the SU solicitor who had no real experience of employment tribunals. The registrar, David Cohen, had been helpful in allowing us use of the University solicitors for this purpose. He also took great pains to remind us, just in case it needed pointing out, that we couldn’t use John Cheetham for anything disputatious between the Students’ Union and the University.
“For the avoidance of doubt…” David Cohen 1960s COPYRIGHT KEELE UNIVERSITY
John Cheetham was a very good solicitor and looked after us sympathetically as well as professionally. He also, I clearly remember, was very cognisant of the mental strain that Tommy and Ralph were undergoing and went easy on them…which is more than can be said for Derek Bamford of NUPE’s approach to us…but that’s another story for another time.
As an avid Private Eye reader (back then and still), I was constantly amused by John Cheetham’s name, as a solicitor. He would surely have fitted in well at Private Eye’s fictitious law firm: Sue, Grabbit and Runne.
Leo Hamburger and Sarah’s party. I remember Leo well and recall keeping in touch with him for a while after Keele. He was very helpful in the Education & Welfare office, although he didn’t have a formal role in the way that Petra and Annalisa did. But it was my style to have a team of helpful people. As much as anything else, if the welfare office was to be staffed most of the time during office hours, I needed volunteers to do that while I was in meetings half the day.
I have managed to track down Petra prior to writing this article but have not yet tried to contact Leo, but I shall do so. I hope one of them will remember who Sarah was in this context. Possibly Sarah Hetherington who went on to marry Andrew Moran? Or possibly another Sarah.
Unfortunately we have no photographs from student parties such as Leo and Sarah’s from the mid 1980s. Photography had only just been invented and certainly wasn’t intended for such events back then.
But no matter – I have asked DeepAI to depict an appropriate scene and it has done a grand job of it:
Interesting that DeepAI depicts “UK students partying in a room in the mid 1980s” with mostly food and just a few signs of drink. My recollection, albeit fuzzy, is that it was much the other way around.
No, it wasn’t ALL about those things, but my diaries and the thrust of the early November issue of Concourse suggest that those aspects of student life were quite central, at least around the union.
Late October UGM
If you are geeky enough to want to read about the late October UGM in excruciating detail, I have good news for you; I was geeky enough to upload all three columns so you can click the links and read them:
The aspect I want to share with all readers, though, is the cartoon of Mark Ellicott accompanying that article, which reminded me of the headline photograph and made me laugh 40 years on:
Late October Rent Strike / Rent Delay
I was also amused to read Concourses take on the conclusion of the rent strike / rent delay, which had taken up a fair chunk of our October time.
A week before the end of October, I had signalled in a Concourse newssheet and Pub Circ that we had achieved our goals in pressurising the University into sorting out the accommodation problems and advised students to settle up before the end of the month to avoid late payment penalties.
Not many readers will be surprised to learn that a great many students left it until the last afternoon (31 October) to turn up at the finance office with their cheques.
Naturally, I was kinda busy that afternoon, so it seems that John White (Union Secretary) picked up this particular mantle. The following Concourse piece from early November describes the end game of this episode:
Here are the extracts from my diary for those last few days of October:
Monday 29 October 1984 – Hard day in office plus UGM in evening – had a late night.
Tuesday, 30 October 1984 – Busy day in the office – working hard etc. Worked late – UC, McDonald’s. Earlyish night.
Wednesday, 31 October 1984 – busy day – office/PSD [Policy, Staffing & Development Committee] etc. Did Union disco [with John White] in the evening.
Ah, so John & I were still talking to each other at the end of that fraught day. Of course we were. We’re still talking to each other forty years on. John’s comment on the above article, when I zapped it over to him ahead of writing this piece:
[That article] did make me smile and that’s the way industrial relations should be conducted
Doing Union Discos With John White After Work
I explained how we ended up DJ-ing a lot in an earlier article:
In short, Social Committee in previous years had paid people to DJ at Union discos, but Pady Jalali (our Social Secretary) felt that people would volunteer to DJ discos. John & I agreed to do any discos that lacked a volunteer until those who wanted to DJ union discos saw sense. My diaries tell me that the late October/early November period was “peak disco” for me and John – three in one week including the 31 October disco.
Thursday 1 November 1984 – Busy day in office over grievance and discipline. In evening went to Mel’s [Melissa Oliveck’s] party which was good.
Friday 2 November 1984 – Very busy day in the office. Came down to the union after dinner – ended up doing disco with John Boy.
Saturday, 3 November 1984 – Busyish day – shopping then in office. Ali [Dabbs] came back for a while – then called out to do disco (again!!).
Sunday, 4 November 1984 – Rose quite late – went over to Annalisa’s [de Mercur] for lunch – very pleasant – had an early night (deserved).
Monday, 5 November 1984 – Worked quite hard today – went to Constitutional Committee in evening – easyish evening.
Tuesday, 6 November 1984 – busy day in the office – drinks with VC etc. early evening -> Stoke to meet Kathy [Kathy Barlow, my opposite number at North Staffs Poly] et.al.
Wednesday, 7 November 1984 – Very busy day with meetings etc. Had a fairly easy evening for a change.
Busy days really were busy days. It might be that my allergy to sitting on committees developed in my union sabbatical year, as I probably attended a lifetime’s worth of them in the space of one year. Here’s an extract from my appointments diary that week:
John was also working very hard during the days. The 62 year old me finds it hard to imagine how the 22 year old me had the energy to do all of those things, including stints of highly active DJ-ing several evenings after work.
Hayward Burt, Melissa Oliveck, Me (resting my eyes), Andy Crawford, Kate (now Susan) Fricker, Pete Wild, Jo Gadian, UGM 29 October 1984
The conduct at…and result of…the Tommy & Ralph EGM did not go down well with the Students’ Union staff.
My diary notes:
Friday, 26 October 1984 – Overslept. Rose late – staff troubles – spent most of day trying to sort them out. Early night.
If I recall correctly, the staff went on strike that day and/but we managed to persuade them to restrict their formal action to that single day. We (Union Committee) thought we got off quite lightly, as some of the student behaviour at the EGM had shocked us on the staff’s behalf. I think it was the fact that we genuinely shared the staff’s objection to the meeting that persuaded them to limit their action.
Meanwhile Concourse covered the EGM, in a rapidly-issued freebie that following day, thusly:
The “Don’t Pay, delay” column on the front page reminds me of the rent strike we led that year in the wake of some pretty poor performance by the University Estates department in getting accommodation ready for enough students. I’ll return to that topic in my next piece. It actually came to a head on 31 October, although you wouldn’t tell from my diary entry from that day:
Saturday, 27 October 1984 – Rose quite late – went shopping – then after lunch went office – Annalisa [de Mercur] came back for dinner and stayed late.
Sunday, 28 October 1984 – Spent a busy day in the office – went over to Kate’s -> on to Sneyd -> Union in eve with Annalisa and Ali [Dabbs] too.
Monday 29 October 1984 – Hard day in office plus UGM in evening – had a late night.
Tuesday, 30 October 1984 – Busy day in the office – working hard etc. Worked late – UC, McDonald’s. Earlyish night.
Wednesday, 31 October 1984 – busy day – office/PSD [Policy, Staffing & Development Committee] etc. Did Union disco [with John White] in the evening.
The late October UGM was covered in some detail in the November issue of Concourse. I’ll write that up along with the November material.
the other matter that came to a head around that time was a controversy over Jo Gadian remaining on the Union Committee while suspended.
I’m trying to remember how that played out, because I thought we appealed that decision by the University quite vociferously. Why david Cohen wrote to me rather than the President, Kate Fricker, is a mystery to me. Perhaps I was fronting the bolshie protest against the decision to prevent Jo from serving.
One of the others might remember, although all seem to be protesting early onset memory loss whenever I bung questions of this kind over to them.
I can’t even remember what I had for dinner yesterday…
The Tommy & Ralph EGM is one of the very few truly horrid memories I have of my year as a union sabbatical, indeed of my five years at Keele. Actually, one of my most horrid memories full stop.
Just in case you are coming to this saga cold, the 84/85 Union Committee had inherited a serious problem with the Union Bars, which were making ruinous losses which the managers could neither adequately explain nor manage down. The previous committee had started a disciplinary process and then left it in abeyance for us to pick up, which we did, from the outset of our tenure.
We held several investigative/disciplinary meetings, the last of which, in early August, I chaired. At that meeting the committee voted unanimously to dismiss the two bar managers, Tommy and Ralph. Their trades union (NUPE) rep, Derek Bamford, immediately announced that both would pursue their right to appeal to an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the students’ union in the autumn.
I have written up the story so far in the following two pieces:
All of us on the committee had a sense of trepidation about the impending EGM. As the person who had chaired the final meeting and had delivered the dismissals – the President Kate (now Susan) Fricker was unavoidably on leave for that meeting – I felt very much in the spotlight of the appeals processes. None of us on the committee thought that the EGM was an appropriate forum for a staff disciplinary appeal, but that was what the constitution said.
Ironically, as chair of Constitutional Committee, I had led a comprehensive review of the constitution the previous academic year and had sought to change that aspect of the constitution. I remember going to see the Permanent Secretary, Tony Derricott, about that and some of the other areas I thought ripe for change. Tony told me in no uncertain terms that the right of appeal to an EGM was sacrosanct to the Union staff, because no-one had ever successfully been dismissed if the staff member chose to appeal to an EGM.
My personal diary entries, unusually for me, provide a sense of my dark mood in the run up to that fateful meeting:
Wednesday, 17 October 1984 – feeling very rough today – very busy also – Ball night – went home early.
Thursday, 18 October 1984 – Tough day – worked etc – cancelled London trip – lots of meetings etc – J-Soc in evening.
Friday, 19 October 1984 – Very very busy with EGM and other stuff – worked until late.
Saturday, 20 October 1984 – Kate came over and spent whole day working for EGM etc – dinner in eve etc.
Sunday, 21 October 1984 – Kate came over early – worked all day. Went to Union in eve.
Monday, 22 October 1984 -Horrible day re-EGM business – meetings all day etc – work till late – Constitutional Committee etc.
Tuesday 23 October 1984 – Traumatic day trying to sort things out etc. John [White] stopped over.
Wednesday, 24 October 1984 – busy day of worries and in meetings etc. Went to bed early.
Minor Detour – Freshers’ Ball 17 October 1984
I struggled to remember who played the Freshers’ Ball that year. My Newspapers.com archive subscription now includes the Evening Sentinel, so I can report faithfully as the following preview attests:
Rocky Sharpe & the Replays followed by Dr Feelgood. I’m pretty sure I stuck it out for the former but bunked off before the end of the latter.
For anyone who wants top remember what Rocky Sharpe & The Replays were like, here are a couple of live vids from ancient archives:
If younger readers look at these vids and decide that the 1980s seems further in the distant past than they imagined, I should point out that both of the bands on show that night were rock and roll revival of one sort or another, although Dr Feelgood tried to be a bit more rock (1970s pub rock) than the 1950s revival rock and roll of Rocky Sharpe & the Replays.
Here is a vid of Dr Feelgood as they looked live by the mid to late 1980s:
Get Back To The Main Story – The Run Up To The EGM
My personal diary makes it clear that I was busy with other stuff as well as preparing for the EGM. My appointments diary supports that idea – every day at least two, normally three or four meetings, including the first Senate of the term. The University meetings were not for winging – I would always take the time to go through all of the papers and there would have been preparatory meetings for some as well.
The day of the above ball also included
13:30 pre-senate meeting in Vincent’s Room” [guessing Vince Beasley]
14:15 Senate [that would have lasted a good three hours]
18:30 Thorns Senior Common Room Wardens Meeting/Dinner…
…then the ball.
I had planned to go to London Friday evening and return Monday morning, but cancelled that trip as there was simply too much to do. Kate Fricker and I worked all the way through that weekend to prepare our meetings for the following week, including the EGM.
I don’t think my parents were too pleased with my cancelling the visit, as they were going away for several weeks the following weekend, so that cancellation wrote off any chance of seeing them for yonks. We got over it.
Although I say I had an early night on the Wednesday night before the EGM, I am sure I stuck around long enough to see The Frank Chickens and Billy Bragg before sloping off (by my standards) early.
Another Diversion Subsection: Billy Bragg Supported By The Frank Chickens
If you want to know/remember what The Frank Chickens looked like, this video is quintessentially Frank, as it were. For sure I saw this pair perform:
I am 99% sure that I stuck around also for Billy Bragg because I know I saw him perform live and don’t think it could have been any other occasion than this. His “party piece” back then was a version of Route 66 about the A13 to Southend, which brought a smile and also some happy family memories for me.
I hadn’t thought of the connection before, but Pady Jalali seemed to be specialising in bringing acts from the A13 corridor to Keele at the start of that year – Billy Bragg from Barking, Dr Feelgood from Canvey island…
…but I am continuing to digress rather than write the painful stuff.
The EGM Day Itself: 25 October 1984
The image below is an extract from my appointment diary, just showing that day.
My personal diary simply says:
Thursday, 25 October 1984 – Spent most of the day in a daze and in meetings. Annalisa [de Mercur] came over for dinner – EGM over Tommy and Ralph – we won – much relief.
The EGM was horrible. All the imaginings I had about the inappropriateness of a students general meeting were amplified and almost caricatured that night. Of course it was a boozy affair – UGMs always were, whether they were E or not.
The ballroom was very crowded – several hundred people had turned out – at least the students were taking an interest. A large number of them were freshers who could surely only go with their gut feelings and/or the sense of the meeting, rather than take in the complexities of what had been a heart-wrenching and difficult decision to dismiss long serving staff.
Then there were vested interests. Tommy was a Roman Catholic with several children. The Catholic priest and the Catholic Society had turned out en masse (I think my sense of humour survived sufficiently for me to privately pun “on mass” to fellow committee members), plus Toby Bourgein and Neil White of course, ready to sink us with a plea for compassion. Most tellingly, all the Union staff turned up to support their colleagues. Most of them had only heard about but not seen a UGM before.
We were ready simply to tell the narrative faithfully and explain the meticulous steps we had taken to try to rehabilitate Tommy and Ralph’s position, but our enquiries and entreaties simply led us to conclude that they could not manage such a large and complex bar arrangement and that no amount of training or support could rectify those shortcomings. In truth, they couldn’t in any meaningful sense read the stock reports that were highlighting the deficiencies and the losses.
Mark Ellicott, who was the Speaker that year, chaired the meeting. He and have discussed that night at some length in the run up to its 40th anniversary. I am sure he will allow me to share some of his thoughts as a postscript, if I haven’t captured them in this piece. In my view, Mark did a superb job of handling a monumentally difficult meeting.
Derek Bamford of NUPE led for the appellants. I remember him at one point trying to continue talking beyond the guillotine time and actually being guillotined (i.e. having his microphone cut off, nothing more serious than that) and I also remember that he was a small man who looked very strange in that meeting, because he leant across the podium to the extent that the green timing light illuminated him, in green, from below. It’s funny how certain little details tick in the mind, with the rest being rather a blur.
Kate took full responsibility for leading our “defence” and advocating that the appeal be rejected. I did speak at one point but not for long at that meeting.
Of course the debate became raucous at times and some of the questions and comments from the floor were utterly inappropriate for such an important decision-making panel.
But I do remember one speech in particular that seemed to turn the sense of the meeting on its head, by which I mean that before that one speech I thought we were going to lose vote, but by the end of that speech I sensed that the vote was going to go our way.
It was John White’s speech, but not my friend John S White who was on the committee with us; John “Beaky” White, a research student who ran the KRA Bar and who, along with Pete Cumberland, helped run our bars during the summer while we appointed replacement bar managers.
The beer truth
John basically told the meeting that he and Pete had found the cellars in a shambles when they took over the bars and that the pipes were in a filthy condition. He asked any freshers who were in the meeting to turn to someone who had been at Keele the previous year and ask them if the beer tastes better now than it did the previous year, because the beer was now being stored and served appropriately.
I remember Kate and I looking at each other, a little horrified, because those factors had not been the grounds for the dismissal. In a formal legal setting, this evidence should not be used to determine whether or not we had fairly dismissed the staff and whether or not their appeals should be upheld.
But of course the appeal to a General Meeting was not a formal legal appeal – that aspect would come later at Employment Tribunal. John’s arguments clearly swayed many undecided voters in the room that evening.
I remember Annalisa telling me afterwards that she thought that the sense of the room was 60%/40% against us (i.e. in favour of the appeal) until that speech, whereas in the end the vote went 60%/40% the other way, possibly even more than 60% supported us. It didn’t need a count.
We had won but none of us felt good at the end of that evening. Derek Bamford made an angry statement on exit and it was clear to us that we had a lot of work to do to win back the support of our excellent and loyal team of staff, some of whom were horrified at witnessing that meeting.
There’s probably a Concourse write up of this which I must dig out and add to this piece…
Postcript: Yes there is a Concourse write up – I have included it in my fllow up piece:
For now, the last word goes to the Evening Sentinel, which, unsurprisingly, was not exactly the employer’s friend in this matter as it subsequently panned out, although the following piece was short and to the point.
Maya Angelou, American writer and civil rights activist, famously wrote:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The details of this strange story from 40 years ago are lost in the mists of time and the sad fact is that I am now the sole survivor of that late evening, as Neil White (Lindsay Hall resident tutor) and Toby Bourgein (former Students’ Union Secretary and Postgraduate grandee by that time), have both since died.
I eulogised Toby in the following piece when I learned, in September 2020, that he had died:
Ah, the Neil White home brew. I suspect that was also involved in the October 1984 kidnapping incident.
Here is all that I recorded in my personal diary for 15 October 1984:
Monday, 15 October 1984 – Very busy today – went to McDonald’s for tea and on to Marston tasting in KRA and on to Chalky’s [Neil White’s] flat.
That is not very revealing, but I remember that night 15/16 October, impressionistically, very well.
The context of all this is the Tommy and Ralph saga, which had come to a head that August when we dismissed the Students’ Union bar managers, Tommy & Ralph…
…and which was about to come to a head again, as their appeal to a Students’ Union EGM was to take place 10 days later, 25 October.
Ironically, our purpose at the KRA (postgraduate bar) on the evening of 15 October was to finalise the choice of main real ale for the new Real Ale Bar, formerly – and in location terms still – the Ballroom Bar. After searching high and low for an alternative to the KRA’s choice of Marston’s Pedigree, we bowed to the inevitable and chose to offer that brew also in the Students’ Union. The fruits of our research did mean that we also offered Banks’s Mild as a regular beer in that bar, which I found particularly pleasant as a brew for the remainder of my sabbatical year.
Neil and Toby invited me back to Neil’s resident tutor’s place for a chat and some home brew. This did not seem an odd invitation, as I had spent the occasional long evening that way with them over the years, see Snow White article and other such evenings.
But it soon became clear that Neil and Toby had a serious purpose to their invitation. I knew that they were friends with Tommy and Ralph. I also knew that they did not approve of the actions we had taken. But they made it very clear to me, as we downed some of Neil’s home brew, that they were going to support Tommy and Ralph’s motion of appeal to the EGM and that it was their view that the appeal would succeed and that the dismissals would be overturned. They certainly had precedent on their side to support their confidence that the appeal would succeed. No such appeal against a dismissal had ever previously been denied by the student body.
I explained to Neil and Toby the deep thought and heart-wrenching that had gone into our decision, but also that I/we were resolute that we had done the right thing in law and for the good of the Students’ Union. They disagreed and tried to persuade me to recant and change sides ahead of the appeal. In their minds, THAT would be for the good of the Union and also for my own good, as they saw my position and Education & Welfare Officer, having chaired the August dismissal meeting, as untenable once the appeal had been upheld and the decision to dismiss forcibly overturned.
I responded that such a change of position would make it even more untenable for me to continue in my role. I also felt (and still do) that such a U-turn would have been ruinous for the Students’ Union. We had, after all, made the decision because the status quo with those bar managers was unsustainable; the Union would have been financially ruined by or even before the end of that academic year.
Once we reached the point that, to my mind, we had established that our views were diametrically opposed and that there was no “third way” that might reconcile our positions, I got up to leave.
My memory is not entirely clear about how they prevented me from leaving, but I do recall at least one of them, if not both of them, blocking the door and at least one of them, if not both of them, saying:
we’re not going to let you leave until you change your mind.
It is that aspect of the evening that has, for all these years, made me associate the word “kidnap” with this event.
I’d like to make a few impressionistic things clear. At no point was there a threat or even the vaguest suggestion of serious violence, other than the aggression that might be supposed when people block a door to prevent someone from leaving. I recall that it was sort-of well-humoured, despite being sinister.
I recall giggling at one point and telling Toby, as he would well know, that they were technically falsely imprisoning me. Neil and Toby asserted that this was for my own good, that they liked me, and that they wanted me to put my own position (and that of Tommy and Ralph) right, and that they couldn’t possibly let me go until they had persuaded me to follow their guidance.
This odd event went on until really quite late. My appointment diary for those two days provides a clue as to how I escaped.
Nothing as exciting as a Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped adventure. I squeezed in a meeting with Toby Bourgein the next day. My escape was achieved through the expedient of promising to think very carefully about what Neil and Toby had said and to meet Toby the next day to continue the conversation.
The meeting on 16th at 1.00 was not very long and not very pleasant. I told Toby that reflection had only firmed up my view that the decision we had made about Tommy and Ralph was the right one and that recanting would neither be right nor in the interests of the Union.
The words in my personal diary of 16 October are quite revealing.
Tuesday, 16 October 1984 – Feeling rather ill today – meetings galore – all unpleasant – John Boy [John White – no relation] came back in eve to do policy document.
I found the whole Tommy and Ralph matter painful and emotionally draining. Finding myself up against old friends who were so sure of their position that they were prepared to kidnap me in an attempt to persuade me only added to the pain.
I’m not sure whether I even told my colleagues what had happened that night, John might remember if I did tell them, as might Kate (Susan) Fricker and/or Pady Jalali.
I still have fond memories of Neil and Toby from the many happy occasions I spent with them. I also firmly believe that they had the interests of the Students’ Union and their friends Tommy & Ralph genuinely at heart. But I believe that they were wrong-headed over this matter. I also believe that their conduct in the way they went about trying to persuade me to recant – was inappropriate and out of character for those two.
