…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.
The late, great Alan Gorman, aka The Great Yorkshire Pudding, with thanks to Susan Gorman for the photo
Thursday 24 May 1984: Did some work today – played tennis in afternoon – worked at Bobbies in eve – came back after.
Friday 25 May 1984: Did some work today (not very much) – cold etc – worked over at Bobbies in eve.
Saturday 26 May 1984: Went shopping in afternoon (-McDonalds ) – played tennis in afternoon – went Bobbies to work in evening – stayed.
This was part of a short period between the end of my Law Finals exams and the start of my Economics Finals exams.
I do remember playing rather a lot of tennis at that time.
The tennis (when the opponent was not named in the diary) would have been Alan Gorman, aka The Great Yorkshire Pudding.
Pudding and I played a great deal that year, including several five match thrillers, which might well have taken in excess of three hours to complete.
I have a vague recollection that one of our five set thrillers did take place in that interval between my finals exams and I have a feeling it would have been the 24 May match, which preceded me having a cold the next day – a minor illness probably exacerbated by an excess of tennis.
Pudding and I were quite evenly matched at tennis, although we were very different in playing styles and physique. Pudding was tall and skinny, with “long levers” (as we say these days) and a fair bit of strength. I was much shorter, skinny, compact and comparatively feeble – but I was quick around the court and quite cunning in my style. Our matches were nearly always close.
We didn’t look much like this in 1984, but Ivan Lendl did.
The tennis courts were not much used, so we could usually play whenever we wanted for however long we wanted.
Unfortunately for me, several members of the Economics Department were amongst the very small band of other regulars on those courts, not least Professor Les Fishman, Mrs Fishman and Peter Lawrence. I don’t think they were impressed by the duration and intensity of our matches that close to my finals.
Monday, 11 April 1984 – Finished project. Went library etc. Went to Newcastle with Ashley to food co-op thing – got back late.
My Keele economics project was a bit of a magnum opus. I set out to try to model the pharmaceutical industry, only to learn very rapidly that the apparent cost drivers (i.e. those that were visible in the public domain) had little to do with the actual costs and where actual economic activity took place – rather they were the product of tax planning devices to ensure that profits were maximised in nations with low rates of corporate taxation. Who knew?
I get heartburn just from the thought of writing up that darned project
I remember sheepishly asking Joe Nellis (latterly Professor Joe Nellis at Cranfield) early in the process whether I had screwed up by making a naïve choice of question? Joe simply advised me to “tell it how it is” and the dissertation can still do very well. Which it did.
“Went library” will have been part of the convoluted process in those days of ensuring that a project report was typed up and copied appropriately. I think I typed my own but had to pay for copies in the library.
I’ll scan the document and place it in the public domain at some point. If any reader is desperate to see it, pip me an e-mail message requesting that I upload it – that will induce me to do it sooner rather than later.
Ashley Fletcher
The evening at the food co-operative with Ashley was an unforgettable experience.
The meeting was in a pub’s snug or upstairs room, I forget which, much like Careless Talk meetings. Indeed many of the participants were from that group and a lot were Keele students, researchers and/or graduates. Bob and Sally were there, although this was not “Bob and Sally’s thing”, not that they considered Careless Talk to be “Bob & Sally’s thing” either. Also , I think, Simon and Theo. In addition, a fairly motley collection of local folk in search of cheap bulk food.
The group had been going for a while, although neither Ashley nor I had visited it before. I am pretty sure this was the one and only visit for both of us.
The group and had named itself “Esamrek”, which was a play on the name of the local wholefood store, Kermase, the idea being that the co-operative would reverse the worst excesses of Kermase (i.e. its desire to make profit from selling food).
I was not at one with this economic position, even back then. I was keen to shine a light on excess profits made by Big Pharma, not least by their trick of playing the global taxation game, but I was not against the idea of a retailer making a turn of profit by retailing food.
The first item for debate at the Esamrek meeting was the name of the group itself, which several members found cumbersome and/or tiresome. The debate on the name was quite lively. I recall Bob (even though it was not Bob and Sally’s thing) trying to steer the discussion towards “groundswells” and “the sense of the meeting” a few times, just as he would at a Careless Talk meeting.
One member, who I can only describe as a left-over hippy type by look and sound, at one point said:
…we should name the group Pan Foods, because Pan is the god of the sun and of the earth.
“Siri…Alexa…am I the god of the sun and of the earth?”
This statement somewhat silenced the group. I remember thinking that Pan was not exactly the god of those things, but, unsure what he was the god of, and in any case unsure whether that point was relevant to the debate, I decided (wisely I think) not to chime in on this point.
I remember a conversation with Ashley afterwards about this type of factual nit-picking, in which Ashley posited a business idea: a telephone helpline (premium rate naturally), staffed by brainy youngsters armed with encyclopaedias, to which this type of debate might be put and resolved. Ashley’s considered view was that pub debates up and down the country would very naturally resort to such a service and that the business could rake it in. That idea might have done rather well, especially in the early days of the mobile phone, only to do very badly very rapidly once Alta Vista and Google emerged.
Most amusing to me, though, were the debates about what to order and in what quantities. The group was too loosey-goosey libertarian to take firm orders in advance or anything like that, so they were planning based on the sense of the meeting and people’s vague notion of how much of such-and-such a product they might want at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Ashley threw a cat amongst the pigeons a few times by “naively” questioning the exact variant chosen for a particular product. For example, there was a presumption that the order would be for wholegrain rice. Ashley chimed in…
…I don’t really like wholegrain rice so I wouldn’t go for that. I might be interested in white rice…
…at which point several people then admitted that they quite like white rice and hadn’t eaten any of it for a while…not since they started buying infeasibly large quantities of wholegrain rice via the co-operative…
…while others were persistent in their desire for the wholegrain.
A similar debate ensued around brown pasta and so on the meeting went.
My recollection is that the group ended up in a state of some confusion, given that the only way the co-operative could achieve ultra low prices was through buying very large quantities of a very small range of products.
The notion of a supermarket with buying power and the ability to offer a wide range of products all at once, to me, seemed a rational solution to this micro-economic problem. There might have been a whole second economics dissertation in that.
I do recall laughing with Ashley about that meeting afterwards. Rather than a dissertation, Ashley thought there might be a Mike Leigh style play in the story of that evening.
The meaning of this image for this story will become apparent if you read on!
Forty years after the event, I can still give myself the collywobbles by reading my diary entries for the weeks approaching my finals at Keele. Economics and Law, just in case you were wondering.
I never have been much use at revising for exams. These were important exams to say the least. I sense that I distinguished myself for these big ones by being proportionately dreadful at knuckling down to revision.
I was, at least, quite brutally honest in my diary as to what I was – and wasn’t – doing around that time.
This multi-part article on how not to revise for your finals might serve as an object lesson to students everywhere.
Let’s start with a transcription from my diary for the first 10 days of April 1984:
Sunday 1 April 1984 – Got up late! Did little all day – Viv [Robinson] came round in afternoon – had nice meal and early night.
Monday 2 April 1984 – Got up quite late – Ashley [Fletcher] came round. Went into town – shopped and went to Ashley’s – Bobbie [Scully] left – easyish evening – went Union with Mel [Melissa Oliveck] for last orders – early night.
Tuesday, 3 April 1984 – Tried to do some work today – not too successfully. Went to Union in the evening with Mel.
Wednesday, 4 April 1984 – Late start – intermittent work – went to union with Malcolm [Cormelius] in the evening.
Thursday, 5 April 1984 – Did some work today – intermittently -big demo against Police Bill [which became the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984]. Went to KRA in evening with Malcolm.
Friday, 6 April 1984 – worked quite hard today – shopped etc – went to Union in eve – had a bop!
Saturday, 7 April 1984 – busyish day. Worked quite hard on project today. Went to union in eve – disco etc.
Sunday, 8 April 1984 – Worked on project today after late start. Visited Q92 [my Malay friends] etc. Went to Union for last orders.
Monday, 9 April 1984 = Shopped and worked today. Went to KRA with Malc, Farm [Chris Spencer] and Mel – nice evening.
Tuesday, 10 April 1984 – Worked hard on project all day. Went to Careless Talk meeting in evening, then union, then K41 do.
Some points to note here. Firstly, there are some references to working hard, but they are unquestionably linked to finishing my project – i.e. my Economics dissertation on the Economics of the Pharmaceutical Industry. I am proud of that piece of work, which achieved a first class mark, but in truth it should have been finished before revision time came around in April 1984.
My flat, Barnes L54, had just two of us regular residents: me and Chris “Farmer” Spencer. Pete Wild’s girlfriend, Melissa Oliveck, was there, at least for that first chunk of the vacation, while Malcolm Cornelius was occupying Alan “Great Yorkshire Pudding” Gorman’s room.
One aspect, unmentioned in the diary but which I remember very clearly, was a short-lived tradition of making Irish coffee at the end of the evening on return from the Union. I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago (March 2024) when my wife, Janie, ordered an Irish coffee after our meal in Petworth (see headline image and below).
“You were a role model…on how NOT to revise…”
I recalled that we were trying to get work done for our finals, so were not spending much time in the bar. Instead, Malcolm and I tried many different ways to prepare the Irish coffee in the flat – all in the interests of science of course.
I remarked to the maître d’ in Petworth that Malcolm and I had concluded that the essential component to make the cream float nicely was the sugar content within the coffee. The maître d’ explained that, to get a full-on Irish coffee to look the way the coffee looks in our photos, you also need to bring each ingredient to the right temperature before combining and use cream with the right fat content.
Back to the drawing board, Malc.
The woeful tale of my attempts to revise for finals will continue soon, after a short interlude next time, to describe a visit that Ashley Fletcher and I made to a Keeley food collective group in Newcastle.
“Welcome To The Top Table”. Picture 1985, with thanks to Mark Ellicott
I claim in my diary not to remember much about this week…John White reports similarly from his diary when he ran successfully for the sabbatical Union Secretary role a couple of weeks earlier…
..yet there are several aspects of that election week that I remember very clearly, forty years later.
The Story So Far…
Just to summarise the story so far – I was quietly trying to ensure that the Union Committee for 84/85 would be a lot more effective and less chaotic than the 83/84 team, which was beset with ructions and (often self-inflicted) problems.
My dream team for 84/85 included my girlfriend, Bobbie Scully, as Education and Welfare sabbatical. Bobbie had other plans and turned out to be better at the Machiavellian stuff than me, ganging up with other friends to turn the tables on me.
I saw Bobbie at the Gresham Society dinner earlier this week (writing in March 2024) and warned her that I would be writing up the story of her stitching me up for this role.
Quite right, except the truth of it was that you tried to stitch me up and the easiest way out of it was for me to stitch you up instead
That’s clear.
A late Renaissance petard. There’s me, setting it off, about to be hoist by it, while Malcolm Cornelius and Bobbie Scully watch from a safe distance
…held me back from campaigning until the last few days of the race.
Other Random Memories Prior To Canvassing
I recall that there were 11 nominations for the role of Education & Welfare that year and all of us remained in the race and appeared on the ballot paper. That was believed to be a record back then and might still be a record.
I hoped to get endorsement from the Liberals and Labour…although I was a member of neither…on the basis that the position is apolitical, no-one amongst the 11 candidates was a member of either party and that my political leanings were (are) unattached liberal-left. The Liberals went for it without fuss…my flat, Barnes L54 was sort-of “Liberals Central” with Pete Wild living there and Melissa Oliveck hanging out there with Pete much of the time.
It was much harder to persuade Labour to endorse me. I had been a member of Labour Club until a year or two previous but had not identified enough with the local MP nor the party line to feel comfortable with formal alignment. One of the candidates decided to try to carpetbag Labour endorsement by joining Labour Club. Truda Smith, by then head of Labour Club, thought that was good enough. Frank Dillon, presumably thinking differently, took it upon himself as Secretary of Labour club to come round and see me in Barnes L54, give me a good grilling and decide who to propose for Labour endorsement. It was the first time I had a long chat with Frank, but for sure it was not the last.
Frank did not say, “Ian Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”
…but I did get the Labour endorsement and it was the beginning of a friendship with Frank that has endured.
The Legwork Campaign Began
Sunday 11 March 1984 – Started canvassing this afternoon- hard work. Went to KRA with Vivian in evening after.
Monday 12 March 1984 – Canvassed hard today – went to UGM in evening – left early – went over to Bobbie’s – came back.
Tuesday 13 March 1984 – Hard canvassing all day today – refecs, rooms, etc. V tiring – popped in to see B after for a while.
Wednesday 14 March 1984 – Canvassed hard all day – went Union in eve with Bobbie – came back.
I recall getting advice from Dr Scott on whether my rubella presented a risk to anyone – he gave me a rule to follow ahead of going door to door, which I think would have enabled me to start on the Saturday but I waited until the Sunday “to be sure”. That didn’t prevent one “spoiler” rumour that I was spreading rubella and might cause birth defects were I to infect a pregnant woman while canvassing, rendering me utterly unsuited to a welfare post. I remember being furious about that one.
I also recall some low-level attempts to spoil my campaign by the Tories, who saw me as a Union insider and a leftie at that. I particularly remember Laura Helm and one of her Tory pals trying to delay me and/or honey-trap me by flirting with me and inviting me in when I went to Laura’s door. Didn’t work. I dread to think what might have happened had I taken the bait. I remember Laura telling me after the election that she sensed that I would win it from the way I handled that stunt.
Laura second from left, with “the Tory crowd” – thanks Mark Ellicott for the picture
I also remember Duncan Baldwin, with whom I studied both Economics and Law, telling me that he was going to vote for me despite the difference in our political views, because he sensed that I would be honest and diligent, which he felt was what the Union needed. I remember being moved by that statement and also thinking that I would be well-placed if there were plenty of others who thought like Duncan.
I also remember my Malay friends telling me that they were not going to vote because they wouldn’t be around the following year and that they felt that the matter should be determined by those who would be living with the consequences of that vote. An interesting morality, not one that I shared but I understood it. I thought that factor might run against me if there were too many of my friends who felt that way.
I hadn’t set foot in a refectory for years, but chose to eat in them while canvassing. One person in the refectory told me that they were going to vote for me because I removed my plates and bowls from the tray rather than scoffing from the tray. I didn’t read too much psephology into that event but never forgot the strange exchange.
I oriented my campaign to some extent to encourage overseas students to vote. I felt that they got a raw deal and that there were interests of theirs that I could advocate, both on the education and welfare side of things. Blessing Odatuwa and Bobbie’s friend Lara from Lindsay K Block lobbied the Cameroonian and Nigerian communities (respectively) for me. I knew Tony Wong and others from the Chinese student community well, following several years of joint activities – Bobbie was also well connected with that crowd.
Election Days And Aftermath
Thursday 15 March 1984 – Whole day in concourse – very tiring. Went to J-Soc and on to Union after with Bobbie – came back after.
Friday 16 March 1984 – Big day – Concourse all day (charades at end!!) – result – won – don’t remember much!! Bobbie came back.
Saturday 17 March 1984 – Rose quite late – went off to Lichfield etc – went to restaurant in Hanley -> Union after -> Bobiie’s.
“Don’t remember much” is not quite true.
I do remember Bobbie’s friend Lara, in the concourse, trying to badger some of her fellow Nigerian students into voting for me. Bobbie berated Lara for being overly persuasive – she was virtually dragging reluctant people towards the ballot box – but Lara said, “a bit of political thuggery never did any harm”. She was 18 or 19 years old.
I’m not sure what I mean by “charades”. I was being ultra careful to do everything by the spirit as well as the letter of the rules. At one point, because there was a shortage of people to staff the ballot boxes, I noticed that both Bobbie and Annalisa were the pair on the boxes. Given that they were both actively part of my team, that felt wrong. I remember raising an objection myself, suggesting to Vivian that she must replace one of them in a hurry, only for all the other candidates to tell Vivian not to bother and me not to worry…they trusted Bobbie and Annalisa to behave impartially on the ballot boxes. That’s what happens when you are trustworthy.
Annalisa – a card carrying member of the Union
But hanging around in the concourse was rather dull, especially towards the end of a two-day election, by which time most people had either voted or long-since decided not to bother to vote. So perhaps we actually played charades, as I do remember a good feeling among the candidates…
…at least, there was certainly a good feeling among the candidates before we played charades.
The count took ages, not least because there were eleven candidates and counting was done using the single transferrable vote system. Malcolm Cornelius could explain to you in excruciating detail how that works. Ask him…go on, ask him.
Actually, the voting was quite close among the ten other people in the election, who I think all landed somewhere between 40 and 100 first votes. I landed just over 200. Thus I think the eliminations did need to be done one by one., which is very time-consuming.
I recall being nervous and fretting that I might have needed more first votes than I got in order to win the election, thinking that I might have been a “marmite candidate” who mostly landed only first preferences. At one point I remember Bobbie taking me aside and telling me, long before the result was called, that I should relax because I’d won.
ME: But I might not have enough second preferences…
BOBBIE: Yes you do.
ME: What makes you so sure?
BOBBIE: Because I sat on those blinking ballot boxes for hours and most people did their voting in front of me.
Of course Bobbie as right – the transfers landed in similar proportions to the first votes and my margin kept increasing.
The tallying might have looked a bit like this, only with younger people and no Gerald Ford pipe
The only thing I really remember about the celebrations was being descended upon by the gang from my old Lindsay F Block: Richard van Baaren, Benedict Coldstream and Bob Schumacher, who carried me aloft around the main bar for a while, much to my fearful chagrin. Big units, those guys, they were never going to drop me.
To Summarise…
I got elected as sabbatical Education & Welfare Officer in March 1984. I tried to keep my promises when in office between June 1984 and June 1985.
Answer: They all strangely find their way into one week of my diary.
Quite a week, that first full week of March 1984. Once the decision was made that I’d run for Education & Welfare, the campaign went into overdrive. What could possibly go wrong?
Sunday 4 March 1984
Rose quite early – worked a little – spent afternoon in dark room with Annalisa [de Mercur] etc. Popped over to Bobbie’s in eve.
Monday, 5 March 1984
Busy working on manifesto today – got quite a bit done – constitutional committee in the evening – went over to Bobbies after.
Tuesday, 6 March 1984
Not feeling very well today – worked on manifesto today – almost done – went over to Bobbie’s – really felt ghastly!
Wednesday, 7 March 1984
Worked on manifesto today – covered in German Measles. today. Took it fairly easy.
The reason the manifesto was such a time consuming matter was a decision, taken jointly with my campaign manager, Malcolm Cornelius, to produce both the manifesto and leaflet (known as a supplementary manifesto) using digital technology. I wrote this up several years ago in the following piece, click here or the image link below:
Word processing on a University mainframe in 1984 was a non-trivial matter, believe me. Malcolm, who was pretty geeky back then and possibly remains so, could probably explain in excruciating detail what we had to go through to get that job done. Ask him. Go on, ask him.
I merely remember a lot of trial and error and also remember not feeling at all well throughout the process, probably because I had Rubella, commonly known as German Measles.
Younger readers, please do not berate my parents for failing to have me vaccinated – our generation didn’t have a vaccination for Rubella. What was supposed to happen was that you had the disease as a child and then never got it again because the instance of having the disease effectively vaccinated you. Some of us were careless enough to avoid the disease until the fourth year at University – or even longer in some cases – then get it at an inconvenient time…which for me this unquestionably was.
It would have been so much worse had the Rubella presented before the photo shoot. Any spots you might detect on the images from the shoot are either dust or my regular spots and blotches, which were quite numerous when I was in my very early twenties.Please let us not discuss THAT tie.
Thursday, 8 March 1984
Still not very well – spots disappearing – busyish, but took it fairly easy. Finished manifesto etc. Bobbie came over later.
Friday, 9 March 1984
Feeling a bit better today – Bobbie went away – manifesto’s in and supp’s out.– Social Sec election & big appeal over VP internal.
Saturday 10 March still quite tired – has an easy day today – went to Andrea’s party in eve – on to union briefly.
Right, so not only did Bobbie abandon me to run that election…the one I had hoped she’d be running for…but she went away for the weekend ahead of my campaign proper starting. In retrospect I don’t blame her at all, but I do remember feeling a bit miffed at the time.
Although I was a candidate for the following week’s election, I was still Chair of Election Appeals for that week’s election. I sense that the Social Secretary election went smoothly…
Here’s me with Pady Jalali, who won that election. Image Summer 1985 with thanks to Mark Ellicott
…whereas the VP Internal election had some element of hoo-ha attached to it, probably long-since forgotten by all concerned. Hayward Burt won that election and it is just possible that he remembers the hoo-ha.
Me and Hayward in the summer of 1985 – thanks Mark Ellicott for the picture
Ironically, the challenge probably came from the Tories, as Hayward was, in those days, one of the “Liberals with infeasibly strange names”. Hayward now can be found through more Conservative channels. I wonder whether he remembers what the shenanigans were on this occasion. I’ll send this piece to him and ask him.
Update: Hayward Replies…
Thanks for the heads up and the photo (I used to be thin! who knew?)
The controversy rings no bells at all, the result was v close between me and the Labour Club chap and I remember being absolutely knacked with all the door knocking.
“Andrea’s party” on the Saturday will have been Andrea Collins’ (now Woodhouse’s) party. Strangely, a Facebook birthday reminder for Andrea popped up on my FB tab while I was in the process of producing this piece.
Malcolm might have been unusually geeky back then but in many ways we are all geeks now, forty years on.
I’ll send Andrea a “Happy Birthday” message by dint of a link to this piece – Happy Birthday Andrea!
