Tag: Durham University

Let your fingers do the walking … in the cash register : 1976-1978 : Kay, DSU Bookshop, Dunelm House, Durham University

 FIRST YEAR. I had landed in a ‘one-bookshop town’. The lone academic book retailer in Durham City was bizarrely named ‘SPCK’, aka the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’ founded in 1698 by English clergyman Thomas Bray. Naturally, it was packed with books about religion. If you desired a tome documenting the life of Saint Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne, then Bob was definitely your uncle. However, if you wanted books to study more mundane contemporary subjects, you were dispatched to considerably shorter shelves at the rear of the premises or up on the first floor.

The Durham University economics department had given me the booklist for my first year. I rushed to SPCK the same day and found that none of the required books were in stock. Could I order them? I was told it would take at least three months for delivery, maybe longer. By then, I would be almost half way through my first year. The same booklist had been given to almost a hundred other freshers because first-year economics turned out to be a ‘unit’ that could be studied as a ‘minor’ alongside ‘major’ subjects. Out of the university’s population of four thousand, a hundred students must all have been chasing the same required materials. Despite this, SPCK staff had gazed at my list as if it was the first time they had seen anything like it.

I visited the university library on Palace Green, next to the hugely imposing cathedral, and looked through the dozens of well-thumbed index cards stored in banks of long drawers. Though multiple copies of the books I needed were catalogued, they all proved to be absent from the relevant Dewey Decimal shelves. I had to fill out handwritten triplicate forms to request they be reserved for me once they were returned to the library. When might that be? The librarian said it was impossible to tell because borrowers often kept books well beyond their return date and there was no way to force them back. Fines were imposed but students simply paid them in absentia of sanctions. Library staff had no suggestions about how I could obtain academic books compulsory for the subject I had arrived to study.

Then I recalled that, whilst attending the ‘Societies Day’ for freshers held in the concrete brutalist student union building, Dunelm House, I had noticed signs for a bookshop. I returned there and found at the end of a long corridor a large, high-ceiling room stacked with second-hand books. The economics section turned out to be small and useless. The shop’s stock bore no relation to academic need. It was merely a marketplace where students could sell books they no longer needed for a few pence. I browsed the other sections and stumbled across an unknown book from 1964 titled ‘Understanding Media’ by someone called Marshall McLuhan. It was the first academic book purchase that spoke to my passion for radio, broadcasting and media. However, having failed to discover a university offering such a degree course, I had had to instead choose ‘economics’ as it was my best subject at school. 

I took McLuhan’s book to the checkout where a tiny woman in her fifties checked the price on the inside cover and charged me. She took my cash and placed it on the little shelf above the drawer of her cash register, joining piles of coins already assembled in the same place. I asked for a receipt, as was my habit, but she said it was not possible. Not only did it appear strange that she had not put my cash in the cash register, but neither had she rung up my purchase. I understood straight away that her actions were, er, wrong. Having been required to help run my father’s business for a decade [see blog], I knew that every financial transaction had to be recorded on the ‘till roll’ of a cash register and then reconciled at the end of the day with the money in the drawer. The equation is: cash in till minus float must equal daily till roll. Many childhood evenings had been spent sat around our tiny kitchen table doing these precise tasks for the bookkeeping my mother brought home from her workplace [see blog].

During that first year in Durham, I revisited the Dunelm House bookshop dozens of times, never finding the economics books I sought, but secretly observing the same elderly shop manager when students either bought or sold books. She did occasionally ring up some of these transactions on her cash register, though the majority followed the pattern of my initial book purchase, neither rung up on the cash register, nor the money deposited within. Beside the till, I would see her write in biro the value of each covert transaction in a tiny notebook. These actions were all being accomplished in plain sight within a bustling shop. Evidently, nobody must ever have challenged her as to why she was operating such a system.

Maybe I am too observant for my own good, but it was self-evident to me that she was ‘on the take’. After the shop closed at the end of each day, all she had to do was total that day’s transactions written in her notebook and walk out with that same amount of cash, in the knowledge that the till roll would reconcile with the cash in the cash register. It was the simplest retail scam and, being the only person employed in the shop, the easiest to pull off. There were no debit card or credit card transactions to confuse the issue. What perplexed me was that nobody else had seemed to notice what she was doing day in day out.

I sailed through that first year using a ring binder of fulsome notes I had made at school for economics A-level and so passed the Durham exam in June without ever having found the requisite texts on my booklist. This was a testimony to the abilities of my school economics teacher, Mr Hodges [see blog]. However, I only just scraped a pass on my economic history paper, having opted not to study history at school because my brain proved unable to learn and recite the long lists of dates, names and locations that the subject required. My first year at Durham was immensely disappointing because I had learnt absolutely nothing that I did not already know about economics. Furthermore, my student life there had been nothing like I had anticipated a university would be.

After the end of the final term, I remained in Durham a few weeks to help the student editor of the 1977 Durham Student Handbook, Tony Jenkins, who had asked me to prepare articles for inclusion in the publication, ready to be sent for printing at City Printers in nearby Chester-Le-Street. Just as I was about to leave Durham to start my regular holiday job working in the bowels of the Associated Examining Board office in Aldershot, I received via internal mail the carbon copies of request slips I had filled out eight months earlier at the university library, informing me that the course books I had requested had finally been returned. I failed to comprehend how a Durham undergraduate was meant to study and learn if they were unable to obtain the necessary books.

SECOND YEAR. Durham had been the only university not offering a student radio station to which I had applied through UCCA. Despite having received unconditional offers from Warwick, Lancaster, Keele and Loughborough, I chose Durham because I was told it had a better ‘reputation’ for future job prospects. To console myself at its lack of opportunities to practice radio, at the start of my first year I had volunteered at the student newspaper ‘Palatinate’, despite having never previously written anything for publication. I enjoyed working in its small office in Dunelm House, though it had proven a culture shock to be surrounded by loud, brash upper-class students who dominated the editorial team [see blog]. My skills were uniquely practical because, unlike my posh peers, I could already type copy quickly and accurately on an IBM Golfball typewriter, plus I had experience in design and layout from working on my father’s architectural plans. When the newspaper editor post was advertised in my third term, I stood for election but was terribly disappointed at the student council meeting that my candidacy was not supported by outgoing incumbent George Alagiah. Evidently, I did not possess the ‘right stuff’ that oozed from him and his posh team. Having invested so much time and skills within the student publication, I made the difficult decision to walk away entirely.

Instead, from the beginning of my second year, I volunteered to attend the Finance Committee of Durham Students’ Union [DSU] where I was soon appointed ‘secretary’, taking minutes of weekly meetings and preparing its agendas. The committee was chaired by Kate Foster, the Union’s full-time sabbatical ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ with whom I quickly developed a good working relationship. Foster was a friendly, quietly confident introvert, the opposite of the ‘media types’ who had dominated the student newspaper. My knowledge of accounts and business gained from working for my parents from such an early age proved relevant and useful in understanding the Union’s financial issues. Unexpectedly, none of my first-hand knowledge of real-world finance was being developed by the highly theoretical and dull economics course I was studying [see blog]. Worse for my academic success, I had no better luck in obtaining the requisite books cited by the second-year reading list than I had experienced in my initial year.

In the third term of my second year, I shared my long-held observations about the practices in the Student Union’s second-hand bookshop with Foster, who was ultimately responsible for ‘DSU Services’. We both stood in the bookshop and observed the woman at the till openly taking money from students but not ringing it up on the cash register. Kay must have been so used to operating in this way that she had no qualms about anybody observing her ‘skimming’ of the shop’s revenues. Foster agreed that this employee’s behaviour was totally unacceptable. After questioning, the woman was sacked immediately. Until a replacement manager could be appointed, the bookshop was manned/womaned by student volunteers.

I felt no guilt about my role in getting Kay sacked. I had no qualms about this elderly woman losing her job. Yes, the majority of Durham University students she had served in the bookshop came from families that probably had more money than sense. But Kay was no ‘Robin Hood’ character redistributing her customers’ wealth to the poor. She had stolen the Student Union’s earnings for herself. The amounts might have appeared minor, compared to most middle- and upper-class white-collar crimes which, ironically, were more likely to have been committed by the families of her customers. But during the years that she worked in this job, she must have accumulated significant sums tax-free. Not enough to buy a yacht, certainly, but sufficient to take some nice vacations and purchase new three-piece suites.

Since that day when, at twenty, I was involved in my first sacking (of a woman who would have been almost three times my age), one mystery has remained unsolved in my mind. Though I never learnt when the Union’s bookshop first opened, I do know that the Dunelm House building opened in 1966 (with a concert by the Thelonius Monk Quartet to whose music, by remarkable coincidence, I am listening whilst writing this). It appeared to me that Kay might have worked alone in that bookshop for at least a decade. How many students had passed through that shop during that time. Tens of thousands? How many ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ officers before Kate Foster had managed Kay’s employment during all those years. At least ten? Yet none of those students who bought or sold a book and must have witnessed what Kay was doing at her cash register ever seemed to conclude that something inherently ‘wrong’ and ‘unlawful’ was taking place?

Only after having arrived at Durham did I discover that 95% of its students had come from private schools. My new environment where I was surrounded by ‘affluent’ people was a shock for which I had not been prepared. They behaved like nothing I had seen before. They already seemed to know each other, they moved in ‘brigades’ that were named things like ‘green wellies’, ‘god squad’ and ‘rah-rahs’ and they ignored anyone who was evidently not ‘one of them’. You would never have found any of these privileged offspring working behind the cash register of a shop as Kay had done for years. Neither did they feel the need to understand how accounts or business functioned. Their families employed accountants to handle such grunt work, even as some still employed servants in their grand homes. None of them apparently had the faintest notion that the working class ‘townie’ taking their cash in the Dunelm House bookshop was so obviously stealing part of it.

THEN & NOW. I am reminded of a more recent incident from 2022 when then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak staged a public relations stunt at a petrol station where he filled his car with petrol. He attempted to pay at the cash desk by placing his debit card under the barcode reader, instead of the payment reader, evidently having never previously made a ‘contactless’ payment. Then it transpired that the modest red Kia car he had filled with petrol was not his but belonged to an employee of the petrol station. Had he even ever filled his own (unseen) luxury car with petrol before? As ever, the privileged betray themselves by attempting to demonstrate mundane tasks they have never HAD to do themselves.

It might be imagined that my own experience of class divergence at Durham University half a century ago must belong to a bygone era. Surely, ‘things’ have moved on since then? Mmmmmm. But perhaps it has always been, and will always be, this way. The privileged class has always run Britain, has always controlled opportunities for themselves and they are hardly going to sacrifice glittering outcomes to which they feel entitled to help the rest of us who have no access or right to their immense resources and social connections. We only inhabit their world on sufferance. Durham has always been a ‘finishing school’ for posh kids not clever enough to get into Oxbridge, where they can continue the ‘fun’ they enjoyed at their private schools, find a suitable wife from their own class and bag a lucrative job as a barrister, politician, newspaper editor or some such [see blog].

Back in 1968, a letter from Ian S White of Durham’s (all-male) Grey College was published in the student newspaper Palatinate under the heading ‘Elitist Students?’ It criticised “the elitism of so many students, the feeling that they are somehow special and that they must not therefore associate with the ‘townies’. […] At the moment, the will, on the part of the University, does not seem to be present.”

That ‘will’ for change within the university was always a pipe dream. From the time in 1963 when Durham demerged from Newcastle University, it was purposefully designed “to provide for the North of England a Collegiate University, one in which the undergraduate experience would be essentially the same, though simpler (and less expensive) than that afforded by Oxford and Cambridge in the South.” This strategy was doggedly pursued from 1963 until his death in 1984 by ex-Army university registrar Ian Graham who “sought out also a large number [of students] whose names were known to him through his acquaintances in the schools or among previous generations of students.” Graham excelled at populating ‘his’ university with this old (private) school tie/old boy network that would eventually span generations of Britain’s most elite and privileged dynasties. [see blog]

What about after 1984? Whilst seeking a photo online of the DSU bookshop, I accidentally stumbled across a 2024 article in Palatinate by English student Stella Fenwick:

“When I arrived in Durham, I was faced with the fact that, for half of the year, this little northern city is transformed into a cacophony of London accents, and vastly different educational backgrounds compared to anyone I had met before. […] Though we may relish the prestige of being second to Oxbridge, we must confront the disproportionate number of privately-educated students accepted to these universities. […] We are promised by novels and shows that we will ‘find ourselves’ at university, but for many this moment never comes. The broken promise, which we believe is broken only by ourselves, leaves us feeling inferior to the people that have experienced Durham in the Instagram-able, Oxford-like way.”

It is simultaneously so sad and so outrageous that the experience of ‘higher education’ for us non-privileged students, who should benefit from it the most, still remains tainted at Durham by the behaviours and attitudes of the privileged elite who have always overwhelmingly dominated university cohorts.

I imagine that, had I not intervened, Kay might have continued working in that bookshop and stealing cash until the day she dropped dead … impervious because, amazingly, both her student managers and her student clientele had absolutely no clue how the day-to-day world of commerce functions below their own rarefied strata of British society.

[First published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/11/let-your-fingers-do-walking-in-cash.html ]

Students! Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved : 1976 : Durham University

 It is a sad fact that, alongside other by-products of the affluent society in which we live such as the National Health Service and Unemployment Benefit, education has come to be regarded as a natural phenomenon that is in constant and seemingly endless supply. Perhaps our forefathers would not have regarded the existence of ‘free education for all’ with such dull acceptance as prevails today.

Because our society has reached such an advanced cultural state that primary education is not only freely available to all, but is compulsory, it is too often regarded by the youth as a never-ending hindrance to leisure activities rather than an opportunity to develop their minds. Perhaps it will only be in later life that those who leave school as soon as they can will look back and wish that they had taken advantage of the educational opportunity that was presented them then. It is ironic that, whilst there are thousands of children in Britain playing truant every day, mothers in Latin American ghettos sell themselves on the street to raise enough money to send their daughters to the nearest educational establishments. The ‘Third World’ is realising that education is the sovereign road to prosperity that can break the vicious circle of poverty, but it is not a simple task to bring such schooling to the masses.

Those of us who are lucky enough to have secured a place in higher education seem to accept it as a natural progression of events leading to the ultimate goal of ‘success’ (and possibly the capitalist ideal of ‘wealth’). To be able to choose from a vast range of courses offered by dozens of universities throughout the land is not a phenomenon encountered by prospective students in many other countries of the world. The process of selection of candidates that is carried out in an efficient and fair manner and the ‘clearing’ scheme by which spare university places are filled are shining examples of the precision and co-ordination with which our higher education is planned. The fact that even a student from a poor family background can enjoy a lifestyle of comparative luxury is a credit to society that can never be emphasised enough. The constant preoccupation of the poor as to how they will be able to afford next week’s meals can be eradicated, so that enthusiastic involvement with academic pursuits can become a pleasure they may never have experienced before. These are the people who realise the full value of education, and these are the ones who will seek to learn something new every day. But how many of us idle away our time whilst taxpayers have to continually contribute more and more to meet our expensive whims? Should we not at least show our gratitude towards a society that has given us a ‘song for the asking’?

Durham University is not simply a degree factory where one can walk in with three A-levels and march out a few years later with a BA or BSc that is respected the world over. Durham University can only be what its students make it; but how many are prepared to make enough effort? It seems that, although students were quite willing to hand over innumerable subscription fees on ‘Societies Morning’, few feel obliged to attend society meetings and functions to which they are entitled. Surely an active member of a single society is of more value to the community than someone who possesses a wad of membership cards in their wallet that never see the light of day.

It is certainly a sad day when twice the number of college students who attend a Junior Common Room meeting are quite content to pass their time watching a television programme on Saturday afternoon. How long will it be before those who pay for our education begin to question our value to society as we seem more and more satisfied to sink into our insular environment and forget the real world outside?

Durham students! Contribute towards the community in which you have chosen to live! Education is the greatest treasure in the world: accept it, but offer something in return.

[First published as ‘The Value of Education’, Palatinate #299, 2 December 1976, p.4]

[My first published writing, a confused reaction after having arrived from a struggling one-parent family at a university unexpectedly 95% filled by privately educated toffs who mostly demonstrated scant interest in anything beyond their social lives.]

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/05/students-get-up-get-into-it-get.html ]

I just looked around and he was gone : 1979 : Jerry Dennis, Palatinate editor, Durham University

 “I am here for the Accommodation Office, please,” I said with trepidation to the uniformed man behind the huge wooden reception desk in the lobby of the Old Shire Hall. On the front of the desk, elaborately carved nineteenth century working-class scenes from Durham’s coalmining industry seemed to clash with this building’s present users – high-flying academics and the children of Britain’s upper classes.

The man behind the desk looked at me with a suspicion seemingly reserved for the occasional long-haired student who ventured into his domain wearing crumpled denim clothes and platform shoes … like me.

“You will have to leave a message,” he eventually replied in a bored tone that conveyed the regularity with which he was required to offer such a response. He did not bother to elucidate whether the Accommodation Office was presently unmanned, temporarily closed or existed in any physical form. Instead, he gestured towards an open hard-backed ledger laid at one end of his mighty desk, beside which was a chained Biro.

I was made to feel so small and insignificant in the foyer of that hugely imposing town centre monolith constructed in 1898 as the headquarters of Durham County Council but, since 1963, used as the administrative centre of Durham University. (Years later, when I watched Lowry approach the front desk of The Ministry of Information Retrieval in the movie ‘Brazil’, I instantly recalled my sentiment). I wrote in the visitors’ book that I was requesting information urgently about landlords presently offering accommodation to rent. 

I was homeless, secretly spending my nights in a sleeping bag on the floor of an office in the Students’ Union building, Dunelm House. Student ‘digs’ around Durham were advertised but landlords were demanding rents way beyond my budget. Extortion proved no barrier to the 95%+ of undergraduates who had arrived from private schools, receiving only the minimum student grant from their local authority, but whose parents were sufficiently wealthy to uncomplainingly pay such rents through their noses. Some students I met lived in accommodation their parents had even bought for them as an investment within this English county so poor that miners’ cottages could be acquired for £1,000.

I was not amongst this privileged majority of students. Since arriving in Durham in 1976, a chunk of my full student grant from Surrey County Council and my vacation earnings had been diverted to pay the utility, property ‘rates’ bills and overheads of my family’s home in Camberley. After my father had deserted his family four years earlier and then ignored court-ordered maintenance payments, my mother had been struggling to raise my two younger siblings in austere circumstances. During my first two undergraduate years, I had opted for subsidised college rooms but then had been forced out onto the ‘open market’ by university policy. Additionally, I had waived my vacation earnings during the summer of 1978 by choosing to remain in Durham to edit (unpaid) the annual ‘Durham Student Handbook’ with the hope it might benefit my career in media. Whereas, the previous two summers, I had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week continuously for two months in a basement office in Aldershot, maximizing available overtime to help fund my family’s expenses.

Weeks after having left my message for the university’s Accommodation Office, I received by internal mail sent to my college’s basement pigeonholes a photocopied A4 page listing about a dozen local landlords. This document was of no practical use, lacking basic, accurate and timely information that could have helped me. I wondered whether the university’s ‘Accommodation Office’ really even existed since Durham’s posh students scarcely appeared to require practical assistance when their parents were still organising their education. Who was the university’s ‘Accommodation Officer’ Catrin Prydderch-Jones, a 1977 graduate of Durham University with a 2:2 in music who had been appointed in September that year to the post of “Administrative Assistant in the University Office”?

I was not her only unsatisfied customer. In January 1979, a letter from archaeology undergraduate Jeanette Ratcliffe published in Durham student newspaper Palatinate had complained:

  • “Miss Prydderch-Jones sent out to students looking for accommodation next year a list of landlords and their respective houses and flats” that was “incomprehensible, grossly out of date and of little constructive use”
  • “A considerable number of landlords no longer wished to be on the list and students who contacted them became the subject of their anger at receiving numerous phone calls a day enquiring about their property.”
  • One listed house “according to the landlord has not been standing for six years”
  • “What exactly does Miss Prydderch-Jones do to retain her position in the Accommodation Office?”
  • “… I suggest she give up her position as Accommodation Officer”.

In a follow-up front-page article in February 1979, the student newspaper reported that “doubts have been expressed in Durham Student Union council [meetings] about the efficiency of an Old Shire Hall-based Accommodation Office.” It explained that “complaints about the way that the [Accommodation] Office is working led Palatinate to talk to Ms. Prydderch-Jones” who was pictured sat at a desk. Her quoted responses proved to be wholly evasive and she ended by assuring readers “there is no crisis at the moment about finding places to live!”, apparently oblivious to the notion that the high prices of available accommodation might prove a barrier for those students having to survive without parental support.

In the same issue of Palatinate that had published the letter from Ratcliffe, a front-page expose had criticised the financial management of the Durham University Athletic Union [DUAU], provider of the university’s “excellent” sporting facilities, under the headline ‘DUAU Foul Play’. Beneath a photo of DUAU treasurer Ian Graham sat at his Old Shire Hall desk, the article explained that the £38 annual ‘Composition Fee’ paid by the local government authorities of each of Durham’s 4,000 students was divided by the university between its athletic union, student union and college ‘Junior Common Rooms’. DUAU audited accounts showed that:

  • In 1977/8, 42% of the Composition Fee had been spent on sport, compared to the 18% national average (the DUAU share increased to 52% the following year)
  • When Durham colleges’ expenditure was included, £20 of the £38 per head Composition Fee was spent on sport.

DUAU accounts documented a surplus greater than £4,000 during each of the previous three years, a situation that “should lead to a cut in their grant, as showing a surplus is interpreted as meaning that too much money has been given”. Surpluses of £5,200 in 1976/7 and £10,000 in 1977/8 were said to have been allocated to “reserve funds”. Questioned about these reserves, Graham “evaded the fundamental points by talking at some length about the rather vague uses of these funds” which the article concluded “does not alleviate Palatinate’s concern[s]” which were:

  • “One of the complaints that the [government] Department of Education & Science is making is that there is not enough public accountability for student unions”
  • “DUAU, by claiming large sums of money for their FUTURE but, as yet, UNSPECIFIED capital expenditure, is effectively avoiding any sort of accountability whatsoever.”

Some of Ian Graham’s unverified arguments in the interview to justify DUAU’s dominant share of the per capita funding appeared bizarre:

  • “It is much easier for a student who has been actively involved in university sport to get a job”
  • “Many parents have sent their children here because of its fine sporting reputation”
  • “There was a correlation between the increase in good A-level results of Durham students and the growth and success of DUAU”.

Confusingly, although DUAU was constituted as a student organisation, just like Durham Students’ Union, Graham was no student but rather the university registrar responsible for managing the entire institution’s administration. This would be like having a school principal in charge of its students’ council! It was no wonder that DUAU could appropriate the greater part of each student’s Composition Fee with impunity, to the detriment of the student union, because each year it was the university administration, led by the very same Ian Graham, that determined the division of funds. Conflict of interest or what?

These separate anonymous front-page articles appeared in Palatinate within weeks, criticising two Durham University administrators, Catrin Prydderch-Jones and Ian Graham. However, a link existed between these two that had not been published. It was Graham who had appointed Prydderch-Jones to the accommodation job for which she appeared to be poorly qualified. It was also Graham who allegedly had invited Prydderch-Jones amongst a bevy of posh, female undergraduate first-years to stay in the expansive university flat at 71 Saddler Street that accompanied his job.

Whether the Palatinate editor of the day knew of this connection I know not. What I divine is that the student newspaper’s simultaneous critical coverage of Graham and his ‘protegee’ must have embarrassed and infuriated the registrar who ran our university with an iron rod. Having served in the British Army and been wounded at Anzio during “the Italian campaign”, he had joined Durham University in 1950 as assistant registrar. Promoted to registrar in 1963, Graham devised and drafted a new constitution and statutes for the university that were reported to be “almost entirely Ian’s work.” His objective was said to be “to provide for the North of England a Collegiate University, one in which the undergraduate experience would be essentially the same, though simpler (and less expensive) than that afforded by Oxford and Cambridge in the South.”

A lifelong bachelor, Graham was said to have given “to the University the time which most people spend with their families” and to have “sought out also a large number [of students] whose names were known to him through his acquaintances in the schools or among previous generations of students.” In this way, he perpetuated the institution’s old (private) school tie connections, making Durham University a natural social repository for posh people’s children not smart enough to attend ‘Oxbridge’. Apparently, “all of these people were welcome in [Graham’s flat at] 71 Saddler Street, not only for the crowded parties which regularly took place there, but on frequent more private occasions.”

Whoa! This 50-something year old bureaucrat was organising student ‘parties’ for newly arrived teens in his flat? It would be easy to characterise Graham as the Hugh Heffner of Durham University, an aged man with a gammy limb, surrounded by a bevy of good-looking, posh-sounding, double-barrelled debutantes prancing around his flat in their underwear. The truth is rather more insidious. Graham had been the architect in 1963 of Durham University’s ‘divorce’ from its considerably less posh partner Newcastle University and had accumulated more power to control the organisation he had created during thirty years in the job than anyone else employed in Old Shire Hall. Any perceived threat to Graham’s eco-system would have to be eradicated. And so it was.

The elected editor of Palatinate at the time was Jerry Dennis, an English Literature undergraduate who was not at all the typical upper-class student that Graham desired at ‘his’ university. Despite a posh accent, Dennis appeared somewhat hippy-like with a tall rake-thin body and long straight brown hair falling to his shoulders. He spoke languorously and purposefully with a keen wit and an analytical mind. He was fearless and unafraid to challenge the status quo, hence the investigative articles concerning Prydderch-Jones and Graham published in a fortnightly student newspaper that, until his appointment, had been more a gossip sheet and CV builder for adolescent essays by aspiring upper-crust authors.

Graham required revenge. Unfortunately for him, Dennis’ two-year academic record at Durham had been positive as he had passed all mandatory exams. Instead, Graham had to scour ancient statutes within the 1832 Act of Parliament and 1837 Royal Charter that had created England’s third-oldest university. There he discovered that a student accused of holding the university ‘in contempt’ could be expelled by a specially convened committee. This procedure had never been used in Durham’s century and a half history, though Graham was undaunted given the power he wielded. He set about convening the requisite brand-new committee of university personnel upon whom he could rely to do his bidding.

Weeks later, I was startled to find in my college pigeonhole an official letter from Ian Graham inviting me to be the one student that the statute required to attend the meeting of this committee which would be considering Dennis’ case. Out of the university’s 4,000 students, it was against all odds that I had supposedly been chosen randomly to consider a verdict on a fellow student with whom I was already acquainted. I could read between the letter’s lines. In reality, it had been sent as a warning shot across my bows, hinting that I might soon follow Dennis and be dispatched into the wilderness. Why?

That year, I had been tasked with writing the annual Durham Students’ Union submission to the university to request the following year’s Union funding through the aforementioned Composition Fee. My application was the most voluminous and forensic ever compiled, documenting why a substantial year-on-year increase proved necessary. The chair of the university Finance Committee, finance officer Alec McWilliam, seemed to appreciate my expertise in accountancy (the result of my mother having taught me double-entry bookkeeping and accounts reconciliation at the age of seven). The outcome was that McWilliam’s committee awarded Durham Students’ Union its largest ever year-on-year increase in funding.

However, for every winner, there has always to be a loser. My personal success meant that Ian Graham’s competing bid for additional funds for the Athletics Union had been rebuffed at the same committee meeting. For once, Graham was not getting all his own way and was probably not enamoured of this outcome. That was my reading of the reason I had received his letter. My suspicions were confirmed when I called the confirmation phone number in the letter and was told by a woman administrator at Old Shire Hall that my receipt of the invitation letter had been an ‘administrative error’. In fact, I had never been randomly selected to witness the ‘Inquisition’ against Jerry Dennis … who Graham’s committee agreed to expel at the end of his second year.

Palatinate subsequently published a front-page story beneath a photo of Dennis that noted “a considerable degree of shock and dismay at the apparently unsympathetic attitude taken by the University authorities towards this case, an attitude which several students believe to be almost vindictive.” It commented somewhat hesitantly that “the paper did adopt a particularly critical stance under the editorship of Mr Dennis, and many feel that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the difficulties he created for the University may not be totally unconnected with his present predicament.”

Incensed by Dennis’ expulsion, I wrote Palatinate a signed letter it published in October 1979:

“It is frightening to think that any students at this University can be sent down for not ‘keeping term’, which could mean:

  • Not attending a course of instruction (which could be a subsidiary [subject]) to the satisfaction of the Chairman of the Board of Studies concerned.
  • Not attending ‘academic engagements to the satisfaction of the Board of Studies concerned.
  • Not presenting written work as and when required unless excused in advance.

Is it really fair to leave such vague definitions to the interpretation of the Chairman of the Board of Studies? How clearly are these conditions communicated to new students? How many students treat their lectures as ‘optional’?

It is a sobering thought that if YOU do not get on the right side of the Chairman of your Board of Studies (do you know who he/she is?) and you:

  • Miss a lecture because your alarm clock fails to go off
  • Miss a tutorial because you muddle the date
  • Hand in an essay late because you could not get the books

YOU could be accused of not keeping term …. Sweet dreams.”

If Ian Graham’s letter to me the previous term had been an oblique personal warning, this publication of my opinions ensured that there was now an oversized target on my back. That is a story for another day.

Despite this realisation, I was determined to persevere with investigating Ian Graham for a potential further article in Palatinate. Each new academic year, Graham distributed invitations for a ‘fresher’ party held in his flat to first-year female students arriving from the private schools he favoured. My then student girlfriend had a friend who was prepared to pose as one of these targeted young women. ‘KT’ was suitably talkative, pretty and had a posh accent. Although she was in her second year, she would attend using a ticket we wrangled from a new student who had no interest in taking up the offer.

KT arrived at Ian Graham’s flat the evening of the party with my Sony TCM-3 cassette recorder under her clothing, attached to a hidden lapel microphone. She was sufficiently bold to strike up conversation with Graham who, as hoped, suggested she return on her own for one of his “more private occasions.” However, after reviewing the tape recording, there was nothing substantial enough from their dialogue with which to craft an article. After much discussion, and in light of Jerry Dennis’ expulsion, we decided regrettably that a further ‘mission’ to follow up Graham’s invitation would prove too dangerous for KT’s academic future. His annual recruitment of ‘pretty young things’ would continue regardless.

I had been upset, angry and horrified by Jerry Dennis’ expulsion. I still am. It was me who had analysed the audited financial data for the article Dennis published about DUAU’s finances. I was partly responsible for the ructions caused with Ian Graham. However, it frustrates me that, whenever Palatinate is mentioned now in the media, its former student editors Hunter Davies and Harold Evans are frequently vaunted for their subsequent glittering journalistic careers. From my perspective, it was Dennis who introduced investigative journalism into the formerly staid student newspaper … and paid a terrible price. The Jerry Dennis I recall remains an inspiration.

On 27 December 1984, Ian Graham was returning to Durham from Edinburgh by car when he was involved in an accident in which he died from his injuries. His official university obituary mentioned his “happy and congenial social life” and noted that, for many Durham graduates, “the name of Ian Graham has been something of a legend.”

In March that year, the British government had announced the initial closure of twenty coalmines, including one in County Durham, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. It was the cornerstone of a deliberate strategy by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher to destroy the strong trade unions within traditional North of England industries, the dominant employer of working-class people there. This annihilation was enabled by financial and electoral support for Thatcher’s Conservative Party provided by successive generations of the very same privileged, wealthy class of (mostly) southerners with whom Ian Graham had successfully populated Durham University. Their ideological objective destroyed the surrounding County Durham local economy and created mass unemployment on a hitherto unseen scale.

The figurines of miners carved into the front of that huge wooden Edwardian reception desk in Old Shire Hall would have wept at the ease with which their new owner’s affluent cohorts had so casually succeeded in destroying their centuries-old livelihoods. Before long, coalmining disappeared altogether from Durham.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/12/i-just-looked-around-and-he-was-gone.html ]

Teach your children well? : 1960s-1970s : vegetable-free adolescence, Camberley

 “How often do you wash your face?” asked the doctor.

“Like how?” I responded, uncertain about what he was enquiring.

“You know, with soap and water,” he clarified.

“Er, never,” I replied truthfully.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because nobody ever told me I needed to,” I said, somewhat embarrassed.

The doctor regarded me pitifully, imagining I must belong to a tribe of itinerant gypsies or have been raised by wolves. To the casual observer, my suburban home life appeared quite normal. Scratch the surface and you would have discovered that my parents had given me few of the ‘life skills’ that are supposed to be demonstrated to children. On this occasion, my mother had sent her teenage son to the family doctor in Frimley Road because his face had become progressively covered in spots. But neither she nor my father had ever instructed me how or when to wash. Once a week, I stood under the water in our modern home’s shower cubicle. If my face became wet while shampooing my hair, I merely dabbed it dry with a towel.

The doctor wrote a prescription for a liquid called ‘Phisohex’ which came in a large green bottle. After a few weeks washing my face twice daily with this cleanser, my spots magically disappeared, following more than a decade of cheeks shamefully having been untouched by soap. Did my mother acknowledge this shortfall in her parental duties? Of course not. This was but one aspect of her ‘hands-off’ approach to childrearing. She had enjoyed a good post-war education at Camberley’s girls’ grammar school in Frimley Road where she was likely taught conventional housekeeping and domestic skills in preparation for marriage. She was goodlooking and always dressed immaculately in the latest trends. Her parents had raised her and her two sisters impressively. So where had her own parenting regime gone awry?

Most of the basic skills I developed – writing, reading, arithmetic – I learned from books and television rather than parental instruction. However, one ability that proved impossible to appropriate in that way was tying shoelaces. As a result, at junior school, after ‘PE’ (Physical Education) lessons that required us to change into slip-on plimsolls, I always had to seek out my cousin Deborah in the year below mine to ask her to retie the laces on my shoes. Once I progressed to grammar school, my skill deficit became more difficult to hide. The mandated school uniform required black lace-up shoes. My mother acknowledged my ‘shoelace’ issue but, instead of simply demonstrating how to do it, she bought me slip-on ‘Hush Puppies‘ shoes for school which resulted in regular disciplinary action. Finally, I had to draft an embarrassing letter from my mother to the school, asking for her son to be excused from the dress code due to difficulty finding suitable lace-up shoes for his high in-step feet.

Like many 1960’s housewives, my mother regularly cut out recipes from magazines and stuffed them in a kitchen drawer. She was particularly proud of a plastic box with transparent lid holding two rows of Marguerite Patten recipe cards that she had sent for to ‘Family Circle’ magazine and which I was tasked with keeping in correct order. She loved making cakes and had a sweet tooth that probably promoted the development of diabetes in her later life. However, her skills with main meals were limited and she preferred to rely upon ‘instant’ foods like fish fingers that were heavily marketed to ‘busy’ housewives at the time. This was probably why I remained as thin as a rake during my childhood, despite teenage years spent scoffing two bowls of cereal both morning and night.

I had been a regular visitor to the family dentist on Middle Gordon Road due to the dreadful state of my teeth. Even at a tender age, I was being gassed for extractions. On one occasion, the stern dentist accused me of not brushing my teeth sufficiently firmly to prevent decay. I resolved to use the state-of-the-art electric toothbrush in our family bathroom with greater pressure during twice-daily cleanings. I returned to the dentist six months later, only for him to inform me that I had rubbed away most of the enamel from my remaining teeth. The outcome of his ‘advice’ was merely more extractions. Not once did this dentist question my mother about her children’s diet. Even if he had, she would have been unlikely to respond honestly.

My mother had an inexplicable lifelong aversion to vegetables. Only the humble potato would accompany our meals, usually in the form of Cadbury’s ‘Smash’. Carrots? Never. Peas? Nope. Broccoli? Unseen. There were other foodstuffs we never experienced – spaghetti, yoghurts, condiments, rice – because my mother had a preference for jellies, custard and blancmange, but it was the lack of vegetables that must have impacted our health growing up the most. I never understood how, despite the piles of women’s magazines around our home, she somehow studiously avoided taking their practical advice regarding suitable family diets. Such behaviour could have been excused earlier in the twentieth century when literacy and knowledge were less prevalent, but surely not by the 1960’s.

Much of my childhood during weekends and school holidays was spent at my maternal grandparents’ adjoining house where I helped prepare ingredients for their meals. Instructed by my wonderful grandmother, I would sit on the backdoor step with a bowl between my knees, shucking peas from their pods. I would use a peeler to remove the skins from various vegetables whose names I did not know. I would carefully place dozens of apples in rows within cardboard boxes, separating each layer with old ‘Daily Sketch’ newspapers before carrying them into the recesses of the house’s darkened larder under the stairs. My grandmother loved to make jams with these fruits, for which I carefully wrote out white adhesive labels carrying the manufacture date and type. Bizarrely, none of these vegetables or jams were ever served in our own house next door.

From the day she left school at twelve until the day she finally retired, my grandmother worked in fruit and vegetable shop ‘H.A. Cousins & Son’ at 11 High Street on the corner of St George’s Road in Camberley. During all those decades, her ‘sales assistant’ job never changed, standing all day on the shop’s bare floorboards, putting requested items in brown paper bags, weighing them on old-style scales against combinations of various brass weights, calculating the cost in her head and then the correct change to return to the customer.

Shop owner Mr Cousins would daily travel thirty miles to the fruit, vegetable and flower markets in London at the crack of dawn, returning with a van of produce to sell. Once a day’s stocks were sold, that was it. Any produce left over would be given to the shop staff. My grandmother regularly brought home quantities of all sorts of fruit and vegetables which she shared with us, though my mother always refused the vegetables. Thankfully, she did accept the fruit which became the sole source of my necessary five portions per day.

Cousins advertised its shop locally as “by appointment to Staff College” (Sandhurst Royal Military Academy), providing “Dessert Fruit and Flowers for Dinner Parties, etc.” Its upper-class customers and Sandhurst’s foreign residents necessitated it stock a variety of exotic fruits, the excess of which ended up in my family’s fruit bowl. Visitors to our house in the 1960’s were shocked to see pineapples, mangoes and lychees on our dining table, delicacies that I enjoyed as ‘normal’ long before their availability in supermarkets.

My mother insisted that fruit always be eaten covered in sugar, her favourite ingredient. Cups of tea required two spoons of white sugar, coffee two lumps of Demerara sugar, stewed apples or pears served frequently as our dessert had to be sprinkled with granulated ‘Tate & Lyle’. Even when I visited my mother in her final years, she would buy in a banana to offer me (she refused to eat them), accompanied by a plate of sugar in which to dip it. Thanks, mum. Banana yes, sugar no.

When my grandmother reached the statutory retirement age of the time, we all went round to her house for a little celebration of her departure from a lifetime of work on Cousins’ shop floor. She was pleased to be able to retire before Britain switched to decimalisation in 1971 as she feared metric calculations that no longer involved farthings, florins, half-crowns and guineas. Months later, the shop asked if she would return and work part-time because it was short-staffed. Of course she agreed. In total, she clocked up more than half a century working for that one employer in that one location, a 400-metre walk from her sole marital home.

In 1976, on arrival at university, the bulk of my Surrey County Council grant had to be paid in advance for one term of accommodation and three meals per day within college. Having never taken school dinners and rarely eaten out in restaurants, I was unfamiliar with the canteen system where you line up and tell the kitchen servers which food you want. I hardly recognised any of the foodstuffs on offer and would often merely opt for two identical desserts, skipping main courses entirely. Most intimidating were twice-weekly ‘formal dinners’ lasting an hour, during which more than a hundred students remained seated at long benches in the huge dining room to be served by staff a succession of courses completely foreign to me. The table places were laid with radiating lines of various cutlery, none of which I knew their specific purpose. My fellow students seemed to find all this ‘etiquette’, including ritual table-banging and foot-stomping, perfectly normal because 90%+ of them had grown up around such ‘practises’ at elitist private schools. I often avoided these ghastly events and sat in my room munching a packet of biscuits.

My parents having never taught me how to use cutlery, I had developed my own system whereby I always used my right hand to hold the fork. Only when I had to cut up some food would I transfer the fork to my left hand and then simultaneously use the knife in my right hand. The rest of the time, I placed the knife down on the table. Nobody had ever corrected me. Not until sitting in that university dining room, surrounded by loud toffs with posh accents and double-barrel surnames, did I have to learn to eat holding the fork in my left hand. To this day, my default way of eating is to grab the fork with my right hand. Old habits die hard.

In 1986, my little sister was offered a Saturday job on the till of a small self-serve fruit and vegetable shop in Camberley town centre. She was worried that she would not recognise the produce she would be expected to ring up, since our mother had never fed us veg other than potatoes. By then, I had spent a decade living away from our vegetable-free home and was able to accompany my sister on a ‘Secret Squirrel’ mission to the shop, during which we walked slowly around its one central aisle and tried to identify the varieties of common vegetable on sale. ‘Common’ to everyone else, particularly to our beloved late grandmother, but weirdly not at all to us!

In retrospect, my childhood must have been quite unusual because, although I lacked some basic life skills, I was steeped in other abilities beyond my age. By junior school, I had taught myself to type, to read music and play the piano (despite having non-musical parents). Having recruited me into his business once I could walk, my father taught me how to survey a property, create architectural plans on a drawing board, use Letraset, calculate floor areas and room volumes, prepare client invoices and statements on an electric typewriter, photocopy and make dyeline prints. Meanwhile, my mother enrolled me into reconciling her employer‘s accounts and calculating its staff’s pay packets, pinning and cutting dress patterns to materials, basic knitting stitches, using her sewing machine and threading multiple yarns on her knitting machine. I was eight when typing the forms for my parents’ passport renewals, testing my mother’s knowledge for her driving test and testing my father for his pilot licence. By the time I started secondary school, I was holding the fort at my father’s town centre office, learning shorthand from my mother’s discarded 1950’s text books and calculating potential profits of deals for my father’s new property business. What a strangely un-childlike childhood it was!

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/06/teach-your-children-well-1960s-1970s.html ]

The day the (reggae) music died : 1981 : Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Matumbi

 “Bob Marley has died!” I exclaimed. Having switched on the car radio before starting the engine, one of Marley’s songs was playing on John Peel’s ‘BBC Radio One’ ten-to-midnight show. I knew immediately what that meant. Peel was a longtime reggae fan, though I had not heard him play a Marley track for years. There was no need to await Peel’s voice announcing the sad news. I had read that Marley was ill but had not understood the terminal gravity of his health.

Peterlee town centre was dark and desolate at that late hour. I had walked to my little Datsun car across a dark, empty car park adjacent to the office block of Peterlee Development Corporation, accompanied by my girlfriend who was employed there on a one-year government job creation scheme. We had attended a poetry reading organised by Peterlee Community Arts in the building, an event she had learnt of from her marketing work. It was my first poetry reading. Only around a dozen of us were present, everyone else at least twice our age. But what we heard was no ordinary poetry.

Linton Kwesi Johnson had coined his work ‘dub poetry’ in 1976 and already published three anthologies and four vinyl albums, voicing his experiences as a Jamaican whose parents had migrated to Britain in 1962. Peterlee new town seemed an unlikely venue for a ‘dub poet’, a deprived coal mining region with no discernible black population, but working class Tyneside poet Keith Armstrong had organised this event as part of his community work there to foster residents’ creative writing. Johnson read some of his excellent poems and answered the group’s polite questions. It was an intimate, quiet evening of reflection.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0NjIxvry79Svr0G4Qzb5NR?utm_source=generator

Due to my enthusiasm for reggae, I was familiar with Johnson’s record albums as one strand of the outpouring of diverse innovation that Britain’s homegrown reggae artists had been pioneering since the early 1970’s. Alongside ‘dub poetry’ (poems set to reggae), there was ‘lovers rock’ (soulful reggae with love themes sung mostly by teenage girls), UK ‘roots reggae’ (documenting the Black British experience) and a distinctly British version of ‘dub’ (radical mixes using studio effects). One name that was playing a significant writing/producing role spanning all these sub-genres was Dennis Bovell, alias ‘Blackbeard’, of the British group ‘Matumbi’. His monumental contributions to British reggae are too often understated.

Until then, there had been plenty of reggae produced in British studios and released by UK record labels such as ‘Melodisc’, ‘Pama’ and ‘Trojan’, but most efforts had been either a rather clunky imitation of Jamaican reggae (for example, Millie’s 1964 UK hit ‘My Boy Lollipop’ [Fontana TE 17425]) or performed by ‘dinner & dance’-style UK groups such as ‘The Marvels’. I admit to having neglected Matumbi upon hearing their initial 1973 releases, cover versions of ‘Kool & The Gang’s ‘Funky Stuff’ [Horse HOSS 39] and ‘Hot Chocolate’s ‘Brother Louie‘ [GG 4540]. It was not until their 1976 song ‘After Tonight’ [Safari SF 1112] and the self-released 12-inch single ‘Music In The Air’/’Guide Us’ [Matumbi Music Corp MA 0004] that my interest was piqued as a result of the group’s creative ability to seamlessly bridge the ‘lovers rock’, ‘roots reggae’ and ‘dub’ styles. Both sides of the latter disc remain one of my favourite UK reggae recordings (sadly, these particular mixes have not been reissued).

In 1978, Matumbi performed at Dunelm House and, after attending the gig, it was my responsibility as deputy president of Durham Students’ Union to sit in my office with the band, counting out the cash to pay their contracted fee. They were on tour to promote their first album ‘Seven Seals’ self-produced for multinational ‘EMI Records’ [Harvest SHSP 4090]. It included new mixes of the aforementioned 12-inch single plus their theme for BBC television drama ‘Empire Road’, the first UK series to be written, acted and directed predominantly by black artists. Sensing my interest in reggae, the group invited me to join them for an after-gig chat, so I drove to their motel several miles down South Road and we sat in its bar for a thoroughly enjoyable few hours discussing music.

As part of my manic obsession with the nascent ‘dub’ reggae genre, I had bought albums between 1976 and 1978 credited to ‘4th Street Orchestra’ entitled ‘Ah Who Seh? Go Deh!’ [Rama RM 001], ‘Leggo! Ah Fi We Dis’ [Rama RM 002], ‘Yuh Learn!’ [Rama RMLP 006] and ‘Scientific Higher Ranking Dubb’ [sic, Rama RM 004]. They were sold in blank white sleeves with handwritten marker-pen titles and red, gold and green record labels to make them look similar to Jamaican-pressed dub albums of that era. However, it was self-evident that most tracks were dub mixes of existing UK recordings by Matumbi backing various performers, engineered and produced by Bovell for licensing to small UK labels. I also had bought and worn two of their little lapel badges, one inscribed ‘AH WHO SEH?’, the other ‘GO DEH!’, from a London record stall. During our conversation in the bar, Bovell expressed surprise that I owned these limited-pressing albums, and even more surprise that I recognised Matumbi as behind them. They remain prime examples of UK dub.

It was Bovell who had produced Linton Kwesi Johnson’s albums, and it was Matumbi who had provided the music. Alongside a young generation of British roots reggae bands such as ‘Aswad’ and ‘Steel Pulse’, Johnson’s poetry similarly tackled contemporary social and political issues with direct, straightforward commentaries. It was a new style of British reggae, an echo of recordings by American collective ‘The Last Poets’ whose conscious poems/raps had been set to music (sometimes by ‘Kool & The Gang’) since 1970, and whose couplets had occasionally been integrated into recordings by Jamaican DJ ‘Big Youth’ in the 1970’s. Of course, MC’s (‘Masters of Ceremonies’) had been talking over (‘toasting’) records at ‘dances’ in Jamaica since the 1960’s, proof that the evolution of ‘rap’ owed as much to the island’s sound system culture as it did to 1970’s New York house parties.

In Peterlee, Johnson read his poems to the audience without music, his usual performance style. It was fascinating to hear his words without any accompaniment. For me, the dub version of Johnson’s shocking 1979 poem ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ (retitled ‘Iron Bar Dub’ on ‘LKJ In Dub’ [Island ILPS 9650]) is brilliantly effective precisely when the music is mixed out to leave his line “Me couldn’t stand up there and do nothin’” hanging in silence. Sadly, memories of Johnson’s performance that night were suddenly eclipsed by the news of Marley’s death. I drove the eight miles to our Sherburn Village home in stunned silence. I was sad and shocked. It was only then that his sudden loss made me realise how much Marley had meant to me.

Despite having listened to reggae since the late 1960’s, I admittedly arrived late to Bob Marley’s music. Though I had heard many of his singles previously, it was not until his 1974 album ‘Natty Dread’ [Island ILPS 9281] that I understood his genius. At that time, I was feeling under a lot of personal pressure which I tried to relieve by listening to this record every day for the next two years. At home, my father had run off, leaving our family in grave financial difficulties. At school, I was struggling with its inflexibility, not permitted to take two mathematics A-levels, not allowed to mix arts and science A-levels, not encouraged to apply to Cambridge University. Back in my first year at that school, I had been awarded three school prizes. However, once my parents separated and then divorced, I was never given a further prize and the headmaster’s comments in my termly school reports became strangely negative, regardless of my results.

Feeling increasingly like an unwanted ‘outsider’ at grammar school, Marley’s lyrics connected with me and helped keep my head above encroaching waters rising in both my home and school lives. I knew I was struggling and needed encouragement from some source, any source, to continue. For me, that came from Marley’s music. While my classmates were mostly listening to ‘progressive rock’ albums with zany song titles (such as Genesis’ ‘I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe’), I was absorbed by reggae and soul music that spoke about the daily struggle to merely survive the tribulations of life. After ‘Natty Dread’, I rushed out to buy every new Marley release.

During the months following Marley’s death, I was absorbed by sadness. It felt like the ‘final straw’. The previous year, I had landed a ‘dream job’, my first permanent employment, overhauling the music playlist for Metro Radio. Then, after successfully turning around that station’s fortunes, I had unexpectedly been made redundant. I was now unemployed and my every job application had been rejected. That experience had followed four years at Durham University which had turned out to be a wholly inappropriate choice as it was colonised by 90%+ of students having arrived from private schools funded by posh families. I felt like ‘a fish out of water’. I loved studying, I loved learning, I desired a fulfilling academic life at university … but it had proven nigh on impossible at Durham.

“This is what I need
This is where I want to be
But I know that this will never be mine”

Months later, my girlfriend awoke one morning and told me matter-of-factly that she was going to move out and live alone. She offered no explanation. We had neither disagreed nor argued. We had been sharing a room for three years, initially as students in a horribly austere miners’ cottage in Meadowfield whose rooms had no electrical sockets, requiring cables to be run from each room’s centre ceiling light-fitment. Now we were in a better rented cottage in Sherburn, though it had no phone, no gas and no television. Her bombshell announcement could not have come at a more vulnerable time for me. I had already felt rejected by most of my university peers and then by my first employer. At school previously, I had passed the Cambridge University entrance exam but had been rejected by every college. At Durham, I had stood for election as editor of the student newspaper, but its posh incumbent had recommended a rival with less journalistic experience. A decade earlier, my father had deserted me and his family, and now the person I loved the most had done the same.

I just could not seem to navigate a successful path amidst the world of middle- and upper-class contemporaries into which I had been unwittingly thrown, first at grammar school, then at Durham, and now in my personal life too. Most of those years, I felt that circumstances had forced me to focus on nothing more than survival, whilst my privileged contemporaries seemed able to pursue and fulfil their ambitions with considerable ease. I had to remind myself that I had been born in a council house and had attended state schools, initially on a council estate. My girlfriend had not. I had imagined such differences mattered not in modern Britain. I had believed that any ‘socio-economic’ gap between us could be bridged by a mutual feeling called ‘love’. I now began to wonder if I had been mistaken. I felt very much marooned and alone. My twenty-three-year-old life was in tatters.

Fast forward to 1984. I had still not secured a further job in radio. I was invited to Liverpool for a weekend stay in my former girlfriend’s flat. We visited the cathedral and attended a performance at the Everyman Theatre. It felt awkward. I never saw her again. It had taken me months to get over the impact of Bob Marley’s death. It took me considerably longer to get over my girlfriend ending our relationship. 

“That clumsy goodbye kiss could fool me
But looking back over my shoulder
You’re happy without me”

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/291PlBjtQIVyEzOPeXNSyD?utm_source=generator

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-day-reggae-music-died-1981-bob.html ]

Around the British Rail network in eight hundred minutes : 1976 : Durham University challenge

 “Which bus goes to the University, please?” I asked. The man replied helpfully, but I could not understand a word he had said. He spoke English, though not an English I had heard before. I was confused by all the bus stops, having just exited Lancaster railway station. At which one did I need to wait? There was no bus map. There were no obvious students to ask. I had never been north of Luton until then. I had never watched ‘Coronation Street’. I was a southerner who barely understood a word that was being said to me there, hundreds of miles from home.

I had left the house that morning at the crack of dawn to make a day trip to check out Lancaster University. It was one of five universities I had selected on my UCCA form, all of which had offered me a place, conditional upon A-level results, without requesting an interview. However, if I was going to spend three years far away from home, I wanted to go see each one to help me choose. I had never visited a university before. Aside from my teachers, I had never met anyone who had attended university. That year, I hoped to be one of the 6% of school leavers who would go on to university, a proportion that had multiplied from 2% the year I had been born.

My state school had provided no useful advice how to choose a university or course. Our designated ‘careers counsellor’ was actually a moonlighting English teacher who would merely direct us to a row of dogeared university prospectuses on his office shelf. Some were out-of-date, many were missing. We were offered no ‘careers’ seminars. Surrey County Council had compelled each sixth-former to complete a multiple-choice questionnaire and then informed us for which career we were supposedly suited. Further studies were never suggested. You were on your own when it came to an academic future.

I understood that my choice of university could be a life-changing decision, one that required me to review the maximum amount of available information. If neither my family nor my school could provide useful advice, I would research all the options myself. I wrote a letter to every UK university outside London (where I realised accommodation was unaffordable), requesting their current prospectus and details of their economics courses. I chose that subject simply because it had provided my best academic results at school. I had known for a decade that I desired a career in ‘radio’, though university courses in media or broadcasting did not exist. If I had known then that Britain’s first ‘media studies’ degree had been launched at the Polytechnic of Central London (later renamed the University of Westminster) in 1975, I might have rethought my plans.

Seven years earlier, at my council estate junior school, I had been one of three children out of my class of thirty (10%) to have passed the ’11-Plus’ examination, necessary to progress to ‘grammar school’. However, at that time, around 20% of UK pupils attended these ‘selective’ secondary schools, the difference attributable to the substantial numbers of privately educated children who were crammed intensively at fee-paying ‘preparatory schools’ to pass the exam and who then dominated grammar schools’ intakes. From my ‘year’ of sixty students at Strode’s School, only around ten of us progressed to university, an indication that the ’11-Plus’ was less a successful method of identifying Britain’s brightest children, and more a route for middle-class parents to secure their offsprings an elitist secondary education paid for by the state. Has this situation since improved? In 2008, the Sutton Trust reported that grammar schools were enrolling “…half as many academically able children from disadvantaged backgrounds as they could do”.

I was fortunate that Surrey County Council would pay my train fares for visits to five universities, whether an interview was required or not. I had to determine when each institution offered ‘open days’, book my place, arrange train tickets and inform the school of my impending absence. It required considerable organisation, particularly as these visits necessitated train connections in London. These were days when I would not return home until almost midnight and would have to go to school the following day. I had never travelled so many miles on public transport or seen so much of England from a train window.

I must have been the only student at my school to own a copy at home of almost every UK university’s current prospectus. My request for economics course information proved less successful. Many sent me nothing, the remainder provided a single sheet outlining a course that merely encompassed all aspects of the subject. I read absolutely everything I was sent and concluded that every university claimed to be absolutely perfect and their courses the best. I had merely filled my bedroom bookshelf with marketing propaganda. Instead, I decided to select four universities that already operated student radio stations as this was my long-term career objective … plus Durham.

Although Durham University had no radio station, I learned it was apparently thought of highly. If I were rejected by Cambridge, I considered it might be a reputational substitute. Due to the 300-mile distance, my trip to Durham required an overnight stay in Collingwood College which was offered free to those attending ‘open days’. After a long train journey followed by an uphill walk, I was given an undergraduate bedroom within the college and met several other visitors who were there for the same reason. We took the university’s guided tours together the next day and ate as a group in the college’s dining room, offering us a first taste of undergraduate life.

The following morning, we packed our bags and met together for the thirty-minute walk to Durham railway station on the opposite side of town to catch our trains back to ‘the south’. However, we found the platforms deserted and, eventually locating a member of staff, we were told that a strike had started that morning and there were no trains departing in any direction. Returning to the college with our tails between our legs, we explained our problem and it kindly offered to extend its hospitality until we could depart. Each of us changed our banknotes into piles of ten-pence coins and queued at the college’s one public phone in the basement to contact our parents and schools to explain that we did not yet know when we could return. A quick visit had unexpectedly transformed into something longer.

I took the opportunity to wander around Durham’s compact town centre and explore more places, particularly the ‘Musicore’ record shop. The university library and the cathedral were both impressive, as was the brutalist concrete student union building ‘Dunelm House’ and adjoining ‘Kingsgate Bridge’ constructed by architect Ove Arup in 1963. The other universities I had visited were campus-based, requiring a bus journey to the nearest town. I quite liked Durham’s integration into the city and the ability to walk from one end to the other without need of transport.

The next morning, before breakfast in the college dining room, I phoned Durham railway station, to be informed that no trains would be running for the second consecutive day. This was the only method to obtain information in those days. I met the others and we phoned our families with our disappointing update. We spent most of that day sat together in the Junior Common Room chatting, sharing our university visit experiences and our hopes for the future. For me, it was particularly interesting to meet young people for the first time who shared my situation.

I made another call to the railway station the next morning, anticipating more bad news, but was told a single train was expected that day. It would be heading north, the opposite direction to what we required. I asked if there was any alternative route to London and it was explained that, although the east coast route was still on strike, we could try travelling via the west coast on the opposite side of the country. When was this one train expected? In an hour, I was told. Action stations!

I located my fellow visitors and, without taking breakfast, we all signed out of college and rushed off to the station. There was no information available there about the time of the train, on which platform it would arrive or where it would be heading. While we waited, we examined a British Rail route map in the ticket office which showed a cross-country route from east to west coast that started in Newcastle, the next major stop north of Durham. We were the only people awaiting a train and did wonder whether we had been sent on a wild goose chase, only to have to return to the college for yet another night.

Then the day’s promised one train appeared and pulled into the station. Unsurprisingly, it was almost empty. Who would have known it would be running in the midst of a crippling strike? We boarded and waved farewell to Durham, not knowing if any of us would ever return. Within a quarter-hour, we alighted in Newcastle. It was the first of many times that day that we were required to explain to confused railway staff that, although our tickets to London were dated days earlier, the unanticipated strike had forced us to take the only train available … in the opposite direction.

Next, to cross England to the west coast, we discovered we had to take a less regular, slower train that would depart in an hour. The wait gave us an opportunity to walk out of Newcastle railway station, buy some breakfast and wander around the city. Compared to Durham, it appeared a huge, busy scruffy city centre with huge Victorian stores and old-fashioned shopping arcades. Even the clothes people wore seemed dated and dowdy, particularly seeing many men wearing flat caps. It was an industrial city where time seemed to have stood still fifty years earlier.

Our ninety-minute journey in a local train from Newcastle to Carlisle took us across the bleak terrain of the North Pennine hills, stopping only at tiny towns with strange, unfamiliar names like Prudhoe, Corbridge, Hexham and Haltwhistle. Once again, we were required to explain to the train’s on-board ticket inspector why we were travelling in the wrong direction with out-of-date tickets. He knew about the strike and laughed heartily at our story, wishing us well on our journey home. It began to feel like a kind of ‘expedition’ where, at every step, it proved necessary to explain why our little group of seventeen-year-olds were taking a route no sane person would choose to follow.

The train terminated at Carlisle, a two-thousand-year-old city on the border between England and Scotland, fifty-five miles west and north of Durham. It was midday by now and, from there, we could now take a west coast ‘Intercity’ train southbound. We did not venture outside the station as this would have entailed having to explain our tickets once more and we feared not being allowed entry back into the station. This region was unaffected by the strike and trains seemed thankfully to be running as scheduled.

Our four-hour journey to London was comfortable until a ticket inspector arrived. We explained our story but he seemed unaware of the rail strike on the east coast and disbelieved our narrative. Initially, he demanded we pay for new tickets. We refused because we each held a valid, paid-for British Rail ticket that we had been prevented from using by the strike. The argument continued and he demanded we write down our names and addresses in order that the police could be contacted so that we would be fined for travelling without valid tickets. He was a ridiculous ‘jobsworthy’ who showed no sympathy for our plight. His attitude ruined the longest, most gruelling part of that day’s journey.

Reaching London’s Euston station, our small group split up to head different directions home. It was a sad parting of ways as we had no idea if we would ever see each other again or even which university each of us might attend (no social media or mobile phones then!). The last few days had required us to bond in the face of adversity, forcing us to make a round-Britain trip we had never imagined. It would be quite a story to tell our classmates.

I crossed London by Tube, caught a train from Waterloo station to Camberley and then a bus, reaching home more than twelve hours after having left Collingwood College in Durham. My school might not have been happy about my extended absence but, later that year, those awaydays would play a major role in my decision to study in Durham. I felt as if I was already sufficiently familiar with the college and the town as a result of that elongated visit. I imagined that my fellow Durham students would be similar to those with whom I had travelled the length and breadth of England.

Did I receive correspondence from British Rail or the police as a result of the unfriendly ticket inspector we had encountered? Thankfully, no. Did I ever see my newfound friends again? Sadly, no.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/03/around-british-rail-network-in-eight.html ]

You can’t tell me what I’m doing wrong… : 1976 : And Mother Makes Four, Camberley

 “Why are you choosing a university so far away?” aunt Sheila demanded of me. “You should commute from home to Guildford so you can help your mum.”

I was seething. It was the first time we had spoken in years and THIS was her ‘advice’ to me? How dare she! It was three years since my middle-aged father had walked out on our family to shack up with a runaway teenage bride. Following his departure, he had apparently visited Sheila and poisoned her mind against her younger sister, my mother, so that the pair exchanged not one word for decades thereafter. Just when my mother had needed sisterly support to survive a difficult breakup and resultant hardship, Sheila had frozen her out. But she still felt able to tell me how to run my life?

There had been a time, between 1967 and 1969, when I had walked round to Sheila’s home every afternoon after school. My parents had moved house, now too far away for me to simply catch a bus, so I would wait at Sheila’s between four and six o’clock until one of them arrived after work to pick me up. My lovely older cousin Keith would play me his Jimi Hendrix records on their living room stereogram until the arrival of his father from work at Solartron, a defence contractor in Farnborough. Suddenly, us children would be quickly ushered out into the garden (“Quick! I can hear his car,” Sheila would shout), or the kitchen if it was raining, because taciturn uncle Fred apparently required domestic solitude without the distraction of his three children (plus me). Even as a nine-year old, I viewed this household’s behaviour as bizarrely disciplinarian.

According to my mother, in the early 1950’s her father had forced a pregnant Sheila to marry Fred. That rift evidently never healed. Even by the 1970’s, when the couple and their children gathered with us at our grandparents on family occasions such as Christmas, Fred remained sat in his parked car on the street outside for hours, like a vampire uninvited to cross the threshold. A dozen of us relatives would be sat scoffing our dinner around my grandparents’ old wooden dining table, extended once a year by me pulling out its two extra leaves, while Fred was abandoned outside literally in the cold. It was a family feud that had started before I was born and which everybody since had politely ignored and refused to explain. Ours was a family at (passive aggressive) war.

How dare Sheila lecture me about my education choice! I had already been impacted by my parents having selfishly selected a secondary school at the opposite end of the county, saddling me for seven years with a horrendous commute that took at least two hours daily to journey home. I had been denied a voice in that decision and paid the price, marooned so far from my school that I had not one local friend. Now this was MY time to determine MY future. Besides, nobody in our family had gained a school certificate, let alone attended university. Sheila worked as a ‘dinner lady’ at my former primary school. Upon marriage, Sheila and Fred were offered a post-war semi-detached council house on the Old Dean Estate where they remained their entire lives. I wanted more for my future than that.

When Sheila told me I should stay home to ‘help’ my mother, she had no idea what that ‘help’ had entailed during recent years or the toll it had already taken on my teenage life. As the eldest of three children in a newly single-parent household, I had to be the first to rise every weekday morning and the last to go to bed, usually after midnight. On top of a lengthy school commute requiring bus and train connections, teachers gave two homework subjects to fulfil every weekday night. My mother held down a full-time day job and an evening office cleaning job, requiring me to babysit my two siblings after school, as well as undertake ‘parental’ duties such as teaching my baby sister to read and write, along with hours of play on our living room floor. I thoroughly enjoyed providing her with the attentions that my parents had failed to offer me as a child, but my homework had to remain untouched until she fell asleep. (Daytimes during term time, while my brother and I attended school, our retired maternal grandparents generously looked after my sister at their house.)

The other aspect of my ‘help’ was the task of managing my mother’s financial and legal problems. When household bills and reminders arrived by post, she refused to acknowledge them, preferring to stuff them unopened into a drawer. To her, out of sight literally meant out of mind. I had to organise all her paperwork into folders, challenge incorrect charges, negotiate overdue payments and stave off court appearances and bailiffs. I corresponded with the government’s Inland Revenue tax authority, claimed benefits to which I discovered low-income families were entitled and visited the Post Office fortnightly to cash the ’Family Allowance’ voucher book. The volume of correspondence meant I soon became adept at forging my mother’s signature on letters and forms I prepared.

At the same time, I had to tackle the fallout from my parents’ separation and subsequent divorce. Without consulting me, my mother stupidly had decided, for the division of the couple’s assets, to appoint a local solicitor who had previously been used by my father in his erstwhile property business. The outcome was predictably disastrous. The court awarded her significantly less than half the value of the family home the couple had built themselves brick-by-brick in the mid-1960’s, along with no interest in her husband’s self-employed business in which she had undertaken all the bookkeeping for decades. It rested with me to sit in libraries, searching through legal texts until I could prove her solicitor had failed to adequately represent my mother’s interest. I then made after-school appointments with a brace of legal practices nearby, meeting each puzzled solicitor in my bottle green blazer, until I found one who was prepared to initiate action against a fellow lawyer for breach of Law Society rules.

This was the ‘help’ I had been providing my mother the last three years. Although aunt Sheila had been invisible during that time, her eldest daughter Lynn had volunteered to be fairy godmother to me and my siblings, virtually living at our house, cooking meals and looking after us while our mother worked. I had recently been forced into my first ill-fitting suit to attend her church marriage to a salesman for ‘Smith’s Crisps’ (proud of his company car!). Having no children and no longer working, Lynn became the sensible adult sister our hard-up family had never had and made an immense difference by keeping us alive and together during those difficult times. Her invaluable contribution during our hours of need has never been forgotten.

Aunt Sheila had failed to understand that my reason for going away to university was to reduce the burden on my mother’s precarious finances. At the moment, her earnings were having to pay for my upkeep. My father had been ordered by the court to provide maintenance payments for his children but he was forever in massive arrears. Another of my jobs was to phone Farnham County Court once a month (which necessitated arriving late for school) to remind its clerk that my father’s payments were months’ behind and he needed to be threatened. It was a fruitless task. Worse, on my sixteenth birthday, my cruel father had petitioned the court to reduce my maintenance payments to £1 per annum on the grounds that I should take a job. The stupid court agreed, oblivious of my goal to obtain the education my parents had never had.

I had already made attempts to reduce the financial burden. The local council was now paying for my termly railway season ticket to travel to school (but not for the buses). My mother had always prepared sandwiches for me to take in a Tupperware box for my lunch. To cut this cost, I applied for free school lunches, something I had never eaten before. Eventually the school agreed, I entered the dining room for the first time but the staff forbade me to sit on the benches with my classmates. Instead, I was ordered to sit at a tiny table in the corner of the room with three other boys from lower years (out of a school of 300) who were similarly entitled to ‘free school meals.’ I argued that this policy was discriminatory against us ‘poor’ students. I was told where to go. That became my first and last school dinner. I had to return to taking sandwiches.

Attending university away from home meant that I would receive a ‘full grant’ from Surrey County Council that included my costs of accommodation and travel there and back each term. I realised how expensive living costs would be in London so I had to rule out applying to universities there. That left plenty of institutions across the rest of the country. There would be downsides to moving away. I knew I would miss my family terribly, particularly my little sister whom I had looked after from a baby to become a smart, lively four-year old. There had been a time earlier in her development when she had invented her own non-English words for everything and my presence had been required by our family to ‘translate’ what she meant. My mother had even taken her to the doctor, fearing a speech problem, but she eventually grew out of that habit.

Speaking to me the way she had, aunt Sheila appeared oblivious to our family issues. She was equally oblivious to the fact that universities had to choose YOU, not the other way around. To me, at that time she seemed to inhabit a safe suburban bubble. Whereas, since my father’s departure, our family was being tossed around by circumstance, never certain of what further calamity might arrive around the corner. I could not explain all this to Sheila. I was livid with what she had said but I just walked away. Despite me having had to assume domestic responsibilities beyond my teenage years, she had chosen to address me in such a condescending adult tone. Why did she seem in thrall to my dreadful father who was so eager to make life as difficult as possible for his former family? I never understood.

Once I had completed my first term at university, I bought a Kenwood food mixer for my mother for Christmas, to replace the broken one she had been gifted in the 1950’s and treasured. As a small child, she would offer me its ‘K’ shaped mixing element to lick off the excess cake mix. This was the most expensive present I had given her, having saved up through miserliness with my initial student grant. I was pleased to be contributing financially to our household for the first time, rather than being a financial burden. Now, at the end of each term, I would arrive at my mother’s home and have to spend the first few days answering all the bills, demands and legal threats she had ignored and hidden away during previous months. Somebody had to do it. Sometimes it felt as if my life might never be my own.

These days, on the rare occasion I hear the brilliant number thirteen pop chart hit ‘Captain of Your Ship’ by ‘Reparata & The Delrons’, I am transported back to 1968 when I would sing along with the kitchen radio tuned to ‘BBC Radio One’ in Sheila’s house after school. Good times never seemed so good.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/03/you-cant-tell-me-what-im-doing-wrong.html ]

An elite academy for aspiring rent-a-gob politicians : 1976 : Durham Union Society

“I’m sorry but you must wear appropriate attire to attend,” the usher told me sternly.

I thought I had been dressed normally enough, but apparently not. I was waving my club membership card, having paid the annual subscription during Freshers’ Week. Only then did I learn that it was insufficient merely to be a paid-up member. Nobody had told me I needed additionally to wear an academic gown to be admitted, one of those flimsy black material things belonging to previous centuries or ghost movies. Since my arrival at university, I had spotted a few students wafting around the streets wearing such gowns and I had considered their fashion sense preposterous, particularly in the ‘Year of Punk’. Why would I waste £37 of my Surrey County Council student full grant on such an anachronistic garment? Now, to my frustration, I was being refused entry to the society’s first debate of the academic year and had to walk the mile back to my college in autumnal darkness.

I was unaware then that Durham University was so normalised to its elite status that it even labelled its relationship with the local population ‘town and gown’. Evidently it never had considered itself an integral part of Durham, one of Britain’s poorest working-class regions, because its students were not drawn from the locality but from some of Britain’s poshest families whose offspring had proven insufficiently academic to gain admission to Oxbridge. I recall my shock during a party at fellow student John Cummins’ town centre flat when I learnt that his parents had purchased that property for the duration of his studies. Whilst processing my astonishment, I rudely fell asleep on his sofa in the midst of the revelling. Only later did I discover that such investments by rich parents were commonplace. (Despite showing little interest in the pop music with which I was obsessed, later John landed a job at ‘The Tube’ music TV show and was then appointed Channel 4’s launch head of youth television.)

Clubs had never been for me. At school, the only one I had joined was ‘Strode’s Film Club’, a sixth-form wheeze by classmate and film buff Martin Nichols to legally screen in the main hall X-rated movies such as ‘Straw Dogs’, ‘Lord of The Flies’, ‘Canterbury Tales’, ‘North by Northwest’, ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ and ‘Closely Observed Trains’. Now, as a naïve fresher at university, I had been told it was essential to join numerous clubs, particularly the debating society, so I had paid my money, only to be turned away from its first event. A historian had written in 1952:

“When a young man comes into residence in Durham, in seven cases out of ten he decides to become a member of the Union Society. […] And he is then in the succession of many whose first experience in oratory and official administration, gained in the Union Debating Hall and clubrooms, has stood them in good stead for the rest of their lives.”

I was unable to benefit from this ‘experience in oratory’ until later in the year when I discovered the club held one annual debate where neither membership nor a gown were necessary to attend in the Great Hall of Durham Castle. It seemed bizarre that the town’s castle operated as neither a tourist attraction nor the home of some wealthy bigwig, but as a college of the university in which 150 students had lived and studied from 1837. Apparently, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, its oversized dining room had been renowned as Britain’s largest ‘Great Hall’. I sat at the back in my usual student-wear to quietly observe a debate dominated by white males wearing gowns.

What I witnessed stunned me. It was difficult to decide what impacted me the most. Adolescents of my age acting as if they were already middle-aged men, seemingly in imitation of their family’s upper-class characteristics. Boys confident enough to stand up and talk loudly and at length on global issues about which they displayed only the most basic understanding. Conversely, their peers not replying with factual corrections because they too were eagerly awaiting a chance to stand up and mouth their own ignorance. Overloud voices and theatrical flourishes as if the debater were the lead actor in a school play. Mob-like cheering and jeering at speakers as if it were some medieval tournament. Rude audience comments shouted out during speeches, eliciting rumbustious laughter. Loud banging of fists on tables and foot stomping like a mob of noisy yobo’s.

What proved most baffling were the moments when a participant whom I vaguely knew would stand up to argue a point of view that I had thought was the opposite of their personal beliefs. It appeared that, in this playground, moral certitude had to be sacrificed to the altar of argument purely for argument’s sake. It was an intellectual game whose purpose was to impress one’s peers with wit and verbosity rather than facts or evidence. The medium WAS the message, not the content that was being spoken … or more often bellowed. During an evening of insufferably posh accents, visions of fencing, guns at dawn and gloves smacked across opponents’ cheeks crossed my mind. It was evident that many of my fellow students must have already practised this parlour game for years in ‘debating societies’ at their private schools … while, in my parallel state school universe, I had been occupied presenting pop music programmes on London pirate radio stations.

At the event’s conclusion, I stumbled outside into the night air, reeling as if I had been returned to Earth after abduction by an alien civilisation. Perhaps you required blue blood to feel at home in there. I resolved not to renew my club membership nor to attend further debates. The academic Sir Walter Moberly had commented in 1950: “Undergraduate debates are not conducted at the deep level at which convictions are really formed.” This notion that an individual can lack personal conviction to debate or argue a point forcefully was a foreign land to me. I could frame an argument for my principles, but why would one propose a point of view that is not one’s own? Unless you never bother with ‘convictions’ and follow a path of merely blowing with the prevailing wind.

It was not until 1990 that Britain’s primary legislature, the House of Commons, allowed its proceedings to be permanently televised, following its eleventh vote on the issue during the preceding twenty-two years. The motion was opposed by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher because “my concern is for the good reputation of this House.” Initially, only close-up shots of the politician holding the floor were permitted because a wider view would have shown the public the faces of their elected representatives jeering, hectoring, desk banging and rabble-rousing during many speeches. This restriction was later relaxed, allowing the rest of the world to witness for the first time the childish habits of grown men who had never moved on from ‘bunfights’ in oak-panelled dining rooms during ‘High Tea’.

Watching those early televised broadcasts vividly recalled the one debate I had attended more than a decade earlier. I suddenly understood that Durham Union Society had been established in 1842 as ‘A Nursery of the [House of] Commons’, as noted a headline in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. My privileged contemporaries had been in training to become politicians since an early age. Durham had merely been the latest stop on their route to the elevated roles to which they had forever been told they were entitled. Articulating this notion of ‘power’, Sir Winston Churchill had once observed at the Oxford Union: “If you can speak in this country, you can do anything.”

House of Commons rules strictly forbid members to call each other ‘a liar’ or to make an accusation of ‘lying’. As a result, just as I had witnessed in Durham, speakers are permitted to spout any old tosh that comes into their heads and get away with it. How can a critic ‘speak truth to power’ in a forum where the currency of ‘truth’ is not merely devalued but prohibited? Politicians know they can say whatever is expedient in the moment without any recourse, while the rest of us would be sacked from our jobs for what our world considers to be lying.

In my own field, the lack of, ahem, ‘conviction’ of politicians responsible for the British government’s media policy has been evident often. In March 2010 whilst in opposition, Ed Vaizey MP said “the government has set a provisional target date of 2015 [for digital radio switchover] and we are sceptical about whether that target can actually be met.” However, by July that same year and after an election had appointed him the new government’s culture minister, Vaizey conversely said that “2015 is an achievable target date and we will work to support that ambition.” Ho hum.

During the period when I seemed to be the only City analyst covering the radio broadcast industry, I would occasionally be contacted by the BBC to be interviewed for a programme. Before sunrise one day, a BBC car collected me from home to take me to the studios of the ‘Today’ programme on ‘Radio 4’ for a live item about digital radio switchover. On arrival, I was told that I would be answering the presenter’s questions and then the government minister would be introduced and quizzed. However, the minister had insisted that I not be permitted to follow up or respond to what he would be saying. It was obvious that my presence in the studio would suggest a semblance of ‘balance’ whilst not actually allowing genuine debate or argument.

I had arrived at the BBC early and spent an age waiting in the show’s ‘green room’. The minister arrived late, accompanied by a flunky, entered the room and said to me: “So you are the person they have brought here to tell me that everything I am about to say is wrong.”

Just as I had witnessed in Durham, patronising privileged toffs like him function in a world where they insist upon immunity from contradiction or correction to the drivel they shout. Despite my anger at his comment, I followed the instructions for that morning’s appearance, but have refused every BBC invitation since. Where there is purposefully no genuine debate, what would be the point?

Is this the “honourable tradition” maintained by graduates of debating societies like Durham Union Society, the phrase attributed to the club in 1952 by its historian who suggested it:

“… should always retain at least some its present rooms as a gentlemen’s club. There may it long offer to future generations those opportunities for the making of friendships, for argument, and for training in life and thinking …”?

‘Training’ for a ‘life’ as a conviction-free politician?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/an-elite-academy-for-aspiring-rent-gob.html]

I can't dance to that music you're playin' : 1970 : Emperor Rosko, The Paris Theatre, London

 “Would you like to dance?” the girl asked.

I was dumbfounded. Nobody had ever asked me to dance. Particularly a girl!

“Er, no thanks,” I mumbled pathetically.

“Oh, go on, please,” she chivvied. Anyone else would have been flattered. But me? I was terrified. 

“Sorry, but I can’t dance,” I tried to explain. The girl looked disappointed but gave up and walked back to the stage. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But I blew it.

It was true. I have never been able to dance. Too self-conscious. Too buttoned-up in that English way. The last occasion I recall dancing wildly was the 1977 Trevelyan College Summer Ball to which fellow student Zena Carter had generously invited me and whom I must have embarrassed immensely with my feeble attempt at ‘Saturday Night Fever’ moves I had just seen at Durham’s cinema. All the posh male students in attendance wore black tuxedos, while I looked completely out-of-place in a borrowed white suit, jigging around to the local live band ‘No Exit’ featuring a certain ‘Sting’. I still cringe. Three years later, my job would be adding hit songs by his next band ‘The Police’ to local station ‘Metro Radio’s playlist.

But that was in the future. Back in 1970, another reason I turned down the girl’s invitation to dance was that I had become terribly shy. At primary school I had considered myself no different from my classmates. Then, after moving to grammar school in 1969, I was developing a creeping sense of inferiority, not comprehending why my termly school reports criticised me for not being sufficiently vocal in class. Achieving classwork and exam results near the top of my year of sixty students was seemingly judged insufficient unless you flaunted your cleverness by regularly sticking up your hand in class and pushing yourself in front of teachers. In my new ‘streamed’ school, populated by many privately educated ‘prep school’ protegees, it appeared a boy might inexplicably be considered deficient for simply being ‘quiet’ and demonstrating no interest in blowing his own trumpet. I responded to my school’s reproaches by retreating into shyness in company … which dogged me for decades to come.

I might have felt less self-conscious about the girl walking up to me in the end seat of the fourth row on the left side of the centre aisle, had my mother not been sat right next to me. I was embarrassed. I was twelve years old, though I appeared older because of my height. I had written to the BBC Ticket Unit to request a pair of tickets to attend the live broadcast of Emperor Rosko’s Saturday lunchtime ‘BBC Radio One’ show at London’s Paris Theatre. None of my new schoolfriends appeared to be interested in the music I followed, so my mother had accompanied me on the train from Camberley.

The Paris Theatre had been an art-house cinema showing French films in Lower Regent Street until the BBC acquired it in 1946 and equipped it with a radio studio to record concerts and live comedy shows before a seated audience of around 400. From 1968, the weekday lunchtime ‘Radio One Club’ show had been broadcast live from the venue, hosted by a station DJ and showcasing a live band in front of an audience who had all sent to the BBC for their ‘Club’ membership cards. It was the station’s earliest attempt at outreach to its listeners and, by the 1970’s, was extended from London to cities around the country. In 1974, it was replaced by the touring ‘Radio One Roadshow’ whose format was similar to the large summer outdoor events Rosko had been organising independently since the 1960’s.

I was a huge fan of Rosko’s weekly radio show because he played reggae and new American soul records as yet unreleased in Britain. At that time, when around 100 new singles were released a week in the UK, record companies would wait to see which American singles proved successful in North American charts before committing to a British release date. This delay could be months, often allowing British pop artists to ‘cover’ American soul hits before the original was available in shops. My parents owned Julie Grant’s single of ‘Up On The Roof’ which had reached number 33 in 1962, but they had never heard the original by The Drifters which failed to chart in Britain. Grant successfully parlayed her chart success into several television appearances and a concert tour with The Rolling Stones, another British act recycling American black music at the time.

Each week I would record Rosko’s 90-minute Saturday show onto an audiocassette and listen to it repeatedly on headphones while I did my homework, before recording the next show over it the following weekend. This was the first occasion I heard James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’ single, Rosko playing the A-side one week and its B-side the next. It changed my life! Many outstanding tracks like this recorded onto my cassette I went on to buy as imported American singles from ‘Contempo’ at 42 Hanway Street or ‘Record Corner’ in Balham, the main retailers for new American black music as yet unreleased in the UK. Many of those songs first heard on Rosko’s show I still know by heart and treasure to this day. Without the benefit of a black music radio station in Britain (London soul pirate ‘Radio Invicta’ did not launch until December 1970), Rosko was the nearest experience available, even though he mixed reggae and soul with some pop and rock tracks.

What marked Rosko’s shows out from the rest of ‘Radio One’s output was that he simultaneously operated a mobile discotheque (the ‘Rosko International Roadshow’) and compered concerts by American soul artists touring the UK. That gave him a unique insight into the specific music British audiences wanted to hear, something that many of his studio-bound radio colleagues did not understand. The other factor was that Rosko was allowed to choose his own records to play on the radio, whereas the music in most shows was selected by ‘Radio One’ producers, the majority of whom preferred twee British novelty acts to ‘foreign’ reggae and soul. These ‘gatekeepers’ could determine through national airplay whether a record was to become a hit or not in Britain, so the charts inevitably reflected their value judgements.

I was fascinated when analysing the British singles charts from this period to discover the volume of chart-topping pop songs that are never played as ‘oldies’ nowadays because they sound embarrassingly quaint or sentimental. Compare that to the significantly lower chart positions achieved by many black music recordings considered now to be ‘classic’ or ‘standards’ [documented in my book ‘KISS FM’]. It is forgotten just how ‘white’ the BBC’s popular music station sounded overall, despite valiant attempts to play more soul by daytime DJ’s Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis. My appreciation of reggae was sparked by Rosko but had to be developed by evenings tuned to ‘Radio Luxembourg’ which Trojan Records paid to play their latest reggae releases. In 1971, singer Nicky Thomas even recorded the song ‘BBC’ to chastise ‘Radio One’ for not playing enough reggae, its release accompanied by a protest march to Broadcasting House. This had no evident impact on the station’s producers who were almost exclusively recruited from the white middle-classes and who moulded ‘Radio One’ in their own image.

This was why my visit (without dancing) to the Paris Theatre that Saturday was to become such a memorable experience, having enjoyed some of my favourite soul and reggae tunes played loudly through Rosko’s enormous sound system loudspeakers. When the girl asked me to dance, Rosko had been playing Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, a remarkably innovative Motown production by Norman Whitfield recorded to protest the Vietnam War with its chorus: “war … what is it good for? … absolutely nothing!”

A few years ago, I created a Spotify playlist of several hundred Whitfield productions, such remains my unbridled enthusiasm for his work (often with songwriting partner Barrett Strong). At the beginning of October this year, something prompted me to return to this playlist and update it with songs Whitfield subsequently recorded for his own label, notably by Rose Royce. I spent the following days listening non-stop to songs from my enlarged playlist such as ‘War’, ‘Stop The War Now’, ‘Friendship Train’, ‘Unite The World’ and ‘You Make Your Own Heaven And Hell Right Here On Earth’ all recorded half a century ago, all explicitly criticising violence and promoting peace. This was the music I was listening to only days later when news broke of atrocities committed in Israel. The music was appropriate … but the timing was inexplicably spooky.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/i-cant-dance-to-that-music-youre-playin.html]

If you go down to the lemon groves today, you’re sure of a big surprise : 2017 : Mar Menor, Spain

 The motionless car stood sideways across the road with its four doors wide open. A road accident? Moving nearer, nobody was visible either in the car or on the roadway. The engine was running and its headlights were bright, but there was no sign of another vehicle or an obstruction the car could have hit. If not a traffic accident, then what had happened?

I was taking my daily early morning run, normally uneventful, along a straight, flat tarmacked ‘agricultural road’ that led three kilometres out of the Spanish village as far as the shore of the Mar Menor inland sea. When the summer heat became this oppressive, runs proved feasible only during the darkest hour just before dawn. Other than an occasional farmer on his tractor, the roads were empty at that time of day as village life did not awaken until ten o’clock. Something about the car up ahead of me was definitely not right.

Wherever I found myself in the world, my morning constitutional involved an outdoor run. This exercise regime had been thwarted only in Moscow where, after several attempts, I was choked by engine fumes and endangered by cars driven along pavements; and in Cambodia where even a short walk in its humid heat immersed you in a sauna-like furnace. I had started running regularly forty years ago as a university student to relieve stress, initially circling the little used 400-metre Maiden Castle racetrack alongside the River Wear a few times, then having built up my regime daily until it reached dozens of laps.

At school, a weekly three-mile cross-country run had felt akin to punishment during Wednesday afternoon ‘Games’ in winter for the thirty of us disinterested in playing team football. Regardless of what the weather might throw at us, PE teacher Graham Taylor would send us out on the footpath up Coopers Hill, passing the John F Kennedy Memorial, the site of the Runnymede signing and Langham Pond, to return to our school Playing Fields more than an hour later. For a cheap thrill at the outset, boys would hold hands in a line and the end one touch the electrified fence alongside the A30 Egham By-Pass, awaiting the periodic pulse that sent a shock through each of us in turn. I am grateful to Taylor for having unwittingly initiated my fitness regime, despite his indifference in the face of my disdain for competitive sport. When I visited his office on my final school day after seven years to purchase a yellow ‘Strode’s’ sweatshirt, he scoffed: “Why would you want that now?” I still have it almost half a century later!

Not that I was wearing it in Spain that morning as, even before dawn, it was already way too hot. As I ran closer towards the car in the darkness, I could see it positioned across the roadway to shine its headlights into the neat rows of the unfenced lemon groves that stretched for miles on both sides. I was close enough now to make out that the car’s back seat and passenger seat were piled high with … lemons. Aha! Even Clouseau would have deduced that I had stumbled across a lemon thief operating under cover of darkness in the middle of nowhere. Despite my temptation to stick around and view the perpetrator, I had no desire to be shot at dawn. Instead, I ran on into the darkness, reached my end-point where sunrise was emerging over the sea, paused and returned along the same route to find the thief long gone as daylight was starting to seep across the landscape.

Friday was ‘street market day’ along the village’s ‘High Street’ where, that week, I spotted a stall with a man selling loose lemons, rather than those from marked agricultural crates. Was he the fruit bandit whose nocturnal handiwork I had witnessed? I never knew and, apparently, neither did the pair of municipal police who ambled through the market. It was an example of the combination of audacity and pettiness apparent in Spain. In the centre of another village, already I had watched an old woman nonchalantly rip out plants from a municipal flowerbed in broad daylight and carry them home, apparently unconcerned who might be watching. Do the Spanish even have a word for ‘shame’?

During another early morning run on the same route, I was surprised to find a woman’s matching check bra and knickers on the ground at the edge of the lemon grove in the middle of nowhere. My initial instinct was to leave the road and walk into the grove to convince myself this was not a horrific crime scene. Then I realised it might not be construed as civic duty for the police to find me possibly standing over the remains of one of the five thousand women murdered annually in Spain. So, yet again, I simply ran on … after photographing the evidence.

The only regular sign of life I saw on my route out of the village during daily runs was a group of men who stood outside the ‘Sport Bar’ at six in the morning on weekdays. They would await the arrival of minivans whose drivers shouted out the number of men required for that day’s work in the surrounding fields. As I passed the group, they would jeer and shout at me as if the notion of an old man running in order to maintain his health was a completely alien concept to them … which in rural Spain it probably was.

There was a memorable morning when, following their usual taunts, one man emerged from the crowd and started to run alongside me. I was not intimidated. I imagined he might continue a short distance, tire quickly and return to his mates. However, once we reached the limit of the village’s lit streets, he continued into the darkness of the lemon grove. Now I began to feel intimidated, particularly as he insisted on running so close beside me that our elbows touched, despite the unlit road being sufficiently wide for two vehicles. If I were to stop running, or to say anything, I was worried that he might turn on me, so I continued and ignored him.

After a while, he switched to running behind me, but so close that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. It was a stupid and dangerous move, as he could have easily tripped me up, so I responded by picking up my pace to pull away. This must have been misunderstood as a challenge rather than self-preservation, as he caught up, then ran closely beside me once again, then switched to running inches in front of me. If I had maintained my speed, I would have been in danger of stepping on his heels and tripping up both of us. I slowed my pace and watched as he continued to run on ahead into the darkness beyond. He must have felt so proud that day to brag to his mates how, during a quarter-hour, he had run faster than a foreigner three times his age. Angry and upset, I cut short my usual routine, turned around and re-entered the village on a longer route to avoid the ‘Sport Bar’. After that, I ensured that my morning run never passed there again.

Even everyday village life proved a challenge. Each occasion my wife and I shopped in its supermarket, we would be the only customers in the checkout queue humiliated by having to empty out the contents of our knapsack and handbag. We observed locals in its aisles pocket items from shelves with apparent impunity because it seemed self-evident that only foreigners were thieves. We also aroused ire because we paid by debit card, which the checkout person would insist on grabbing from us, inspecting this strange technology and ramming it into a prehistoric machine that only functioned sporadically and required a wait of several minutes to display ‘approved’.

Having spied a poster for an ‘open day’ at the village’s modern theatre building, we thought it would make an interesting diversion. However, before our visit inside had even reached the auditorium, we were confronted by an angry group of women who ordered us out of their building. Many such municipal projects become ‘white elephants’ created by the mayor’s ego simply to impress his chums and the electorate, regardless of practicality or cost. Belonging to neither category, we were evidently not welcome. From its published schedule, this particular theatre only staged productions on about a dozen days per year.

To make explicit this village’s unfriendliness to outsiders, it would have been an easy task to simply stick two huge posters on the outside of their building that state in big red lettering ‘DO NOT ENTER FOR NO MEMBER OF THE SOCIAL CLUB’ in English. That is exactly what the village’s social centre had done to ensure that no foreign tourist dared to cross its threshold, pointedly warning in a language we found no local spoke.

Scuttling back to our rented terraced house near the village centre, we were left to the mercy of our neighbours. On one side was a couple in their fifties who argued and watched television late at maximum volume. Friday evenings, a minibus would arrive to unload a group of primary school age children into their tiny house. Group sing-songs at high volume ensued … continuously. In pyjamas, I knocked on their front door at two o’clock in the morning to ask politely if the tuneless singing could be curtailed. The door was slammed in my face. At three o’clock, I knocked again as the noise had continued regardless. Nobody answered. Their ‘party’ ended at dawn. By afternoon, the minibus would return and take away the children. Some kind of cult?

The first we knew of our opposite neighbour’s business was our living room filling with smoke from an unidentifiable non-tobacco drug. I traced it to the electricity meter on the party wall, built so thinly that smoke from next door seeped through holes made for cables connecting the adjoining houses. Thick insulation tape had to be purchased to block the gaps around the meter and prevent us suffering involuntary highs. Noises from this neighbour’s kitchen, audible through the wafer-thin wall, sounded as if he was chopping vegetables all afternoon … but then it continued through the night. Eventually it dawned on us that he was a drug dealer cutting up supplies for customers. Why else would he drive a black sports car with gold wheel rims, darkened windows and a windscreen inscribed ‘PSAddicted’ that was parked out front? Not the kind of delinquent with whom to raise a neighbourly complaint, even though we often passed him sat outside on his front doorstep during daylight, openly smoking drugs.

One day there was a flurry of activity outside his house, including a brief visit from a local policeman. Later, a smartly dressed, middle aged man arrived and we could hear loud discussions inside the house surprisingly in French, a language never previously heard there. We could make out the lawyer instructing the dealer that he had a stark choice: negotiate with the family of the young girl he had hit while driving his car outside the local school and pay them an amount sufficiently persuasive to drop a prosecution; or flee to his native North Africa. We did not stick around long enough to learn of Kid Charlemagne’s fate.

Had we been staying in Sodom or Gomorrah? God may not have inflicted a plague of locusts on this village but he had dispatched its inhabitants a stern warning by infesting the whole place, not just the odd house, with cockroaches. You could exit your home in the heat of the noonday sun and see large bugs scuttling up the exterior walls and along the streets, totally oblivious to daylight or humans. Because household drains had been constructed without U-bends, the vermin could travel with ease through the sewers into buildings. Everything that we witnessed there resembled a biblical tableau … of a godforsaken village that was determinedly stuck in feudal times.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/if-you-go-down-to-lemon-groves-today.html]