Yesterday and being creatures of habit, we watched the Sunday morning Politics programmes, had breakfast and then made our usual journey to the park, having picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper at Waitrose first of all. Now that we have had ‘Last Night at the Proms’, I always have the feeling that summer is well and truly over. The jingoism prevalent at the Last Night of the Proms irritates me in these post Brexit days but a witty conductor’s speech can occasionally make up for this.

Having successfully negotiated my first year at University, we now tended to specialise and my regime was to concentrate upon Sociology and Social Anthropology. But we still studied some cognate subjects of which one was Comparative Politics where we studied the French, German and Russian political systems. At the end of year examinations, we were expected to retain some knowledge of the British and American political systems and the end of year examination was designed so that one could have questions that ran across all five political systems. This was so wide and vast in its scope that I think I made a conscious decision to not revise part of the syllabus as otherwise I felt my knowledge base ran the risk of being wide but incredibly shallow. But the second year of my undergraduate career had a pronounced political tinge to it as events unfolded. The Vietnam war was in full swing and the Student Union offered a ‘teach in’ whereby distinguished academics came along to debate the subject all day long and we often missed other lectures in order to attend it. The concept of the teach-in was an American import, I think, but the whole university was highly politicised at this time. For example, the president of the student’s union was Anna Ford who became well known in later years as a news reader and TV presenter whilst another president of the Students Union became editor of the Communist mouthpiece ‘The Morning Star’ and one of my fellow sociology students was to finish up as editor of ‘The Scotsman’ having made his career by editing the Student newspaper which was then called ‘The Independent’ and came out weekly with a circulation, I believe of about 20,000. But the biggest political event of the year was the Labour government’s debacle over raising the fees of the overseas students who attended our universities. At the time, overseas students paid the same fees as the rest of us and this was an almost derisory sum but the government decided to raise the fees for overseas students five fold. The university practically came to a halt as protests of various kinds were undertaken. As I was an avid reader of ‘The Guardian’ at that time, I had collected s series of press cuttings which were taken over by the Students Union and ‘blown up’ to create poster and campaigning materials. The university instituted several ‘ad hoc’ committees where the university came together as one body and we had the interesting experience that would never be countenanced these days when I chaired a particular sub committee one of whose members was the Professor of Geography and another of whom was one of my Social Anthropology tutors. Student protest and ‘sit ins’ were very much the order of the day in the mid 1960’s but in the campaign against the raising of the overseas student fees we acted completely constitutionally and organised a huge lobby of the UK Parliament. As one of the protagonists in this whole debate, I was allowed to be part of a small delegation that were ushered into a committee room of the House of Commons to make our case. This was quite an experience in itself as the technology at the time meant that a microphone was placed above one’s seat and one spoke in a normal voice but the whole of the committee could hear one’s contribution without a voice having to be raised. We did not bother with lobbying Conservative MPs who backed the action of the government but only those on the Labour back benchers. Having said that, the whole of our protests and completely constitutional practice did not result in a single change of policy in any of our details. We were led to reflect why Labour governments engaged in these kind of measures for which there is no popular appeal and which only seem to harm the rest of their agenda – the debate that we have over withdrawing the winter fuel allowance for pensioners is very much cut from the same cloth. In the university life, the Rag Week was a highly important event and generally took place just after the university had some mid-sessional examinations and where the tutors were busy marking and were quite happy to let their students have their head for a week. In our time, we raised £20,000 in Rag week and if we were to translate that into current values we would be talking of an amount of about £½ million pounds across all of the Manchester colleges. The Rag week took in students not only at Owens College (the main body of the university) and ‘The Tech’ (that was later to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) Some of the students performed impresssive money raising stunts – for example some of our number went down to Regent’s Park Zoo and captured a famous golden eagle known as ‘Goldie’ and kept it in a student flat at the top of a large residential student block known as the Fallowfield Tower after the Manchester suburb where it was located. All hands were on deck to help in this venture so the Biology students were enlisted to go and capture some mice to feed the beast whilst the electrical engineers rigged up a pirate radio station from the top of the tower. One of the really amusing stunts at the time was to paint footsteps from the statue of Queen Victoria in Piccadilly Square to the nearby public conveniences in a curving arc and then back up the statue again. Rag Day itself was given to the procession of floats which thousands of the townspeople came out to witness and to contribute money. As students, we also given to an all day drinking spree. In fact, it was at a Rag Day ball that I first really got together with Meg and we became an ‘item’ although we only tended to really go out once a week and to enjoy the occasional coffee with each other during term time.

On Sundays we fall into our normal routine which is the Politics programs at the start of the day followed by a visit to Waitrose for the purpose of picking up our Sunday newspaper and where we met with our University of Birmingham friend. Then after we return home and I cook the Sunday dinner, we view another episode of ‘Pilgrimage’ which somehow seems especially appropriate for a Sunday. After lunch, we completed our viewing of ‘Goodbye, Mr, Chips’ (which had an especially poignant ending) followed by the full length feature film of ‘Dad’s Army’

My first year at Manchester University was quite hard work and I typed up my lecture notes every single night. This had the advantage that at the end of the year I had a comprehensive (and much sought after) series of lecture notes that could be further day-glo’d or annotated and, in any case, fixed their content in my mind. We allowed ourselves to slip out to a local pub sometimes for an occasional half pint at the end of the day and for a bit of relaxation but the main focus of our leisure activities, apart from the Student Union, was the institution of the student party. At this time, in 1965 in Manchester there were no night clubs to speak of largely because of the very repressive policies of the then Chief Constable. I did in subsequent years work as a barman at Tiffany’s, run by Mecca but the admission charges were very steep (at about £55 per person at todays prices, £2.00 then) So the student party was ‘the scene’ of the moment. The pirate radio stations were to come along later – Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 but could be received in the Medway towns for example. So the music that we had consisted of portable record players and collections of Beatles and Rolling Stones records. Via one of my flatmates, I did listen to and acquire a taste for the folk songs of Joan Baez, a Mexican-American folk singer, well known for her protest songs but not particularly well known in 1965 in the UK. But party goers brought along their LP’s and someone acted as a DJ whilst the rest of us drank cans of beer, bottles of cheap wine and occasionally stuff sold cheaply from a barrel in some off-licences such as peach wine. The satisfying party always consisted of three stages. The first stage consisted of much drinking and the occasional bit of dancing if space would allow. This stage went on until about midnight after which there was always a certain degree of pairing off and this stage could last from a few minutes until about 3.00am in the morning. The final stage consisted generally of us sitting around on the floor, nearly always in semi darkness and engaging in arguments and discussions in which we believed in the Latin tag ‘In vino veritas’ This is a Latin phrase that means ‘in wine, there is truth’, suggesting a person under the influence of alcohol is more likely to speak their hidden thoughts and desires. For example, I remember having a very long and completely inconclusive discussion with the girlfriend of one of my school friends whether a true understanding of society and social conditions was best appreciated by a study of the social sciences (my position) or by a study of Literature such as Balzac and Dickens. Neither of us convinced the other but the argument went on for a long term. We had quite an interesting pecking order when we came along to discuss and argue with students on other courses. In general terms we quite liked the lawyers and the town planners with whom we could always have a good discussion but a low opinion of medics who we felt, with some justification, were unable to talk about anything much outside of their field of study. This was interesting, really, as the medics were generally much better qualified than we were in terms of A-level grades. So the party petered out by about 6.30 or 7.00 or certainly dawn when one would make one’s bleary way home. But one usually had a great sense of satisfaction when all of one’s thirsts and desires physical and intellectual had been satisfied. Now one of my flatmates also rode an Lambretta scooter as I did but mine was in Leeds and his was in Croydon. We decided that I should collect my Lanmbretta from Leeds and we would then share it on a 50:50 basis. This proved to be invaluable at the weekends because we very quickly discovered that whoever had the scooter that night got the girl (who being streetwise, realised that a male with transport could give one access to a generally empty flat for the evening) The one of us who did not have the scooter stayed behind quietly drinking the night away as it were. All of this was, of course, in the autumn term and although I had been introduced to Meg we were not actually going out with each other until about February of the following year when we paired off at a Rag Ball during the rag week celebrations in Manchester. Meg and I gradually made our parties a little more sophisticated by having cheese and wine but we were to discover that scraping off ground-in cheese after a night’s activities gradually took the shine of all of this. At one famous, or perhaps infamous, party (as our fame and address seemed to spread) we had more than 70 people crammed into nook and granny of a three bedroomed terrace house. After this, we rather felt that we had done the ‘partying’ bit and got it out of our system but as the popularity of our parties grew, we had to introduce a ticketing system and a series of whistles by the means of which we as the host could mobilise support from each to throw out gatecrashers, the more so if they were completely unknown to us. One occasion, we took a very drunk stranger that no one knew and hung him over the fence overlooking Platt Fields park outside our house. In the morning he had disappeared but we did not know how. We even had a party at out house in Leeds when my mother happened to be away for the weekend but this, too, turned out to be a disorderly event and was yet another reason to have done with partying. But in many ways the part of the party scene I enjoyed the most was the lengthy discussions in the wee small hours of the morning when we were anxious to put the world to rights.

Yesterday we looked forward to seeing our domestic help who had delayed her session with us from Wednesday to Friday. After catching up news, we visited our favourite cafe but had to dash up the hill to be in time for the carers’ late morning call. Then we discovered some fish pie which I had prepared some time ago but made for a very satisfying Friday meal. This morning we were delighted to visit out local (large) Anglican church which is being used for a ‘free’ concert venue as part of the Bromsgrove festival. We are treated to a pot pourri of organ and piano pieces followed by some welcome tea and biscuits.

Now we come to my early days at Manchester University. I was lodged with three other lads, with two of whom we subsequently shared a flat and I am still in contact with them. The third has moved out of our orbit, so to speak and I believe had a successful career in a Canadian IT firm. Once we had got over the trauma of registration (it took me a week with one thing or another), work started in earnest. There were about 200 of us I think who all studied the same four subjects of Economics, Economic History, Social Anthropology and Politics/Government. I remember quite vividly the various first seminar which I attended which I think was in Social Anthropology and the tutor asked a question of the 8-10 people in the seminar group. There was a pause of several seconds before anyone spoke but several thoughts raced through my mind. This was that I felt I had undergone a struggle to get to university having left school at the age of 16, having had two civil service jobs which I had evidently given up to go to University and then, of course, I had studied for my ‘A’-levels completely on my own. So as it is said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are drowning, so I felt that I had done so much to get to university and I was not going to let the opportunity of a University education pass me by. So I started to give my answer to the question and another of the students replied to me after which point the two of us were labelled as ‘talkers’ and argued with each other throughout the year whilst everything else stayed more or less silent. I must clarify at this point what when I say ‘argued’ I do not mean in the disputatious sense of the word. But in logic and critical thinking, an argument is a list of statements, one of which is the conclusion and the others are the premises or assumptions of the argument. I was also conscious of the fact from my little ‘Teach Yourself Logic’ which I studied intensively is that it is possible in Logic and Philosophy that in an argument between two participants it is possible to arrive at knowledge which in a sense is new knowledge for one or both of the parties. And so I carried on in my university career being conscious of the fact that it was quite possible that your own thought processes when articulating a position can be clarified in the course of argument/discussion with others. I have one or two abiding memories of my first year at Manchester. One of these is that the University Economic History department used to think of itself as a world leader in the subject which may have been true thirty years earlier with some distinguished scholars but now I got the impression that they were living out their former glories. So during the course of the year, I think I wrote at least five longish essays in Economic History and we were directed to go straight to the journals in Economic History to get to the heart of particular debates avoiding anything so mundane as a textbook. So when it came to the Economic History examination at the end of the first year which happened to be the first examination in the timetable, I felt reasonably well prepared and confident. To my absolute horror, every single essay that I had written failed to be represented on the Examination paper so I got the horrible feeling which does not happen very often when you read the first question on the paper and say ‘No’ to oneself before proceeding to read the rest of the paper. I do not think I have ever felt so much like absolutely bursting into tears – I had spent probably half of my first year researching and writing Economic History essays and I felt I could not answer a single question on the paper. When I shared this experience with others on the course, one explained that he was in the tutorial group of the Professor who had actually written the paper so that the contents of it came as no surprise. After this experience, I vowed to myself that I would never let this happen to any students that I might happen to teach in the future and therefore I always gave students an indication of the areas upon which a question was going to be asked so that ‘examination question spotting’ should not have to be a concern of students. In the event, at the end of the first course of the course, I achieved a Third in Economic History and a Third in Economics (the curse of having achieved an ‘A’ at A level and assuming I knew it all already) But I achieved a First in Sociology/Social Anthropology and a First in Politics/Government so it was fairly evident where my strengths did and did not lie. Sociology seemed to be the more interesting of these choices then but nowadays I would probably have chosen the Politics/Government option (but it was more like constitutional history rather than Politics as we know it today) The huge intake divided into the specialisms of Economics, Economic History, Politics, Sociology, Social Administration and several more besides. In practice, in the first year when we had mass lectures, one tended to know other students who were part of ones party going set rather than students who were to later follow one pathway or another. But the University Union had a very lively debating society, the debates being an opportunity to offer entertaining and witty contributions. I remember one very talented student of German (who failed his examinations) providing the lead-off debate on the subject of ‘Do children enjoy their childhood more than adults enjoy their adultery?’) But these debates that started at about 12.30 had to be terminated by 2.00pm when the afternoon lectures resumed.

Yesterday was my shopping day and we have a sitter who looks after Meg whilst I pop out to local grocery store. I try to get all of this done in just over an hour if I can but the local traffic can make a difference to the timings. Today, we go to ‘The Lemon Tree’ for our weekly treat of a bacon butty followed by a quick tour of the local charity shops to see what takes our fancy.

Whilst working at the Central Office of Information (COI) I quickly came to appreciate that I had to acquire some ‘A’ levels in order to get into University and I also made application to a range of Northern Universities to study almost anything. I secured an interview at the University of York which was then only about a year old – the University consisted of an Elizabethan manor house (I think) called Heslington Hall and the rest of the university was under construction but it was a largely green field site. I was interviewed by the Professor of Sociology (Raymond Fletcher) who I subsequently discovered had written the definitive student textbook on ‘The Family and Marriage in Britain’ He was assisted by a very young Economics tutor called Douglas Dosser who asked me various technical questions in Economics which I struggled to answer. But the older Professor asked me some other types of questions, one of which was whether there were any concepts in Economics or the other social sciences for that matter that had applicability outside the immediate field. I rather took the bait at this point and waxed lyrical about Marginal Utility theory which is the theory that increasing increments of a good (pints of beer) become of less import to the individual as one consumes more. At the end of the interview, Raymond Fletcher said to his colleague ‘Are we decided?’ by which he meant that he had made up his mind and his younger colleague was not in a position to argue. I had applied for a degree in Sociology about which I knew nothing although I had read a periodical called ‘New Society’ in earlier years but I was offered a place on their joint Sociology and English degree course about which I was over the moon. I remember earnestly requesting that they inform me of the grades that I needed to achieve and was told that all I had to do was to satisfy the matriculation requirements which meant, in practical terms, two ‘A’ levels at a grade of ‘E’ which was the lowest grade of pass. This was almost unheard of at the time but I think I know what happened in my case. Faced with the very unusual situation of a candidate with a good range of ‘O’ levels supplemented by the Civil Service Open Competition result and four years of work experience, they decided to take a gamble on me. At this time, in 1965, it was really quite unusual for mature students to apply to university but as the years rolled by the universities realised that students in this category were quite a good bet and of course the Open University was to underline that point when it was established in 1969, some five years later. Also, I have a shrewd suspicion that in the absence of a report from a headmaster, my immediate library boss had written me a reference which I suspect was sufficiently glowing for the reference not to be ignored. All of this happened, as I recall on a Friday and it was a very wet and rainy day in York. I remember walking through the streets of York going to the bus station with tears of joy rolling down my face but, of course, as it was raining so hard nobody noticed that I was weeping copiously. I mention the fact about a glowing reference because the following Monday, I received a scrappy bit of a duplicated letter from Manchester University without so much as an interview with the same offer. Hence I think that the admissions tutor at Manchester must have come to the same judgement and for the same reasons as the professor in York. As Manchester was an old and established university and I already had at least one school friend there, I chose Manchester over York because it was a case of the established versus the unknown. York University subsequently established a high reputation in the social sciences and had I graduated from there then I think the degree would have had the same street credibility as one from Manchester but the Manchester University offer seemed, at the time, to be the more sensible offer to accept. One complicating factor about the Norther Universities at this point was they demanded a ‘University Test in English’ in addition to one’s ‘A’-levels, even if you already had an ‘A’-level in English. I think this was instituted primarily for the Science students but the science faculties argued that standards of English were declining and so everyone ought to take the test. It made the actual process of registered so much more fraught as you had to prove you had passed the test, even though a certificate was not issued to you (but rather a form ‘Q’ followed by a form ‘R’) when I worked at the National Lending Library, I did actually acquire an English Literature ‘A’ level at the grade of ‘D’ I actually feel quite proud of having achieved this certificate because I only studied for three weeks to obtain it. There were two Shakespeare plays of which one I studied one for three weeks and completely ignored the other. I read some Chaucer in translation the night before the examination and then faced with Chaucer in the original Middle English, I could just about remember enough of the story line to make it look as though I was actually translating rather than remembering. I remembered the poetry form what I had studied for ‘O’ level so the three weeks of preparation, plus a good memory allied with good examination technique ‘(aka known as ‘Bullshitting’ such as ‘There are evident parallels to be drawn at this juncture etc. etc.’) I must say I have always been slightly cynical about the value of ‘A’-levels in the Arts subjects because it would be impossible to gain a similar qualification in the Sciences, Languages, Music etc. after only three weeks of study. To underline this point, my attempt to gain an ‘A’-level in French failed and I got another pass at ‘O’ level which I did not need as I already gained this ‘O’ level some years earlier. In my later professional career, we used to recruit students without ‘A’-levels if we could find some good alternative evidence that they could profit from a degree course but of course, 1965 was a very different era.

Yesterday is the day when our domestic usually calls around but this week she was going to come along on Friday instead. I have got quite a lot to moan about to her this week as the care agency has been falling short of requirements this week. We had a fairly horrendous day last Tuesday when one thing went wrong after another. For a start, I needed to be the ‘second hand’ to assist the care worker first thing in the morning, Then the promised ‘sit’ call did not materialise as they had forgotten that the scheduled care worker had actually returned to college. Half way through the afternoon, I discovered that the downstairs toilet was blocked as the morning worker had put a non-disposable wipe down it. I stripped to the waist, donned the only Marigold glove that I had which happened to be the left hand, cleared the loo which was not a pleasant job but at least succeeded. Then the scheduled care workers were an hour late in the afternoon as they had encountered horrendous traffic jams (probably because it was raining all afternoon and this plays havoc when parents use the car to pick up children from school and the whole system jams up) When the care workers turned up for the evening session, Meg had a bad mood change which made getting her to bed somewhat traumatic and, as I suspected would be the case, it took her a couple of hours to get to sleep. So it was one of those days that we all experience from time to time which it is best to forget.

Life in the civil service hostel proved ‘interesting’ at least for the first few weeks. Initially, I shared a downstairs dormitory with three other quite adolescent lads who were all into rumbustious horse play which I did not actually like but had under group pressure to join in. After a couple of weeks, the Personnel Officer at the COI sent for me and I assumed (wrongly!) that I was going to have a pleasant chat about how I was settling in and so on. Instead, I was greeted with the fact that the ‘lady’ who had the basement flat below the hostel had made an official complaint to the hostel warden about the thumps and noise coming from the room above and this then resulted in each one of us being summoned within our various ministries to explain our bad conduct. I explained about the horseplay and then mentioned that the occupant in the flat below us seemed to have a succession of men throughout the early evening and wee small hours of the morning followed by a series of all night parties. We concluded, righty or wrongly, that the occupant of the downstairs flat was ‘on the game’ and when I mentioned to the personnel officer that the complainant was probably a prostitute, I have never seen anybody work so fast to get me out of the office. After all, she might have assumed that I was in a type of moral danger but she was powerless to do anything about, so I promised to be more quiet in the future and was quietly amused by the whole episode. Later I was given the opportunity to share a top floor double bedroom rather than a dormitory at a considerably enhanced rent which I could scarcely afford but there was a consolation that my fellow flatmate came from Leeds and was working for a year before he went off to Cambridge University. We were given a breakfast and an evening meal as part of our hostel rent but the remainder of the time I was desperately short of money. For lunch I often had half a pound of broken biscuits which cost me about 4d (1.5p) but when I could afford it, I treated myself to a warmed Cornish pasty which cost about 6p. The London Hostels Association had a sort of inter-hostel sports and social organisation the main function of which was to arrange football matches between the various hostels. We used to play on some football pitches in an obscure part of Regent’s Park and the games were generally shambolic, not least because we did not any uniform strip and it was not uncommon to pass the ball to a member of the opposing team who, similarly, did not have any appropriate strip. However, I became a close friend of the Sports and Social organiser of the hostels association, so much so that I almost became his Man Friday. My friend was training to be an opera singer and tried to inform me about some of the roles in the operatic pieces that he had been practising which was lost on me then but not now. Through his good offices, we actually received a grant of £20.00 from the Lords Taverners (cricketing group) which was meant to be spent on cricket equipment. But we had some old cricket equipment lying about and did not really need it so I went down to a sports shop in central London and bought some football strip. I could buy whatever I wanted so I went for a black top and then (very fashionable) cut away black shorts so that the whole team looked like an assembly of referees. This did such magnificent things for the morale of the team so on the first occasion instead of losing about 11-1 which was the norm we won by several goals, such is the tremendously motivating effect of some good kit. Apart from the football, I did actually run some inter hostel general knowledge quizzes which provided us with something to do in the evenings. I need to explain that there was no TV and none of us could afford to go to pubs or anything that cost any money at all. I then helped to compile and published the inter hostel magazine of which the social organiser was technically the editor but actually we split the task between us, In this, I wrote some stories and some jokes, as I remember and this is when I first got the taste for writing, publishing and putting together a communal magazine. I also save up as hard as I could and purchased an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter (which later I discovered was regarded as a modern design classic and was featured as such when I saw an exemplar of it decades later in the Design section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) The typewriter was to be my constant companion in the next few years because I used it to type up all of my lecture notes when I eventually attended Manchester University.

Yesterday we were pleased to continue our wedding anniversary celebrations carried over from the day itself which was on Monday. The Waitrose staff were exceptionally good to us, donating a special chocolate cake to the five of us which we consumed with much relish – and many thanks to the staff. I wore the special ‘psychodelic’ tie that I generally reserve for birthdays and anniversaries after which it will certainly be relegated to the tie rack once again. I have recently learned that a special concert is to be held in our local Anglican church on Saturday morning and the timings are excellent for us from 10.30-12.00. So I have found a way in which I can get Meg’s wheelchair up the hillock and into the church so that is something to which we can look forward.

After I had joined the Central Office of Information in 1964, little was I to realise that this was going to be a most significant year in news terms. One event was the death and subsequent funeral of Winston Churchill and the world’s press were going mad to verify each bit of Churchilliana it was possible to find. So the whole of our team was immensely busy and then there was the lying in state. I actually did queue in, I think, Westminster Hall and we filed slowly past the coffin as I had the sense of ‘history in the making’ Together with several other hostel residents we went down to be part of the crowd that watched as Churchill’s body was drawn past us on a gun carriage. Our hostel warden who was both Australian, racist and a monarchist allowed us boys to go down the watch the procession and arranged that a dinner be available to us half way though the afternoon when we returned. A second major event was the fact it exactly 700 years since the founding of the first Simon de Montfort Parliament in 1265. This was an important step in extending the role of ordinary people in government and Simon de Montfort’s 1265 parliament deserves to be remembered as a crucial step on the road to modern democracy. The British government devoted much energy and resource to this celebration of Parliament and again meant quite long but interesting days as we tried to feed the world’s press with whatever we could muster. There were some remarkable individuals employed at COI and quite a sense of history as well. For example, Sir John Betjeman the one time poet laureate was employed at the predecessor Ministry which the wartime Ministry of Information. Many of the older generation may remember the lines penned by John Betjeman in ‘A SubAltern’s Love Song’ of which the most famous couplet is ‘Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn/ Furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun’ Now the person to whom the poem was actually addressed (not the Joan Hunter Dunn as in the poem indicates) was well known to personnel in the Ministry as a clerk with whom Betjeman was besotted so her identity was an open secret. In theory, we were meant to supply information only to the rest of the Whitehall machine but occasionally illegitimate queries got through. Members of the public were directed to their local reference library but on one famous occasion I answered the telephone at about 1 minute before 9 and on the phone was the managing director of a company that made water pumps. The Queen was due to arrive later on that day and he wanted to let her Majesty know how long it would take one of his pumps to empty all of the water in the Serpentine (which is a 40-acre recreational lake in Hyde Park, London, created in 1730 at the behest of Queen Caroline). Obviously I could not answer this question but I referred him to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works who might have been able to give a guesstimate of the answer. On another occasion I was asked the colours of the Union Jack and upon replying ‘Red, White and Blue’ was then asked to specify which shade of white, which red and which blue were to be used. The Pantone system was only developed in 1963 and this was only one year earlier than my period of employment. But the Exhibitions Division of COI must have known the exactly right paint hue and so the query was transferred onto them. Occasionally, a query would be addressed to us and we would transfer the enquirer to a body better able to answer the query which occasionally got back to us as it was assumed that the COI should have the answer to everything. I did notice that to get any kind of promotion within the COI I would get nowhere without a degree so I needed to some GCE ‘A’ levels as soon as I could. I chose ‘Economics’ because I was desperately short of money but it seemed an interesting social science and then ‘Logic’ because it was the shortest possible syllabus I could find in the information available to me. To help me study the course in Logic, I did purchase a set of duplicated copies of a course from a correspondence college called Wolsey Hall College, Oxford. I had known about this so-called College because my mother had used these notes to help her prepare for some ‘O’-level courses that she need to pass in order to get in the then teacher training Colleges in 1955. In the event these notes served me well and I studied them whilst I could which was generally on my journeys along the Bakerloo line between the hostel and my place of work. Upon learning this, I was rescued by my life-long friend, Jo, who let me go along to her house for the three weekends before my examinations so that I could revise intensively whilst she fed me. This undoubtedly help me to do well in the examinations which of course I studied completely on my own and without the benefit of any submitted any work to get marked. I applied to a variety of universities mainly in the North of England to study practically anything. I did gain two good ‘A’-level scores (an A in Economics and a B in Logic) on the basis of which I finished up at Manchester University, where I read for a BA(Econ) which was the generic title of a degree course in the social sciences. There it was that I met Meg within the first few weeks of arriving at University and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today being Tuesday we carried on some additional wedding anniversary celebrations by going down to Waitrose and entertaining the rest of ‘the granny gang’ with the promised cake which we know is always available in the store. The store very kindly gifted us the cake which was very good of them but we are about their oldest and most loyal of their customers. Approaching mid September, the weather now has a decided autumnal feel to it and although we do not mind a little light drizzle such as we experienced on Sunday, the wheelchair wheels always require a certain degree of cleaning as we enter our hallway to ensure that we do not make a mess of the carpets by transferring the roadside grit to the inside of the house.

Upon arriving in London to take up my post at the Central Office of Information, I was directed to make initial contact with reception where someone from personnel was detailed to look out for me. Her words sent a chill through my heart as she announced that as I had had library experience, I was going to be detailed to work in the Reference Library of the Reference Division of COI. I tried to indicate to them that I knew nothing about libraries as the National lending Library was staffed by scientists who filled professional librarians with despair by ignoring nearly all of the rules of what was considered good library practice. For example, none of the periodicals was given a classification number but a series of rules were applied to standardise the title for the library records and then everything was filed from A-Z. I had visions of the Reference Library being stuffed full of little old ladies with fingerless gloves on poring over card indexes and the like but the die was already cast and so I was marched upstairs. My worst fears were not to be realised, though. The Library was indeed a library but not in the conventional sense and was nowadays what would be called an ‘information centre’ Its function was not to lend out books as such but to research and supply relevant information to the rest of the Reference Division who produced each year ‘Britain – An Official Handbook’ mainly for the use of embassies abroad. It worked with Whitehall departments and public bodies to produce information campaigns on issues that affected the lives of British citizens, from health and education to benefits, rights and welfare. The rest of the Central Office of Information, henceforth COI, was full of departments which again was very unlike the Civil Service. For example, there was a Films and TV division which made official government films such as road safety films and an Exhibition Division that would design and mount the UK’s pavilions at overseas trade fairs and the like. As it turned out, my year at the COI was one of the most interesting and productive that it was possible to be. Although we all had our official list of duties, in practice we answered telephone queries from the rest of Whitehall to assist in the marketing and press offices of the various ministries. COI was full therefore of journalists (in the Reference division), TV and media people (in the Films and TV department) and so on. One of my official duties as the office junior was to arrange for the distribution of newspapers across the various parts of the Reference Division and we took every newspaper then produced including ‘The daily Worker’ (which was to rebranded as ‘The Morning Star’ as the official mouthpiece of the Communist party – it was said that the newspaper was excellent on constitutional issues) The library was headed by an emigre Hungarian who treated me kindly and benevolently and it was here that I met Jo, the brilliant young widow who took me under her wing as it were and became a life long friend. She died in her 90’s and I devoted the whole of my day’s blog to her when I heard the sad news of her demise as our frienship lasted from 1964 to 2024 so we had been life long friends for sixty years. The other staff were very varied, one being a young and I suspect gay man who was passionate about and incredibly well informed about every aspects of the arts and cultural life in Britain. There was one other young person who had performed the office junior role but moved on to make way for me and a friendly older female worker. Most of our work consisted of answering queries from all over the rest of the Whitehall machine and we always kept an ear open to other’s conversations in case you happened to have a lead that would help them in their present enquiries. A few days after I joined the Library, it was the date of General Election which the Labour Party won by three seats. Our Hungarian boss had a transistor radio on his desk tuned to the election news which resulted in knife edge win for the Labour Party. The Tory Party had won three general elections in 1951, 1955 and 1959 and by 1964 there was felt to be a need, then as now, for a change. The Labour party had made massive gains in the urban results declared in the early part of the evening but then the results from the Tory shires kept trickling in making a Labour victory seem more and more problematic. For accommodation, I had been offered a place in the London Hostels Association which, as it name suggests, provided hostel accommodation for young impecunious civil servants. My hostel was in Broadhurst gardens and I made the journey every day down the Bakerloo line from Finchley Road to Lambeth North which was a journey of about eight Tube stops. As I made my journey home each evening, the placards of Evening Standard newspapers was full of warnings such as ‘Battle for the Pound’ as immediately after the election of the Labour Government many international investors (then dubbed by Harold Wilson as the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’) took fright and withdrew funds from the London capital markets. So the incoming Labour government with a majority of only three had an immediate fight on its hands not to be destabilised as it fought to preserve the parity of the pound vis-a-vis the rest of the world’s currencies. My journey across London by Tube took about 20 minutes and I only had a short walk at each end of the journey to reach the appropriate Tube station so travel was not one of my difficulties. We managed to get a cut price season Ticket for the Tube which helped considerably as well as it could be used for out of work activities as well.

Today is our 57th wedding anniversary but it is a very low key affair given the other milestones that we have celebrated. Our 25th wedding anniversary was held in Mexico but for our 40th wedding anniversary we really pushed the boat out and had four celebrations in total, one in Harrogate in Yorkshire (primarily for members of my family) one in the Midlands for friends, neighbours, one in Southampton for our friends, neighbours and work colleagues and the final one in Santiago de Compestela in Northern Spain for our Spanish friends. For our 50th, we had a fairly large celebration here in Bromsgrove and then we had organised on in Santiago de Compostela which I attended but Meg could not because at that time she was plagued by a succession of disabling migraines, which have nor fortunately ceased. Today we made track for ‘The Lemon Tree‘ where we have promised ourselves some goodies for the day and tomorrow, when we see our Waitrose friends we shall some celebrations delayed by a day and share some cake with our friends. On our way down into town, we bumped into a couple of our Church friends who came round with some Prosecco to help us celebrate in the late afternoon which made a wonderful day for us. We also acquired some goodies from the AgeUK shop across the road which is often the case.

The question might well be asked what happened to terminate my period of association and employment with the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate and the short answer to all of this is that this association ceased when I started work at the Central Office of Information in London. Although I was more than happy working at the National Lending Library, from the ages of 17-19, I really wanted to see the world and I found out that I could do this by joining the Foreign Office as a Grade B6 clerical officer where I would almost certainly be posted abroad. You would have thought that it would have been quite an easy job to transfer from the scientific to the home (domestic) civil service but there seemed to be some ‘silos’ in place to make this difficult. The simplest way to achieve my objective was to enter the Civil Service Open competition which were set at a more or less GCE ‘O’ level standard. I was obliged to take English and Arithmetic as two core subjects and then chose to study French, Physics and Chemistry and I still have the examination papers that I took in my files at home. I do not remember doing any real preparation or revision for these exams and I am a fairly confident examinee in any case and then the results were published. The total marks of in the five subjects I took was 900 and I scored exactly 600 which makes my average percentage mark very easy to calculate at 66.67%. The Civil Service Commission published a list of the entire 6085 candidates and everybody slightly above a certain mark would be offered employment as a Clerical Officer and candidates in a lower tranche of marks would qualify as a clerical assistant. My position in the list was 77th which out of 6085 candidates works out as the 98.735 percentile point (i.e. 1.265% candidates scored a high composite mark than I achieved) So having achieved a degree of success I was then offered a list of ministries in London of which the Central Office of Information seemed to be the most interesting. This was the post war successor of the Ministry of Information and proved to be a very interesting and exciting period of my life. When I was chatting with some of our younger care staff, one of them asked my if I knew my IQ. As it was, I did not and I have always had rather a disrespect for this metric as I undertook more studies in the social sciences. There was a massive expose of the work of Sir Cyril Burt, the so called ‘father’ of the IQ test who believed in the ‘heritability’ of intelligence, now a discredited concept. In order to prove this statistically, one needed to compare the measured IQ of the young person with that of their parents but Burt had not taken any measurements of their parents. So Burt estimated what the intelligence level of the parents might be by studying the IQ of the school children he tested which was evidently no sort of objective test at all. This was all exposed in a great investigation by the Sunday Times in the 1970’s but by this time, the formation of the post WW2 school system which was based upon grammar schools for which to pass the infamous 11+ examination had done its best (or its worst). It has been argued that the whole of the school system was based upon the Platonian concepts of ‘Men of gold, men of silver and men of brass’ and the IQ test was a way if identifying which was which and selecting for the ‘appropriate’ level of school. Nonetheless, being asked about my IQ and certainly not wanting to take a rather spurious ‘know your own IQ’ tests, I reasoned to myself that the Civil Servant Open competition examinations and identifying where one stood in the pecking order so to speak, one could probably quite easily concert my position of 77/6085 into an IQ score. There are masses of online calculators from which I derived a figure of 133 for what that it worth. But when I thought further about it, the sample of individuals putting themselves forward for five GCSE type examinations must be a skewed sample of the entire population as one would not expect many individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy to put themselves forward for five examinations. So I did some quick investigations and discovered that in 1964 some 17% of the population gained 5 passes at GCSE ‘O’ level. Then taking this into account and attempting to correct for what initially was a skewed distribution, I then consulted some online calculators that now came up with an IQ score of 143. So I am prepared for settle for 140 as a reasonable mid-way figure although I am still not convinced that it has real utility. In my later years of teaching, I discovered an index of ’emotional’ intelligence which I suspect is a far better guide to how well individuals function in practical work situations than an IQ score the currency of which I feel is now spent.

Yesterday, we were delighted to make our progress down the hill and to meet up with our Saturday crowd in Waitrose. We have noticed that the lamp standard into which a car crashed and the driver lost his life and we were only about one hundred feet away has now been replaced. In addition, the grass has been mowed and all of the last remnants of the crash cleared away so not a trace remains of a memorial to the driver who sadly lost his life.

One of the jobs that I did at the Old Swan hotel was to act as a porter and specifically a night porter. But we had an ‘all hands on deck’ hour to deal with the coaches that arrived to disgorge their usually American visitors on two or thee occasions a week. The hotel was on a route which ran from London to Stratford on Day 2, a journey up to Yorkshire and the Old Swan on Day 2 and then a trip up some of the Yorkshire dales and onwards towards Edinburgh. Four coaches with 40 occupants each is evidently 160 bedrooms that are required and not many hotels would have the capacity to accommodate the coaches. But on arrival, the customer’s bags had to be marked up with their room number and then it was our job to deliver these to the right rooms as quickly as possible. You might have thought that this was a fairly simple task but the job had its complications as with many ancient hotels there were sections of corridors that went up or down three or four steps and we had to utilise a trolly with those wheels arranged in a triangle to negotiate these. Each room was equipped with a gas fire (in those days) and often the Americans had no knowledge or experience of a gas fire so we often needed to light it for them. Sometimes, they were nervous that the gas fire would consume all of the oxygen in the room. One of the reasons why we liked this job was that we were always tipped and sometimes quite generously. The hotel used to sell books of matches that retailed for about 2d but I use to buy a quantity of them out of my own money and then donate the book to the guest after the gas fire had been ignited. Needless to say, this gesture paid for itself several times over. The other portering job that I remember was as a ‘night’ porter. I suppose there was a need for some portering staff for guests who arrived late in the evening but I do not remember that much about our duties except that we were probably trundling trestle tables and chairs from one part of the hotel to another. But a nightly job was to use one of those big old Hoover vacuum cleaners to hoover the large function room that was typically in use throughout the day and therefore had to be cleaned at night. This job took about an hour to complete as the room was so large but when the job was completed and there was nothing else to do after about 2am, we were allowed to curl up on one of the sofas and go to sleep for the rest of the night for which we got paid as well. We did put on a rather snazzy green porter’s apron to distinguish us from other staff and these duties were quite pleasant compared with the dish washing. There were evidently times in the ebb and flow of the year when the hotel was relatively quiet but there was always quite a brisk Saturday and Sunday lunch time trade. It was one of those hotels where families who wanted to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or other special occasion would forget about the expense and treat themselves to a meal. Indeed, when our son was at boarding school in York, my wife, son and mother would treat ourselves to a meal at the Old Swan and these we generally enjoyed, But we did have a celebratory meal for family members on the occasion of our 40th wedding anniversary and our stay, and that of our son, was generally disappointing and we suspected that we would never stay at the hotel ever again. Harrogate being a conference centre, there were two occasions that I remember when the hotel was full and absolutely buzzing. These were the Toy fair held in the spring and when manufacturers, wholesalers and other toy retailers would come to some kind of decision as to what toys were going to be the best sellers at Christmas time some months later. The other large conference event was the Antiques fair and I think this held in the Autumn. After the Harrogate conference centre was built in the 1970’s evidently this pattern of conferences would evolve over the years. In a hotel of this size – I think about 375 bedrooms – it was evident that on a statistical basis there would be about one death a year in a hotel bedroom. Nowadays, of course, we would have crash teams, ambulances with wailing sirens and flashing lights and a general hullabaloo. But we had a much more sensible and pragmatic solution as to how dispose of the dead body without attracting undue attention. As porters we often had to transport rolls of carpet from one part of the hotel to another and when a death occurred, we simply rolled the corpse in a length of carpet and brought them downstairs in the utility lift. I never had to do this myself but I was reliably informed it was a not infrequent event and the staff had to learn to ensure that the feet of the dead person did not stick out from the carper roll. In later years, the Old Swan became well known as the hotel with Agatha Christie associations. It was to the Old Swan that Agatha Christie famously disappeared in 1926, resulting in a public furore over the 11 days that she could not be traced. Nowadays this is made into a feature of the hotel and events such as ‘Mystery Weekends’ have tried to capitalise upon this famous association. But when I worked there, nobody really mentioned it. This hotel became an important part of my life because it was not only a source of income but also one good meal a day. Also, there is something a little ‘special’ about working in a large hotel like this which becomes a society in miniature and some of the lessons that it taught me I have retained for the rest of my life.

Yesterday morning I went to get our weekly shopping done as with the delivery of Meg’s bed yesterday and a morning punctuated by the visit of the Eucharistic minister from church, our normal shopping routine was disrupted. Meg and I made our way down the hill, somewhat later than usual to Waitrose for our elevenses this Friday morning with our University of Birmingham friend.

In my career at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, I had now been promoted, as it were, from washing dishes at 12.5p an hour to washing glasses for the bar at 20p an hour. Why the differential in pay rate was in operation escapes me now, as it did then, for one was exchanging heavier and more arduous work for lighter and less onerous work but at a higher rate of pay. It was not too long before I was prompted again to become a cocktail barman in the main hotel bar (even though, paradoxically, I was under the legal age for drinking when this happened) I exchanged the white linen overall I wore when washing dishes for a little jacket which was like a small waistcoat and pointed to a small ‘V’ at the back. We were expected to buy and wear our own black trousers and a pair of black shoes as we now served the public. Although behind the bar most of the shift, one had to collect empty glasses and do a general tidying up to make the bar area presentable (emptying the ash trays, wiping down the tables, keeping them supplied with crisps and nuts and so on) The rate of pay was 25p an hour i.e. I had doubled my wages but the hours of work were generally shorter. There was, of course, the opportunity to get tips and we always found the Americans generous in the extreme and the English generally stingy. One was expected if the night was a quiet one and a customer wanted to make conversation to be able to do so on a wide range of topics. We were instructed if a customer bought us a drink not to abuse this by having a real drink but taking the price of a small soft drink such as a coke or a tonic water. Although I started off in the main bar, the hotel management decided to open up another more specialised area. So we had what was termed a cocktail bar which specialised in serving some quite exotic sea food type dishes and this was staffed by an experienced waiter and myself. Everything seemed to be going extremely well and we made a great team until one night I discovered that the waiter was outrageously drunk which I suppose was an occupational hazard. As a young barman, I was actually given a great deal of autonomy on occasions. If there was a large function such as a dinner and dance then a temporary bar would be set up on trestle tables. One quickly learnt what kind of stock was required and the glasses were arranged in neat looking diamonds together with cigarettes, nuts and crisps. We had to make a good guesstimate as to what stock was required (gin and tonic and Double Diamond beers being the favourites), organise a float of money from the hotel reception, then at the end of the evening do everything in reverse including making sure that the stock sold and the money collected were in a sort of balance with each other. The thing that was particularly enjoyable, though, was when we were detailed as washers up in a part of the hotel when a large wedding reception was organised. I well remember that one occasion, one hundred of champagne were ordered for some three hundred guests. We used to say to ourselves on occasions like this that there will 90 bottles of champagne for them and 10 for us, which we consumed in beer glasses behind the scenes. Serving is so frantic of course that nobody could possibly literally count the bottles of champagne as they made their way into the function room so I drank more good champagne when I was about 17 or 18 than I have ever done since. Of course, we ensured that the guests never ran out of the champagne that they wanted so we always had some in a strategic reserve. It is said that everybody remembers what they were doing on the night that President Kennedy was shot, which was 22 November, 1963. Although I was working during the day at the National Lending Library, I would still do occasional evenings and functions when called upon to do so and indeed, I was working with the chief barman-cum-cellarman on a temporary bar such as I have described when a member of staff shot into the room to exclaim that Kennedy had been shot. Christmas was always a special occasion in the hotel because it was one of those types of hotel where families would spend their Christmas and so the hotel would be full. The management imported a bevy of young female catering college students from a catering college in South Yorkshire to act as a temporary waitresses and, of course, to the local lads employed in the hotel this was like manna from heaven. The young waitresses were supplied with some temporary accommodation in an obscure part of the hotel and so seemed to be around for every meal and I did strike up a friendship with a couple of them who actually came from Middlesbrough as I remember. When the Test matches were on, I did serve Fred Trueman, the famous English bowler on one occasion. My abiding memory of him was with two quite gorgeous looking young women, one on each arm, of whom one was a blonde and the other a brunette. Whether it enhanced his performance on the field of play the following day, I was never able to ascertain. Being what was technically described as a cocktail barman, I was expected to know a range of cocktails. Typically at Christmas people would come and order a ‘sidecar’ and the like. But half the time, the customers themselves were unaware of the actual ingredients particularly if a ‘John Collins’ was ordered as there are so many different concoctions by which it can be made. We had a little book to consult on occasions when we were stumped and on the occasions when there was some ambiguity we used a certain amount of guile to extract from the customers what their preferred recipe was and so went on our merry shaking way.