I became a university student for the first time in September 1965, when I registered for a B.Sc(Econ) at the London School of Economics. I was, as far as I know, the first member of my family to go to university, at a time when very few school-leavers did so. I was not, however, a school-leaver. My secondary school career had ended in failure when I got only two A levels (in chemistry and maths). I switched to social sciences at Handsworth Technical College across the other side of Birmingham. Freed of the obligation to attend sport, school assemblies, cadet training and other ‘character-building’ nonsense, I was able to get three good A levels in a year. Handsworth Technical College also prepared me for the way in which universities organised their teaching, with lectures and seminars spread through the week, with long gaps for self-directed study.
Universities in those days were small institutions, and undergraduates got the chance to listen to lectures by and discuss their ideas with the most elevated of intellectuals. I remember lectures by Michael Oakeshott, Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the Labour Party), William Robson, Geoffrey Sterne and Peter Self. My tutors included Alexander Irvine (later Lord Chancellor), Edward Mishan and William Letwin (father of Oliver). The were many essays to write, but exams only at the end of the first and third years. There was none of the endless grind of modular continuous assessment which students experience these days. The LSE was indeed a wonderful place to learn, and not just about economics and politics.
The LSE was in easy walking distance of everywhere in central London, near an incredible range of cinemas, theatres and galleries. To me, the act of becoming a student in London involved joining the world, and learning about art and culture. I went to the theatre when I could afford it, and the cinema almost every week. I bought a student membership of the British Film Institute, and spent any free afternoons watching classic old films. Saturday evenings were less cultural. These were spent at a dance in one of the colleges of the University in a determined (but usually unsuccessful) attempt to find a woman.
This rich life was possible despite a severe shortage of cash. My grant was £110/term, from which I met all living and travel costs. I visited home every half-term and vacation, and saved money by hitch-hiking. I phoned my parents from a call box every Sunday morning at 11am. My main recreation was walking, and I travelled over large areas of London each Sunday.
Most students in the 1960s lived in halls of residence (which in those days were more like barracks than flats) or lived in ‘digs’ with families who registered with the university to provide bed, breakfast and evening meal for a small group of students. I spent the first year living with two other male students with a family in Streatham. This involved daily commuting by suburban train from Streatham to Blackfriars, and then a walk either along the Embankment or through the Temple to Fleet Street. For someone raised in the dreary suburbs of Birmingham, this was all immensely exciting.
In the second year of my degree, I moved to shared rooms in a house in Lordship Road in Stoke Newington, and then in the third year to rooms in Finsbury Park Road. I had to learn to cook for myself, which I did most evenings and at weekends. However, there were alternatives. LSE students avoided the appalling canteen in the School, and gatecrashed canteens in local businesses. My specialty was the Indian High Commission - a large building just across the Aldwych from the LSE. I would enter by an unmarked back door, which was always opened just after noon. Past the lift shaft and along a corridor, I would join a queue of Indians shuffling forward. Food was served by friendly canteen staff from huge metal pots. I would pay and find a table - often the only person in the entire canteen who didn’t look Indian.
Finsbury Park Road was a tough area at the time I lived there. Three doors up from my house was a brothel, inhabited by haggard women and filthy, neglected children. A car was abandoned outside, and the brothel children reduced it to a wreck in days. Requests to the local council had no effect, and in the end one of the exasperated local residents fire-bombed the car. It was cleared the next day. This was the start of Finsbury Park’s long climb to respectability. Now my son lives in a quiet and pleasant street in another part of Finsbury Park. There are no abandoned cars there any more: indeed, residents and visitors need to pay a fee to the local council to park outside their own houses.
There was no fire-bombing at the LSE, but much talk of revolution. By 1968, my quiet world of study was disrupted by strikes and protests. I personally saw little wrong with the LSE, but the various groups of student ‘agitators’ in the School saw protests about trivial issues like security gates as a kind of small-scale simulation for the imminent British revolution in which they would become its officer class. This desire for power coupled with a strange admiration for violence in other countries was cloaked in an intense and intolerant form of Marxist mumbo-jumbo.
Marxism has now all but disappeared, but the LSE lives on. When I can, I meet with other ageing alumni in the West Midlands. We talk about politics like we did when we were young, and I remember the time when I walked out of the working-class Birmingham suburbs into the world of learning.
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