Summer Of Love & Nudity
By: Michael Thorn
Tags: Alumni, University, Nudity, Protest, Students

memories of the University of Keele

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Tony Elliott, founder of Time Out, died very recently, aged 73. When I read his obituary in The Times, I was reminded that he was, like me, an alumnus of the University of Keele.

Other Keele alumni include Marion Boyars (publisher), Andrew Glover (composer), Liz Kessler (children’s writer), Robert Lee (historian), Michael Mansfield (barrister), Priti Patel and Clare Short (politicians).

Elliott dropped out of Keele, where he was studying French and history, in 1968, midway through his degree and the year before my own arrival. The first issues of Time Out, named after a Dave Brubeck album, were co-edited by Bob Harris, later known as the presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Initially, the publication consisted of just a single sheet of event listings in London. Within two years it was nearly 70 pages thick and stocked in W H Smith, the UK’s largest stationery chain. It went on to cover cities world-wide.

Keele is a rural campus university, some distance away from the nearest town, Newcastle-under-Lyme. It has expanded greatly since my time there and is now the largest campus in the UK. I have not been back in decades, and dare say I would hardly recognise it, although photographs suggest the woods and lakes behind Keele Hall remain much as they were.

Conceived as a ‘people’s university’, Keele was established to serve the towns known collectively as the ‘potteries’ — Hanley, Burslem, Fenton, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent, and Tunstall. It aimed to overcome the divide between the arts and the sciences and what was seen as the ‘evil of departmentalism’. Established in 1949 as a college for North Staffordshire, Keele was awarded full university status in 1962, and renamed after the nearby village.

My first choice had been to go to the University of East Anglia, but I had been interviewed by Germaine Greer, who had been unimpressed by my less than enthusiastic reading of a Sylvia Plath poem and had spent the greater part of the interview delivering an intimidating monologue to which I barely attended, transfixed as I was by the short crocheted mini-dress she was wearing and the scores of cigarette butts upended on their filter bases all over the room.

In contrast, I had found the interview at Keele much more to my taste. A pair of chummy blokes sat opposite me in a peculiarly shaped room at the top of the Victorian mansion that is Keele Hall and some mild conversation passed back and forth between us, to which I contributed rather little. I also liked the student union. There was good music on the jukebox and some cool people playing table football.

I badly wanted to go. But my A-Level grades were below par and, resigned to having to find an alternative, I began to send off for information about journalism schools, only to be surprised a few days later to receive confirmation that Keele was accepting me.

In those days Keele was unique in insisting that all students complete a Foundation Year before specialising in their two chosen subject areas. Even then you had to take two subsidiary subjects alongside the main ones. I eventually studied English and American Studies, with Astronomy and Philosophy, or was it Politics or Psychology, I honestly can’t remember. Perhaps I did them all, in different years.

That first year was like being at an American high school. Each day you had to roll up to a vast auditorium and listen to a lecture from the full range of university departments. It meant that you saw and mixed with everyone, no matter what their subject interest.

Early October 1969 was very balmy and I remember discovering one of my early companions was Stephen Benn, son of Tony Benn, minister for Technology in the Harold Wilson government. Stephen wore a very long knitted scarf and played piano for us in one of the university’s music rooms. Later in the year his father came and gave an address in the university’s main hall.

Just about everybody in their first year lived on campus. I was placed in a brand new hall of residence, on the ground floor. A very beautiful Irish girl called Bernadette lived in the same hall and was rumoured to walk around with nothing on under her fur coat. I was unable to verify this, but there was one guy who would stand completely naked just outside the union branch of NatWest, where I opened my first account. Later that year the university was headline news in tabloid newspapers when a group of students had to be disciplined for sunbathing naked in the centre of the campus. One of my close friends attended naked Love-In sessions in an upstairs room of the students’ union building, normally used for TV viewing.

It was the period of student protests and there were regular sit-ins during that first year, including one that happened at night during an occupation of a vast ground-floor room in Keele Hall, when one of the lead agitators had an epileptic fit and there was general panic.

It could be hard to concentrate on course requirements. During the year you had to deliver nine 2000 word essays on a full range of subjects, and pass exams in your subsidiary areas. The night before one of the 2000 word essays was due everybody would be up late trying to submit by the early morning deadline.

At the end of the year I was fed up to discover that, having narrowly missed the pass mark in the Astronomy exam, I would need to return to campus during the summer vacation for a resit. The resit date directly clashed with the Isle of Wight Festival and had I been a more flamboyant, carefree character than I was then, I am sure I would have forgone the exam and attended the festival. But I dutifully resat and passed the multiple-choice test.

The Grateful Dead had played at a small festival in Madely, just outside Keele village, during the May Bank Holiday weekend. Mungo Jerry, Ginger Baker’s Air Force and the Flying Burrito Brothers were also on the bill. It was a free festival and within walking distance so I attended both days. The weather was good, and there was much unashamed baring of skin. I enjoyed it all up until a point near the end when those left in the crowd began pulling down perimeter fences, lighting fires and generally becoming rather manic and wild.

Like Tony Elliott I too dropped out of Keele halfway through my course. Unlike him, I returned a year later.