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.
© Mike Hart [2024]