2300

A DANCE THROUGH THE FIRES OF TIME

9500 SCHOOLDAYS - THE 1950s

At the start of the 1950s I was ten years old. Accordingly, the key event looming over me and all children of my age was my 11 plus exam. It was a prospect that terrified me and my middle class peers. Fail it and you went to New Chester Road School!  This was the ‘secondary modern’ where the more than 90 percent of children – boys and girls - who were doomed to fail their 11 plus went. I used to ride past it on the bus every day. It was an ugly red brick building, soaring threateningly into the sky, with a fenced in area of old tarmac outside where I could see the children at play. It was redolent of the schools described by Dickens. It seemed almost like a Borstal, a prison for the young. Indeed, at that time, the 11 plus examination locked its victims in there until they were released to live the rest of their lives amongst the underclasses.  It really did ensure that class distinctions loomed large in our consciousness.  I guess those who went there didn’t know they were entitled to a better life, and accepted their station in life without question; though the few middle class children who failed the test thought their lives had ended; and in some respects they had! It's sad to think of so many lives cast away in that way. People moan about the comprehensives which have replaced such schools - but they forget the real class divisions their predecessors institutionalised.

At the beginning of 1950 I, on the other hand, was in a preparatory school; preparing for entry to public school. Accordingly all the teaching I was receiving was geared towards the entry exam for Birkenhead School.  This was quite different to the entrance exam for the local grammar schools. As a result, I had to be coached by my grandfather for the  state entry exam to the grammar schools. Fortunately he was an excellent teacher. He did such a good job, that I was successful in getting into the best grammar school, though I never attended this. For, as I have said, everything in my own life was geared towards the entry exam for Birkenhead School, and all the teaching I received was directed towards this end. This meant that I, better prepared by having attended its preparatory school, was deliberately given an unfair advantage over other children. The elite’s road through life was then, and now, eased in such ways.

Our own exam was not just the standard IQ test. Instead it revolved around essays.  I remember that we, in particular, had to write an essay which started off with the information that there were large holes being dug around the countryside.  Everyone else did the usual thing, and talked about people digging for gold etc.  I, on the other hand, told a story about a giant  rabbit digging the holes. Even then I was perverse in my approach to life! Fortunately Birkenhead School encouraged what it saw as ‘creativity’. We also had to do a written ‘treasure hunt’, where the clues were given out in the form of crossword questions. All in all, it was much more challenging, and for me much more fun, than the IQ tests set for the 11 plus; especially where outside candidates had not been specially prepared for it as we had been. But it had to be challenging, where there were more than 1,000 of the Wirral’s brightest applicants for just 90 places. However, with the odds weighted in my favour, I easily passed this exam and graduated to the main part of Birkenhead School. 

Of course, it was – as then were all the best public schools – single sex! Only boys were allowed in, though – after my time - it later took some girls into the sixth form. In my day the girls had their own establishment, Birkenhead high School, a discreet distance away. Thus, as then with most public school boys, I did not mix with girls until my late teens; and this has cramped my lifestyle throughout my life.

When we arrived there, we were - for the first two years - taught in its Junior School.  I suspect this strange arrangement, though never explained, was made so that it could pretend to be a traditional public school; where, traditionally, the main entry was at 13 years. This was, in the case of Birkenhead School, the third form and hence this was quirkily deemed to be the first year in the senior school.

The Junior School even maintained some physical separation from the senior school, being set apart - in a corner of the main site - with its own building and its own facilities. It was an old mansion, with large sunny rooms which were our classrooms.  It couldn’t have been more different to the prison-like secondary modern I passed each day. Outside there wasn't much for us to do, though, except for a large quad - surrounded by high mesh fences - on which we enthusiastically played quad hockey in our lunch hours. Our sports, rugger and cricket, were played - two half days a week - on the school’s enormous, lush green, playing field half a mile or so away; again very different to the asphalt playground which was all that the secondary modern boasted. The school building itself was two-storey, with the first year on the upper floor and the second year on the lower floor; connected by a central grand staircase. Thus were we taught in surroundings suitable for our middle class aspirations.

Even we were streamed, by our performance in the entry exam which, in essence, had given a measure of our intelligence. It was true to say that, at that time, streaming, from the lowest grade in the secondary modern through to the top of the best public schools, was at the heart of education – and of society. Thus, for us, there were three main classes in the first form, of 30 boys each -- with a total of 90 pupils per year. This three form pattern remained the same throughout the school.  The streams were linked to the languages you took.  In the junior school, the lowest form, which only took French, was called Trojans.  The middle stream, which ultimately took French and Latin, was called Romans, and the top stream which initially also took Latin -- but then moved on to Greek or German as well, was called Greeks. The names were, incidentally, a very good indicator of who the staff of the school admired most from classical times; I guess I would now agree with their judgment. As you might also expect I was in Greeks.  Apart from the different range of languages, the syllabus was pretty much what you might expect; maths, science, geography, history, English -- but only English language -- and the usual RE etc.  There were some masters, the school as a whole had no female teachers, largely committed to the Junior School, in particular the headmaster was dedicated to it. In addition some masters - covering the more specialist subjects - were also shared with the senior school.

In terms of sports, we switched from the soccer, which we had played in the prep, to rugger. This was, of course, the sport of public schools, and again differentiated us from the rest who played soccer.  We played rugger in the winter and cricket in the summer. 

It was a pleasant life, and I soon met my most important school friend - Brian Wrench.  I later learned that he was a scholarship boy. His mother was single parent, which was unusual in those days.  On the other hand the ethos of the school was – surprisingly in view of all the other class distinctions – so egalitarian that I didn't realise until years later that this was the case.  We became great friends, and our friendship lasted through his life until his death at an early age, in his early twenties.

To be honest I can't remember much about the Junior School.  It was in many respects, from my point of view, an extension of the prep school I had been attending.  The only thing I can remember was that, every year, I valiantly entered a handwriting contest - set by a newspaper for schoolchildren which we all received.  As anyone who has seen my handwriting will realise, I have just about the worst handwriting in the world.  Even so I lived in hope, but it was one skill where I was never going to excel!

Much the same pattern of life continued into the second form of the Junior School, before we moved up to the third form and into the senior school..  There was, thank goodness, no exam at this stage –and, in that respect at least, there was nothing equivalent to the public schools common entrance exam. 

I suspect this was nothing like the experience of those in grammar schools, and certainly not of those consigned to secondary moderns. It probably was also not much like that of the traditional public schools, which were driven by the requirements of boarding their pupils. It was, indeed, only representative of a narrow stratum of elite public day schools; such as Manchester Grammar, with whom we continually compared ourselves.

With my move into the third form at Birkenhead School, I at last reached the main school and moved onto the main school campus.  Even so we were in old buildings, Victorian mansions which were less salubrious than those of the junior school, albeit that they also had been modernised for use as classrooms.  This didn't worry us, though, because it was the standard of teaching -- even we recognised that -- which really mattered.  Needless to say we had the best teachers in the area.  This was partly because, being a public school, the conditions and pay of the teachers was better. Above all, though, it was because it was the best school in the district and that by itself attracted the best teachers.

Once more, in the third form, we were split into streams by ability; and once more of in terms of languages.  The lower level were called 'Mod', and they did French, the middle level were 'Mid', and they did French and Latin. It has to be remembered that, as a public school, its focus was on Oxford and Cambridge entry and in those days Latin was essential for these universities!  The higher level -- where I was -- was called 'Lang' and also did French and Latin; but added German or Greek.  I chose German. The streaming was in theory meant to allow people to switch backwards and forwards between the various streams, but I can't ever remember this happening.  Once you were allocated to a stream, in the junior school, that was yours for the whole of your life within the school. I guess much the same was true in those days of grammar schools, except that Latin was largely unknown in their case. In those days, even though they were creaming off the best state system pupils, they had difficulty getting even a minority of these to any university, so that they simply could not even consider Oxbridge; which was largely the province of the public schools. The split was certainly permanent in terms of those consigned to the secondary moderns, who stood almost no chance of improving their lot.

When we moved up into the Third Form we were allocated to ‘houses’.  Birkenhead School, like most public schools, still split its pupils up, into ‘houses’. The idea, a mainstay of public school culture, was supposedly to give us the necessary competitive spirit.  In the public boarding schools the ‘house’ was, of course, the physical place where they lived and where their dormitories were.  In our case we were essentially a day school and had very few boarders. Those that we had were in ‘School-House’; the boarding part of the school which has since closed. Even then School House had to have some day boys to bring the numbers up to a reasonable level.  I was in Pierse’s, but had not an inkling who it was named after. It was just another mysterious fact of school life.

Each house had, though, developed its own genuinely unique character, surprisingly considering we were day boys.  Schoolhouse was something of a yob's paradise, but they were supposed to be best at sports.  Unlike the traditional boarding schools, however, we all pitied the boarders, since we saw them as people who essentially were orphans  - without parents – though, as some of them were sons of sheikhs, perhaps that was a tad less than true.  Pierse’s, my house, had a reputation for being academic rather than sporty, which suited me. We always got the best academic results, and lost most of our house matches.

The basic idea was that we competed against each other in all things from academic to sports, and earned points for the various things we did. This competition was supposed to be the driver which would make us successful in our later lives. I suppose it did, though whether we were to be happier was another matter!

The subjects continued much as before, though our science lessons had now been split into physics, maths and chemistry/biology.  We were, in a very general sense, starting to study for the O-levels.  The new subject was German, which I didn't like. Indeed, I didn't really like any of the three languages.  On the other hand I wasn't too bad at it, and came second in the exam.  This was much to my surprise and when the master said "I was surprised that you came second", I replied "Not half as much as me!", which raised a laugh in the rest of the form but didn't impress the master!  Later, my school report was to say that "He will have to choose whether he is going to be a scholar or a clown!" This was perhaps a handicap which followed me through my life.

Our play at lunchtime, though being northerners we called it dinnertime, was much the same as it had been. We played tic, and hide and seek. There were also fads, such as marbles, and at the appropriate time of the year we vigorously attacked each other’s conkers. There was one exciting fad I remember. It was form of tic whereby, as each person was caught, they joined hands until a long chain of boys eventually built up. Ultimately there could be as many as 30 boys in this chain, racing across the quad – the dusty yard at the centre of the school – with those on the ends being flung around a high speed. We were lucky that nobody got injured, but the danger always was the spur in the most exciting games!

I suppose I must have moved into the scouts at that stage, having been in the cubs previously.  I can't really remember much about this except wandering around in a scout uniform, and I guess in taking some badges; including, in view of my stamp collection, that for ‘collectors’.  I also vaguely remember going out for the day in some woods nearby and trying to cook flapjacks over open fires.  Although I'm a reasonable cook now, I wasn't then and it was a disaster!  I also remember a school open day, sitting on the wall by the scout hut and combining my two new subjects, scouts and German, with my friends - by watching the girls go by and giving the ones with pleasing breasts 'zwei puncte' - two marks or two points.  We all thought this was hilarious. I hope the girls didn't realise what we were saying. 

It was also the year of the Coronation and the school, always ready to make money from any cause, put on an Elizabethan Fayre.  The whole school was transformed. I, for my part, was in the school choir -- designated the Chapel Royal -- and we had to take part in the royal procession behind Queen Elizabeth. We were all in beautiful red and yellow livery, which my mother had to spend hours making! Mothers were, in general, required to produce all sorts of goods, especially clothes and cakes, for sale in regular bazaars throughout the year. These were supposed to swell the school’s funds, but – as the resulting goods were typically sold for less than they cost to make – I always wondered why the school authorities didn’t just ask for donations; and release the mothers from their unwelcome tasks!

I also sang in the choir for that Sunday’s service.  That was, however, only the only time I actually sang with the choir in chapel – the school was Church of  England and, in common with other public schools and once more in contrast to grammar schools, had a beautiful chapel. I lived too far from the school to be a permanent member of this choir.

The Elizabethan Fayre was a successful event, and all local manufacturers were there to display their products.  I remember going into one tent and seeing, for the first time, whole slabs of tomato soup frozen in a deep-freeze – something I marvelled at, since I'd never seen this before. In those days, freezers – along with most examples of modern domestic equipment -  were simply not available for the home environment.

Like almost everyone across the nation, the coronation itself made a considerable impact on me.  It was supposed to be a new age; the New Elizabethan Age – harking back to the first Queen Elizabeth – and, urged on by the popular newspapers of the time (my parents took the Daily Express, the bible of the middle classes), we were all supposed to be loyal subjects; and we were, in spades. I decorated the house with bunting everywhere and we all watched the ceremony on television.  We had bought the television the previous year, thanks to my badgering my parents - insisting that everyone else in the school had them (though, to the disgust of my parents, this turned out not to be true).  Even so, for the Coronation, the neighbours - who'd been very sniffy at the idea of our having this new-fangled television - managed to come and watch it. My poor mother was forced to spend most of her time cutting sandwiches to keep them fed rather than watching the Coronation itself. 

The Coronation, as a televisual event, was dramatic.  It was the first time that such a large-scale outside broadcast had taken place.  We sat there for hours transfixed by what was going on.  As I have said, we were all new Elizabethans and we thought it was very important that we were loyal to the Crown.  How things change!

When it had finished I went to the village hall for the children's party. I had convinced myself that I would get a coronation coach as a present, since many children were receiving these, but all I got was a propelling pencil!

I will add a note here, about my one and only pet, Smoky. He was a grey cat, who I loved dearly. He was always getting beaten up by other cats, and I spent a significant amount of time throwing clods of earth at these – to no avail! His one great adventure was when our car, a Ford Prefect, skidded and turned over on the way to the cottage. Smoky escaped from the car and disappeared into the distance. As it was something like five miles from the cottage, across the hills, we thought we would never see him again. However, a couple of months later, Sid was at the cottage when a very thin Smoky came up to him. How he had found his way over the hills we never found out.

With me to support at public school, my parents were always looking for moneymaking schemes.  They started a number, but – rather like me much later - never succeeded in any.

One of these was breeding chinchillas.  We read an article in a travel magazine about chinchillas, coming from the high Andes, which had the most beautiful fur in the world.  I only ever saw one chinchilla coat and that was worn in the Cannes casino by one of most elegant women I have ever seen -- who was, unfortunately, clearly the mistress of a Mafia godfather!

The article also explained how people were farming chinchillas to make money from selling their pelts. So my father went off to make a number of cages - which would be kept in the outhouse -- confident that they would soon to full of young chinchillas bred from just one pair.  We bought them from a gentleman who lived in the best part of Chester. We naively thought he must have made a fortune from them.  In any case, they had to be kosher, for they had actually appeared on television in one of the animal programs!

Indeed, they were great fun to watch. They were well and truly acrobatic; rushing round the sides of the cage like wall death riders.  Their coats really were beautiful, and would have made wonderful coats. Unfortunately the one thing they didn't do was breed!  We later found out that chinchillas aren't very good at doing it, unless they see other chinchillas doing it around them!  They eventually did produce a litter of two young. One of these died, closely followed by its father -- so we ended up with two chinchillas. These were sold, for pelting, for the princely sum of £5; when we had paid several hundred pounds for them

The biggest ‘moneymaking’ operation  my father was involved in was ‘G&M Chemicals’.  This started because my father's department at Prices used oleyl-cetyl alcohol, which the workers found relieved their aches-- and rheumatism in general.  It seemed a miracle cure, albeit a rather smelly one.

My father, who had been a chemist earlier in his life, proceeded to spend many months formulating a much more agreeable product -- which was easily absorbed through the skin. Ultimately the oleyl-cetyl alcohol was emulsified with soap (in fact the commercial Shell detergent Teepol) and a range of other products, mainly designed to make it seem to work immediately.  Thus it had methyl nicotinate to make the skin develop a warm glow, so that the ‘patient’ thought something was happening! I though found I was allergic to this and came out in a rash. It also had a nice refreshing smell of pine added. All of this was a lesson in production technology for me, with samples of products coming in from all over the country to be tested!

Of course we had to have a businessman to run it, and Uncle Bill reckoned he was just ideal for the job. He certainly should have been experienced in terms of marketing -- and sometimes was. Watching him make his mistakes was probably one of the reasons I later fell in love with Economics, since it showed me what he should have done!

We rented the disused stables at the back of a large house in Rock Ferry. It proved to be very hard work turning these into a factory.  They were absolutely filthy, but we eventually cleaned the dirt down to a level where it was just about tolerable. The office, out in the yard, is where we kept the records -- though my mother did most of the office work at home.  The upper part of stables was used for storing the packaging and the lower part was the production area.  My father used to buy a drum of the oleyl-cetyl alcohol. As it was a solid at room temperature, he then had to warm it until it melted by the side of our kitchen fire -- before we rushed down to Rock Ferry to get it into production.  All the ingredients were then blended in an old boiler which previously been used for washing clothes.  We then transferred it to the most expensive bit of equipment, the homogenizer which squeezed it into a stable mousse. Finally came the job of filling the tubes, folding them and crimping them, and putting them in the packaging, all of which was done by hand.

My uncle decided to call the products Analglo, and bought packaging to match this.  In our innocence we never thought about what this might mean, and it was only at the last-minute that one of his contacts pointed out the obvious.  The product name was changed to Anaglo and new packaging bought -- which was as well since the previous packaging had been rubbish. We ended up with quite nice packaging - grey and red - and a nicely printed leaflet.  We also produced a doctor's only version; Embrocol.

Bill actually did do some selling and indeed sold several hundred boxes of a dozen-tubes each. The best deal he closed was to get into Boots north western region, on a trial basis. I remember spending days wrapping display outers full of tubes, to send to most of their branches around the North West.

Unfortunately Bill soon lost interest and the whole thing stagnated; though the doctors version kept going for quite a long time

The problem was that Bill was ever chasing after new ventures.  That's why we then started selling soap solutions to the local factories, based on the Teepol synthetic detergent we used as the emulsifier. Bill would buy a 40 gallon drum, and we would break this into smaller quantities.  Then we got into selling anti-freeze in a similar way. Finally, he got us involved in making tow ropes for lorries, and I well remembering sewing heavy steel tow ropes in sacking before taking them down the local rail terminal for shipment.

Bill was ever the dilettante, he could never stay with anything. When he died in his wife found that he was bankrupt, owing tens of thousands of pounds.  Fortunately she managed to avoid responsibility for this, but his pauper’s death was typical of his life! 

In the fourth form we started studying in earnest for our 'O' levels. Academic learning, often of facts by rote rather than by real understanding, was central to our lives. On the other hand, the majority – in the secondary moderns – were focused on preparing themselves to serve their masters; as labourers in the case of the boys and domestic servants in the case of the girls. Our own academic work more or less revolved around those subjects we were going to take in the Fifth Form.  In my case I was preparing to take somewhere between 10 and 12 'O' levels -- though, as we will see, in fact I never did take that many.

In terms of sports, which were central to the life of public schools, I started to get involved in the house activities.  Thus I started to feature in the scrum in the house rugger matches and dug myself in, that may well be the best description, as a left prop.  It was the most onerous job in the rugger team. I carried all the weight of the scrum. I don't know why I was foolish enough to do this, since its lasted with me throughout my school career!

We also practiced for athletics.  The gym master used to be a terror to us.  He forced us out onto the field in the centre of the school, which was used for athletics and cricket, even in deep snow; and even worse in bare feet.  Apart from that, the gym activities inside the school gym were terrifying in terms of having to climb the ropes, at which I was never very good as I was always afraid of falling onto the hard wood floor.  Worst of all we had boxing.  And worst by far we had the boxing contest each year.  You had to box someone of approximately same age and size. The winner got two points and the loser one point.  I lost, but so bloody was the boxing match that I got two points and the winner got three.  I hated every minute of it and managed to avoid it in later years!

Above all, though I loved playing fives; which was almost exclusively the province of the public schools. This was normally ordinary fives, in a court with three walls, where you hit the ball back with gloved hands or - when we were being very macho - with bare hands.  Rugby fives, named after the school where it originated, used much the same court but had a pillar built into it which complicated matters even more. I and John Swift, later to become the Regulator of the whole British railway system, used to go to play on these courts almost every lunch time.  We were probably the best in the school.  Unfortunately we didn't compete with other schools.  Our only competition was in house matches and in these we easily wiped the floor with everyone else.

I've never thought myself as being a sporting person, but then neither have I thought of myself as being a swot; though I have flattered myself at times by thinking I was an intellectual!  But looking back on it, I think I probably was one of the more sporty types within the school. 

As I have said, it all started in terms of the house sports teams. Ours traditionally was not a very sporting house, so I was drafted into its rugger team relatively early; and soon became leader of the scrum.  These house matches were the most vicious I have ever played. Even before we started we were told which of the opposing players we had to cripple! Equally, even though I didn't play hockey in the second term as most of the others did, I was drafted into the house hockey team. Cricket was anathema to me, so I only ever once represented the house in cricket; and then managed the princely total of 0 not out! As a matter of course, I also used to play in all the other house teams; tennis, for example, and - as I have said - fives.  I also performed on the athletics field for the house.  I even managed to be in the relay team that won the school trophy. The reason for my success in this case was quite simply that the other three members of it were the best runners in the school. At the last handover, I started 100 yards ahead of everyone else, and even then only just scraped home to win by a nose!

In the earlier years, my specialty was the shot putt. I practiced for hours at home, resting the shot on the backs of my fingers so that a last flick would add a few extra inches. My triumph was to represent the school, in the under 15s, at the Birkenhead School sports finals. At this event I did all my best tricks, and set up a reasonable target for the others to follow. The next boy into the circle picked up the shot and looked quizzically at it, and then politely asked me "Do I chuck it over there?" Without any attempt at technique, he threw it a good ten feet beyond my mark; and that was the demoralizing end of my athletics career!

I was also quite good at shooting, and won the school shooting trophy. This was an enormous cup whose size dwarfed every other cup in the school!  I have to say, though, that I won this by reading the rules rather than by any real skill.  I discovered that there was nothing said about having to hold the rifle in the air, so I rested it on my fist which provided a much steadier rest. The master in charge of the RAF, under which this activity came, was very upset at this; but couldn't do anything about it.  As a result I was made school captain of rifle shooting -- though this was rather meaningless, since we only had one match against another school. We were absolutely trounced, since they took it seriously and we obviously didn't!

As I have already indicated, most of my spare time at school was taken up with rugger, in the school teams. I was in the school under-15 team for a while; until I was thrown out for ungentlemanly conduct. In one match I had realised the referee didn't know the rules, and had then proceeded to ‘knock-on’ almost every ball with impunity.  This was not the sort of thing a gentleman was supposed to do!  I later got into the school second team and played a few games with them. I eventually was moved to become captain of the third team. This sounds good, but very few other schools had third teams so we played very little. My undoing came when we played Macclesfield School, which had a third team but a very poor one.  I took pity on them in the second half -- when we are already 50 nil ahead -- and swapped our forwards for our three-quarters.  We still thrashed them 70 nil, but this was again pronounced to be ungentlemanly conduct, by rubbing their noses in it, and I lost my position in the team once again!

Returning to my academic progress, in the fourth form I suppose my best subject was geography, and as a result  I helped set up the geographical society. I also gave the first lecture to the society; a lecture which was based on a commercial script and film strip.  I can't say it was very successful, as may be indicated by the fact that the geographical society ceased to exist immediately after this lecture!

Another subject where I was a favourite of the master was English.  I think he had set himself the task of ‘bringing me out’, whatever that might mean.  He persuaded me to run the front of house for the school plays.  This mainly meant that I ran the booking office, where I managed the team of younger boys who actually sold the tickets. Under my command they sold tickets directly to the pupils, who were expected to get their parents to come along.  The lifeblood of all amateur dramatics comes from relatives! 

At the actual performances, my job was to manage the ushers who showed everyone to their seats, and also to run the other aspects of front of house. In particular, this included showing the visiting fireman around to make certain we met the fire regulations.  I suppose all of these activities added up to be my first real management job! 

Indeed a small group of us emerged who were starting to run various activities in the school.  Such was the demand for us that we even organised the Christian students’ week at the local technical College, which was run for schools all round the district.  I and my group took over all the admin and organisational responsibilities; even though most of us were atheist! I didn’t know it at the time, but – in effect – I had started my management career.

Our real work on the 'O' levels started in the fifth form.  Having said that, unlike our contemporaries in the grammar schools, our main focus wasn't really on the O-levels, but on preparation for the A-levels. Indeed the numbers of O-levels we were eventually allowed to take was limited. Although I was on track to take perhaps 12 O-levels, I was artificially limited to eight. Nothing I could have said would have changed this!  The philosophy of the school – right from day one when you entered the junior school - was that you were there to get to university in general, and to get to Oxford or Cambridge in particular; where even Imperial College wasn't really recognised by public schools, despite the fact that it already was the top science university.

Accordingly I had to drop my best subject, geography. I also had to drop history.  At the time I hadn't realised this was fun. As a schoolboy almost all subjects were to be endured not enjoyed! However, it has since been one of the subjects that has fascinated me – since, in looking to the future which has been my lifetime’s work, you must also learn the lessons of the past - though I've never actually studied it formally.  I also had to drop German, which didn't worry me at the time though later, at Imperial, I had to sit a special exam; since the college authorities insisted that you had to have two modern foreign languages in order to get your degree!

The fact is I was already focusing on science A-levels; aiming for maths, physics and chemistry.  These were the traditional science subjects that I studied above all else.  Indeed at that stage, although we still had three streams, of 30 pupils each, these were – for the first time - rearranged into one stream of those doing the arts subjects and two streams for those doing the newly popular science subjects.  So the school’s normal practice, of streaming by academic ability, only occurred in these science streams. My own stream was -- of course -- top.  This suited me and, where some of my main competitors (being the brightest of all) had been chosen to jump straight to the sixth form, I eventually achieved the second form prize ('prox acc')!  That is the nearest I ever got to being top of a form in Birkenhead School.

As the O-levels approached I did do quite a bit of swatting, but even so it was not that stressful a year. It was certainly much less stressful than the A-levels to come.

It was also the period in which I started to take notice of girls.  I was once more very friendly with Brian Wrench. Together we used to catch the bus down to Birkenhead riverside, where we changed buses. The bus stop was where we met girls from the local high school.  A group of five or six of us then used to lark around at the bus stop or on the bus itself.  We eventually also got around to meeting first thing in the morning, outside our school gates, until the headmaster called me into his study and told me I was bringing the school into disrepute!

The three girls we saw most were Brenda, a well-built girl who Brian Wrench eventually married, Carol, who I always seemed to be partnered with, and Hazel -- a beautiful redhead who was something of an enigma.  When I told her about the money I had earned at Butlins -- I eventually used it to buy my first hi-fi -- she offered to take it off my hands and spend a dirty weekend with me.  I still have a suspicion she was deadly serious. At university I bumped into her in the Heaven and Hell coffee bar, in a basement in Soho, and both her wrists were bandaged -- almost as if she had tried to commit suicide. I guess I always was a sucker for girls with problems, and she really was beautiful.

Although we used to go to joint film society sessions with them, I only ever went to one party with them. In fact I only ever went once to a party in the fifth form, and I felt very much out of place.  At that stage, and ever since, I've always been very shy with girls. I didn't really know what to do with them, and I still don’t!

Later, one summer, I went back to the house of another friend, Norman Killey. This was on one of the very few times I ever did so, since his parents ran it as a hotel. We played tennis on their grass court. Playing on any court was also something I rarely did, though I loved playing tennis. In my teens I used to spend hours knocking a ball against the side of the house, it was just that I never actually was able to actually put this into practice in tennis matches; where did an isolated teenager find a partner to play with?  Anyway, this tennis match was mixed doubles with myself and Norman, his sister Jean and his girlfriend.  Jean was an attractive, albeit slightly plump, girl; a nice handful anyway.  We played until the sun had gone down. It was very late dusk when we moved on to mowing the tennis court, with the old mower that they used.  All this time we were larking around as teenagers are wont to.  However what I had not appreciated was that the mower was quite oily, which, mixed with the tennis whites which we were wearing, made for one of the most embarrassing moment in my life.

The denouement came when we went into the parents’ drawing-room. As we went in, blinking at the light, I looked at Jean, to see that her tennis whites were covered with beautiful oily handprints in all the strategic places.  I never was allowed to see Jean again! 

From the age of seven to seventeen I wanted to be a scientist.  I suppose the initial impetus for this came from the book ostensibly given to me for Christmas by my grandmother – though it was probably picked out for her by my own mother. It went through the inventions of the ages.  It was vaguely scientific and I became imbued with the idea of inventing things; it was only much later that I realised science was no longer like that!

When we went down to London I used to head for the basement of the Science Museum and play with all the exhibits which were designed to interest children in science.  It certainly succeeded in my case.

As I grew older, I suppose in my early teens, my interests diverged.  On the one hand I still was fascinated by inventions. My uncle gave me a copy of Mechanics Illustrated -- the American publication -- and I started to regularly take that, and devour it.  I eventually switched to Popular Mechanics, since this was about three times as thick and much better value.  It offered a strange environment in terms of the content.  Their target audience seemed to be farming families in the US Midwest, but that didn't worry me. I just loved their ideas, for instance, for modifications to their farm gates so cattle could be easily herded, or for changing the insides of their houses – where they did wonderful cutaways of buildings.  It transported me into a wholly different world where inventions ruled life.

At the other extreme I started to get interested in astronomy, or at least astrophysics.  At that time the astronomer Fred Hoyle was frequently to be heard on the radio, and he was very good very good salesman for astrophysics.  Borrowing my books from a local library, which I did every week, I worked my way through all the astrophysics texts -- and was particularly influenced by Jeans.  In those days astrophysics made sense.  You could almost feel the planets being created; moulded into gas giants or the inner planets.  Now it seems to be a branch of mathematics and the fascination has gone!  You can get nowhere unless you can handle the development of equations that run to 100s of pages – as I later found on my quantum theory course at university!

Accordingly, even as I entered the fifth and sixth forms at school, I was still determined to be a scientist; a physicist and above all our astrophysicist.  I wanted to explore the wonders of the universe -- but, of course, I never did!

Indeed, my first formal job – albeit a vac job which came at the end of my year in the fifth form, was scientific in nature.  This job was arranged through the local youth employment service. It inevitably was with Lever Brothers - since they dominated the local job market – and it was in the soap-making laboratory of the main Lever Brothers plant. 

Lever Brothers had settled on its position at Port Sunlight, not far away from where we lived, in the late 19th century.  Lord Leverhulme took it there largely because of its access to the raw materials which came from abroad.  Eventually it had its own port, just a few hundred yards from our house, but it had originally used Liverpool docks -- which were then the most important in the country. There the materials were transhipped to barges, which were floated across the Mersey and right into the factory itself. For most of the century since its inception the factory had been based on soap making, from natural raw materials -- and was still so when I went there.  It eventually moved onto detergents, based on petroleum derivatives, but at the time these were only just coming in. 

Even at that time Port Sunlight was becoming the production headquarters of Unilever; though its head office was the art deco gem, Unilever House, at the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge in London.  It had earlier merged with the Van Den Burgh margarine corporation, whose UK plant was a couple of miles away; and it was already starting to take over other companies, to become the massive multinational corporation of nowadays.  Mind you, it is something of a myth that it has only recently become a multinational for – as early as the 19th-century - it had already branched out worldwide; and become the employer of hundreds of thousands of people trading across Africa.  Thus, it had been a multinational for a long time, but this was in colonial form rather than the modern one.

Anyway, I went there, to earn the princely sum of three pounds a week, for doing product testing in the soap-making laboratory.  This was, I suppose, much like any other laboratory you might have found in those days -- or at least any chemical laboratory.  Our work comprised almost entirely in checking the standards of the materials being processed through various stages of production, together with the finished product itself.  As such it meant that the bulk of our work followed the usual titration processes; using a burette to gradually introduce more and more of the indicating solution until some change happened.  In practice it was a remarkably primitive process.  We were given the product, which was - in this laboratory – almost always soap in one form another; usually as a hard block of material, like the toilet soap you have in your bathroom.  We carefully shaved it into pieces, put these on a watch glass, and carefully weighed them until we got exactly the right weight. There was nothing subtle about this. It was just a matter of using a scalpel to shave ever more soap onto the electronic scales.  Then we put these into a flask, adding water and dissolving them, before titrating whatever marker we needed to use.  We then entered the results into our books and informed the department involved of the various levels of chemicals our measurements had shown -- so they could make their necessary corrections.

It was interesting for the first hour or so, but thereafter it was mind-blowingly boring!  From there on in it was just another repetition of the same process: get the bit of soap, cut it into slivers, dissolve it, titrate it. Then get another sample of soap, dissolve it, titrate it and so on.  But many jobs in industry in those days were similarly routine, and many still are. 

This, though, counted as a white collar job; which people then felt was somehow better than a blue-collar job.  I remember seeing, in the John Summers iron works nearby on the Welsh border, the steel strip coming along - at the end of a strip mill - and hitting the buffer which temporally stopped it. At this point shears came down and cut it, so that it dropped on the pile below.  The important difference in those days was that these shears were operated by a man who - when the strip had reached the right position - hit a button to operate them: several times a minute, all day long, every day.  This was his job for life -- and was his future.  It paid his wages, but scarcely gave him any fulfilment.

In some respects the same was true for my job laboratory job. It was repetitive in the extreme.

I don't remember much about any camaraderie we used to take our mind of the boredom.  But I do remember the end of the day. This was signified by the sounding of a siren, which we called the ‘hooter’.  For five or ten minutes before that happened, you would find us, and many of the office workers, hiding behind the buildings at the main gate. As the hooter blew we all rushed out, in our hundreds, through the main gate; and away to home.  It was all too clear that very few of us were dedicated to our work!

There were two of us taken on for this vac work, replacing the half a dozen or so people who were our holiday (and thus saying something about their productivity). My colleague was offered a job at the end,  I wasn't, since it was clear that – thank god – I was destined for better things!  I sometimes wondered about what sort of future he faced. On other hand, my father had started in Prices laboratory in much the same circumstances and, over the years, he had risen to be supervisor and then manager; so perhaps progress was not impossible.

After the fifth form I started on my first year of the A-level syllabus; in Physics, Maths and Chemistry.

I also took up Economics as an extra subject.  The background to this rather perverse choice was that the school had decided that, presumably to ‘broaden’ our education (then the flavour of the month in education), we should take one optional subject as well as our A-levels. Looking around, and stimulated by the interest G&M Chemicals had provoke in me, I saw Economics as a potentially interesting subject. Accordingly, I took it at O-level, and indeed later in the year successfully completed the O-level exam. However, at the start, this was really only out of some sort of vague interest.  To my surprise I fell in love with the subject, though it still didn’t become the centre my life. With my attention still firmly focused on doing a degree in physics, I was still as determined as ever  that I was going to be an astrophysicist. On the other hand, Economics became an increasingly important extra interest; though I didn’t yet recognise just how significant it was to become for me. Of course over the next few years it progressively took over my life.

In the sixth form we no longer had classrooms, since we rotated between the various labs.  We only ever met as a class in the physics lab, on the few occasions when that was necessary, which was not very often. We were supposed to have lockers to keep our books in. Unfortunately, these were useless -- not having any working locks. So we had to carry everything around in bags. Our uniform in those days was a duffel coat with a haversack over our shoulder.  The latter was incredibly heavy and it was surprising that we didn't develop back problems at the time; though I did so later!

I suppose the sixth form was the best time, certainly my happiest time, at school.  I felt a great deal of freedom and played it to the full; which is probably why the headmaster never made me a prefect, but only a monitor!

It was the year in which I had a reasonable degree of academic success.  I came second in the ‘Gordon Willmer’ general knowledge competition, and would have come first had the headmaster -- who judged them -- realised that the arts student who won gave answers on science which were absolute rubbish!  I also made a spectacular entry into the ‘Fitzgerald French English Essay’ prize. This time no one quite knew what to make of my entry. The headmaster again threw it out, this time rejecting my entry as rubbish!  In fact I suspect it had some merit, since I thought that - for a change - I would write my essay in sonata form. Much later I realised I had actually written in stream  of consciousness form - even though I had never heard Virginia Woolf!

It was also where the English master, continuing his support for me, pushed me into being one the editors of school magazine.  Needless to say, in view of my other work within the school, I was appointed by the other editors to be their business manager -- which in practice meant I had to obtain all the advertising revenue!  Once more I guess it was a mark of things come.  Having said that, it was quite enjoyable. In particular, I enjoyed trying to get advertising income from the New Shakespeare Theatre.  My enjoyment in this case was mainly because I used to go across and pester their administrators. They were a bunch of nubile young girls, located in the overheated basement of the theatre -- with scarcely any clothes on. I never got any advertising but I was able to spend an enjoyably long-time trying to persuade them!

It was here also where I started my interest in theatre, with the New Shakespeare Theatre Club.  This was a venture by Sam Wanamaker, who later built the Globe Theatre in London.  It was wonderful venture. I went to everything, seeing such things as "Cat on a Tin Roof", "Rose Tattoo" (Tennissee Williams was a very popular playright then) a "View from the Bridge" (Arthur Miller was also at the height of his success) and "Tea and Sympathy". Everything was - needless to say in view of Sam Wanamakers pedigree - superbly well produced, and attracted stars from Hollywood.  Playing the Cat on a Tin Roof, for example, was Kim Stanley. 

The New Shakespeare Theatre was a club which meant it could show banned plays at a time when the Lord Chamberlain rigorously enforced the outdated rules on sex in the theatre. Thus, at a very tender age I came to watch plays such as "A View from Bridge, where for the first time an actor kissed another on the lips, and "Tea and Sympathy" where the housemaster’s wife allowed the pupil to seduce her. As the curtain came down he started unbuttoning her blouse putting his hand inside it. This really was hot stuff in those days, and was much enjoyed by me.

I was also was into jazz, modern jazz, and used to go, in particular, to the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" shows put on by Norman Granz. Sometimes it actually was at the Philharmonic in Liverpool, or sometimes at the Empire Theatre. I saw Ella Fitzgerald a number of times, though I only ever met her once. Then, much later, I was in an elevator at the IBM 100% club; and all we had to say to each other was "Hello", but that was enough! We also had people like Dizzy Gillespie as well as the wonderful Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.

It was a period which shaped the interests which have accompanied me through life. It was also when my future was, unexpectedly, thrust in a totally new direction.

The highlight of my school career was, I suppose, the sixth form; when I took my A-levels and (Scholarship) S-Levels.  I suppose also it was the time of my life when I put in my most intense scholarship activity.  Certainly, working up to the exams in May of 1958, I spent a month or more roaming backwards and forwards through the first floor of our house; learning – as usual by rote - all facts over and over again, so that I could do my best in the exams.

Of the exams, my weakest subject was chemistry.  There was the important matter of the practical, which was not necessarily a foregone conclusion.  You didn't know what was the material you were going to be made to analyse, and to that extent the result was potluck. The theory, in addition, was made up of what seemed to be lots of disconnected facts -- especially chemical equations -- which did not appear to have a great deal of logic linking them together.  Though I was able to learn these by rote, I wasn't totally happy with my understanding of the links between them, and this made my learning difficult.  In any event, I got a reasonable exam mark, of 55.  Fortunately this didn't matter, as we will see later.

Similarly, maths - though it had a bit more logic to it at that level - was still a matter of learning all the various elements; and the links between were again sometimes quite tenuous.  I scored something like 60 on A-level and 55 at scholarship level.  At this stage I should explain that the scholarship (S) level was then undertaken by some pupils as a route to getting scholarships; especially state scholarships.  But it was also taken into account by the best universities when they were selecting their students.

The one thing that I was confident about, and still very much enjoyed, was physics.  There was a natural logic -- or at least there was for me -- to all the facts involved.  You could look at them and see - more or less - why the various things happened.  The Newtonian Laws of Motion, for example, were almost self-evident.  Accordingly I learned them well and obtained a score of 75, with 60 at the Scholarship level.

The saving grace was, in fact, my sideline.  In a lower sixth, as I have already said, I had done Economics as an option; merely out of interest.  I had done it at a low-level but had become fascinated by the subject, and had eventually taken – and passed – the O level exam.  In the sixth form I decided to do it at A-level as well.  As everyone told me, I hadn't hope in hell of getting it; because I was only studying it for only one lesson a week, say three-quarters of an hour, with a little bit of study at home.  In fact I had considerable difficulty getting the school to allow me to take the A-level examination in the subject.  In the end my father went to see the headmaster, and said that he would pay all the costs. It was only at this stage the school grudgingly gave in and allowed me to take it.  The end result, however, was that I got 90 in the subject!  That was enough to pull my overall result up to state scholarship level. 

I well remember that I was in the middle of my vac job in Butlins when my mother telephoned the results through to me.  I quickly calculated the totals, as she was reading out the results, and at the end quite happily said "Oh that means that I've got a state scholarship”.  My mother nearly fainted at the other end of the phone, because the state scholarship was a great honour in those days.  Despite its high academic rating, the school rarely got more than four or five state scholarships each year. I had certainly not been expected to get one of them.

It was only years later, when I studied Economics at an undergraduate level with the Open University, that I found out why I had done so well.  The economics master, called Tom Hockton who mainly taught history, was a left-wing MP contender – albeit in a hopeless constituency for Labour .  He took me under his wing and pushed my development in the social sciences. For example he sent me on a weekend residential school, with other high-flying teenagers, at Burton Manor; a local higher education college.  Incidentally that was a great social education; for half those attending were girls! Never was playing cards so exciting. Tom also took me to the Liverpool Economic and Statistical Society to meet Harold Wilson, who was then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

But, to cut a long story short, as preparation for the A level exam, he'd given me a textbook to read.  This was the first edition of Samuelson.  I loved it, for it was one of the first really well written textbooks. But the sting in the tail was that – unknown to me - it was a textbook for undergraduates, not for sixth-form students. That presumably was why I scored so highly, since my answers were at undergraduate level not A-level.

Thus I sailed out of the sixth-form and went on my way to the upper sixth, where I was to spend the next year sitting the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. 

Not everyone was party to this decision though.  At the end of the year, along with my compatriots, I turned up at the RAF hut carrying my uniform and waved them a tearful farewell, on the basis that I was leaving the school.  It took most of the following year for them to realise that I hadn't left after all.  But it got me out of the hated CCF!

In the days of my youth public schools were committed to having CCF (Combined Cadet Force) contingents. Moreover, all pupils were forced to join these. We all started in the army, and spent our time – as did, and still do, all recruits into the army – practicing drill. There may have been good reasons why such drill was necessary at the time of Waterloo, with its red squares of infantry. But I fail to see what use it is in modern warfare. I amply demonstrated this when I led a team of cadets tasked with ‘ambushing’ other cadets; albeit our only weapon was a rattle, which was supposed to sound like a sub-machine gun. We ranged about the countryside, and our victims followed the requisite procedures, dropping to the ground and returning fire from their empty rifles. At the end of the day they all lined up ready to march back to the school. That was when we attacked again. You have never seen so many cadets falling over each other; as they tried to react. Typically, for the army, we were ticked off for daring to ambush them when they weren’t expecting it!

Even worse was all the bull. Our boots had to shine, with the boot-polish boned up with the handle of a toothbrush. Our brass also had to shine. And we had to ‘blanco’ our webbing and gaiters every time we went on parade. It meant that much of the evening before the half day a week we spent on such pursuits was spent on this bull.

Worst of all was the day we had our general inspection, by some local army bigwig. Several hundred of us had to stand to attention in perfect lines for hours on end, as he wandered up and down the lines. As this usually took place in June, on a hot day, quite a few cadets used to faint; and we all dreaded the thought that we might be one of them.

After a year I was able to join the RAF contingent, hoping for better times there. It wasn’t much better in fact; except that the masters in charge were more incompetent and we were able to get away with some tricks which we would not have perpetrated previously.

Much as I bitterly hated having to participate in the CCF, even the RAF,  I hated the two annual camps I was forced to go to even more. They were an opportunity for the older boys to bully anyone they wanted to, especially the younger ones, much as was the treatment meted out to those across the wider population enduring their introduction into national service in the armed forces. I ended up being the butt of much of their bullying. The first such camp was when I was in the fourth form. We went to RAF Hucknall near Nottingham. It was the first time I was away from home and also the first time I had stayed in a dormitory, if you can call a nissen hut that! This offered the maximum opportunity for the bullies, and they took every advantage of it. It was also the first time I had to take showers in public, and I hated it. In fact I steadfastly avoided doing it, which made me even more a target for the bullies.

The camps were meant to be a combination of training and holiday. Thus, while we were on the first camp, we also went to Lincoln Cathedral to see the Magna Carta, and made a number of side trips. But most of the time we had to put up with the drill and boring routine of RAF camps; and being subject to all the bullying squaddies are forced to endure.

It was, though, the first time I saw an X film. This was the 'Moon is Blue", with David Niven, and I saw it in the camp's cinema. The thrill of getting into an X film at my age was rather diminished by the fact that the front row contained a number of cubs still in their uniform! The film was, though, very funny. I always enjoyed David Niven’s laid back performances.

The second camp, in the fifth form, was at Driffield in Yorkshire. This was a night fighter station and, as in the previous year, the one thing I did very much enjoy was the flying. This was in two seat piston-engined planes doing aerobatics high in the sky. There is nothing like the thrill of doing a loop or a role or a spin. It is a wonderful feeling.

But one flight stands out in my memory. A number of us were to be given a special treat, albeit in an old Anson aircraft. Left over from the war, these were rather rickety piston-engined passenger planes and were normally not of special-interest to us. But we were promised that we were being taken out by the group captain who commanded the station. We were thrilled because he was a World War II fighter ace!

I began to have my doubts when I saw what was going on in the pilots cockpit. I was at the front of the cabin, just behind the cockpit and, through the door opening, I heard the sergeant pilot, who was alongside him, say to the group captain say: ‘You pull this back to take off’! This was scarcely reassuring! With that the group captain revved up the engines and rushed off down the runway. My problem was that, without warning, he went straight down the runway the wrong way. Possibly he thought he was entitled to do this, as the aerodrome belonged to him. But facing us was an awe inspiring sight, as we accelerated down the runway, for a whole wing of night fighters was coming in to land ahead of us. Fortunately they all sheared steeply away on either side to avoid us. On the other hand, how we avoided going head-on into them I don't know!

The flight was then relatively quiet until we came to land. Our adventurous pilot did not want to waste time going around the circuit, so he cut across the corner of the airfield and in the process hit a large tree. Fortunately he didn't crash the Anson and, after a rather bumpy landing, we came to a halt. But, as we were clambering out, the tyre on the left-hand side, amply decorated with tree branches, gave a loud gasp and the whole plane slumped over. The tyre had burst. I dread to think what would have happened had this taken place when we were landing. So much for the thrill of flying with the RAF. Thereafter, until I escaped the CCF, I avoided camps like the plague.

The one thing I have not mentioned is National Service. The reason for this is that this ceased just a few months before I was due to enter it. As a result, it does not feature either in my memories of the time or in terms of its impact on my life as a whole; and I am eternally grateful for that! For most of my peers, however, it loomed large in their lives, and often shaped their destiny. Not least, it took 2 years, or latterly 18 months, out of their lives. That was the amount of time that, in their late teens, they had to give to the government; to defend the country. For most of them, as ordinary squaddies, it was two years of drill and bull; enduring months of bullying much as I have described above. But it often broadened their experience of life, not least taking them to strange places across the world they would never otherwise have seen. For some of those in the under-classes it was their making, giving them skills they would never have otherwise have gained. But for most it was doubtful that they gained anything like enough to compensate for the 2 years of career they lost.

I had originally thought I too would have had to undergo this treatment. As such I had to decide whether to do it before I went up to university. In that case, due to my time in the RAF contingent at school, I expected to spend my two years in something like air traffic control. This wouldn’t have been too onerous, since it would have been just like a civilian job. My roommate at Farnborough, for example, was in the airforce but he was treated in all respects exactly the same as I was. The alternative would have been to do it after university, when the ‘job’ would have been as an officer. Fortunately I didn’t have to do either, and I gained an extra two years of career on those just a few months ahead of me.

When I was in the sixth form, my second vac job was intended to be purely about making money, though in fact it turned out to be a great experience -- much more so than the laboratory at Levers.  I got it through my uncle, who ran the shops and bars at Butlin's Pwllheli. Making full use of this nepotism, I was employed as a beer porter in the Pwllheli camp!

I especially well remember the trip there, in the days before Dr Beeching cut out most of the branch lines. I left from the Riverside Station in Birkenhead. In those days this was a busy transport interchange; with the Mersey ferries, along with many of the buses, congregating at their terminus outside the station itself.  The station has long since disappeared, for the line is now merely an extension to the Mersey underground railway, which bypasses the site.  Thus, it is now essentially a commuter line, but in those days it really was supposed to be a mainline station.  There, accordingly, I caught the Pwllheli express!

This was billed as a mainline express.  In fact it was the slowest train I have ever come across.  It took a full six hours to get from Birkenhead to Pwllheli, where the same journey by car took no more than two to three hours - even on the country roads of the time.  We meandered backwards and forwards across the countryside. I remember it running along the banks of Bala lake and visiting Barmouth.  Perhaps understandably, all these rail lines have disappeared in the cut-backs of branch lines since then; though the stretch alongside Bala Lake is, I believe, run for (heritage) tourists!  It was a pretty route, but very boring, especially as I was getting increasingly homesick -- this being the first time I had been away from home for any length of time. 

I remember getting off the train at Barmouth to ask the guard to check that it was going to Butlins. The guard casually said to me "Ask the driver, and then would you tell me as I don't know either!”  This was truly one of the joys of the railways in those days.  We arrived eventually at Pennychain, which was the stop before Pwllheli, and was where the Butlin's camp was.  Thus began one of my adventures

The camp itself contained something like 1,000 staff to service around 10,000 campers.  We staff were kept away from the rest campers, living in a separate area with our chalets surrounded by a high wire fence.  At first I thought this was to keep us away from the campers, and from the facilities they had paid for, but I learned very soon that it was to keep the campers away from us!  Our chalets were fairly bare, a couple of bunks, one on top of the other.  But then so were those of the campers. My roommate was an elderly gentleman who managed the supplies for the staff canteen - which meant he had to go round each day to beg, borrow or steal food from the campers' restaurants. Billy Butlin didn't budget for his staff having to eat!

My job, as I have said, was as a beer porter.  This meant I had to work in the beer stores. There I helped tranship the numerous loads of beer coming in every day to the bars around the camp.  The camp in those days survived on beer and sex!  Or at least that was the case for the young. It was certainly where Billy Butlin made his money -- hence my uncle, who was in charge of this veritable gold mine, was the most important manager in the place!  Accordingly, massive lorries, carrying hundreds of crates full of bottles of beer or dozens of 32 gallon barrels of beer, used to draw up outside our warehouse; and we would have to unload them. It was a backbreaking job. The beer mainly used to come 24 bottles to a crate, and we used to put a 12 of these crates on a hand-trolley and wheel them into the warehouse. Needless to say, with the typical British flair for planning, there was a steep ramp in front of the door which made life much more difficult.  Once inside we stacked then up to twenty high. I set the record for such stacking, with something like 200 of them stacked in just over a quarter of an hour. 

It was very energetic job. I lost three stone in weight in a fortnight.  The guy with whom I worked most closely also lost a couple of stone; and he was a docker who started off at just 9 stone! We then reversed process, pulling out the beer bottles to match the orders from the various bars, loading them on to low-loading trolleys which were pulled by a 'Planet' tug around the camp.  Equally these would return with the empties which were stacked in another part of the warehouse until they could be loaded onto the empty lorries.

As well as those crates we had the barrels of beer.  These were to be found in a range of sizes, but they were mainly 32 gallon barrels; which took two of us to handle. Rolling along the ground was no problem, but we then we had to load them on to the trolleys for them to be distributed around the camp. This required special skills, since the trollies were about 18 inches off the ground and the two of us had rock the barrels backwards and forwards and then bounce them on board.

But, surprisingly, though the work might have been said to be as boring as in the laboratory of previous year, in fact it wasn't.  We were a great group of workers together, although we were always tired from the heavy work. I well remember developing the ability to climb on top of a stack of crates containing the empty bottles and lie down to go to sleep for just ten minutes.  I should point out that this meant lying on top of empty bottles, with their necks upwards in the crates – and lying on that was rather like a fakir lying on a bed of nails. Even so was able to instantaneously snatch ten minutes sleep, here and there during the day.

While I was at Butlins, to make more money, in fact to make most of the money I earned in the time I was there, I worked on the bars every evening. This was despite the fact that I was under the age at which I should have been allowed into a bar!  I started as a barman in the Coronation Bar -- which was the most 'upper class' of the bars on the camp. 

I should explain, at this stage, that the camp was divided into a number of parts. Thus the West camp, where the Coronation Bar was located, was for the ‘better class’ families.  These were identified by the addresses they came from. In the case of those allowed into the West Camp they had to be couples from the Wirral. Accordingly, the whole atmosphere of West Camp was quite select.  The cabins were still very basic, but were well-kept, though they still had separate toilet blocks; which was normal in those times (en-suite facilities were only for toffs!). The whole area was nicely planted, with flowers and rockeries so that the environment was quite pleasant. 

The South camp was more for mere mortals, couples from the suburbs of Liverpool, and had some landscaping. 

East camp on the other hand was for the yobs!  Again they were selected by address, and by age. They were the single teenagers coming from the slums of Liverpool.  Though  their part of the camp still had the same basic huts, between them there was no hint of greenery. There was just bare beaten earth and guard patrols ran backwards and forwards between them all night long. In addition, to facilitate this, it was floodlit at night.  It was very much like a German prisoner of war camp.  These were the inmates from whom our own high barbed wire fences protected us!

Anyway, in the Coronation Bar I served behind the bar and rapidly developed skills in the serving of beer -- albeit from bottles, since we didn't serve any draught beer whatsoever.  If an 'undesirable' came through the door, they would almost certainly ask for draft beer. When this happened, we would very carefully say “We don't have any of that” followed by "What you do is go out, turn left and you will find a bar that does draught beer just 200 yards down the road".  They were never allowed any choice; since they would only spoil it for the (better class!) rest. If that approach failed, though it rarely did, we bar staff would all stare at the offender until he got so embarrassed that he left anyway. As a result it was a very select bar and we never had any trouble.

In one of the other less select bars, which had pillars along the bar itself, the bar staff each kept an empty bottle hidden behind the nearest pillar. The rule was if one guy grabbed you over the bar - which did happen - you grabbed the bottle and hit him over the head with it. If more than one grabbed you, you smashed the bottle on the edge of the bar and jabbed it in their faces! In another bar, with hundreds of small leaded windows, the lights once went out and - by the time they came back on, five minutes later - the campers had broken every window in the place. It was a tough life.

My friend was a security guard, and the technique he was taught, for dealing with the many trouble-makers, was to seem to nervously clasp his hands together in front of him, but then suddenly jab their opponent (all campers were opponents!) in the pit of the stomach. As the opponent pitched forward, in agony, the security guard then brought his fists down on the back of the trouble-makers neck to knock him out!

It was easy for them to identify who were going to be the worst trouble-makers; and this was routinely done by the end of their first (Saturday) evening in the camp. The ensuing routine was that, at three am the following morning, the guards would break down the door of their cabin, beat them up and throw them out of the main gates. Being Sunday, there was no bus to anywhere so they had to walk five miles or so with their luggage to Pwllheli. They didn't get their money back either. Even so, to the best of my knowledge none of them ever complained. It was what they expected of an exciting holiday! Drunks, of whom there were many more, were simply tossed into the bushes to sober up over night! It was through this mayhem that I carried the night's takings - hundreds of pounds of it slung over my shoulder - to the accounts office.

The Coronation bar itself was tastefully decorated, as a cocktail lounge.  It had originally been next to one of theatres, and held the record for sales; when the audience poured out into it – where it had been carefully positioned at the main exit!  But now it was quiet backwater, a select one. There I learned my trade. In particular I learned how to deliver a short measure. The 'correct' way to give a short measure, it turned out, was to do it right in front of the punter's nose. We used ‘optics’ to measure out the spirits and there always was some hidden before the optic finished delivering its load.  We could save something like one in six or eight measures this way.  We had to do this because the bar supervisor said we needed to cover our losses, but I always suspected it went into other people's pockets. More ethically, I learned to make all the various cocktails, and to do it expertly.

The bar supervisor was a small woman, I guess I would now call her a girl, who was not especially attractive; but I was very attentive to her -- and everyone else thought that I was getting too close for.  Eventually my uncle moved me to another bar. I suspect rumours about our behaviour were getting to him!  The reality was very innocent, nothing happened between us at all. Indeed, I maintained my innocence until I met my wife; I was still a virgin when I met her. This was normal at the time, you had to 'save yourself' for your wife! The miracle was that I saved myself even at Butlins -- because so many people came to Butlins specifically to lose their virginity! 

I went to party soon after getting there, where there were three or four boys and three or four girls and we drank and drank all night.  I later calculated I had the equivalent of 16 measures of spirits!  I guess they were trying to get me drunk and 'into bed'. But I and my friend managed to get back into the staff lines without being raped. I thought we were not too drunk but, en route I was rather surprised to find him wandering around women's toilets, quaintly called 'lasses' (where the men's were called 'lads'), muttering that he could not find 'them'.  I guess I was not on top form either, since it took me a few minutes to realise he was trying to find the urinals. But I got back safely to my bed, and so it seemed that I had survived that first real drinking experience.

Even when I got in to work the next day, and up to as late as ten o'clock in the morning, I felt absolutely fine. I began to wonder what people meant when they talked about hangovers.  Then at ten o'clock the worst hangover I have ever had in my life struck me!  I guess actually it was more like alcohol poisoning!  Anyway it quite literally lasted for the best part of a week. Immediately my fellow workers realised what was happening, they sent me back to the Coronation Bar; where everyone fed me their favourite concoctions for a hangover. I guess it might have been those that prolonged it rather than the alcohol itself!  Many years later I was attending a medical convention with a friend, and he got a stomach bug. His big mistake was to mention this to some of the doctors  - and they each gave him a different remedy -- and I suspect he was ill for much longer as a result! 

I enjoyed my time in The Coronation Bar. I did have something going with the supervisor, though nothing sexual. I even took a day out, to buy a record -- of a singer in the camp -- she wanted.  The one I found most fascinating, though, was my dishwasher.  To increase productivity we all had someone washing our glasses for us.  Mine was a Welsh girl, who I thought of as a Welsh witch. I remember she had just had a baby and was drinking stout to build up her milk supply! But she was attractive in a very strange way.  I could just imagine her on a Welsh hilltop playing a harp as she cast her spells!

For whatever reason, probably because I was becoming too involved with my (attractive) bar supervisor, my uncle moved me to be Bar Waiter in the French Bar - one of the down-market large bars.  He said, at the time, this was so I could earn more money . He may well have been right, because our income came largely from tips and as a waiter these were much greater than anything I received as a barman.

Bar waiters operated only in the larger bars, where they supplemented the barmen by delivering drinks, ordered from them, to each of the tables scattered throughout the bar.  The main skill was in learning to remember all of the order.  You could have up to a dozen people ordering at the same time, wanting a wide range of different drinks.  You had to get it right, because any mistakes came out of your own money!

The big advantage was that some of the punters tipped you for doing this. Clearly it saved them having to queue at the bar, and it added to any feeling of luxury they felt – though, in bars where this operated, luxury was scarcely a word that was applicable to the squalid ambience. After a shaky start, and losing some money, I rapidly progressed to be the most successful waiter in the bar. At least I was in terms of the amount of tips I received -- which eventually was over £10 a week, a lot of money in those days.  There was a skill in it, which I learned from the others:

The first, and most important, rule was that you only served punters that experience told you were likely to be tippers.  If you judged any party was not likely to tip you, then you didn't serve them. If they indicated they wanted serving, then you made frantic motions showing you were serving someone else. They had to wait for a less experienced bar waiter, or go to the bar themselves.  This was not infallible. Once or twice I was forced to serve such people and they actually did give quite a good tip; but as a rule, it proved to be the first rule of salesmanship - always pitch the customers that are likely to 'buy' .

The second rule of salesmanship is that the most likely customers to tip are those that already have done so, and this certainly applied with the vengeance in that situation.  I guarded them like a mother hen with chickens.  They really did get super service!

The third rule of tipping was simply to give excellent service; to talk to them and make them feel they were the most important people in the world. 

The fourth rule, which I always broke - but which I was told about - was that you should always pass change back to them on the tray with beer slopping around on it, so they wouldn't want to pick it up . As far as I was concerned that militated against the earlier and more important rules, so I never did this.

Whatever the reason I did make a lot of money in tips.

I also got various propositions.  I remember, for example, one young girl, a very attractive one, sitting for half an hour or so on the skip I was pulling around collecting the empty bottles from the tables before we closed. I've no doubt that I could have had sex with her, since that was the whole ethos of the camp - let alone in the bars.  The younger campers used to go out into the sand dunes for their nightly assignations. But I was a virgin, I was innocent, and I was scared of the whole thing. I even got back to my cabin one night to discover a girl in my bed, and my immediate reaction -- a genuine one -- was to say "Oh God!  I am too tired for that". I proceeded to pick her up and throw her out of the door. I suspect my colleagues put her in there to try and relieve me of my hang-ups, though it took a lot longer for those to be resolved. Now I wish I had taken the opportunities on offer!

The worst part was during the 'wakes', the two weeks when -- traditionally -- Merseyside heavy industry shut down for its holidays.  It had been a tradition because employers couldn't manage with people taking holidays at odd times, so the whole factory was shut down at one time. Indeed the all the factories across the area shut down for the same two weeks in August.  When that happened the world descended on Pwllheli, or at least that bit of the world that was working class and living on Merseyside!

During those weeks life for us staff was a battle. We hated the campers with real passion.  And we had every right to so, because there often was a true conflict between the two sides.  At times it actually came to a physical battle. In one of the campers’ dining rooms, perhaps canteen would be a more applicable term, hand to hand fighting broke out between the staff and the campers, with the air full of flying crockery. It raged backwards and forwards for more than an hour.

It was not pleasant environment.  You used to hear the chalet maids, most of whom were Irish, sadly singing in their own bar ‘Oh how I want to go home’.  I think we all felt much the same: pretty miserable.  I certainly would have done so if I hadn't kept myself busy working from eight o'clock in the morning to twelve at night. Perhaps it was there that I learned my habit of working all hours God gave me. 

Anyway it eventually was over and we caught the coach home -- taking just 2½ hours rather than six hours on the train. I was never so happy as when we reached a bit of the road I recognised as the way home from the cottage!

With me I took a large box containing literally hundreds of beer mats and bar advertisements -- on tin. My mother thought it was a present for her, and was very disillusioned when she realised what it was.  She was even less happy when I decorated  the walls in the playroom with them. I eventually had to throw them away, which was a pity because they would now be worth a small fortune to collectors.

With the A-levels behind me I moved on to the Upper Sixth.  It comprised a small select group, made up only of those who were attempting Oxford and Cambridge entry.  As such our lessons diverged from the A-levels and were angled towards the higher-level requirements -- almost undergraduate -- of the scholarships.

The first of these attempts had in fact been made the previous year when I went for an interview at Cambridge, at Saint Catherine's College.  It was just about the first interview I had ever done, and it showed!  I had to travel halfway across England to get Cambridge, and that didn't help. When I got there I boarded in the college's lodge, and was all by myself – and was very lonely - the first time I had really been so alone.  I was there for three days, during which time the only thing I did was go out to watch the local rugby match; Oxford University versus Bedford. It was, even to this day, the only time I ever watched professional sports, rugger or football, from the terraces!

The main problem, however, was that I was ill-prepared.  As I have said, it was the first interview I had ever done and I found the place very forbidding. I ate in hall with the students, which was rather awe-inspiring.  But when it came to the interview itself, the critical question turned out to be "Who do know who has been to Cambridge?" I guess I knew a number of people who had been to Cambridge, but no one had prepared me to say this and I said "Nobody" -- and that was probably the end of my career at Cambridge.  The net result was I didn't get in by the back door, and had to sit the scholarship entrance exam the following spring.

After my A-level results, and gaining my state scholarship, I interviewed for Imperial College. In reality, this was already my first choice, since I was still targeted to become a scientist -- and in particular a physicist.  Accordingly, the interview for this, in the college in South Kensington London, was much more friendly and I felt a much happier glow about the whole College.  I guess I must have done reasonably well, and my state scholarship probably did me no harm; though in the physics stream, that I eventually entered, something like two-thirds of the students had state scholarships.  It was a very elite institution.  In particular where everywhere else physics streams started by studying maths, physics and chemistry for the first two years, at Imperial we studied physics in general for two years and then in final year we specialised in a part of physics!  This was another reason why I loved the idea of going to Imperial.

Maybe that was the reason why, in the spring of 1959, I made such a mess of the Cambridge scholarship exam.  In particular, in the first part of exam, I managed to shuffle some of my answers underneath the spare paper and these accordingly were ineligible.  I still don't know whether this was deliberate, albeit unconscious, or whether it was a genuine mistake.  Whatever the reason, Cambridge went out the window -- and I never really regretted that.

En route to those scholarship exams, I very arrogantly ditched Oxford.  My headmaster, who was an Oxford graduate, put in a lot of effort persuading Oxford to set up a special course for me, combining economics and engineering. I, perhaps unfortunately, would not - at that stage - have ever dreamt of doing engineering. I thought that was for losers and I was intent on being in the elite doing physics - so I quite brusquely refused the offer.  In retrospect I am sorry, mainly because it was impolite of me to reject it so harshly.  Even so I suspect Oxford would not necessarily have been the best place for me to study. One of my classmates at school, a boy called Cowan, went to Oxford, on a choir scholarship, and committed suicide in his first year. I have a suspicion I might have felt much the same.

In any case I only stayed in the upper sixth until the results were known, in the spring, and then I left to go to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough.

You may wonder if I had any time for interests outside of school, and indeed my schoolwork dominated my life. Even so, as a youngster, I collected stamps – as did many others– but most of my collection was handed down by my father. My main addition to this was when we went on holiday to Austria. There I bought a pack which – to my surprise – contained 600 stamps. Maybe some of these stamps, especially those of my father, would have eventually been valuable; but I ruined all of them by sticking them in the album with Sellotape! I did buy a few from dealers. They sent you stamps on approval and you returned them if you didn’t want to buy them. I still remember the excitement of opening the envelope to see what treasures were in it. I also had a cigarette card collection, but this was also handed down – this time from Sid – and I couldn’t add to it (without going through dealers) because they were no longer used.

For a while I took up marquetry. This was very relaxing, cutting the very fiddly pieces of the various veneers and then fixing them in place before polishing the final picture with beeswax. I made a couple of quite passable pictures in this way; one of which was in competition with Sid who made the same picture.

I also did one set of smoked plates. In these you held the plate over a candle until the soot deposited covered the whole plate with black. Then you etched out the picture, in my case a copy of an illustration of a sailing ship from a favourite story based on the East India company. When finished, the picture was sealed with varnish. I put these into an exhibition, at school, of hobbies. The punchline was that my school report that term was poor in terms of Latin, and my mother berated me with the latin comment appended by the headmaster which said ‘I licet hic plates’. It took some time before we realized that he ‘liked my (smoked) plates’.

My main hobby later was photography. I remember going into Montague Fisher, the main photographic equipment shop in Birkenhead – long since disappeared – and buying my first Kodak camera. It was not just a box camera but one which had folding bellows. However, I only really started to take lots of photos when I bought an Agfa Karat 35mm camera. It was unusual, however, in that the film (with only 12 exposures) ran from one cassette to another. I bought the film in bulk and packed it into the cassettes myself – so it was cheap to run. But I never really printed the resulting pictures – though I still have the negatives.

When I was in my teens, though, like many other boys of my age, I was fascinated by car racing; even though this was long before the days of Formula 1 and the key event was the Le Mans 24 hr race. Accordingly, my friend Billy Wilcox and I managed, under the guise of the school’s Science Society, of which I was the secretary, to borrow movies of the various rallies which then were at the pinnacle of car racing.  We used to sit all by ourselves in the school hall watching these movies.  I desperately wanted to build a small racing car, but I never did.

Perhaps incidentally, this film viewing also stimulated my interest in moviemaking itself; though the seminal experience of seeing ‘Gone with the Wind’ may have been the biggest stimulus of all.  At that time, although I was supposedly destined to be a scientist but, above all, I really wanted to become film director.  Thus, when I left the school - half way through the upper sixth form - to do six months vac work, my most vigorous applications were to the film industry.  The problem was that the film industry was then the most energetic supporter of sending letters which said "...we would love to give you a job just a long as you have your union membership card".  On applying to the union you got an equally enthusiastic letter saying "... we will love to have you as a member just as soon as you get a job in the industry"!  Thus a closed shop was maintained, which protected those working in the industry, and kept everyone else out.  I never did work directly in the industry, but I did eventually work on commercials, in the early part of my career in brand management, and on documentaries at the end of it, with the Open University and the BBC.

My other, more covert, interest was in rocketry -- especially rocket engines.  This was in a period when the V2 technology developed by the Germans was being redeveloped by the Americans -- under the guidance of Von Braun who had initiated the V2 work in Germany and went on to lead the work on the Apollo moon landings.

I avidly read everything I could, from the early work of Ziolkovsky in Russia and Goddard in the US to - in particular - Hermann Oberth in Germany.  I knew all their work on aerodynamics.  But in particular I knew their rocket engines inside out; the fuel mixtures, how they were transported to the engine and then how they were burnt in special thrust chambers.  I became something of an expert!

Accordingly the other ‘discipline’ I applied for in my vac job was that of working on rockets.  I applied to a number of commercial organisations but was turned down by them on the basis that I hadn't a hope in hell of getting into the field.  To my surprise, though, I got an interview at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough; then the UK leaders in the field.  I went down to Farnborough, quite a long journey for me at that stage since it was undertaken alone, staying in the hotel just across the road from the establishment. I eventually presented myself for interview by the panel. They asked a lot of difficult questions, but the only really embarrassing one was "How would I measure the air flow over the wings of a plane?"  Having read a lot about the subject, I said that I would measure the pressure on the wings, which was the latest technology.  They then asked what I thought of sticking bits of wool on the wing and seeing how they blew around -- and I with great confidence said that no one had done that for years!  Their answer was that was that was what they were still doing!  Even so I got the job!

The target, for my research at the RAE, was to produce a very fast power supply for a digital computer; long before such things were available in the commercial sector.  I had always thought that a power supply would be made up just of a transformer and rectifier, giving a direct current in some form or other.  But computer circuits need power supplies that are oscillating.  These days you hear people talking about the speed of a computer as so many MHz or GHz. This is the speed at which the power supply -- hence the computer chip -- oscillates.

Because it was to be used for radar, utilising very short wavelengths, the target for my power supply was approaching the speed of modern chips; of around one GigaHerz -- which even now, 40 years later, is still seen as a very high speed.  In those days it seemed impossible. What was even worse was the shape of the wave, for it wasn't a normal sinusoidal waveform. Instead it had to be a square wave!  The key measure was, therefore, the rise time at the leading edge of the wave. It had to rise to its full potential in much less than a nanosecond. My superiors at the RAE believed it was possible, because another lab had already achieved this.  The problem was that the other lab had used the tunnelling effect, which created a one-off avalanche of electrons and this process could not be reproduced on a regular basis.  Hence it could not be used to provide a clock that the RAE, in its wisdom, said must do this in normal mode.  Over the six months I was there I got closer every day to the requisite 0.1 nanosecond rise time. I suspect it wasn’t finally achieved until sophisticated micro-miniaturisation techniques, which weren’t available for another two decades, could achieve this.

As I said, each day I sat down at my bench to review the results from the previous day. Then I proceeded to fine tune the one I had in front of me.  I tried the whole range of transistors available. This was very soon after the transistor has been invented -- and most electronic circuits were still driven by valves. The result was nothing like fast enough. I guess the wires leading to and from the various resistors and capacitors probably would have limited its speed anyway. But, even so, I eventually could produce a good performance; but it was just not good enough.

I was not really appreciated by the head of the lab, since he had not got a degree himself and had a big chip – excuse the pun - on his shoulder as a result.  When I left he even said he would have never have appointed me if he had the choice!  While I was there he tried show me up by giving me the few articles that had been produced about how transistors work.  These were, in those days, very theoretical and contained a fair amount of quantum-mechanics.  Nobody else in the lab understood more than a few words of them.  Perhaps foolishly, I did translate the material for him -- which only confirmed his dislike of me.  I have always had problems with weak managers!

In the lab there were about half a dozen of us working on several different approaches.  Despite the antagonism of the manager, it wasn't bad environment.  We worked with very high-tech equipment which dated very rapidly.  I remember I had to use a high-speed oscilloscope which was the size of a large refrigerator. One day I plugged it in and it shorted out, blowing off the cover of the fuse box at the other end of the lab. We had our fair share of such accidents.  Thus, one of my co-workers was trying to repair some equipment when he contacted 400 volts inside it . He shot his arm out at such a high speed that the piece of equipment, worth several thousand pounds, went sailing 30 feet down the lab!  This technician was, though, rather accident prone. He foolishly tried to heat some ether by putting it in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. When it caught alight, with a pillar of flame reaching to the ceiling, he did the right thing and reached for the carbon dioxide extinguisher.  Unfortunately so powerful was the pressure that the beaker blew off the tripod and scattered the flaming ether everywhere. Fortunately ether is not a very difficult fire to put out and this was accomplished with the rest of the carbon dioxide.  But it was very exciting at the time!

The facilities at Farnborough were very good. It had its own excellent library -- which included classified documents on all its work and I was able to make full use of these. Following positive vetting, I had been cleared to handle the top-secret material, but I then realised there were a number of levels to this -- and I was on the lowest.  Rather ridiculously, however, one of my jobs was circulating the in-house reports of the progress the RAE was making.  For this I was given all the performance data, for example, of the rockets. Thus, I was aware that Black Knight and Blue Streak had reached altitudes, in test flights, which were three to four times higher than had been reported in the press. Information at this level was meant to be restricted to the heads of departments, who were a number of levels of security clearance above me! I imagine the security services must have had kittens when, soon afterwards, I went up to Imperial College and started friendships with some senior members of the Communist Party!

When I eventually did go up to university, to Imperial College in London, I found myself in digs; in Fulham, by the Bishops Park on the river.  In the digs, run by a spinster of a certain age, there were four of us; myself and Jon Power, in the room downstairs, and Harvey and Martin upstairs.

Our room was quite large, on the ground floor, with a nice bay window onto a quiet suburban street.  We had twin beds and a table, on which to write, together with a wardrobe.  It was fairly spartan but comfortable.  We had our breakfast and evening meals provided for us.

Thus started one of the most intense friendships I ever had.  But first of all was the excitement when we arrived, with a few days to go before we actually started our courses. We had the run of London for the first time in our lives.  We immediately dashed up to the West End and in particular to the area around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square where the nightlife was. Picalgar Squircas was the name we gave to the epicentre of our adventures.  In fact we did little more than wander around the shops at night, marvelling at all bright lights and the human activity.  I remember we were once looking in the HMV store on Oxford Street when a professional photographer took our photographs -- ostensibly for a record cover, though I never saw this! 

When we finally start at Imperial College, it was - first of all - to go to the union for ‘freshers day’, when we were supposed to sign up to all the spare-time activities.  In fact we got involved in the inter-college rivalry.  Imperial College was made up of the Royal College of Science (RCS) -- the scientific disciplines to which I, John and Harvey belonged -- City & Guilds (C&G) -- the engineering part to which Martin belonged -- and the Royal School of Mines (RSM) to which none of us belonged.  There was intense rivalry between these colleges. At the beginning of term it took the form of traditional battles to capture each other's trophies. Ours was a thermometer fashioned out of a broomstick and a ball-cock!  This soon disappeared and later had to be retrieved from the top of the Empire State Building in New York -- these pranks were done at a very sophisticated level.  I, and the others, got involved at a very early stage when the City & Guilds freshers were having their welcome dinner. We barricaded them in, so they couldn't get out.  I well remember rushing out in a state of excitement, and fear at what might happen, and jumping on the back of a waiting motorcycle which then roared off.  My driver was less than impressed when it turned that I hadn't got their spanner, which was their trophy, but had just run away! 

If we had been ordinary youths, I suppose we would have been ‘teddy boys’ in those days and our activities would have been condemned as almost criminal. But, as undergraduates it was then, and now, supposed to be normal behaviour. How often are the rules of society bent for the benefit of the elite!

Much of our first term, was therefore taken up with such nonsense. This came to a head with the traditional Morphy Day battle between the two sides (RCS and C&G, though RSM were as far as I can remember not represented) along the towpath by Putney Bridge. It was a boisterous affair, with many of us - including myself - ending up in the river. This ruined my clothes, fortunately very old ones, but had I swallowed any water in the process the requirement then was to have your stomach pumped out; so polluted was the river at that time!

I slowly started to move into more serious things, having been persuaded to propose the first coloured person, Samuel Akintola Apeji (the son of a Nigerian chief), for union president. I plastered the whole union with posters for his candidacy.  He didn't get the job, but it was good experience for what was to come later; as I entered the revolutionary sixties!

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