I arrived at Churchill Hall in my Singer feeling lost and bewildered. Most other students had been brought by their parents. I had a bedsit on the first floor with a small kitchen opposite for making toast and hot drinks and coffee. Meals were provided and there were many rules to be obeyed – such as having to wear an academic gown into many meals. Since I had been a free agent for many months I resented many of these.
SINGER nine saloon
I made friends with a few fellow students who were also disenamoured with the enforced discipline of the place, Tony, Steve and John Randolph. We listened to Billie Holliday records in Tony’s room, lit by a single bulb encased in a large coffee jar so there was no hint of brightness to lighten the melancholy mood. I also befriended a lad called James who came from Devon and introduced me to Francois Hardy records. None of these characters survived into the second year. None of them enjoyed their courses.
I had chosen to read zoology with botany as a subsidiary subject. Basically we studied 2 subjects for the first two years and just one for the final year when doing an honour’s science degree. After the exciting, demanding, personal teaching I had received from Messrs Lambert and Little at High Wycombe I found both courses dull and old fashioned, particularly the Botany. The one exception was Mr Round’s course on algae. We had far more course work than the arts students because many of our afternoons were taken up with practicals. I enjoyed these, as I am a practical person, and became quite a joker too, entertaining the girls in particular.
We went on a number of field trips of various duration. The one that made the most impression on me was a study of littoral marine organisms at various sites round Falmouth. My faithful old Singer took me there but one valley was so steep that even in 1st gear the car wouldn’t go up. I ended up reversing out of it. Phew! We were in Falmouth for a week and I was amazed by the variety of organisms we found but was not as enthusiastic about classifying them all as many of my fellow students.
As freshers we were invited to join all sorts of clubs. I elected to join the rowing club (see separate page) and assist with the rag. I was co-opted onto the zoology committee and helped building a float with the theme of a triffid. As part of rag week we were asked to do door to door collections and I was sent to Fishponds and was shocked by the poverty that greeted me. Such a contrast to the grandeur of the parts of the city we students inhabited. I felt we should be giving them money not asking for it.
Me and Jill
I kept my girlfriend, Jill, that I had in Wraysbury for several months but her letters became increasingly bizarre and her attitude to sex was very different to mine. She didn’t believe in sex before marriage and whilst she was happy to indulge in petting this only when she was the recipient. We had fun though and one of the records that was popular at the time had the line “met him/her at a party and his/her name was Bill/Jill” sung by both male and female singers which made us feel a bit special. I finished with her after the first term and after that had a few romantic encounters all of which were relatively short lived. I was finished with on a couple of occasions which knocked my confidence a bit.
I was a bit lost at Christmas and Easter as, with my parents now living in Kingston, Jamaica, and unlike all the other students I had no family to go to. However I did have some interesting invites and recall staying with John Randolph’s family (owners of Wilkinson Sword), Jo Ward’s family – sister of my friend Chris who had recently died and my second cousin John Hasler, brother of the famous “Blondie”. In the summer I had a fabulous holiday in Jamaica.
Penny outside Ravenswood Road flat
I had no accommodation organised on my return from Jamaica but an Ethopian friend, Seth, offered me his sofa which was home for a couple of uncomfortable weeks. Then I moved in with two post graduate aeronautical engineers in a 2-bedroom flat in Ravenswood Road, Redland.
I soon found the food in the refectory not to my taste and started to cook for myself. My quickest dish was a tin of baked beans with an egg dropped in heated in the tin on the stove – washing up 1 tea spoon. I shared a room with another lad but he didn’t fit in and left at Christmas.
I did Psychology as my subsidiary subject in my second year (in place of Botany) and really enjoyed it. The department seemed much more on the ball than the Biology department and the experiments were so much fun. I took up rowing again, this time in the first eight, but could tell it wasn’t such a good crew as the 2nd eight the previous year. So when I was demoted to the 2nd eight I left in disgust, disillusioned as I felt the Captain of rowing had just favoured his friends rather than choosing on ability.
I spent a lot of my spare time in the Barclay coffee bar, just opposite the main university building, always on the lookout for attractive girls. That’s where I saw Penny, a student at the Bristol School of Art, soon after Suzanne and I had finished. We quickly became friends but it took me some time before I could persuade her to become my lover. At Easter she took me down to her home, where she lived with her mother and her grandmother, in Stokenham, South Devon. I had always enjoyed our family holidays in the West Country and fell in love with her home and the surrounding countryside.
My faithful 1933 Singer had failed to pass the MOT, it needed new king pins. So I split it up and sold it piecemeal, the engine to one purchaser, the front seats to another and the aluminum body to the scrapyard. In those times cars of that vintage were not valued and Morris 8’s, Austin 7’s etc. could be bought for just a few pounds. Somehow I had managed to have a bit in the bank and I decided upon my return from Jamaica to buy another car. I found a 1951 2 1/2 litre Riley which I paid £75 for and which I owned until just before I sailed for Cape Town 4 years later.
Penny and my beloved Riley
In the summer I went in the Riley to Spain and when we returned worked as an ice cream salesman, with a van and a regular sales area that included Wooton-under-Edge. I was taken out by another salesman and shown the route and the ropes. Some of his comments were amazing – “You can easily short change the very young children and if their mother’s complain say they must have lost some coins on the way home”, “The smaller the kids are the less you can give them”, “That girl there, see her? She’s a right nympho. Only 15. She went on a rugby coach and they all had her”, “You can cream off a few pounds every day as the soft ice cream isn’t measured.” I took no notice of any of this but did sample most of the menu of the Lyons Maid range that we sold without paying. Two incidents stand out. 1/ I heard that there was a film crew in action down a little gated road so drove down it until I found it. They were impressed with my enterprise and I did good business there. Hayley Mills was the star and several of the men were competing with each other to pay for her choice of ice cream. 2/ One day the van got a puncture. I was driving through Chipping Sodbury at the time so phoned up the depot who told me they would send someone. Whilst waiting I thought I might as well try to make some money and opened up (We were paid £12/week + commission if we exceeded our target). Soon an angry man from a van came and told me to close up as this was his pitch. I ignored him.
My brother, Chris, arrived from Jamaica whilst we were in Spain and somehow managed in my absence to settle into Penny’s flat and get himself a job in a fruit wholesalers.
Penny, Chris and Ann
He was due to start medical school in London in September. We had lovely fruit which he brought back each day. The flat above was occupied by 5 nurses and Chris and I used to be kept awake as the one in the bedroom above us entertained her boyfriend in very noisy grinding sessions that seemed to last for hours. I took over this flat from the nurses along with 4 other males while Penny shared the flat below. The nurses left the place in a disgusting state with a huge number of milk bottles, many of them half full of sour milk.
Aberdeen Road, Bristol
In November my mother arrived – she’d come to visit her mother, me and Chris – and stayed in Penny’s flat. Penny had been sleeping in my single bed on the top floor of the house and she moved down to pretend to my mother that we weren’t co-habiting.
Bill & Chris, Pilgrims
At Christmas I asked Penny to marry me and we got engaged. She was extremely attractive but both of us had quite a lot of emotional baggage and we were not ready to marry but I didn’t know what faced me after my finals only 6 months away and nor did Penny. We planned to marry in July when my parents were due to return from Jamaica. In March one of our contraceptive sheaths burst and Penny became pregnant. We decided against considerable opposition not to bring the wedding forward.
In the third year we concentrated on Zoology. We had to do 3 research projects and chose three lecture courses on which we examined in our final examinations. The first project was to be done in the summer holidays and we had little supervision. I chose to do one on ants and dug up a colony and kept the colony between two sheets of glass. I was never certain that I had managed to include the queen and was a bit directionless in what I wanted to achieve. I think we should have been given more supervision on our first project. I had more success with my other projects – a comparison on the distribution of gammarids in the Severn Estuary with a survey done by my supervisor decades earlier and a study of the safety factor of the flight bones on pigeons. The former involved going out at various points along the Severn Estuary at low water springs and collecting gammarid specimens for later identification and the latter, collecting pigeons from the university tower and measuring the strengths of the radius and ulna of newly killed birds as well as taking photographs of the birds with ultra fast film and a telephoto lens. None of the lecture courses were of real interest to me and I ended up concentrating on the research projects. I also decided to relax prior to the examinations and went to stay with friends for a week instead of swatting like all the other students on my course. Because I am a practical person I helped many of my course-mates with their projects. I was completely gutted when the results came out as I achieved a third class honours in a year when 2 of us managed firsts. In those days no-one informed you how marks were allotted and I guess I put far too much effort into my projects, which I really enjoyed, and far too little into the lecture courses on which we were examined. I don’t think my relationship with Penny was very helpful to my attitude to my studies, especially after the shock of her becoming pregnant.
I had an interview with my professor who didn’t give me much explanation as to what had gone wrong but he did give me a lifeline, he organised a place on an Oceanography MSc course at Southampton University. Looking back on this part of my life I think I needed more support than I received. My parents were not there and there was no-one to talk to at the university, either about my studies or my personal problems.
I fancied myself as a furniture designer and constructed an arm chair and a record rack. Terence Conran didn’t take me on board!
