My first year was spent living in the student residences a few miles from UEA, in ex-army barracks on Fifers Lane. There was a free regular coach service between residences and the University Plain, where the teaching blocks were, the nearby ‘Village’, where the students union bar and concert venue was.
An immediate advantage for me was meeting people from towns and cities across the British Isles. A huge variety of men and women from all sorts of backgrounds. I remember one guy used to say “Hi Man!”. That seemed very modern to me. Nobody in Barry spoke like that.
During the first week or so, all the ‘freshers’ were invited to go along one evening to meet the vice-chancellor and drink free sherry. I never met the guy but drank a few sherries. It turned out to be a sherry drinking contest amongst some of the new undergraduates; two guys drank over twenty glasses each. One was taken to hospital; the other wanted to fight everyone.
The other advantages were that there were girls about, one could drink beer whenever one wanted (subject to opening hours) and there were bands to see.
At the Fifers Lane residence, where the coach dropped us off next to one of the girls residential blocks, there was a bar. Needless to say, that was the first place I headed to.
My main group of friends were Nick and Barrie, the lovely Freda, Angela, Marie and Nina. Later John Sullivan, Brian Smith, Jaime Mulvaney and Glenys and Rob White.
Going to rock and folk concerts was new to me. I had never seen a band live before. The first one was, Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger Trio, then Tyrannosaurus Rex. Over the following few years I also watched performances by Family, Fleetwood Mac, Caravan, Soft Machine, Fairport Convention, Joe Cocker, Free, Principle Edwards Magic Theatre, Curved Air, Hawkwind, The Third Ear Band, Al Stewart, Fred Wedlock and many others: I enjoyed them all.
There was a bit of a division between ‘town and gown’, as they said. I did not go into Norwich City very often in those days. Everything was available on campus.
I remember one evening, I was sitting in the students union debating chamber when some guy rushed in and said there was a group of ‘skinheads’ outside on the walkway beating up students. Everyone, including about fifty guys, rushed out and confronted them. The skinheads had baseball bats. I was shocked to see a couple of guys from chemistry run towards them and just grab the bats and start swinging. The skinheads ran away. I don’t think they ever came back..
The academic year was divided into three, with two four week holidays at Christmas and Easter and about ten weeks during the summer recess. During those holidays, I went back to stay with my parents and family in Barry in Wales. I took a bag of dirty washing, which my dear Mum, bless her, cleaned. I was growing my hair long. They didn’t like that, especially my Dad
That first summer recess, 1969, my dad told me he had found a job for me. It was with the local council, emptying bins, cleaning weeds from drains and cleaning the local beach, the one that as a child I had thought was cleaned each night by the tide. It was not easy work; I had to stand on the back of the truck and the other workers would chuck up the bins and I would empty them, placing sheets of cardboard along the sides so I could pile the trash higher whilst standing in it.
There were no plastic bin bags or wheely bins in those days. It was indeed a very dirty and smelly job. My wage, with double time for a Saturday morning, was £20 a week. On the beach in the mornings each team member collected something such as tokens from 'Crispy Crisps’ or cigarettes. I was allowed to collect glass bottles which I could cash in and boost my wages. £20 a week was double my weekly grant! I was rich for six weeks. What I did not like was the blatant racism amongst my fellow workers.
I spent the last few weeks of summer 1969 hitch-hiking around England, visiting University pals in Guildford, Essex, London and Guernsey. I also went to the Isle of White festival where I camped over a few days and saw performances by Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, The Who, The Bonzo Dog Band, The moody Blues, Family, The Third Ear Band and many others, often, though, from a distance as there were so many people in the audiences. I later read that over 150,000 people had been there, although some of the press reports did not read like the journalists had been to the same event at all.
So September came and I was back at UEA. This time I was sharing a room in ‘digs’ with my my friend Barrie from Taunton.
Barrie was actually the first fellow student I met, in fact in March 1968 when I had travelled to UEA for an interview. He introduced me to some of the music that he liked, such as Elmore James and played the guitar himself.
The room was let by Mrs Utting, a very stern looking middle-aged lady. The room cost us about £2 a week each, with breakfast, but as winter came it got very cold. We had to walk for about thirty minutes to the residences at Fifers Lane to get the coach to campus..
The alternative was to walk all the way to campus which took about ninety minutes as there was no convenient bus service and I could not afford a taxi and did not have a car. I did manage to swap the room for a space in a double room on campus with a guy who had a car. I was much happier there.
Several friends used to come round for coffee in the mornings after lectures, many of which I missed as they all started at 9 am, so I copied their notes.
UEA was a modern University. It was only a few years old by then, with blocks for studying Arts and Languages, Chemistry and Biology, two blocks of residences, Norfolk and Suffolk Terraces, a library and another lecture block.
During my second year, I joined the fell-walking club, the rock climbing club and the caving club.
I wasn’t so good at rock climbing but the three clubs all arranged cheap visits which I went on.
I walked up Snowdon, Ben Nevis, Helvellyn and Coniston and Scafell in the Lake District.
They were great trips that I remember well. I went into caves in Yorkshire and in Somerset where I had to do things like climbing underground waterfalls and squeezing through natural tunnels, one being called ‘Bloody Tight’, which it was.
We travelled in the Student Union van and stayed in climbers’ huts. There was a great felling of comradeship and a sense of achievement.
I remember well the trip to Scotland. We stayed in a climbers hut In Glencoe.
It was all blokes except Ginnie, a delightful American student over here to study for a year. I did get the impression that some of the chaps would have preferred that she wasn’t there but personally I think she leant an air of dignity amongst us.
My good friend from Barry came up from Southampton University to join us on that trip. Also my UEA friend Rob Cranthorne was there.
We climbed, or rather walked up, Ben Nevis.
We visited Keswick where Paul and I were refused entry into the pub because of our long hair,
The sign in the window of this Keswick pub read
“We regret we do not serve gentlemen with Long Hair”
At one point in some sort of bizarre ritual, we all swapped hats. I was the only guy willing to wear Ginnie’s hat.
Another good friend that I remember well was John Stott. He used to own a yellow van which he used to take extra people on walking trips. He was a great and sociable guy, another anarchist,
Students Rag week was also fun, towards the end of the third term in my second year. A group of us donned our white coats, called ourselves the ‘Flying Doctears’, EAR representing East Anglian Rag, and entered the Pram Race, just over twenty miles from Cromer, on the coast, to Norwich. Six of us, four guys and two gals, had to push a pram in turns, riding bicycles in between our turns to push.
"The Flying Doctears" Pram Race Team for UEA Rag Week
Steve the pilot, Steve Allsopp, John Sullivan, Angela, Nina, Nick.
In front, myself praying and Barrie.
We were the only team with a bloke as the baby in the pram. I was the first person to push, down the hill to turn right, getting faster and faster. I though, well this is easy. With great confidence I turned right and promptly the pram tipped over, our ‘baby’, John wearing a crash helmet and nappy and with his hairy chest, toppled out on to the road. The other guys rushed to make sure he was OK whilst the two girls rattled collecting tins. The crowd must have thought it was a stunt as the girls soon filled the tins. About an hour or so later, in the middle of nowhere in Norfolk, a wheel came off the pram. Fortunately I had somehow been prepared for that as I had a spare wheel, so we changed it, as the teams behind us passed us by.
It was early evening by the time we got back to Norwich. We even went round the one-way road system.
Our finishing point was outside City Hall. I expected there to be crowds welcoming us. By then of course, the crowds had left. There was nobody there.
We phoned the Students Union and they said the van was out picking up stragglers, starting at the last ones, and had missed us whilst we were probably on the one-way system. We left our bicycles outside the police station and told the union to pick them up whilst we caught the bus back to campus and straight into the bar.
There were a couple of other stunts, such as ‘climbing’ the pavement in London Street, a pedestrian way, and being put in the stocks to have sponges of water thrown at us. It was fine until some student-hating idiot just threw the plastic bucket at me.
One of my Chemistry friends, Steve, a local lad, was taking flying lessons and had to make up some hours, so he offered some of us a ride in a two-seater plane. I had never been in a plane before, but loved it. We flew from Norwich airport, which was much smaller in those days, over the City of Norwich and UEA, and out over the Norfolk Broads. It was not a long flight but seemed a lot longer. Thanks Steve!
That summer, 1970, I hitched around the UK again and went to another Isle of White festival that years starring Jimi Hendrix (just weeks before his death), Joan Baez, The Who, The Moody Blues, Joni Mitchell, The Doors, Jethro Tell, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Supertramp, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis and others. There were 600,000 in attendance.
Those were the days. It was incredible to hear all those bands in one place over just a few days.
By my third year they had built another residential block, Waveney Terrace. Then a new students union building with bars and a concert hall.
By the time I started my third year, to tell the truth, I was getting fed up with Chemistry. Somehow, after I stopped believing in church and religion, I had thought that science would give me an answer to my questions on life and the universe. It now seemed to me as if science was just another religion, asking us to believe in things we could not see, like electrons, atoms and molecule; like gravity and the Big Bang. Also I did not like ‘organic chemistry;, which did not seem systematic like ‘inorganic chemistry’.
That year I took a room in a flat not far from the city centre. That had good and bad consequences. Good that I found myself able to go to the city centre more often and even meet some locals. Bad because it distracted me from my studies.
Just before the Easter holidays in 1971, students at UEA held a sit in inside the Arts building. The cause was that an American student had been busted with Acid (LSD) and had been fined by the courts, but then he was to be punished again by being kicked off his course, which meant him having to return to the US and possibly face the draft and end up in Vietnam. I could see the injustice in punishing him twice, so I took my sleeping bag, some course work notes and books, a little camping stove and some tins of food and some hash, which by then I had been smoking with tobacco in joints for a year or so, and joined the sit in.
At that time I should have been studying in preparation for the exams a few moths later. That never happened, with all the music being played, people milling around, politics and smoking hash. It was great fun during the sit-in but it ended just before the Easter holidays when a meeting was held and it was decided to end it with a march up the road to the University offices in Earlham Park, with the possibility of continuing after the holidays. As it turned out, when the next term started, we learned that the American guy had quit and gone back to the US.
So I was in my last term heading for exams. I realised that I had far too much to learn in organic chemistry, about five think folders full of notes, compared with two of inorganic chemistry.
I had also turned against the idea of determining a students future in an exam; even though the course was supposed to take into account continued assessment, the final exam contributed to 80% and the rest of it just 20%, and half of that was through annual tests. I had spent a year on a practical chemistry project and a chemistry literature project which together amounted to only about 4% of the final marks.
I spent my last few days thinking I would not sit the exams out of principle and got drunk instead. I wrote to my parents telling them my views and intent and they quickly wrote back saying not to worry and just do my best.
So I did sit the exams. I had six exams, each starting at 9 am, six mornings in a row.
The first was organic chemistry. I was hung-over. I wrote non-stop for three hours, making a lot of it up, guessing some of it and of course there were also some questions I could answer. Inorganic and physical chemistry were next and I thought I’d done OK. The next two exam papers had questions on my specialist projects so I did well. I don’t even remember what the last exam was on, maybe scientific German.
As it happened I graduated. My parents were unable to attend the graduation ceremony so I didn’t go.
As a laugh and a gesture we printed our own graduation papers, calling them ‘Bachelors of Hearts Degree’ and saying “After completing three years of study at UEA, I hereby award myself the Degree of Bachelor of Hearts”. We gave them out to the students as they left after getting their degrees presented to them inside St Andrews Hall.
Then we went up to the University grounds and sat outside the marquee where the graduates were nibbling on sandwiches, strawberry and cream and drinking champagne. One of the more revolutionary of the lecturers, Colin Clarke, came out with a tray for us. There was a group of about six of us.
At UEA I also met a post graduate chemistry student or two. One was called Andy Monroe.
Andy told me that he was planning to make acid (LSD) and offered me a job when I returned from my travels. I never took that job. Several years later, the late 1970’2 I think, Andy became famous in the “Operation Julie” trials when a large group of chemists and others were busted for making and distributing millions of tabs of acid. Any was sent to prison for ten years.
Taken From "The Autobiography of a Head"
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