Life Would Never Be The Same Again...

Rolf Johnson (Politics, 1971, County) reflects on his halcyon days at Bailrigg before embarking on a career in writing, the majority of which he spent as Racing Correspondent on the Daily Express.

"The Careers Advice Officer at Lancaster University advised me to become a Careers Advice Officer turning me down without an interview when I applied. Such was the University as the Sixties sidled into the Seventies saying, “Follow that!”. But if you don’t remember the times, you weren’t really there: Lancaster in those formative years - Elysian Fields inhabited by Lotus Eaters.

No excuses. I’d been mooching down the Spine, at a loose end; and dropped in, as opposed to dropping out, at the glass-fronted office next to the mini-supermarket. I was probably on the way to Cartmel College where, in vacations, campus emptied, there were rich pickings, especially if you liked peanut butter, in the college fridges stocked up by the couple of hundred American undergrads. They were mainly from Colorado University, at Boulder, high (geographically too) near heaven, literally, in the Rockies. Lancaster’s offerings, the Lake District and Morecambe Bay weren’t quite in the same league. The Americans came, bronzed, beautiful, perfect teeth. In return for our welcome and ‘integrating’ their finest, Boulder awarded Lancaster an annual bursary. Our right-back won it one year, his essay plagiarized from an Arthur Koestler article in Playboy.

There weren’t many more than fifteen hundred souls billeted on Bailrigg Hill, in town and Morecambe, when Fylde opened during my time, circa ’68 to ’72. I found shelter in the stone (Red brick? Pah), architectural masterpiece of County College, heretically renamed County Main. I squeezed in with a girlfriend. She repaid my recurrent ‘absenteeism’ one night by hurling my football gear into the noble two-hundred-year old oak in the College quad: the fire brigade ignored my entreaties when I tried to get them out to rescue my kit, and a cat (that I made up).

In absentia I was elected college Vice-President – somebody’s idea of a joke:. If Lancaster taught me anything it was not to vote for politicians, and I could never understand, still less spell, the word quinquennium.

But boy did the place hum. I made five enduring friends, but not longer than death: three down. Martyn tried to drink the Far East dry after graduating from member of our four-man horseracing clique covering the length and breadth of northern England – never missed a Cartmel meeting - to near deity as handicapper at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club.

Dr David Gadian, History Lecturer at Plymouth college and bookies’ runner at Devon and Cornwall point-to-points was an authentic yet gentle left-winger – and football goalkeeper. Paul Robeson’s ‘Ballad of Joe Hill’ was the centrepiece of his cremation.

Charlie Pottins, another mature and much maligned student of the far Left sold the Daily Worker in all weathers outside the town’s Woolworths and led the march of fellow revolutionaries in some demonstration or other, down Bailrigg Hill intent on enlightening Lancaster’s denizens.

But he had to march them up again when the lights at the bottom refused to change from red and traffic on the road into town continued unhindered. The Left, even in those febrile days, just weren’t taken as seriously as they took themselves.

Mick Hughes was lost in action ; and lastly there was myself, former Daily Express racing correspondent and author of an (unfinished) thesis on ‘Kipling and Horseracing in India’..

Dr John Mackenzie, another friend I lost recently, was my supervisor. We exchanged Christmas cards for over fifty years. ’Gad’ and I swapped postcards, his from Greece, mine from India. He didn’t do punctuation explaining that commas and full stops in Ancient Greece were only for the plebs. Given that he was an unredeemed Marxist, I was besotted by Gad’s inconsistency. After all, his work at point-to-points, staged on behalf of the deer and fox Hunts of the West Country, was on behalf of the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. They aren’t part of any communist manifesto.

I fancied John MacKenzie as Uncle Monty of ‘Withnail and I’ and there were more obvious synergies, – the film’s Lake District scenes and the pub up there whose inebriate landlord ‘twin’ ran the Shakespeare pub in Lancaster town, next door to the college where the University was born. It was a hostelry where many a 2:1 became a ‘Desmond’ (Tutu) or even a third – the consequence of taking its status as a Free House too literally. Colin, the landlord, was indiscriminate in his generosity.

There was an unsuspecting but eager leavening of ex milk monitors; lacrosse (female) captains, choristers - the Yanks, generally exemplary over achievers of course,’ and not least, a smattering seconded from industry. The place was alive with clean ambition.

A highlight of my time at Lancaster was tipping the 1974 Derby winner Snow Knight at 50-1 in the County College Newsletter – Pendragon – yes, such were the University newspaper’s beginnings. In our day it was the ‘John O’Gaunt’. If ever the new regime needs a racing correspondent…

The football squad nationally outperformed their numbers and were held in greater awe than the Agitprop. A sit-in by the revolutionaries was ‘relieved’ when the team returned from its annual dinner in the Fells, with a sheep. The benighted creature was pushed through the door of the Senate House where the sit-in was in full swing…maybe they thought it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing but the Herdwick went berserk and the protest’s impetus and credibility were lost. I was assured the sheep later won a rosette at the Forest of Bowland Show.

When the final day of the final year dawned, we staggered out of Bailrigg blinking at the light of reality. Now there are ten times the numbers and even the strongest characters of yesteryear might get ‘lost’: a village has become a metropolis.

There was a cherished poster of a toilet basin (not that Magritte) on my wall in The Hollies, a stone-built den of iniquity for disparate lodgers, on the Scotforth Road out of the town. The urinal had a pair of hands grasping the rim, ostensibly trying to lever themselves out. The caption read: “I was too far out all my life not waving but drowning”. It wasn’t hung for the Grad Ball, but the one that was bore Kipling’s words from his poem The Ladies: “I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it an’ now I must pay for my fun.” The halcyon days were over: life would never be the same again."