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Being an undergraduate student here really was a rewarding experience. I mean I really enjoyed it. Coming from a very quiet life to here and such a melting pot of people from all different sort of ethnic groups and also people from different social class backgrounds from myself. I was a working class kid who didn't expect to go to university but it

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was an extraordinary business coming to LSE because no one in my family even knew what a university was and so for me it was an enormous transition. There was something which was a very long way away from the sort of monochrome processing of students. So there were all kinds of things which I'm sure nowadays would make people faint, you know, very little demands

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of written work. It was already extremely cosmopolitan. I mean I remember how my friends were actually from Africa or India and the US. Very little supervision of students, all the kinds of things which tend to be now part of everyday life in universities. I did feel very shy and I felt quite tongue tied, not sure what to say to people at first. Just

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the size, it seemed very big although I know it's small, it was small compared with what it is now. So it took a bit of time to know your way around and fresh as week there were all these people milling around and all the societies were showing what they had to offer. I did join the film soc and the jazz soc, they were quite good things to start off with

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because that was one way of getting a little foot in the door at the beginning. And I enjoyed it because of the freedom and in some ways as well the kind of, it was highly coloured if that makes sense. There was tremendous depth to the lectures and some of the personalities who were giving those lectures.

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Its physical location in London and its great involvement in political issues meant it was extraordinarily good at getting people to come and speak at a critical moment and no warning. When the British put Cheddy Jagan in prison, Forbes Berman, who later became president of Guiana, was here speaking two days later.

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I think it always allowed people space to think about what they were being taught. Allowing people time to think about what they were doing and also think about what they wanted to make of it. So pressure yes to get a very good degree, everybody wanted that, that hasn't changed an iota.

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LSE was strange, many of my fondest memories are sitting on a radiator actually, there was no actual social facilities at all. So you would go to Wright's where Wright was actually there. And Wright's bar used to sell, I mean I'm sure they still do, they seem to sell bucket loads of chips and they've clearly got rich on chips.

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I mean Wright was an actual person, quite the grumpy old man who ran the place. One would go to Three Tons, one would hang out in strange places, like in those days you still had the Lions tea rooms, there was one around the corner, you might go over there for tea. There were also a few jazz clubs, I remember going to them,

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Cy Lawrence and Ronnie Scott's, places like that. You would try to not spend too much time in the refectory, which was awful. It was truly horrible, there was a particular meat pie that a lot of some of my people I knew used to eat, which still makes me feel ill when I think about it.

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Because it did come in a kind of, they were individual and they were cut into them and this awful brown goo would come oozing out of this meat pie, which was of course routinely served with chips. Then it became known as the Brunch Bowl, later on when I was working here, but that was always quite noisy because you always heard the clattering of plates and

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the dinner ladies, who were all very friendly, would be sort of shouting things out and quite a lot of hubbub of people talking. I didn't only engage in politics, which was an important part of my time in the Labour Society, but I was also rowing, and so social life around the rowing club was quite important.

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It was very, very different, I mean two different milieus, one was a highly intellectual group of kids who were interested in left politics and the other were guys interested in beer drinking. So one certainly did a lot of that. When I first came to the NSA, the address to the new students was given by the then director,

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a man called Sir Sidney Cain, and he said to us, I think if any of you are doing more than six hours a day academic work, then you ought to ask yourself some very serious questions. I mean he said something along those lines. So he was virtually saying to us, I mean it was like giving us permission to not just work, work,

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work, work, work, but to take part in all kinds of other events and activities, do all kinds of things, sit and talk to each other, which in fact is what for a lot of the time we did. What really made a difference for me was I thought I need to get into, I knew there was a lot of life going on, I just needed to find out where it was. And I was a good writer and my

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mother was a journalist, so I decided to write for the Beaver, so I put myself forward as a journalist and immediately was asked to do some stories, a series of articles about contemporary themes, all to do with the 1960s culture, fashion. I used to do film and theatre reviews as well, so I had tickets for the early James Bonds with Sean Connery and also some theatre tickets and

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reviewed these. So yeah, writing for Beaver I really enjoyed and there was a sort of camaraderie with the other people who wrote for it. We did think of ourselves as budding journalists as well. I was General Secretary of the Students' Union for one year when I was at the LSE. I cannot remember which year it was, but I suspect it was probably my second year,

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because in those days we didn't have second year exams, so if you're going to spend your time doing something other than working very hard, the second year was the year to do it. Through the Beaver I then became part of various student networks, was invited to parties and also I was very much getting into the rock scene, the R&B and so on, and I made friends with people

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who were similarly inclined, you know, who liked that sort of thing. And we went to the bar socials on Friday evenings, which was The Bop, I think it was called The Bop later on, but it was the bar social. And they used to have a band there called Jed Stone and the Raiders, they were quite popular because they played all the music, you know, nearly everything that was a hit at the time

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they could play. In those days the Students' Union would have dances every two or three weeks in the refectory, where you either went and danced and came with a girl or tried to pick up a girl, or you hung around the bar singing vulgar songs with the rugby club. The other thing which was quite interesting for the social and personal lives of many students at LSE was actually sports,

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strangely enough. I mean obviously this isn't a place surrounded by sports grounds, but you know, for a number of the sports clubs were socially very important for the people who belonged to them. The students, and this was a stunt dreamed up by the Student Union as well, occupied the Tower of London, and the headlines were in the evening standard, you know, front page

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occupied, it said occupied and things like that, and this was to raise money for Rag Week. And it's amazing because now with all the security and the fears of terrorism, that would never have been possible. We'd have been arrested before we got anywhere near it and just turned away, but at that time we were able to just go in and take it over, and they got great big white

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sheets out where it said they painted on it LSE occupation and so on, and it was on the front page of the evening paper, like the star and the standard. So that was a part of the feeling about LSE, was although it was only two office buildings, stuck in a way not very interesting part of London, nevertheless it was a place where you were somehow in the middle of things.

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And the reason that it was so interesting was not just the teaching, some of which was sheer magic, and which I still remember as sheer magic, but the fellow students, I learned so much from my fellow students, and there was so much humour, and there was so much irreverence, and it was just a world which I found full of interest. Lots of people discussing things at the tables, a lot of

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the students were always talking, and once I got to know people they were talking about international relations, you know politics, big politics. The sheer constant endless interest, there isn't one highlight, it's one great big long highlight in a sense. I just found more or less every day, every week, fascinating. I mean I'm an enthusiast, I just loved it, I mean it was just so interesting.