Sue, good try, but no cigar!Most of the students were really quite conservative with a small c. No hotbed of radicalism, in fact as I said very little time was devoted to politics.The point about Powell was the opposite of your interpretation - we had read about his speech, seen the dockers come out in his support, etc etc, and those of use who went to see him actually wanted to hear what he had to say. The booing only started when we realised that all he had to say was what was in his infamous speech - steeped in intolerance and xenophobia. It was not a situation where anyone was going to sit in a reverent silence and hear the man out! And he had come to preach not debate.The student body was quite mixed - a lot of public school types, a lot of middle class grammar school types and more than a few from working class backgrounds. Most came from the home counties so we northerners were in a minority.The whole point of uni was to promote critical thinking, to challenge orthodoxies and to analyse and debate. With hindsight we were a fortunate generation, many of us were the first in our families to go to uni and the grant system meant you didn't need well-off parents to get there.But it was 1968 and British unis were - compared to their counterparts on the continent - oases of calm. 1968 saw student riots and revolutions in many a European country, even in the US (Remember "Four dead in Ohio", as Neil Young famously sang?). Many of us became devotees of Bob Dylan and other protest singers, without translating that necessarily into our voting patterns.The only sense of superiority was exhibited by the public school types who all thought they were god's gift. In most cases, the rest of us didn't agree!
Jonathan Callaway ● 7h