“I am here for the Accommodation Office, please,” I said with trepidation to the uniformed man behind the huge wooden reception desk in the lobby of the Old Shire Hall. On the front of the desk, elaborately carved nineteenth century working-class scenes from Durham’s coalmining industry seemed to clash with this building’s present users – high-flying academics and the children of Britain’s upper classes.
The man behind the desk looked at me with a suspicion seemingly reserved for the occasional long-haired student who ventured into his domain wearing crumpled denim clothes and platform shoes … like me.
“You will have to leave a message,” he eventually replied in a bored tone that conveyed the regularity with which he was required to offer such a response. He did not bother to elucidate whether the Accommodation Office was presently unmanned, temporarily closed or existed in any physical form. Instead, he gestured towards an open hard-backed ledger laid at one end of his mighty desk, beside which was a chained Biro.
I was made to feel so small and insignificant in the foyer of that hugely imposing town centre monolith constructed in 1898 as the headquarters of Durham County Council but, since 1963, used as the administrative centre of Durham University. (Years later, when I watched Lowry approach the front desk of The Ministry of Information Retrieval in the movie ‘Brazil’, I instantly recalled my sentiment). I wrote in the visitors’ book that I was requesting information urgently about landlords presently offering accommodation to rent.
I was homeless, secretly spending my nights in a sleeping bag on the floor of an office in the Students’ Union building, Dunelm House. Student ‘digs’ around Durham were advertised but landlords were demanding rents way beyond my budget. Extortion proved no barrier to the 95%+ of undergraduates who had arrived from private schools, receiving only the minimum student grant from their local authority, but whose parents were sufficiently wealthy to uncomplainingly pay such rents through their noses. Some students I met lived in accommodation their parents had even bought for them as an investment within this English county so poor that miners’ cottages could be acquired for £1,000.
I was not amongst this privileged majority of students. Since arriving in Durham in 1976, a chunk of my full student grant from Surrey County Council and my vacation earnings had been diverted to pay the utility, property ‘rates’ bills and overheads of my family’s home in Camberley. After my father had deserted his family four years earlier and then ignored court-ordered maintenance payments, my mother had been struggling to raise my two younger siblings in austere circumstances. During my first two undergraduate years, I had opted for subsidised college rooms but then had been forced out onto the ‘open market’ by university policy. Additionally, I had waived my vacation earnings during the summer of 1978 by choosing to remain in Durham to edit (unpaid) the annual ‘Durham Student Handbook’ with the hope it might benefit my career in media. Whereas, the previous two summers, I had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week continuously for two months in a basement office in Aldershot, maximising available overtime to help fund my family’s expenses.
Weeks after having left my message for the university’s Accommodation Office, I received by internal mail sent to my college’s basement pigeonholes a photocopied A4 page listing about a dozen local landlords. This document was of no practical use, lacking basic, accurate and timely information that could have helped me. I wondered whether the university’s ‘Accommodation Office’ really even existed since Durham’s posh students scarcely appeared to require practical assistance when their parents were still organising their education. Who was the university’s ‘Accommodation Officer’ Catrin Prydderch-Jones, a 1977 graduate of Durham University with a 2:2 in music who had been appointed in September that year to the post of “Administrative Assistant in the University Office”?
I was not her only unsatisfied customer. In January 1979, a letter from archaeology undergraduate Jeanette Ratcliffe published in Durham student newspaper Palatinate had complained:
- “Miss Prydderch-Jones sent out to students looking for accommodation next year a list of landlords and their respective houses and flats” that was “incomprehensible, grossly out of date and of little constructive use”
- “A considerable number of landlords no longer wished to be on the list and students who contacted them became the subject of their anger at receiving numerous phone calls a day enquiring about their property.”
- One listed house “according to the landlord has not been standing for six years”
- “What exactly does Miss Prydderch-Jones do to retain her position in the Accommodation Office?”
- “… I suggest she give up her position as Accommodation Officer”.
In a follow-up front-page article in February 1979, the student newspaper reported that “doubts have been expressed in Durham Student Union council [meetings] about the efficiency of an Old Shire Hall-based Accommodation Office.” It explained that “complaints about the way that the [Accommodation] Office is working led Palatinate to talk to Ms. Prydderch-Jones” who was pictured sat at a desk. Her quoted responses proved to be wholly evasive and she ended by assuring readers “there is no crisis at the moment about finding places to live!”, apparently oblivious to the notion that the high prices of available accommodation might prove a barrier for those students having to survive without parental support.
In the same issue of Palatinate that had published the letter from Ratcliffe, a front-page expose had criticised the financial management of the Durham University Athletic Union [DUAU], provider of the university’s “excellent” sporting facilities, under the headline ‘DUAU Foul Play’. Beneath a photo of DUAU treasurer Ian Graham sat at his Old Shire Hall desk, the article explained that the £38 annual ‘Composition Fee’ paid by the local government authorities of each of Durham’s 4,000 students was divided by the university between its athletic union, student union and college ‘Junior Common Rooms’. DUAU audited accounts showed that:
- In 1977/8, 42% of the Composition Fee had been spent on sport, compared to the 18% national average (the DUAU share increased to 52% the following year)
- When Durham colleges’ expenditure was included, £20 of the £38 per head Composition Fee was spent on sport.
DUAU accounts documented a surplus greater than £4,000 during each of the previous three years, a situation that “should lead to a cut in their grant, as showing a surplus is interpreted as meaning that too much money has been given”. Surpluses of £5,200 in 1976/7 and £10,000 in 1977/8 were said to have been allocated to “reserve funds”. Questioned about these reserves, Graham “evaded the fundamental points by talking at some length about the rather vague uses of these funds” which the article concluded “does not alleviate Palatinate’s concern[s]” which were:
- “One of the complaints that the [government] Department of Education & Science is making is that there is not enough public accountability for student unions”
- “DUAU, by claiming large sums of money for their FUTURE but, as yet, UNSPECIFIED capital expenditure, is effectively avoiding any sort of accountability whatsoever.”
Some of Ian Graham’s unverified arguments in the interview to justify DUAU’s dominant share of the per capita funding appeared bizarre:
- “It is much easier for a student who has been actively involved in university sport to get a job”
- “Many parents have sent their children here because of its fine sporting reputation”
- “There was a correlation between the increase in good A-level results of Durham students and the growth and success of DUAU”.
Confusingly, although DUAU was constituted as a student organisation, just like Durham Students’ Union, Graham was no student but rather the university registrar responsible for managing the entire institution’s administration. This would be like having a school principal in charge of its students’ council! It was no wonder that DUAU could appropriate the greater part of each student’s Composition Fee with impunity, to the detriment of the student union, because each year it was the university administration, led by the very same Ian Graham, that determined the division of funds. Conflict of interest or what?
These separate anonymous front-page articles appeared in Palatinate within weeks, criticising two Durham University administrators, Catrin Prydderch-Jones and Ian Graham. However, a link existed between these two that had not been published. It was Graham who had appointed Prydderch-Jones to the accommodation job for which she appeared to be poorly qualified. It was also Graham who allegedly had invited Prydderch-Jones amongst a bevy of posh, female undergraduate first-years to stay in the expansive university flat at 71 Saddler Street that accompanied his job.
Whether the Palatinate editor of the day knew of this connection I know not. What I divine is that the student newspaper’s simultaneous critical coverage of Graham and his ‘protegee’ must have embarrassed and infuriated the registrar who ran our university with an iron rod. Having served in the British Army and been wounded at Anzio during “the Italian campaign”, he had joined Durham University in 1950 as assistant registrar. Promoted to registrar in 1963, Graham devised and drafted a new constitution and statutes for the university that were reported to be “almost entirely Ian’s work.” His objective was said to be “to provide for the North of England a Collegiate University, one in which the undergraduate experience would be essentially the same, though simpler (and less expensive) than that afforded by Oxford and Cambridge in the South.”
A lifelong bachelor, Graham was said to have given “to the University the time which most people spend with their families” and to have “sought out also a large number [of students] whose names were known to him through his acquaintances in the schools or among previous generations of students.” In this way, he perpetuated the institution’s old (private) school tie connections, making Durham University a natural social repository for posh people’s children not smart enough to attend ‘Oxbridge’. Apparently, “all of these people were welcome in [Graham's flat at] 71 Saddler Street, not only for the crowded parties which regularly took place there, but on frequent more private occasions.”
Whoa! This 50-something year old bureaucrat was organising student ‘parties’ for newly arrived teens in his flat? It would be easy to characterise Graham as the Hugh Heffner of Durham University, an aged man with a gammy limb, surrounded by a bevy of good-looking, posh-sounding, double-barrelled debutantes prancing around his flat in their underwear. The truth is rather more insidious. Graham had been the architect in 1963 of Durham University’s ‘divorce’ from its considerably less posh partner Newcastle University and had accumulated more power to control the organisation he had created during thirty years in the job than anyone else employed in Old Shire Hall. Any perceived threat to Graham’s eco-system would have to be eradicated. And so it was.
The elected editor of Palatinate at the time was Jerry Dennis, an English Literature undergraduate who was not at all the typical upper-class student that Graham desired at ‘his’ university. Despite a posh accent, Dennis appeared somewhat hippy-like with a tall rake-thin body and long straight brown hair falling to his shoulders. He spoke languorously and purposefully with a keen wit and an analytical mind. He was fearless and unafraid to challenge the status quo, hence the investigative articles concerning Prydderch-Jones and Graham published in a fortnightly student newspaper that, until his appointment, had been more a gossip sheet and CV builder for adolescent essays by aspiring upper-crust authors.
Graham required revenge. Unfortunately for him, Dennis’ two-year academic record at Durham had been positive as he had passed all mandatory exams. Instead, Graham had to scour ancient statutes within the 1832 Act of Parliament and 1837 Royal Charter that had created England’s third-oldest university. There he discovered that a student accused of holding the university ‘in contempt’ could be expelled by a specially convened committee. This procedure had never been used in Durham’s century and a half history, though Graham was undaunted given the power he wielded. He set about convening the requisite brand-new committee of university personnel upon whom he could rely to do his bidding.
Weeks later, I was startled to find in my college pigeonhole an official letter from Ian Graham inviting me to be the one student that the statute required to attend the meeting of this committee which would be considering Dennis’ case. Out of the university’s 4,000 students, it was against all odds that I had supposedly been chosen randomly to consider a verdict on a fellow student with whom I was already acquainted. I could read between the letter’s lines. In reality, it had been sent as a warning shot across my bows, hinting that I might soon follow Dennis and be dispatched into the wilderness. Why?
That year, I had been tasked with writing the annual Durham Students’ Union submission to the university to request the following year’s Union funding through the aforementioned Composition Fee. My application was the most voluminous and forensic ever compiled, documenting why a substantial year-on-year increase proved necessary. The chair of the university Finance Committee, finance officer Alec McWilliam, seemed to appreciate my expertise in accountancy (the result of my mother having taught me double-entry bookkeeping and accounts reconciliation at the age of seven). The outcome was that McWilliam’s committee awarded Durham Students’ Union its largest ever year-on-year increase in funding.
However, for every winner, there has always to be a loser. My personal success meant that Ian Graham’s competing bid for additional funds for the Athletics Union had been rebuffed at the same committee meeting. For once, Graham was not getting all his own way and was probably not enamoured of this outcome. That was my reading of the reason I had received his letter. My suspicions were confirmed when I called the confirmation phone number in the letter and was told by a woman administrator at Old Shire Hall that my receipt of the invitation letter had been an ‘administrative error’. In fact, I had never been randomly selected to witness the ‘Inquisition’ against Jerry Dennis … who Graham’s committee agreed to expel at the end of his second year.
Palatinate subsequently published a front-page story beneath a photo of Dennis that noted “a considerable degree of shock and dismay at the apparently unsympathetic attitude taken by the University authorities towards this case, an attitude which several students believe to be almost vindictive.” It commented somewhat hesitantly that “the paper did adopt a particularly critical stance under the editorship of Mr Dennis, and many feel that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the difficulties he created for the University may not be totally unconnected with his present predicament.”
Incensed by Dennis’ expulsion, I wrote Palatinate a signed letter it published in October 1979:
“It is frightening to think that any students at this University can be sent down for not ‘keeping term’, which could mean:
- Not attending a course of instruction (which could be a subsidiary [subject]) to the satisfaction of the Chairman of the Board of Studies concerned.
- Not attending ‘academic engagements to the satisfaction of the Board of Studies concerned.
- Not presenting written work as and when required unless excused in advance.
Is it really fair to leave such vague definitions to the interpretation of the Chairman of the Board of Studies? How clearly are these conditions communicated to new students? How many students treat their lectures as ‘optional’?
It is a sobering thought that if YOU do not get on the right side of the Chairman of your Board of Studies (do you know who he/she is?) and you:
- Miss a lecture because your alarm clock fails to go off
- Miss a tutorial because you muddle the date
- Hand in an essay late because you could not get the books
YOU could be accused of not keeping term …. Sweet dreams.”
If Ian Graham’s letter to me the previous term had been an oblique personal warning, this publication of my opinions ensured that there was now an oversized target on my back. That is a story for another day.
Despite this realisation, I was determined to persevere with investigating Ian Graham for a potential further article in Palatinate. Each new academic year, Graham distributed invitations for a ‘fresher’ party held in his flat to first-year female students arriving from the private schools he favoured. My then student girlfriend had a friend who was prepared to pose as one of these targeted young women. ‘KT’ was suitably talkative, pretty and had a posh accent. Although she was in her second year, she would attend using a ticket we wrangled from a new student who had no interest in taking up the offer.
KT arrived at Ian Graham’s flat the evening of the party with my Sony TCM-3 cassette recorder under her clothing, attached to a hidden lapel microphone. She was sufficiently bold to strike up conversation with Graham who, as hoped, suggested she return on her own for one of his “more private occasions.” However, after reviewing the tape recording, there was nothing substantial enough from their dialogue with which to craft an article. After much discussion, and in light of Jerry Dennis’ expulsion, we decided regrettably that a further ‘mission’ to follow up Graham’s invitation would prove too dangerous for KT’s academic future. His annual recruitment of ‘pretty young things’ would continue regardless.
I had been upset, angry and horrified by Jerry Dennis’ expulsion. I still am. It was me who had analysed the audited financial data for the article Dennis published about DUAU’s finances. I was partly responsible for the ructions caused with Ian Graham. However, it frustrates me that, whenever Palatinate is mentioned now in the media, its former student editors Hunter Davies and Harold Evans are frequently vaunted for their subsequent glittering journalistic careers. From my perspective, it was Dennis who introduced investigative journalism into the formerly staid student newspaper … and paid a terrible price. The Jerry Dennis I recall remains an inspiration.
On 27 December 1984, Ian Graham was returning to Durham from Edinburgh by car when he was involved in an accident in which he died from his injuries. His official university obituary mentioned his “happy and congenial social life” and noted that, for many Durham graduates, “the name of Ian Graham has been something of a legend.”
In March that year, the British government had announced the initial closure of twenty coalmines, including one in County Durham, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. It was the cornerstone of a deliberate strategy by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher to destroy the strong trade unions within traditional North of England industries, the dominant employer of working-class people there. This annihilation was enabled by financial and electoral support for Thatcher’s Conservative Party provided by successive generations of the very same privileged, wealthy class of (mostly) southerners with whom Ian Graham had successfully populated Durham University. Their ideological objective destroyed the surrounding County Durham local economy and created mass unemployment on a hitherto unseen scale.
The figurines of miners carved into the front of that huge wooden Edwardian reception desk in Old Shire Hall would have wept at the ease with which their new owner’s affluent cohorts had so casually succeeded in destroying their centuries-old livelihoods. Before long, coalmining disappeared altogether from Durham.
