FIRST YEAR. I had landed in a ‘one-bookshop town’. The lone academic book retailer in Durham City was bizarrely named ‘SPCK’, aka the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’ founded in 1698 by English clergyman Thomas Bray. Naturally, it was packed with books about religion. If you desired a tome documenting the life of Saint Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne, then Bob was definitely your uncle. However, if you wanted books to study more mundane contemporary subjects, you were dispatched to considerably shorter shelves at the rear of the premises or up on the first floor.
The Durham University economics department had given me the booklist for my first year. I rushed to SPCK the same day and found that none of the required books were in stock. Could I order them? I was told it would take at least three months for delivery, maybe longer. By then, I would be almost half way through my first year. The same booklist had been given to almost a hundred other freshers because first-year economics turned out to be a ‘unit’ that could be studied as a ‘minor’ alongside ‘major’ subjects. Out of the university’s population of four thousand, a hundred students must all have been chasing the same required materials. Despite this, SPCK staff had gazed at my list as if it was the first time they had seen anything like it.
I visited the university library on Palace Green, next to the hugely imposing cathedral, and looked through the dozens of well-thumbed index cards stored in banks of long drawers. Though multiple copies of the books I needed were catalogued, they all proved to be absent from the relevant Dewey Decimal shelves. I had to fill out handwritten triplicate forms to request they be reserved for me once they were returned to the library. When might that be? The librarian said it was impossible to tell because borrowers often kept books well beyond their return date and there was no way to force them back. Fines were imposed but students simply paid them in absentia of sanctions. Library staff had no suggestions about how I could obtain academic books compulsory for the subject I had arrived to study.
Then I recalled that, whilst attending the ‘Societies Day’ for freshers held in the concrete brutalist student union building, Dunelm House, I had noticed signs for a bookshop. I returned there and found at the end of a long corridor a large, high-ceiling room stacked with second-hand books. The economics section turned out to be small and useless. The shop’s stock bore no relation to academic need. It was merely a marketplace where students could sell books they no longer needed for a few pence. I browsed the other sections and stumbled across an unknown book from 1964 titled ‘Understanding Media’ by someone called Marshall McLuhan. It was the first academic book purchase that spoke to my passion for radio, broadcasting and media. However, having failed to discover a university offering such a degree course, I had had to instead choose ‘economics’ as it was my best subject at school.
I took McLuhan’s book to the checkout where a tiny woman in her fifties checked the price on the inside cover and charged me. She took my cash and placed it on the little shelf above the drawer of her cash register, joining piles of coins already assembled in the same place. I asked for a receipt, as was my habit, but she said it was not possible. Not only did it appear strange that she had not put my cash in the cash register, but neither had she rung up my purchase. I understood straight away that her actions were, er, wrong. Having been required to help run my father’s business for a decade [see blog], I knew that every financial transaction had to be recorded on the ‘till roll’ of a cash register and then reconciled at the end of the day with the money in the drawer. The equation is: cash in till minus float must equal daily till roll. Many childhood evenings had been spent sat around our tiny kitchen table doing these precise tasks for the bookkeeping my mother brought home from her workplace [see blog].
During that first year in Durham, I revisited the Dunelm House bookshop dozens of times, never finding the economics books I sought, but secretly observing the same elderly shop manager when students either bought or sold books. She did occasionally ring up some of these transactions on her cash register, though the majority followed the pattern of my initial book purchase, neither rung up on the cash register, nor the money deposited within. Beside the till, I would see her write in biro the value of each covert transaction in a tiny notebook. These actions were all being accomplished in plain sight within a bustling shop. Evidently, nobody must ever have challenged her as to why she was operating such a system.
Maybe I am too observant for my own good, but it was self-evident to me that she was ‘on the take’. After the shop closed at the end of each day, all she had to do was total that day’s transactions written in her notebook and walk out with that same amount of cash, in the knowledge that the till roll would reconcile with the cash in the cash register. It was the simplest retail scam and, being the only person employed in the shop, the easiest to pull off. There were no debit card or credit card transactions to confuse the issue. What perplexed me was that nobody else had seemed to notice what she was doing day in day out.
I sailed through that first year using a ring binder of fulsome notes I had made at school for economics A-level and so passed the Durham exam in June without ever having found the requisite texts on my booklist. This was a testimony to the abilities of my school economics teacher, Mr Hodges [see blog]. However, I only just scraped a pass on my economic history paper, having opted not to study history at school because my brain proved unable to learn and recite the long lists of dates, names and locations that the subject required. My first year at Durham was immensely disappointing because I had learnt absolutely nothing that I did not already know about economics. Furthermore, my student life there had been nothing like I had anticipated a university would be.
After the end of the final term, I remained in Durham a few weeks to help the student editor of the 1977 Durham Student Handbook, Tony Jenkins, who had asked me to prepare articles for inclusion in the publication, ready to be sent for printing at City Printers in nearby Chester-Le-Street. Just as I was about to leave Durham to start my regular holiday job working in the bowels of the Associated Examining Board office in Aldershot, I received via internal mail the carbon copies of request slips I had filled out eight months earlier at the university library, informing me that the course books I had requested had finally been returned. I failed to comprehend how a Durham undergraduate was meant to study and learn if they were unable to obtain the necessary books.
SECOND YEAR. Durham had been the only university not offering a student radio station to which I had applied through UCCA. Despite having received unconditional offers from Warwick, Lancaster, Keele and Loughborough, I chose Durham because I was told it had a better ‘reputation’ for future job prospects. To console myself at its lack of opportunities to practice radio, at the start of my first year I had volunteered at the student newspaper ‘Palatinate’, despite having never previously written anything for publication. I enjoyed working in its small office in Dunelm House, though it had proven a culture shock to be surrounded by loud, brash upper-class students who dominated the editorial team [see blog]. My skills were uniquely practical because, unlike my posh peers, I could already type copy quickly and accurately on an IBM Golfball typewriter, plus I had experience in design and layout from working on my father's architectural plans. When the newspaper editor post was advertised in my third term, I stood for election but was terribly disappointed at the student council meeting that my candidacy was not supported by outgoing incumbent George Alagiah. Evidently, I did not possess the ‘right stuff’ that oozed from him and his posh team. Having invested so much time and skills within the student publication, I made the difficult decision to walk away entirely.
Instead, from the beginning of my second year, I volunteered to attend the Finance Committee of Durham Students’ Union [DSU] where I was soon appointed ‘secretary’, taking minutes of weekly meetings and preparing its agendas. The committee was chaired by Kate Foster, the Union’s full-time sabbatical ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ with whom I quickly developed a good working relationship. Foster was a friendly, quietly confident introvert, the opposite of the ‘media types’ who had dominated the student newspaper. My knowledge of accounts and business gained from working for my parents from such an early age proved relevant and useful in understanding the Union’s financial issues. Unexpectedly, none of my first-hand knowledge of real-world finance was being developed by the highly theoretical and dull economics course I was studying [see blog]. Worse for my academic success, I had no better luck in obtaining the requisite books cited by the second-year reading list than I had experienced in my initial year.
In the third term of my second year, I shared my long-held observations about the practices in the Student Union’s second-hand bookshop with Foster, who was ultimately responsible for ‘DSU Services’. We both stood in the bookshop and observed the woman at the till openly taking money from students but not ringing it up on the cash register. Kay must have been so used to operating in this way that she had no qualms about anybody observing her ‘skimming’ of the shop’s revenues. Foster agreed that this employee’s behaviour was totally unacceptable. After questioning, the woman was sacked immediately. Until a replacement manager could be appointed, the bookshop was manned/womaned by student volunteers.
I felt no guilt about my role in getting Kay sacked. I had no qualms about this elderly woman losing her job. Yes, the majority of Durham University students she had served in the bookshop came from families that probably had more money than sense. But Kay was no ‘Robin Hood’ character redistributing her customers’ wealth to the poor. She had stolen the Student Union’s earnings for herself. The amounts might have appeared minor, compared to most middle- and upper-class white-collar crimes which, ironically, were more likely to have been committed by the families of her customers. But during the years that she worked in this job, she must have accumulated significant sums tax-free. Not enough to buy a yacht, certainly, but sufficient to take some nice vacations and purchase new three-piece suites.
Since that day when, at twenty, I was involved in my first sacking (of a woman who would have been almost three times my age), one mystery has remained unsolved in my mind. Though I never learnt when the Union’s bookshop first opened, I do know that the Dunelm House building opened in 1966 (with a concert by the Thelonius Monk Quartet to whose music, by remarkable coincidence, I am listening whilst writing this). It appeared to me that Kay might have worked alone in that bookshop for at least a decade. How many students had passed through that shop during that time. Tens of thousands? How many ‘Deputy President (Finance)’ officers before Kate Foster had managed Kay’s employment during all those years. At least ten? Yet none of those students who bought or sold a book and must have witnessed what Kay was doing at her cash register ever seemed to conclude that something inherently ‘wrong’ and ‘unlawful’ was taking place?
Only after having arrived at Durham did I discover that 95% of its students had come from private schools. My new environment where I was surrounded by ‘affluent’ people was a shock for which I had not been prepared. They behaved like nothing I had seen before. They already seemed to know each other, they moved in ‘brigades’ that were named things like ‘green wellies’, ‘god squad’ and ‘rah-rahs’ and they ignored anyone who was evidently not ‘one of them’. You would never have found any of these privileged offspring working behind the cash register of a shop as Kay had done for years. Neither did they feel the need to understand how accounts or business functioned. Their families employed accountants to handle such grunt work, even as some still employed servants in their grand homes. None of them apparently had the faintest notion that the working class ‘townie’ taking their cash in the Dunelm House bookshop was so obviously stealing part of it.
THEN & NOW. I am reminded of a more recent incident from 2022 when then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak staged a public relations stunt at a petrol station where he filled his car with petrol. He attempted to pay at the cash desk by placing his debit card under the barcode reader, instead of the payment reader, evidently having never previously made a ‘contactless’ payment. Then it transpired that the modest red Kia car he had filled with petrol was not his but belonged to an employee of the petrol station. Had he even ever filled his own (unseen) luxury car with petrol before? As ever, the privileged betray themselves by attempting to demonstrate mundane tasks they have never HAD to do themselves.
It might be imagined that my own experience of class divergence at Durham University half a century ago must belong to a bygone era. Surely, ‘things’ have moved on since then? Mmmmmm. But perhaps it has always been, and will always be, this way. The privileged class has always run Britain, has always controlled opportunities for themselves and they are hardly going to sacrifice glittering outcomes to which they feel entitled to help the rest of us who have no access or right to their immense resources and social connections. We only inhabit their world on sufferance. Durham has always been a ‘finishing school’ for posh kids not clever enough to get into Oxbridge, where they can continue the ‘fun’ they enjoyed at their private schools, find a suitable wife from their own class and bag a lucrative job as a barrister, politician, newspaper editor or some such [see blog].
Back in 1968, a letter from Ian S White of Durham’s (all-male) Grey College was published in the student newspaper Palatinate under the heading ‘Elitist Students?’ It criticised “the elitism of so many students, the feeling that they are somehow special and that they must not therefore associate with the ‘townies’. […] At the moment, the will, on the part of the University, does not seem to be present.”
That ‘will’ for change within the university was always a pipe dream. From the time in 1963 when Durham demerged from Newcastle University, it was purposefully designed “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.” This strategy was doggedly pursued from 1963 until his death in 1984 by ex-Army university registrar Ian Graham who “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.” Graham excelled at populating ‘his’ university with this old (private) school tie/old boy network that would eventually span generations of Britain’s most elite and privileged dynasties. [see blog]
What about after 1984? Whilst seeking a photo online of the DSU bookshop, I accidentally stumbled across a 2024 article in Palatinate by English student Stella Fenwick:
“When I arrived in Durham, I was faced with the fact that, for half of the year, this little northern city is transformed into a cacophony of London accents, and vastly different educational backgrounds compared to anyone I had met before. […] Though we may relish the prestige of being second to Oxbridge, we must confront the disproportionate number of privately-educated students accepted to these universities. […] We are promised by novels and shows that we will ‘find ourselves’ at university, but for many this moment never comes. The broken promise, which we believe is broken only by ourselves, leaves us feeling inferior to the people that have experienced Durham in the Instagram-able, Oxford-like way.”
It is simultaneously so sad and so outrageous that the experience of ‘higher education’ for us non-privileged students, who should benefit from it the most, still remains tainted at Durham by the behaviours and attitudes of the privileged elite who have always overwhelmingly dominated university cohorts.
I imagine that, had I not intervened, Kay might have continued working in that bookshop and stealing cash until the day she dropped dead … impervious because, amazingly, both her student managers and her student clientele had absolutely no clue how the day-to-day world of commerce functions below their own rarefied strata of British society.