Staff Writer Ewan White looks back to a different era of King’s College London (KCL) through an enlightening interview with his grandfather.
If you wander around King’s this September, you will surely find new students drifting about cluelessly in the Chesham building. Scrambling around in this antiquated building to find a virtual ghost of a classroom is all but a ritual for freshers at this point. For all of King’s new buildings and premises, this old maze on Surrey Street remains a constant. However, back in the ’50s, the Chesham building had another tool of disorientation. Alcohol. Home to the “convivial” student bar, this was very handy for students studying Spanish, whose department was located just upstairs. One such student taking advantage of the “lovely and cheap” beer was Brian Young, my Grandad. I interviewed him about his time at King’s studying Spanish with French, from 1958 to 1961.
Getting In
Like many people in the 1950s and 1960s, my Grandad was the first in his immediate family to go to university. His parents “weren’t familiar with the university thing… they just knew it was very good”. In an era where only 4% of school leavers went on to university, it was “something really outstanding” to get there. Yet, having reached the sixth form of a grammar school, “it was assumed that you would go to university”. What’s more, his Languages teacher, John Wedd, knew a professor at KCL and recommended applying to King’s specifically. This was an application process that is strikingly different to today’s. Not only were interviews ubiquitous, but a different funding model also resulted in a different process.
Until 1962, students were not entitled to maintenance grants. This meant it was not mandatory for local educational authorities to award grants to its students to attend university. In spite of this, local authorities did send approximately 16,000 students to university each year through grants. 1962 was also the last year of state scholarships. There were less than two thousand of these up for grabs and their funding came directly from the state. To receive this scholarship, my Grandad had to take “additional, more difficult” Scholarship-level papers, in French and Spanish on top of his A-Levels in French, Spanish and Latin. For my Grandad, being awarded a state scholarship greatly helped his application to King’s. “It gave me a step-up… they were impressed by that”.
Life at King’s
Arriving on the Strand was a very different sight for new King’s students back in 1958. Traffic, and not just pedestrians, rolled through the Strand. The now shut Aldwych tube station was open, if barely used. Instead, my Grandad walked down from Charing Cross station. The brutalist Strand and Macadam buildings would not appear until the 1970s. The main entrance was where the King’s building empties out onto the courtyard. From there to the Chesham building and the Spanish department, it was a matter of crossing the same internal bridge that connects the King’s building and Surrey Street today.
University life for students in the ’50s and ’60s operated in “a little world of its own”. With only a dozen students on the course, you “soon got to know… fellow students”. These fellow students were almost entirely British and came from all over the country. Today, seminar groups may dwindle in size over the year and lectures are available online, but back in the ’50s missing classes “wasn’t a normal thing to do” because “there were consequences and it was known”. However, similarly to today, the number of classes students attended each day was different. Monday morning played host to the Associate of King’s College (AKC) lecture. Getting the AKC, on the other hand, was significantly more difficult. There were not simple quizzes, like today, but a whole exam!
Such exams were the norm at King’s. For my Grandad, there was “no coursework, all exams”. There would be exams “at the end of the year, each year”. Despite the weight placed on exams, the location of exams was, at least in my opinion, significantly better. Rather than being in East London, “finals were in a church on Tottenham Court Road”. You can still find this church today. It is the Whitefield Memorial Church, which currently hosts the American International Church.
When studying for these exams, students couldn’t just pull all-nighters in a central library belonging to King’s, such as the Maughan today. Instead, there were specialist Spanish and French libraries, as well as the Senate House Library. However, such libraries could not cover the necessary textbooks and literature needed for the course. Languages students bought these books at Grant and Cutler’s bookshop—a specialist foreign languages bookshop now housed within Foyles. The money to buy these books did not come from part-time work. Working to support yourself at university wasn’t “the common thing to do”, instead, “the grant was everything”.
Although printed knowledge could be hard to find, this was hardly a problem as the staff were “little Googles walking around”. The Spanish department was home to a largely unchanging staff who students “got to know… very well”. Professor A.A. Parker and Senior Lecturer Rita Hamilton were “brilliant” on the Spanish Golden Age and Spanish medieval text respectively. There was also a certain Rafael Nadal—no, not the tennis player.
A Spanish exile, Nadal was a close friend of poet and playwright Federico Lorca. Franco’s soldiers executed Lorca in 1936. The same year, Nadal escaped and joined King’s, where he taught for 40 years. “Quintessentially Spanish”, Nadal “never spoke any English at all, ever”. Between 1940-44, Nadal broadcasted a weekly programme for the BBC to be shown in Spain. My Grandad would also speak on the BBC’s Spanish service, who interviewed him before going on his term abroad to Spain at Bush House—the then home of the BBC’s overseas and foreign language service.
A term abroad… in Franco’s Spain
Having chosen Seville over Salamanca, in 1959, after a two-day train ride, my Grandad arrived to study abroad in the summer term of his first year—unlike today, there were three terms. Despite “no help given whatsoever” by King’s with finding accommodation, he caught a slice of luck. “My mum knew a lady who knew a Spanish lady who owned a townhouse in Seville and she arranged for me to stay in that house. There was a maidservant and meals were served”. However, the house soon got a lot busier. “The other students, seven or eight of them who had chosen Seville, found themselves living in a flea-ridden boarding house and they were jealous of me being in this very posh Spanish noblewoman’s house, so they all moved in… we became a little colony of English students in this big house”.
The University of Seville was itself also located in an impressive building. This was the former tobacco factory which featured in the opera Carmen. It was “a very beautiful place… wood panelling all around, you could still smell the aroma of the tobacco”.
While the University and the townhouse were glimpses of Spain’s beauty, the results of Francoist dictatorship brought out its uglier side. “It was poverty-stricken… lots of beggars, a lot of roads with poor surfaces”. Unsurprisingly, the Spanish students he met at the university were unhappy with the state of the country: “I did meet one student who was pro-Franco, but in the whole time that was the only one, most people were anti-Franco”. However, they could not express this feeling openly. “They had to be careful, they said these things to you in confidence”. Equally as anti-Franco were “two very good friends, older than [himself]” that he met whilst giving English classes. He managed to “arrange for some accommodation for them in London”, and, “on the basis of that, they were allowed to leave Spain”. But, unable to find stable work, they would not stay long.
Still, despite the stagnation, signs of change were beginning to emerge in the country. Most notably, Spain was beginning its journey towards being a hub for tourism. He recalls that when “travelling back [home] slowly northwards over that summer”, he asked the bus driver “to let me know when we were going through Torremolinos because I’d heard it was going to be developed, [into one of the Spanish Costa resorts]… and 1959 was the year that all started”. This was one of several stops “in all sorts of places” on a journey back home that took several weeks. He travelled through a then-quiet Benidorm—it was “nothing, only a few houses and a few hotels”. Following this, he visited Catalonia and Paris before returning to the UK at the end of the summer.
The Wars of Reggie
Seville and King’s were not the only universities that made an impression on my Grandad. Unfortunately, this other university was the infamous “Godless College on Gower Street”, more commonly known as University College London (UCL). The rivalry took the form of “raids by UCL students trying to take Reggie away” that could even develop into “loutish fights”. In return, King’s students would attempt to steal UCL’s mascot, Phineas. When Reggie wasn’t in enemy hands he would be “paraded down the Strand occasionally. We used to run behind making silly noises”. Perhaps it’s time we re-consider Varsity, and re-introduce mascot wars as the true embodiment of the UCL-KCL rivalry!
To wrap up I asked — What’s your overwhelming feeling when you look back?
“I was very lucky to go to King’s because it was my niche, you know, it suited me and I enjoyed it… it was a very positive experience.”.
BA European Politics Student
