by Rick Stein
Bill Potter was a local photographer but, more than that, he had been at Oxford and had perfected the art of photographing the offspring of celebrities and sending pictures and gossip through to columns like William Hickey on the Express. All he needed was a shred of a story.
He was nice to us on Cherwell partly because he realised that some of us would grow into the job and become valuable to him, and indeed a few would end up editing newspapers as was the case with one of our number, Peter Stodhart, who went on to edit The Times. There was a story – doubtless apocryphal – that Bill had had a lucrative period before my time with a student who may or may not have actually been an undergraduate called Jeffrey Archer. Indeed the myth has it that they honed the practice to a fine art and that this same Jeffrey Archer once persuaded The Beatles to appear at Brasenose for a fund-raiser and Ringo Starr famously asked Sheridan Morley in the gents who Jeffrey Archer was. Morley replied that everyone was trying to work out who he was, to which Ringo replied, ‘He strikes me as a nice enough fella, but he’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.’
I never felt at ease with being a reporter. It wasn’t just upsetting people, it was also the dawning understanding that most stories were in reality far less contentious than they ultimately appeared in the paper.
Occasionally I reported on almost serious things. Students occupied the Clarendon Building because it was alleged that the university was holding files with information about the political activities of undergraduates including sit-ins, the digging up of rugby pitches where the Springboks were playing and anything else antisocial. I interviewed a few of the organisers. I remember that Christopher Hitchens was particularly sartorial, wearing jeans and a tight donkey jacket and a fine silk scarf in a nice shade of purple very much in vogue at the time. He was charismatic, and there certainly seemed to be more than his fair share of protesting female undergraduates around him. During the sit-in, one of my colleagues at Cherwell asked me to drive past the Clarendon Building and to stop a second. He got out, took a brick out of a bag and hurled it at one of the windows, smashing the eighteenth-century glass. I was outraged. Later that night I went round to my brother John’s in Winchester Road in North Oxford and grumped about what a storm in a teacup it all was. John’s wife, Fanny, who was going through a left-wing phase at the time, told me to get out of the house.
Keith Jenkins took the job seriously. He introduced me to the Velvet Underground and the prose style of the Daily Mirror. He was a fan of Hugh Cudlipp who was the Mirror’s editorial director. The Mirror, Cudlipp said, provided its public with ‘Vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language, and the wide use of illustration by cartoon and photographs.’ Tabloid journalism could actually be a joy to read. Sparely written with a minimum of adjectives, it really worked when describing something totally dramatic such as the assassination of Martin Luther King. The style was, unfortunately, less effective when writing about college gossip.
The main reason I got to be Cherwell’s editor was most likely because I had a car, a Land Rover, and could drive over to Swindon where Cherwell was printed at Wiltshire Newspapers. We would spend half a day putting the paper to bed. It was still lovely old-fashioned letterpress printing – the letters were formed from hot lead. The sight of your own hard work rattling down a chute in the form of blocks of hot type, which would be made up into the solid forme of a whole page, was very satisfying. It also meant that headline writing was a precise combination of space and shape requiring verbal dexterity and a lot of convulsive laughter. Here are a few.
Poor Penetration
In Oxford Attack
(A rugby game)
Nose Belches
Fire and Flame
(Referring to a fire at Brasenose)
Police hot
up arrests
of student
heads
(Drug arrests)
I enjoyed being editor. I attempted to make the paper look like the Daily Mirror. I changed the typeface and put a red top to the left of the front page and increased the size of headlines, just like the real thing. The hardest part was trying to make it pay, trying to persuade advertisers that a student rag was worth it. The best part was the people I met. One of the other hacks, Martin Leeburn, is still one of my best friends. I was awed by his aggressive style of writing. He always seemed to be fuming about some fool or shyster, which made for great copy. If he wrote about goings-on in a senior common room, it would be mingled with images of crusty old bores passing the port. He also had the knack of getting interviews with people of some stature, including Rupert Murdoch. He used Bill Potter the photographer a lot. On one occasion he went off with Bill to interview the designer of the hovercraft, Sir Christopher Cockerell, and reported that the famous inventor had been dismayed to be asked to hold an Airfix model Martin had made for the photograph.
Scott Donovan was another friend. We all thought he was going to be prime minister, he was so on the ball politically. We used to joke about his name-dropping but it was just a game to him, flexing muscles, understanding how it all worked. In the end he became a barrister with a social conscience in his native Liverpool. He was also very good at gaining interviews with famous people, he had a lot of audacity. When he and I interviewed W. H. Auden in Christ Church, Scott certainly did the lion’s share of the chat. I found it hard to think of questions to ask a hero, and was mesmerised by the lines of the poet’s face, the most lived-in skin I’ve ever seen.
Scott lived on Headington Hill in Oxford in a house owned by Richard Bulmer whose family made cider. Richard was reclining in a cricket catching cradle outside the New College pavilion when I first met him. I was about to hold a party nearby. I’d written the invitation in the style I remembered from my time in Sydney:
Rick Stein Invites You to a Crash Hot Turn
I’d invited my friends John Thompson, Francis Bowerbank and Graham Walker down from London, as well as virtually every girl I passed in the street, and there we were on the New College cricket pitch which stretched down to weeping willows and the Cherwell river, with Bulmer dressed in white trousers, a pink flower-patterned Carnaby Street shirt and desert boots. Lying in the cradle, his arms behind his head, Bulmer looked at my friends as if they were a complete intrusion on his serenity. They, for their part, were intrigued by such cool. He and I became friends from then on, and enjoyed an almost hostile banter. He always claimed I had lots of money, which I didn’t, and he had none, which he did. We discovered at one stage he had 250,000 Bulmer shares which seemed quite a lot. Sadly, he died in Hereford about ten years ago. We all miss him.
My party was distinguished by the fact that we polished off 27 gallons of Morrells bitter.
Meanwhile I had started a mobile disco. With a sort of nod to LSD – which I was too nervous to take – I had christened it ‘The Purple Tiger’. This party was to be its first outing. I had built a simple plinth designed to house two record decks, which in the early days were of unequal shape, one coming from an old portable player and the other my mother’s deck from her stereogram in Cornwall, which since she didn’t need to listen to The Seekers any more, as I was back from Australia, I reasoned she wouldn’t really need. The amplifier I had bought from a hi-fi trip to Tottenham Court Road, the speakers were the ones I made in Shaun’s basement, but the new star was a sound-to-light machine. My brother John had commandeered one of the technicians at the physiology lab, John Mittlele, to make one of those sound-sensitive, three-channel flashers from bits and bobs out of the labs. An early example of technology, its output was 110 volts rather than 240, and this was DC rather than AC. I made the light boxes, but the only bulbs I could get for them were from builders’ merchants and they weren’t coloured so I bought lots of coloured plastic folders from WH Smith and sellotaped them to the front. The DC current was a problem, too, as it was, even at 110
volts direct, potentially a heart-stopper. Tame Boffin (as Francis dubbed John Mittlele) was not completely tame: he had a wild-eyed look about him when describing the special qualities of thyristors, the hurried, slightly demonic chat of someone talking the secret language of electronics. I have to confess I was hard on him. I needed the magic light box to be flashing in fierce spasms to Free’s ‘All Right Now’ in time for the party and would hold no truck with his protestations that he had more important lab work to do. He finished the box in a panic and was testing it when he touched the DC current which laid him out on the floor with a commensurate bang.
He survived but he spent some time sitting cross-legged in the corner, holding his head and moaning.
And I got my sound and light machine. We had our beer. The girls all came, everyone came. It was a thoroughly wonderful party. Unbeknown to me at that time it was another landmark in my journey to opening crash-hot restaurants and I’m afraid a certain ruthlessness with poor Tame Boffin was part of it.
Soon after the party, I went home for the summer vacation and another long holiday in Cornwall. Jill Newstead, who had dumped me two years before, had come back to Cornwall and was extremely keen to carry on where we had left off. I was still suffering the aftermath of my rejection by Fanny Pick, so was wary of being caught on the rebound. But I no longer minded that Jill had favoured someone else previously. She was so attractive that before long we were getting on extremely well and the thought of spending the summer with her was compelling. My mother initially was hostile towards her, but later described how she’d found her curled up naked in the hall in the middle of the night (we’d probably been out and drunk enormously and I think she’d got up to go to the loo and passed out). My mother said she looked so young and innocent with her long hair that she took to her then and adored her for the rest of her life. I was at that time a typical male. I loved having Jill with me in Cornwall, and around my Cornish and London friends, but I didn’t want to let her in on the secret society that was Oxford University.
I had met an exotic gay man through Cherwell. James Ruscoe was an occasional contributor to the fashion section and the source of stories about celebrities at the university whom I’d never heard of. Although I’d had one or two slightly dodgy experiences when I was doing my round-the-world trip, I have always liked gay men. In the early seventies at Oxford they were very popular indeed. I suspect many a now-happily-married man had had a little fling, and, even if you hadn’t, it was fashionable to say that you had. Personally, my leaning in that direction stopped at very flowery shirts and beads but it was nice to come off being a macho man and feel a bit almost pretty. The great attraction about James and his friends was that they were always surrounded by adoring girls. There were far more men than women then at Oxford so any seam of females was a mighty magnet. In the same way, the various tutorial colleges around the city, especially St Clare’s and the Oxford and County secretarial college – known as the Ox and Cow – were happy hunting grounds.
Martin Rebush and I were fans of the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and in his strip cartoon Fritz the Cat there is an episode where Fritz, the randy cat, is sitting in the bedsit of a very pneumatic cat called Charlene who is singing folk songs rather badly. He’s trying to concentrate and saying things like, ‘Interesting, interesting,’ which it isn’t, but he’s really trying to find a way into her knickers. Well, that was me and Martin and many others.
Whenever I made it into a girl’s bedroom, usually an attic with murals and collages on the walls, Oz Clark had been there before me. Unlike Fritz, I rarely enjoyed any success, but then neither did Oz. I didn’t know him then – I was just his trail – but we are now friends who enjoy reminiscing about the futility of it all.
James Ruscoe wore colourful suits: his shirts were yellow, powder blue, white, flowery and furled. He had the sort of high black boots that girls normally bought from Biba, the trendiest thick black-framed glasses and lots of black curly hair. He also must have had an account directly with Estée Lauder for the quantity of Aramis he wore. Aramis, the ad said at the time, ‘is an attitude’. And indeed it was. James and I shared the job of writing ‘John Evelyn’, the gossip column in Cherwell. He supplied the social stuff and I was the guy using the column to pick up chicks. My writing was a bit cringeworthy, James’s stuff less so. One of his pieces was about the recently formed Gay Liberation Front and how they would soon be taking over Oxford, ‘mincing down The High hurling Aramis gas canisters’.
It was a golden period, the summer of 1970. Parties on college lawns, parties in rooms in Christ Church and Brasenose, and almost every lunchtime spent in the Kings Arms in Holywell Street where the sort of people I didn’t know but would love to have done congregated, people like Martin Amis, Ian Fleming’s son Casper, Tina Brown and others, all of whom seemed immensely interesting and above me. This also used to irritate me: in my John Evelyn column I listed the most boring people in Oxford, one of whom I said was Rachel Toynbee, because she was so ‘nice, so friendly, so entertaining’. It seems very babyish now, to have vented my resentment at not being part of the inner sanctum in the KA. I described Mark Blackett-Ord as, ‘An appallingly pretentious youth who invited Maurice Bowra to dine with him last week in his college room.’
I had it in for Mark Blackett-Ord. One lunchtime he had a drinks party in New College and I invited myself, along with my friends John Thompson and Francis Bowerbank. Mark may have mentioned to me that he was having a party but certainly I wasn’t at liberty to invite my friends. He was leaning back, with both arms draped across the mantelpiece in his large rooms overlooking the garden quad, dressed in a three-piece suit made of some fine Northumberland tweed, complete with a gold watch and chain. He was not at all pleased to see us and said, ‘Rick, would you take your nightmare Cornish friends and get out of my rooms immediately?’
At another party – this time in an old mansion in Wiltshire – one of Mark’s friends, I thought, patronised me about my choice of music, so I told him if he didn’t fuck off I’d take him outside and punch him. He was disconcerted; those types don’t like violence. In those days I was lively and energetic but also insecure. I felt I was quite dim and shouldn’t really be at the university in the company of all these bright people, so I tended to hide behind a cover of being a bit of a heavy. Nowadays, I understand that it’s a common problem with being at Oxford. There’s a perception that everyone else is cleverer and more handsome than you are. Even Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman suffered from it; you can see the fear in their writings. In some ways being at Oxford is as stressful and competitive as trying to make your way in Hollywood.
As the time drew closer to Finals, I became uneasy. It is difficult to write honestly about myself as I was then but I wasn’t particularly nice, and one of the ways I was not particularly nice was in my treatment of Jill. She was there in Cornwall and there I wanted her to stay. But she had other ideas. She wanted to be with me and let me know she had taken a job in a country pub at Sandford in Oxfordshire. She didn’t mention that it was four miles from Oxford. When I found out, I was angry. I felt trapped, my swaggering style was being compromised. I was spending time with a girl called Lois Ainslie who was lodging with James Ruscoe in the Cowley Road.
At one stage Jill left a note on my desk in my rooms, typed on my prized red Valentine typewriter, which said, ‘I just thought I would tell you that I love you in case you were interested. Get the picture sweetie. I think you are intolerable sometimes, far too cruel for words, but I suppose you are OK.’
But I was still somehow armoured against life outside Oxford. I felt curiously immune in my lovely rooms in New College looking over the Chapel with my King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Jimi Hendrix LPs and my collection of green bottles filled with water with a light behind them to suggest ‘green thoughts in a green shade’.
What did it finally was Richard Bulmer, who plonked himself down on my sofa one morning and said if I wasn’t interested in Jill he certainly was and he w
as going to take her out. And then things started to unravel. I must have started talking to Jill because Lois left a note on my desk which said,
When the girl in your head is the girl in your bed
The girl in your heart has a head start.
I realised that in Jill I had an ally; someone who was not going to make me feel inadequate, who didn’t make me feel dim. Jill was among the party of friends who went to Greece in the summer holidays, travelling overland in my very noisy diesel Land Rover. I came back to Oxford in early October with exams threatening and both my hedonistic lifestyle and my confidence draining away.
Jill moved to London at the end of the summer and lodged in Archway in a run-down flat with Francis Bowerbank and his girlfriend Pauline Huddleston. Two weeks after the beginning of term, she came to Oxford for the weekend. She arrived on the Friday evening, but I had gone to a dinner organised by one of those slightly arcane dining clubs for undergraduates called The Boojums. These clubs allow over-privileged young men to drink and eat excessively. That night I was very tanked up when I got to the pub, the Bear, where Jill waited with my brother John and John Thompson.
Unbeknown to me, John Thompson had told Jill that The Boojums was a bit like the Hellfire Club near High Wycombe, famous for orgies. Jill had become extremely agitated and flew at me when I arrived. I reacted angrily but also very lustfully. The combination of all that and the drink was perilous. I snatched her and dragged her to my car, which was a Mini 1275 GT, and drove very fast round the Oxford bypass towards North Oxford and straight into some road works. I hit a 44-gallon drum which had an oil lamp on top. This smashed through the front windscreen and hit Jill on the head and then broke through the rear window.
The first thing I noticed after I came to a shuddering halt was she had blood running down her hairline and she was crying weakly and saying she wanted to go home. Fortunately, even drunk, I was frightened by the blood and took her to the Radcliffe Hospital. Then I drove the short distance home. I carried her little overnight case into the bedroom. It was covered in blood, as it had been on her lap. I opened it and saw all her clothes neatly folded for a happy weekend.