Harry McGrath
They hadn’t heard of kettling on the campus at Stirling in 1972
Ah fickle mistress memory. I was certain I had seen a royal coupon morph that way before: from benign smile, to bewilderment, to shock, as a member of the great unwashed gets close enough to poke at your wife with a stick. Surely that was the look on Charles’s mother’s face back in October 1972 at Stirling University when a student ‘made contact’ with her. No stick, but an arm around the shoulder (allegedly) and the offer of an even more intimate connection – a swig from an already partly consumed bottle of cheap wine.
I remember it because I was there – a risky assertion at the best of times. The queen was giving her blessing to a new administration building (I think) and I was standing somewhere out of the way wondering how long I had before the bus left for Cumbernauld and home. In fact, I never saw her face and I’ve just found a photograph on the internet that tells a completely different story from the one that I’ve concocted. There’s the student with the bottle of wine and there’s the queen (was she really that young?) laughing rather fetchingly and without a trace of bewilderment or shock.
I think that the false memory might be conditioned not by the queen’s visit itself but by what happened after she departed. The following day the national newspapers were drunk on the wine bottle incident and the demonstration (of a sort) that preceded it. The queen, they said, was caught up in a riot, jostled, abused, and had to run a gauntlet of hirsute, drunken, radicals all of them existing on state handouts otherwise known as student grants. The campus was soon crawling with reporters who seemed determined to raise the temperature.
And rise it did. Student leaders were suspended (or were they expelled?), the administration building occupied, emergency meetings called on all sides. The bus from Cumbernauld didn’t stop at the entrance to the campus any more but drove through to Bridge of Allan. Retribution was required and suggestions about what should be done ranged all the way up to closing the university and turning its feckless former-residents into something useful like street cleaners or soldiers.
In the end, they decided just to note ‘this unpleasant incident’ and forget it, as they were sure that was also what her majesty would want to do.
Sobriety returned, if I remember correctly, only when tragedy intervened. Two student leaders were killed in a car crash on the way to London for one of those emergency meetings. The university principal, Professor Tom Cottrell, died soon after, his death attributed by some to the pressure brought on by the visit and its aftermath. The monarch’s campus visit was Cottrell’s Nick Clegg moment though, unlike Clegg, he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. He was a scientist who believed in the arts; the MacRobert Centre is his legacy.
Though the Stirling University ‘riot’ caused a commotion at the time, it hasn’t had much attention since. It does get a brief mention in a book by American academic Caroline McCracken-Flesher. It was, she says, ‘one of the most vivid modern indicators that attitudes to the monarchy in Scotland can be challenging and oppositional as well as conventionally deferential’. Well maybe. I remember it now as an indicator that young people can be motivated by a number of things including, and perhaps especially, showing off to one another. For the sexually disenfranchised (ahem!), the occupation of the administration building owed more to the prospect of eyeballing women in their pyjamas than it did to political principles.
McCracken Flesher claims that the Stirling incident was eventually ‘hushed up’ by a pro-monarchist media, the university authorities and historians who made no mention of it. There is, however, an alternative to this unlikely three-cornered conspiracy theory. Hansard records a question from Lord Nugent of Guildford on royal security with particular reference to what happened at Stirling and a desultory discussion that followed it. The Lords considered the actions of a ‘small minority’ of students, the preparedness or otherwise of the university authorities, and whether the queen was being presented with ‘false environments’ when she made public visits. In the end, they decided just to note ‘this unpleasant incident’ and forget it, as they were sure that was also what her majesty would want to do.
Perhaps the queen’s visit wasn’t ‘hushed up’ because it was important but forgotten because, in the great scheme of things, it didn’t much matter. The campus revolutionaries graduated (or didn’t) and dispersed. One writes cogently argued pieces for the Scottish Review, though primarily about a clan gathering which is about as far from international revolution as you can get. Another, a moderate communist of all things, became student council president, and went on to be home secretary and support national ID cards, Trident replacement and the war in Iraq. Some passed their middle years in the reconvened Scottish Parliament where consideration of things foreign was banned by – sorry, reserved to – Westminster and they were directed to spend their time dealing with pressing domestic matters like removing smokers from public houses.
A couple of years ago I revisited the Stirling campus. It is now what it was probably always destined to be: a North American-style enclosed campus with a management centre and a commitment to excellence in sports. To my amazement, I caught a glimpse of one of my former history professors. I remembered him as a Marxist and wanted to ask if he still taught about revolution or if it was all myth and memory in the department now. The moment passed and, anyway, I couldn’t remember his name.
So people change. Universities develop. It’s not the 1970s any more – so far, so obvious. Yet there was something about the queen’s visit and its aftermath that I was reminded of when I watched the recent fees demonstrations though I admit now that it wasn’t the look on her face. I think it was the way in which the ‘adult’ world suddenly rounded on the Stirling students (sanguine Lords excepted) as if it had just been waiting for an excuse to do so. The university authorities had to be seen to be punitive in order to preserve investment and eliminate talk of closure, but the negative reaction was much wider than that.
The Times reported, darkly, that there were ‘Glaswegians’ on the campus that day and they weren’t Stirling students, but perhaps they were. In fact, the majority of Stirling’s students in 1972 were from working-class Scottish backgrounds and consequently surprised by the front rank of resentment which came from bus drivers, campus construction workers and Scottish tabloid journalists with the same accents as many of them had. Perhaps local people saw behind the long hair and the straggly beards to the future home owners lurking within and caught the whiff of class desertion. Or maybe they just didn’t like malingering students insulting the queen while supported by their tax money.
Later he and his Pink Floyd mates played an anthem that began with the line ‘We don’t need no education’. You couldn’t really make that bit up.
As the great London ‘fees riot’ played out on Sky television, I couldn’t help but notice that the argument against supporting students with other people’s tax money has returned with a vengeance. The anti-student rhetoric of 40 years ago is still intact and the real ‘British disease’, lack of faith in its own young people, was everywhere in evidence. There was a nice line in hypocrisy too with those who never paid fees racking up bills for a new generation and former members of the Bullingdon Club carping about loutish behaviour.
This time, however, the stakes are higher than they were at Stirling and the response a lot more physical. A few hundred agitated Jocks kettling themselves on a campus somewhere up there may not have been that much of a concern in 1972, but 100,000 people in the centre of London in 2010 need surrounding. And this time nobody is going to just forget it.
There are slim pickings on the internet as far as the queen’s visit is concerned. The campus wasn’t bristling with CCTV cameras, no mobile phones recorded the incident, nothing from the helicopter cam. Middle-aged Charlie Gilmour, by contrast, will be able to watch himself ascend the Cenotaph from all angles and perhaps he will wonder what was in his head. He’ll notice the insertion of word ‘adopted’ before ‘son of Dave Gilmour’ in multiple online newspaper reports, as if that somehow explains it.
Forty years ago, we speculated on what was in his father’s head. He was in the studio while the queen was on the campus and emerged with ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Later he and his Pink Floyd mates played an anthem that began with the line ‘We don’t need no education’. You couldn’t really make that bit up.
Harry McGrath is the former coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is now based in Edinburgh and runs the Scottish Canadian Agency
