Hopeless But Not Serious by Jack McLean

Author:Jack McLean [McLean, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, General
ISBN: 9781906000615
Google: hd10AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00EBO2CWK
Barnesnoble: B00EBO2CWK
Goodreads: 21116299
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2013-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

13

We’d started only with a student council to get a dance organised. But somehow there were more things which needed to be done and it was myself mainly, I suppose, who did them. It was at the beginning of my second year I remember and I simply created first a newsletter, then a meeting, and then a fait accompli. I made a girl called Myrtle Eadie the President. Myrtle was well off, well spoken, and well endowed with brains and bottle. Thus she and myself were the student representatives on the Board of Governors, a very august body of men and one woman. We had the same number of representatives as the staff did and accomplished a great deal more. The governors were charm itself and very welcoming. We never had a problem with them, and in fact they began to throw money at us, including a genuine set-up for the students club, a kind of Students Union though not quite. (Art schools are strangely authoritarian. Students were expected to answer a roll-call in the morning or sign a register and were not permitted to cut classes. The regime would have caused mayhem in the Yooni’s.) And the students club was unlicensed, save for particular occasions when a special licence had to be obtained as, claimed the governors, there were young people under eighteen etc and no amount of pointing out that university unions possessed a similar difficulty but overcame it with ease could budge them. I knew it didn’t matter anyway because we had total control over the club and even staff couldn’t be admitted unless invited. The club could have been awash with alcohol, and anyway most of the students smoked dope rather than drink regularly, but generally art students act relatively responsibly save in sexual matters. Work is the main thing among art students and socialising came second. But we obtained office and admin services and premises and telephones and then the agreement for a full-time sabbatical president. I persuaded all my chums, most of them exaggeratedly ignorant of politics, to be Council members and Gus MacLean, the son of Callum the minister of Cramond Kirk who appeared regularly on television, to become the first ever sabbatical officer in the art college. With hindsight, I should probably have done this myself but I felt myself too old to throw away a year. However, as I was becoming increasingly active in the national student movement, at that time very much on a roll, I could have used the year to considerable advantage, certainly in terms of a future career. It was not easy to work myself through a course which was already at least five days a week and more, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; be Vice-Chairman of the National Union of Students and get to all the meetings; visit other colleges; produce papers for conference; act as Scottish Vice-Chairman; advise students, chair the National committee for Art and Design; and run the film society and start up the first ever film production unit.

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