At the beginning of 1957, I started the first year of the HND course at Enfield Technical College, back in the buildings that I had attended as a schoolboy but now as A Student. I particularly liked the fact that I was now referred to as Mr Johnson, rather than by just my surname - a practice I had always disliked - and also how politely lecturers addressed students. I was delighted to find that two of my school classmates, Mick Brown and Mick Roamer, were also on the same course, and over the ensuing years we three became very good friends. Sometimes, our trio made our way to my home to be served lunch by my mother. On one such visit Mick Brown - who was the brightest of us, but a bit of a rough diamond - stunned everyone by politely declaring, Mrs Johnson, your cuisine is excellent!
The course curriculum included lectures on Mathematics - where we learned more advanced Calculus from Mr Chalky White - and others on various aspects of electrical engineering. Also included were some from red-haired Mr Howells - which were marred by the fact that he and I took an instant dislike to each other for some reason - and Advanced Physics, mainly devoted to very boring expositions on heat engines. These latter sessions took place in the annex at the bottom of The Queensway, so there was the opportunity to purchase some sweets from the shop across the road on our way there, which helped to relieve the boredom that was to follow. I recall that we usually bought mint lumps, as their waxed paper wrappers did not rustle when the contents were extracted. An unexpected subject it seemed to me for an electronics course was Strength of Materials, lectures for which took place in the Mechanical Block and involved stretching samples of steel and other material to destruction, which I did find rather stimulating.
We also ran tests of different types of apparatus in the electrical labs, for which we had to produce reports of our findings. These reports had sections titled, Object, Apparatus, Procedure, Results, and Conclusion. I quickly realized that the first four of these would be the same for everyone in the class, so devised a system where the job of compiling one of the sections would be given to one person, who would pass it on to the others to copy - with minor variations, of course. Other sections were dealt with in the same way, leaving only the Conclusion to be individually composed. This saved a great deal of time, and meant that lab reports could normally be completed during a Free Period, instead of as homework. Apart from this wheeze, it is difficult to find much more to relate about the actual HND course itself, so most of the rest of this chapter is devoted to what happened outside the lecture rooms.
I soon joined the Students Union, and over the following years became very involved in its activities. On one occasion, someone created a new mascot - Neddy - for the college, a concrete-filled tub standing on short legs having rockers at the bottom, with a face painted on its front and hair provided by a floor mop. One arm held a pint glass tankard, and the other a soft toy in the form of an Enfield, a heraldic beast used on the borough's coat of arms. To celebrate its adoption, we planned a procession up to the college from The Goat pub at the bottom of The Queensway, and a large group of students gathered there at lunchtime. Some wag thought it would be a clever idea to 'phone the local police station and impart the information that a fight between students from rival colleges over a mascot was about to begin at The Goat. A Squad car duly arrived just before the march was about to start, and decided that removing object of contention - Neddy - would prevent an incipient riot. I happened to be one of those holding Neddy at the time, and was ordered to Let it go! I recall thinking that if I meekly did so I would lose face with my fellow students, but if I refused, I would be in big trouble with the policemen, so I deliberately acted stupid, and pretended not to understand the instructions. This did not help at all, as all three of us holding Neddy were immediately bundled into the back of the police car, with Neddy on our laps, and taken to the nearby police station to be charged with Insulting Behaviour.
At a preliminary hearing, we were represented by the college's solicitor, a rather unworldly gentleman who thought that we would be probably found guilty when our case came to a proper trial. This rather worried the college authorities as one of my co-defendants was the president of the students union. His name was Hugh, a mature young man who had served well in the RAF before coming to college and was of excellent character that did not deserve any sort of criminal record. The college solicitor was therefore replaced by another, a Mr Fairbairn, who had gained a considerable reputation in his defences of Edmonton Teddy Boys who had been charged with minor offences. He breezed into court exuding great confidence, and started to debunk the prosecution case quite quickly, detailing the misinformation given to the police. His coup de grâce was delivered when he demanded that Neddy be brought into court - which was done by two police officers to the great amusement of those present - and demonstrated that he was unable to lift it alone. The mascot was far too heavy for the young lads charged to manage easily, he declared, hence their hesitation to release it when asked. The case was quickly dismissed, to our relief, but also with the later approval of the police who by then knew that they had been hoaxed into attending a peaceful event, not a riot. There was another happy outcome of the event in that friendly rugby matches between the college and police teams were regularly arranged after the incident.
Around that time, we came into possession of Chanticleer the metal cockerel mascot belonging to Walthamstow Technical College, from where it had been purloined on a raid one evening. We heard that their students were planning a retaliatory visit to get their mascot back, and to steal ours as well, so began to take steps to prepare our defences. The arrangements included making bombs out of paper bags filled with flour or soot, and we also circulated details of special warning signals to be sounded on the college bells when invaders arrived. To keep the expected mess away from the main building, Neddy and Chanticleer were positioned in a small garden area outside, which was surrounded by single storey glazed corridors. My station during the imminent attack was in one of these corridors, which was outside the gymnasium, where I would be armed with a hosepipe connected to a tap in the showers. When the warning bell sounded, I made a quick exit from my lecture room through one of the windows, and ran to my designated place. Eventually some intruders appeared, and we just stood there for a few moments staring at each other, all of us not quite knowing how to begin misbehaving. The ice was broken when one of the visitors grabbed a fire extinguisher and began spraying me. I retaliated by opening the tap on the end of my hose and firing a jet of cold water at the interlopers. Other fellow students joined me with copious supplies of bombs, and everyone enjoyed a really good ding-dong battle.
When our supply of bombs was eventually exhausted, and so were we, a truce was declared, as it was agreed that honour had been satisfied for both lots of combatants. Each team took their own mascot with them down to The Goat pub, which was just about to open its doors, to enjoy an evening of conviviality. The mess around the college was all attended to by students on the following day, and there was therefore little negative reaction from the principal. However, it was agreed that future combats between the two colleges would take the form of our own version of the Eton Wall Game, and I still remember being in the middle of hundreds of participants during one of these matches.
The students had a Common Room with some old armchairs and a table-tennis table, and also an office - decorated with a large pin-up poster of June Palmer - and I could usually be found there between lectures. I eventually took over the editorship of the college magazine Effluent - subtitled A monthly discharge from Enfield Technical College's Student Union, issues of which were produced on a Banda spirit duplicator. To help speed up its production I purchased a second-hand typewriter, and tried to teach myself to touch-type, with only a little success. I occasionally received articles for submission from other students, and for one issue was given The Rules of Contact (Sic) Bridge and Mrs Punkhurst's (Sic) Speech in the House of Commons. These were rather naughty articles for those days, the former containing a list of rules such as Jump take-outs should always be made if caught in a minor, or there is a danger of losing the rubber. The second was no better, with the reported speech including phrases like We women refuse to be poked in the dark corners of the House, and We say down with trousers and up with skirts and then we'll see how things really stand! As soon as this issue appeared, I was summoned to the Principal's office and told that this disgusting publication should be withdrawn from sale immediately, and all copies destroyed. During this very uncomfortable interview, he asked me if I realized that copies might have otherwise been seen by the college's female clerical staff, and for once I kept my mouth shut, and did not tell him that it was them that had helped with typing the duplication sheets, giggling and telling me what a wicked boy I was as they did so. By promising swift action over the removal of the offending issue, I just about avoided being expelled, but later found that the few copies that had been retained were circulating at a price around one shilling per copy instead of their original sale price of tuppence.
I was asked to help with collecting for the World Refugee Year campaign in 1959, and did so by dressing up as a highwayman, and holding up passengers emerging from Enfield Town railway station. My means of persuasion to get donations was backed by the two-barreled horse pistol I had borrowed from my friend, the publican at The Goat, where we students - and my Dad - drank after college. I had some caps, normally used in toy guns, which I would tear from a strip and place over the pistol's nipples before pulling its triggers. The ensuing bangs helped with collecting, and I did rather well. Before I returned the pistol, I took it into our shed to see if I could find out why the bang sound from the left barrel was quite different to that from the right. After measuring them, I discovered that the left barrel was shallower than the right, indicating that it must be blocked by something. It took some effort to extract what turned out to be a very hard pad of what appeared to be felt, but when it was removed, and the pistol held vertical, black powder emerged from the barrel. Taking cover outside the shed, I reached in with a long taper to ignite the pile of powder, which flared up very fiercely, as though it had been loaded in the pistol only the day before. I realized that I had been lucky that the caps had not ignited the charge in the pistol when I was pointing it at potential donors, as even though there was no lead ball in the gun, the very hard felt pad retaining the gunpowder might have done someone some harm.
Each year an election for a new President would be held, with strong campaigning for the alternative candidates taking place during the preceding weeks. One year I remember an Austin Seven car covered with posters was maneuvered into the college building, and driven around the narrow corridors surrounding the main hall. During the another campaign, when I was the main agent for the candidate Peter Johnson - no relation - I tried to think of something of similar to stimulate interest, and found a suitable object at one of the factories in the Queensway where electrical cables were produced. I managed to persuade the staff there to loan me an empty cable drum - one used for large electrical distribution cables - which was like a huge cotton reel, about ten feet in diameter. With help from other students I rolled this to the college, where it was decorated with posters. We got Peter to climb up onto the core of the reel where, holding onto the sides for support, he was able to walk the reel around the outside of the college, it being too tall to fit in the hall corridors.
My status at college rose considerably when my fellow students met my fiancée, and later wife, June, at the dances the Students Union regularly organised. The tickets for these were not expensive, but somehow we managed to hire Arthur Jay's (?) ten or twelve-piece band which was very professional. This was the era of jive, which included lots of spinning of the female partners. Male wallflowers sitting out a number could take solace in viewing the consequent occasional glimpses of bare thighs and suspenders above stocking tops as the girls' skirts and multiple layers of net petticoats rose under the influence of some sort of gyroscopy. For these dances June always looked particularly attractive in a dress she wore made of a material covered with prints of what looked to be hand-written letters. It always amused me to see my fellow students expressing admiration about the unique quality of her dress, and asking to be allowed to try to read the contents of these letters, and how they seemed to concentrate more on those positioned in the upper area. This attention might have upset a more jealous man, but I was just proud that I had managed to catch such an attractive girl and make the other guys so envious. However, in view of later developments, perhaps I should have learned to be not quite so tolerant.
In the - first - of my final years we had to undertake a project of our choosing, something akin to the Thesis required for some university degree courses. I had no idea what to do, but Mick Brown had been reading about switched mode power supplies, and suggested that he and I should collaborate on designing and building a power supply unit of that type. Switched-mode power supplies can be substantially smaller and lighter than other versions because its transformer can be much smaller. This is because it operates at a high switching frequency, which ranges from several hundred kHz to several MHz, in contrast to the 50 or 60 Hz mains frequency used by the transformer in a normal power supply. It was fairly common practice for students to obtain components for such projects by writing to electronic companies seeking donations, and it occurred to me that besides asking for parts for the switched mode power supply, we might also try to obtain those needed to make another supply unit, which could be used in a photographic flash unit. This latter unit could be used in our project for comparison between supply types, but was really just something that I really wanted for my photographic hobby, so I agreed to join with Mick. He was the brains behind the project, and did most of the construction and writing necessary, with just a little help from me, who was concentrating on the flash unit. When completed, this had a 100 Joule flash output, massively higher than bulb or electronic flash guns of that era, which were capable of illuminating a room, whereas mine could light up a street!
As the current Secretary, I could easily have won an election to President of the Students Union in that penultimate year, but declined to stand because presidents normally failed their exams at the end of their year of office because they were so involved in extra-mural activities. Despite this caution, I still failed my finals, partly due to one of the lecturers not making it clear which of two subjects he took he would be talking about in that day's lecture, so our course notes were all mixed up. That was my excuse anyway, but I had to retake the year after getting the agreement of my employers, Ediswans. I must have worked a little harder in the second year, although I honestly cannot recall ever doing much homework or applying myself overmuch, but I did pass. Luckily, the project undertaken in the previous year was deemed to cover me for that aspect, so I finally graduated, to the relief of my parents, Ediswans, and of course, my wife June.