The Anonymous Widower

Jon Snow Is Everywhere

It’s a good cause and I agree with the charity’s aims.

Trees for Cities Advert with Jon Snow

Adverts for Trees for Cities are everywhere on the Underground and they feature Jon Snow.

I was at Liverpool University, just before Jon Snow organised the protest against Lord Salisbury, who at the time was Chancellor of the university. There must have been an earlier protest, as I remember something about 1968. In Engineering, who didn’t take too much of a political stance. the reasons were a bit above our head.  Although, we did think that Lord Salisbury was not the sort of old right-wing political buffer, who should hold that position. Wikipedia says this about the protest in 1970.

Apart from his political career Salisbury was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1951 until 1971. In 1970, students at the university staged an occupation at Senate House to demand his removal, over his support for apartheid and similarly reactionary views.

I think it is true to say, that today, anybody with those views wouldn’t hold such a position.

In the end Jon Snow was rusticated for organising the protest, but the University did later award him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2011.

C’s tutor at the University was Robert Kilroy Silk.  He was also one of the organisers of the protest against Lord Salisbury, but I have read that at the last minute he didn’t turn up. It couldn’t have been because he was giving a tutorial to C, as she had graduated from the university in the previous year and we were living in London. Obviously, no punishment was handed down to Kilroy Silk.

C always found him odious and I can remember her stinking with tobacco smoke after she had been to one of his tutorials, where he chain-smoked Capstan Full Strength all the way through.

He obviously left the right impression on her, as once we were standing next to him at Newmarket racecourse and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get her to approach him and speak of her times at Liverpool under his tutelage.

So now I think justice has been done. Kilroy was here, briefly and Jon Snow is everywhere.  Sadly C is no more, but I still have her memories of her tutor in my mind.

January 20, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | World | Advertising, Charity, Environment, Liverpool University, London Underground, Trees