Marvellous: Neil Baldwin - My Story. Neil Baldwin
It never seemed odd to me. I know that none of my friends from school did anything like going up to Keele and getting to know everyone. But I did. I met the students and the Vice-Chancellor, too. You can get things by asking for them. I always do. I got the confidence from my mum, and from the church too.
My mum wasn’t worried about me coming to Keele. She wanted me to have a good life. And that’s what I’ve had. She did a good job.
I left school that year. I didn’t bother with any exams or anything, and the school didn’t put me in for any, so I went to work at Swinnertons. It was a big pottery, and I took the plates to the dip. I did that for about four years. I worked from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, and then I’d get the bus home and my mum would give me some tea. And then I’d get the bus to Keele and meet my friends there. Saturdays I’d go to the Stoke City match, and Sundays I’d be back at Keele.
MALCOLM
One of the students Neil met in 1961 was Glyn Cherry, a Christadelphian. They are still friends today. Glyn recalls:
I think Neil and I may have first met at a Bible exhibition we held in the Municipal Hall, Newcastle. As a result, Neil came to see me at Keele and came to some of our meetings. One day Neil said, ‘My mother wants to meet you.’ Two of our Christadelphian members went to see her. It was quite difficult at first because it turned out that Mary was very suspicious and worried about who we were. She was a very devout lady and insisted on saying a prayer at the end of that meeting. But a couple of years later she had a conversion to us and had her Christadelphian baptism. But Neil didn’t join us because he doesn’t think in terms of religious doctrine at all and likes all the ceremony of the Church of England, which we don’t have. Mary was very proud of Neil and always backed him.
The story is typical of Mary. She had a fierce independence of mind, and she also wanted to support Neil’s independence, while always keeping an eye on him.
NEIL
We were Church of England but in 1961 I went to a Christadelphian Bible meeting with Glyn Cherry. I told Mum about it and she came with me to a meeting. She liked it so much that she became a Christadelphian but I liked the church and remained C of E. Mum was quite happy about that. She always let me do what I wanted. So long as people believe in God and live a good life it doesn’t matter which church they belong to.
One day at the beginning of 1964, I saw Pete Dunkerley in the Students’ Union, and I knew he was the new Rag Week Chairman. So I went up to him and I said, ‘I want to do the Rag.’ And he got me collecting money and made me a marshal, and then he made me Rag Safety Officer. I like Pete Dunkerley. He’s a very nice man. And it’s a very important job, Rag Safety Officer.
I’ve been the Rag Safety Officer ever since, and I still am, and Pete and I have been friends ever since. I had to deal with the Rag Committee and the police. I used to go and talk to Sergeant Dave Nixon, and he turned out to be the manager of a police football team, so, when I started the Neil Baldwin Football Club a few years later, we played them.
MALCOLM
Peter Dunkerley (only Neil is allowed to call him Pete these days) is a key figure in Neil’s story, because Peter made him a central figure in the annual student Rag, which he’s been ever since. In 1964 Peter was an eighteen-year-old under-graduate, the product of a North Manchester grammar school. Peter says:
The student Rag was a big deal. We had a procession half a mile long and we raised a lot of money for local charities, so it was also a way of putting ‘town and gown’ together. We needed a lot of willing volunteers, so, when Neil came up to me, the first thing I did was to put a collecting tin in his hand, and he went round with the others to working men’s clubs, and came back with a full tin, and he was really pleased at how well he’d done.
For the procession we had to have six marshals – they wore an armband with a big M on them – and I made Neil a marshal and he went and checked on parts of the procession for me, and he really liked doing that. Then one of us – I’m not sure if it was me or Neil – invented the post of Rag Safety Officer for him. He took the job really seriously. He must have done something right: no one was hurt on the procession, then or afterwards.
For the rest of Peter’s time at Keele – he left in 1966 – Neil visited his room in one of the student halls of residence about once a week:
I’d make coffee, he’d talk about what he was doing, about his mother, Stoke City. He was always chatty. Quite often he’d be carrying a Bible but he was never Bible-thumping, he didn’t discuss that. He was part of my experience of Keele.
Like many of Neil’s oldest friends, Peter has found Neil good at keeping in touch, and gets the occasional visit at his Hampshire home.
It was through the Rag that Neil got to know some of the campus children. Keele at that time (and even today to a lesser extent) was unusual because almost all the students and the majority of the lecturers lived on the campus, with lecturers and support staff bringing up their children there. There was a whole community of families, and of course all the campus children loved going to the Rag procession. David Nussbaum’s father was a classics lecturer, and David told me:
One Keele Rag Week in the 1960s, various floats on lorries were parading around, and Neil, of course, was there in the midst of the spectacle. He mentioned that he was ‘the safety officer’ – which seemed to entail him being able to get on and off any of the floats he wanted to at will, and being given due respect by the students, and of course by us children, as that meant it would be him who decided whether we could get on some of the floats as well.
We campus children of course took Neil as we found him, and rather took to him. He was usually with students, but we sensed he wasn’t quite one of them. Indeed, he seemed somehow in charge at times. Neil was also known to me from chapel (where we went on Sunday mornings), so he felt a familiar member of the Keele community. From our perspective as children, students came and went, but Neil seemed always there, from year to year – with the students, but not quite one of them.
He started playing football with the campus children. Some of them called him Stan, a reference to the great Stoke City player Stanley Matthews – an ironic reference, as Neil always played football with more enthusiasm than skill.
Those were innocent days. Today, I suppose, the parents would wonder who this strange man was who seemed to enjoy playing with their children, and what his agenda was, and someone would call the police. But I’m glad to say the campus parents in the sixties seemed to take Neil at face value. David’s mother, Enid Nussbaum, got to know Neil pretty well. She says:
After the Keele chapel service one Sunday we invited Neil to lunch. Over lunch, Neil suddenly asked me if we had a telephone. We had. ‘Oh,’ said Neil, ‘I think I’ll just phone the Bishop and ask him if I can be ordained.’ He was around seventeen, I suppose. I suggested that, as it was Sunday, the Bishop would be very busy – in fact it was highly likely that he wouldn’t be at home at all, better to put it off for a day or two, to which suggestion Neil concurred.
In September, 1964, I turned up at Keele, and Neil Baldwin was one of the first people I met.
NEIL
I have been greeting the new students at Keele since I first got to know the campus. I stood just outside the Students’ Union – they had the new building by the time Malcolm arrived in 1964. I just came up to the students and said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ I did that because I thought it would be nice to meet students and meet people, because in my life I always wanted to meet people. They were OK about it; they liked it, too. Lots of them stopped and had a chat with me.
That’s how I met Malcolm. He came along and I said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ And he looked quite pleased and he said, ‘Thanks. I’m Malcolm Clarke.’ And that’s how that all started. We’ve been friends ever since.
Now, I know Malcolm says I was wearing a dog collar, and all I can say to that is, maybe I was. I put it on because I thought it would be nice.
MALCOLM