Keele Icons – The Publicity Circular
Nowadays, of course, everything is on Facebook and Twitter. When I’ve signed up for clubs and societies there’s usually someone who asks me, slightly apprehensively as though I’ve landed in Keele from sometime in the 20th century, “are you on Facebook?” When I confirm that I am a look of relief passes across their face
There are Facebook groups for absolutely everything. For example, not only is there one for the Football Club season 2016/17, there’s a separate one for each of the 5 teams they run and there’s yet another one for KUFC Socials only. replicate this (OK the football club is an extreme example) around all the clubs and societies as well as the official Student Union sites (multiple) and you’ll see that keeping up with Facebook is pretty much a full time activity
And that’s before we get on to Twitter and Instagram!
It makes me look back nostalgically at the Publicity Circular, or PubCirc as it was usually known. Printed double-sided on cheap coloured paper every day from Monday to Friday, the PubCirc was the Facebook of the day. If you wanted to put an entry in you had to get it into the Publicity bin by 9 am for publication inclusion in that day’s edition. In practise that meant before you went to bed the night before as few students were up and about by 9 am!
Presumably a short time after 9 the copy was typeset and the Banda machine (remember them!) whirred into action. By lunchtime that day’s PubCirc was on refectory tables campus-wide. And eagerly read they were too. Like Facebook, the entries were wide ranging, from the sublime to the ridiculous
Here’s a small selection from PubCircs of the Autumn term 1972. If the punctuation’s wrong it’s because we were uneducated!
DIVINE LIGHT SOCIETY. Satsang (spiritual discourses) in room 13 (SU) from 1 pm onwards today !! Two guest speakers!!
LOSE WEIGHT PAINLESSLY at an evenings folk dancing – you don’t even need to be able to dance, we’ll teach you. Every Tuesday 8-11 Union Room 11 (ITS FREE)
DO YOU WANT TO LEARN HOW TO CROCHET? If so contact June Boughey or Jackie Nield via p/h. We want to teach people as part of a P3 project
GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION: Annual General Meeting 8.00 Hawthorns General Block Friday 3rd Nov. Please bring a bottle (they knew how to party those geographers – ed!)
and my favourite, which displays both the pretentiousness of youth and the casual sexism of the day:
TONIGHT AT 8.30 IN THE BALLROOM – THE PRETTY THINGS – a simply staggering group whose progress, from the dirtiest American blues to, for want of a better term, underground electric music, I’ve followed for seven years. Their two LP’s “S.F.Sorrow” and “Parachute” are among the best ever recorded. UNCLE DOG – a dance and a letch with lovely Carol Grimes
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – who needs them when you’ve got the PubCirc!
I’m not sure when Pub Circ went out of (ahem) circulation, but a friend who was at Keele in the mid-90s didn’t remember it. Up until 1988 all SU and AU clubs and societies got free entries. I routinely abused this on behalf of the Ski Club, which I was secretary of at the time, with great long rambling screeds about past and coming events. All of that ended in 1988 when they started charging for entries (entries from mere students had been charged at 5p per word for some time).
There were a team of dedicated Pub Circ typists who would bash it out in the vice-president’s office on an old typewriter. One was a strange little guy named John Sinclair, who was always known as ‘Bat’. You always knew when he had been the typist as he would add his own comments to some of the entries, not always in a favourable way.
I used to write the Folk Club entries for this for a while in 1977-78. We had a guest singer once, he Reverend something or other. I didn’t want people to think that it would be a religious evening so I added – “but he isn’t as reverend as all that” to make it clear it would be a fun evening. I was in trouble with the folk club committee and the Christian Union for being disrespectful – you’d have thought I’d said he was a satanist by the CU reaction! They wanted me reported to the University governors or some such body. It all blew over of course.
I was one of the PubCirc typists for a few weeks in circa 1985. I remember it was very hurriedly typed up from lots of little scribbled notes. I tried to cram every last item onto the fewest pages, sometimes turning the sheet round in the typewriter to use a blank space for a short message.
And yes, I did often insert a message of my own. I remember one verbatim after all these years:
“If it’s CrisP outside or not; Tovarishch not to exclaim. 121211!”
(It meant something at the time!)