From Belfast to St Andrews in the 1970s

Alumni Relations

Friday 1 December 2023

Clare Stevens (née Diamond), MA 1979, shares her experience of coming to St Andrews during the height of the Troubles. She recalls the contrast of the safe, quaint cobbled streets with the “strife-torn province” of home.

My dad dropped me at the bottom of the sloping covered walkway leading into Aldergrove Airport and drove off, leaving me to queue for the lengthy security checks and wait by myself in the departure lounge for more than an hour before my flight to Edinburgh Turnhouse was called. Back in the autumn of 1974, you couldn’t come in to Belfast International Airport if you weren’t travelling.

That was because the Troubles were at their height, and security was paramount. But in those days very few students were taken to university by their parents, no matter where they lived. Public transport was the norm; our trunks would be sent ahead of us and were waiting in our hall of residence rooms when we arrived, so we only needed to travel with a single rucksack or case. I successfully caught the airport bus from Turnhouse to Waverley Station, found myself a seat on the train to Leuchars and realised that the young man sitting opposite me also looked like a student. On the other side of the carriage window his mother was blowing kisses and gesturing to him to wrap his scarf more tightly round his neck.

‘Are you a first year too?’ I asked bravely, as the train pulled out of the station.

‘No, I’m a third year,’ came the reply, much to my dismay. After my intrepid solo journey from Northern Ireland, I was shocked to see a male student two years older than myself being despatched by his mum with such solicitous attention, and hoped this wasn’t an indication of the immaturity of all the men in St Andrews (it wasn’t).

I had been inspired to apply to read English and Medieval History at St Andrews after attending a family wedding in Dundee some years before. My family stayed in a B&B in Lorimer Place, St Andrews and I fell in love with the ancient town – where better to study medieval history? – and its beautiful seaside location.

It would have been a wonderful place to spend four years in any circumstances, but the contrast with the strife-torn province I had left was enormous. I had grown up in a middle-class suburb of Belfast and no members of my family or close friends were killed or injured in the Troubles, but the threat that we might be was constant. Winter nights were punctuated with the sound of minor explosions or occasional bursts of gunfire; sometimes on summer mornings we would be woken by the sound of bin lids being rattled on pavements to warn of army raids on the housing estates a couple of miles to the west of us.

Many of the businesses in our local shopping parade had been destroyed by firebombs, some of them such as the Post Office more than once. Two policemen had been shot dead one evening on the doorstep of our pharmacy, a couple of hundred metres from our house; and one evening I heard a commotion outside my bedroom window and looked out to see two men pulling one of our neighbours, a girl a few years older than me, out of her car so that they could hi-jack it. Bomb scares at the railway bridge behind our house were frequent, and on one occasion when the army carefully detonated a suspicious device under the bridge, the resulting explosion brought down three of our ceilings and broke five windows.

In those days before news websites, let alone social media, arriving at St Andrews meant leaving all that behind. Daily newspapers were delivered to Hamilton Hall, but I never did more than skim-read them, and Northern Ireland wasn’t always on the front page. The only TV we watched was Top of the Pops, and the short news bulletins on Radio 1 were easy to ignore.

My new Scottish and English friends rarely mentioned where I came from or asked any questions – partly because they didn’t know much about the Northern Irish situation, and wouldn’t have known where to start, partly I think out of sympathy that they couldn’t articulate and for fear of upsetting me, like people crossing the road to avoid having to talk to an acquaintance who has recently been bereaved.

So, it was easy to immerse myself in student life and forget what was happening at home. Talking to my parents meant queueing to use the single telephone cubicle in the vestibule of Hamilton Hall, and conversations were usually full of gossip, not updates on the political situation or the latest atrocity. I can easily relate to my fellow Northern Irish St Andrean Martin Doyle’s recollection in his book Dirty Linen of how he only found out about a particularly horrific murder in his home village in South Down when one of his cousins travelled over to be his guest at a university ball and told him about it.

My main aim was to fit in with the St Andrews community, which at first was not easy because of my accent, even though it was never terribly strong. To my friends, many of whom were educated at public schools in England or Edinburgh, it was unfamiliar and intrinsically amusing. I was constantly teased on account of my soft consonants (‘Golt Blent’ coffee instead of Gold Blend) and flat vowels (‘flahr’ and ‘pahr’ instead of flower and power). I quickly modified my vowels and the upward inflections at the end of my sentences, but never did pronounce ‘d’s and ‘t’s to the satisfaction of my friends. In retrospect of course I wonder why I felt I should have to alter the way I spoke, and why the teasing, however affectionate, was considered to be acceptable.

I realise too that even though there was a large contingent of us from Northern Ireland, mainly from Protestant schools and all, I imagine, carrying British passports, we were perceived by our colleagues as Irish, rather than Northern Irish. There would be jokes involving leprechauns and ‘begorrah’ which were completely irrelevant to our culture. I think I probably accepted or even encouraged that, because the alternative would have been to explain that I actually came from the same side of the border and the religious divide as the Rev Ian Paisley. He was one Northern Irish character whom everyone in Great Britain recognised, however little attention they paid to the news. And that was definitely an association I preferred to avoid.

Aside from academic work, my main social activity was music. Opportunities to hear famous professional performers in Belfast had been rare, so I went to as many concerts as I could in the Younger Hall and St Salvator’s Chapel. Another Northern Irish friend and I went down to Edinburgh to hear, and more importantly, see for ourselves, the London Symphony Orchestra performing in the Usher Hall, conducted by André Previn, whose Music Night programmes on BBC television with the same orchestra had been required viewing for us as O-level music students.

One consequence of the Troubles had been that my girls’ grammar school stopped putting on joint concerts with the equivalent boys’ school for the entirety of my time there. I had never had the opportunity to sing in a choir with tenors and basses until I got to St Andrews. I felt intimidated by the audible skill and confidence of the Chapel Choir and Renaissance Singers and didn’t dare audition for them; but I did sing with the main university music society choir. My first year included a concert featuring a work by Cedric Thorpe Davie (then Professor of Music when the University was still offering music degrees in the 1970s), and the premiere of the cantata Laudes Montium by Kenneth Leighton (Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh), composed to mark the centenary of the society. I could never have guessed then that I would spend the latter half of my professional life as a music journalist, specialising in choral and contemporary classical music.

A musical highlight of my years in St Andrews was taking part in a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass with the town/gown St Andrews Chorus, conducted by Thomas G Duncan, one of my English lecturers. My mother had sung this in Belfast, together with annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and regarded them as the pinnacle of musical achievement. Nowadays people’s parents would probably fly over to attend such a major event, but in those days, it was out of the question, my mum had to just hear about the concert afterwards in a phone call and a very long letter.

My biggest regret about coming from Belfast was that I couldn’t easily return the hospitality I received from so many of my friends. Three of them did come over to stay, one because she had a Northern Irish boyfriend, the other two because they had Irish relations; but most of my closest friends did not, because their parents felt it would not be safe. I’m glad it’s different now.  I hope there are lots of Northern Irish students taking their Scottish and English friends on tours of the Titanic Experience and the Game of Thrones locations in the summer holidays.