Class Mates: Former students recall how the London School of Economics changed their lives

by Peter Whitehead, Jim Broe, Steve Caine

In his foreword, David Willetts 'This is a wonderful collection of personal memoirs of a group of students at the LSE in the 1970s – and shows how that intense experience has shaped adult careers. There are vivid accounts of the journey from a working class background and the other journey, closely related, to London, a city most of them hardly knew. It is also a celebration of lasting (mostly male) friendships forged at university. As the LSE is at the heart of the story it makes sense also to treat these essays as a case study in social science. They may not be the sophisticated quantitative analysis which LSE graduates produce now. But they are vivid accounts of experience – qualitative social science – with the LSE itself as the subject matter. And even just a few personal accounts provide significant evidence of what education was like then and what the reality of social mobility can feel like.'
These are the stories of 14 young people who became friends at the LSE in 1976 and had their lives re-shaped by the experience.

Kindle Edition

Published June 5, 2024

About the author

Underground filmmaker, novelist, falconer and music video pioneer Peter Whitehead is no longer in this world, a stunning, overwhelming fact to anyone who knew him or formed a fragment in his fragmented life. He was captivated by myths and in many ways sought to turn his own life into one. Films such as The Fall (1969) appeared to provide keys to the secrets of the media age and were undeniably potent, locking libidinal energy into swinging camera movements and tight 16mm edits. It was a hybrid piece about violence and revolution in the USA: part-essay film, part-avant-garde formalist work, part-personal film, part-psychedelia, part-reportage documentary.

In his guise as a counter-cultural documentarian, the strikingly handsome Whitehead, who has died aged 82, travelled the world, changed his identity, moved between classes and had relationships with numerous glamorous, often famous women – almost like a 60s spy. He was partially emblematic of the age by the way he went from a working-class background, the son of a Liverpudlian plumber, to Cambridge University, there making numerous connections that bubbled up later in his life.