Golden Graduates Reunion 2025

• Shelagh Allsop - Applied Social Studies & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1975
• Neil "Nello" Baldwin
• Shelagh Allsop - Applied Social Studies & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1975
• John Bowers - Geography & Geology, 1972
• Lesley Clarke - Social Studies, 1972
  Malcolm Clarke - Philosophy & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1969
• Anne Connelly - Applied Social Studies & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1975
• Harriet Coomber Hewitt - French & German, 1975
• Phil Coverdale - Economics & Law, 1974
• Susan Cunningham-Hill - Law & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1975
• Trevor Curnow - Philosophy & Law, 1974
• Phil Davies - American Studies & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1971
• Peter Day - Law & Economics, 1975
• David Dick - American Studies & Economics, 1975
• Patrick Durkan - Economics & Law, 1974
• Lee Faulkner - Psychology & Biology, 1979
• Beryl Ferguson - French & German, 1975
• Keith Fradgley - French & German, 1976
• Jeff Gleave - History & American Studies, 1975
• Anne Hall - Biology & English, 1975
• Peter Hall - German & Latin, 1975
• Nici Hildebrandt - French & German, 1975
• Sally Hodges - Sociology & Applied Social Studies, 1975
• Carole Holland - French & German, 1971
• Howard Ibbitson - French & English, 1969
• Colin John - American Studies & English, 1973
• Penny Jones - Psychology & Politics, 1966
• Alan Kerr - Law & American Studies, 1975
• Helen Lilley - Applied Social Studies, 1973
• John Lilley - Class of 1973
• Jeff Love - Politics & Law, 1975
• Martin McArthur - English & History, 1975
• Joanna McVeagh - Greek & Latin, 1975
• Judi Moran - American Studies & History, 1974
• Susan Morgan - Mathematics & Education, 1973
• Gordon Mousinho - Law & History, 1975; American History & Politics, 1976 & 1980; Creative Writing, 2017 & 2023
• Derek Nudd - English & History, 1975
• Miranda Peake - Biology & Geography & Education, 1975
• Alan Peddle - International Relations, 1974
• Iain Phillips - American Studies & Politics, 1975
• Richard Purchase - Politics & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1976
• Steve Rowe - Geography & Sociology and Social Anthropology, 1975
• Lynn Smith-Davies - Russian & Psychology, 1975
• Denise Spennewyn -  American Studies & English, 1975
• Brian Standish - Education & Mathematics, 1975
• Annie Stewart - French & Law, 1975
• Brian Stewart - Geography & Politics, 1972
• Anne Strong - Education & Mathematics, 1975
• Ian Taylor - History & American Studies, 1975
• Richard Toon - Quantum Electronics,1970
• Ann Twiselton - English & History, 1975
• Brian Walker - English & French, 1970
• Andy Watts - English & American Studies & Education, 1975
• Penny Welch - History & Politics, 1972
• Anthony Whitehead - History & American Studies, 1975
• Ricky Wilkes - French & History, 1975

Golden Graduates were joined by the current Vice-Chancellor, Professor Trevor McMillan OBE and his wife, Chris; future Vice-Chancellor (from September 2025) Professor Kevin Shakesheff and his wife, Stephanie; Core Chavda, the new Experience & Community Officer at Keele Students' Union; Neil "Nello" Baldwin; and the Alumni Relations (Advancement) team.

Hello 1975!

It was a beautiful October day when I arrived at Keele, never having visited previously. (It was always lovely weather on the first day of the year, and then rained practically every other day for the entire four years…) I much admire those who had deliberately applied to Keele in the knowledge they would be getting a ‘Renaissance Man’ education. I myself had only applied to city universities, thinking I was a city kind of girl, then messed up my A-levels and came to Keele via Clearing. What a lucky day that was. Twofold luck – as my mother and I strolled through the autumn sunshine, (and overheard some pretentious…onanist… commenting on “the extraordinary melange of architecture”), I already knew that campus life was going to be perfect for me.

I made lifelong friends, some of whom are here tonight - give us a cheer Hawthorns - and that will be true for many, if not all, of you.

Having run the gauntlet of the P3s from A-block, who had volunteered to tell arriving FYs which room they had been allocated - and unbeknownst to us, allotting the females amongst us marks out of ten - I moved into my beloved room in K-block, where the first thing I heard was Joni Mitchell, coming from the stereo in the next door room, (one of those lifelong friendships started right then and there), and where I exercised my nascent love of interior decorating, moving upwards and sideways over the years so my room was a different shape and asking for extra bookshelves, mostly to house the objets I bought in the junk shops in Silverdale and Newcastle. I saw an exact replica of one of those objets not long ago in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. I wouldn’t have paid more than 75p for it and Christie’s subsequently told me it was worth several hundred pounds. Most of my friends gradually moved into the LFA flats but I stuck with my little private lair. The demise of the Hawthorns seems a woeful decision to us.

And then the other stroke of luck - FY. I had a lot of growing up to do, and even though I missed a lot of the 9 o’clock lectures, FY gave me that chance before I started my degree proper, and opened my eyes to subjects I would never otherwise have touched on. I was one of the minority who didn’t change either of my Principle subjects. It turned out we were almost the last cohort to get compulsory FY - how very, very fortunate we were. I wish I could go back and do FY now - one could argue it was wasted on 18-year-olds, but nonetheless it broadened my horizons enormously.

University was never about getting a job for me (remember ‘education for education’s sake’?), but it taught me to think, to analyse, and to present ideas coherently, all skills which serve in any career. I worked for almost all my life at the BBC, and when I became a researcher, FY’s heuristic legacy was invaluable. I knew my way around multiple areas, but more importantly I wasn’t frightened of tackling subjects I knew nothing about.

I arrived at Keele in 1971. After the rebel years of the late 60s, they’d allegedly chosen tamer students. When we were FYs there were still some Registry-burning, Clock Tower-levitating P3s, but we were happy just to get drunk and have water fights and fire extinguisher battles. Although they were comparatively settled times politically, there was enough going on to revolutionise my (barely existent) political awareness. I came from a family of Telegraph readers, I left a Guardian reader - thank-you Keele.

They WERE the happiest years of my life, not least because I was warm enough for the first time ever. I left vowing never to be cold again and now I live on a Greek island and have become that cliché: the English lady amateur botanist. I’m working on quite a serious project – recording all the wild flowers of my island, Hydra - which has been a steep learning curve for a lifelong arts person (degree in French and German, career in Radio Drama), but again, my Keele background convinced me that I was fit for the task. (I’m hoping to publish within the next five years and/or before I die.) These are very happy years too.

Our children love to remind us that we were the luckiest generation – the best music, less scary drugs, less scary STDs, no Big Brother social media, affordable housing – but above all, FREE, grant-aided tertiary education. Those days are long gone. I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but I want to encourage you all to help support Keele financially - the debt I owe can’t be repaid with money, but it can help others to have the life-enhancing experience that I will be forever grateful for.

It’s a true honour to welcome you back to Keele for this very special Golden Graduates Dinner. Tonight, we celebrate not just your remarkable milestone of 50 years since graduation, but also the enduring spirit of this university that shaped your lives—and continues to shape the lives of further generations of students. 

Many of you have travelled from all over the UK, including our class representative Nici, who spends most of her time in Greece. I hope you have had a good evening so far and enjoyed meeting people that you probably haven’t seen for quite some time.

Please note that the Westminster Theatre will be open throughout the evening for guests to visit and will contain our archive materials for perusal. 

I know many of you have attended Keele Day activities and these have also been done against a back drop of an open day. Our recruitment cycle never stops and the prospective students here today are largely looking to come in September 2026.

I also saw many of you attended the Philanthropy Tea earlier and this is another opportunity to thank you for your support.

Before I say much more I'd also like to welcome Professor Kevin Shakesheff and his wife Steph. As most of you will know I am leaving Keele at the end of August after just over 10 years in the role.  I'm sure you will give Kevin and Steph as warm a reception as you did for Chris and I. It has been an absolute privilege to have been Vice-Chancellor of this fantastic University and I wish you both a very happy and successful time here. 

I asked AI what was happening in 1975. Margaret Thatcher had just become leader of the Conservative Party. The Vietnam War was drawing to a close. The first personal computer was being developed, and the UK was adjusting to life inside the European Economic Community. It was a time of change, of challenge, and of possibility.

And here at Keele, you were part of something equally transformative.

Keele in the 1970s was still very much an embodiment of the vision of our founding principal, Lord Lindsay of Birker. His dream was radical for its time: a university that broke down the barriers between disciplines, that educated the whole person, and that believed higher education should be a force for good in society - not just a privilege for the few.

He called it “the Keele experiment.” And you were part of that experiment. 

You studied across disciplines. You began with a Foundation Year that opened your minds to new ways of thinking. You were encouraged to question, to connect, to care. Lindsay believed that education should not just produce specialists, but citizens - people who could think critically, act ethically, and contribute meaningfully to the world. 

That vision still lives on today.

As you have gone around today I'd like to think that you will have found that everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. We have to modernise, we have to stay attractive to students and staff today and we have to be financially sustainable in a higher education system that is fundamentally unsustainable in its current form. But we do constantly refer to our past in terms of approaches and values.

You will have seen some shiny new boxes. The Medical School, the Business School, the Vet School, accommodation blocks in Barnes, new science labs, and the development of various science park buildings. Even the wind turbines and solar panels that are generating 50% of our electricity used on campus.

But Chancellors, the Library, KeeleSU, and various accommodation are blocks pretty much as you left them on the outside. We’ve done quite a lot inside them to make them fit for purpose but I am sure you will recognise them.

If you were to look at our degree offer, we still have lots of degree programmes that involve two subjects but most students do single honours. Big expansion in health subjects, and the latest suite of additions this year includes various programme related to sport. In two weeks we will also see our first set of graduates from our Vet School, another example of how Keele has always responded to societal demand.

We still have a Foundation Year but it doesnt do what it did when you were here, except one important thing, for some of our students it’s a critical time of growing into a university learning experience and in some cases giving them a chance to decide exactly what they might want to specialize in.

But the Lyndsey vison of breadth of study still exists through our global challenge pathway programmes that help our students think about how their disciplines impact on major global challenges and they can do that alongside students whose major subject is quite different from theirs.  Very different from your experience but one that designed to achieve similar things in a way that is attractive to a modern student body. 

So we still spend a lot of time thinking about how we best prepare our students for a very uncertain world because the biggest impact we have as a university is in fact mediated through what our students achieve once they leave, just as all of you have. Lyndsey was preparing students for a very uncertain time ahead of them after the wars and we feel that is just as relevant now as it was then. 

Our students achieve great things and Im hugely proud of what our staff achieve on a daily basis in their education delivery and their research. 

I have to admit that it is quite tough at the moment. It is fair to say that the HE is feeling very bruised at the moment having had a long period of not being appreciated by government and the fact that the student fee has effectively remained the same for over a decade now has put a huge financial pressure on many universities. With this added to by an unfavourable immigration policy. You will have seen many of the specific stories in the press. 

Keele is not immune from any of this and we are having to work hard indeed to ensure that our financial situation is resilient and sustainable and that we can continue to deliver our high quality academic endeavors and develop the campus over the next few years.

We have achieved a lot despite the prevailing external winds and we are really working hard to maintain that momentum. Significant growth plans are in place. These are needed to increase our research and teaching impact and enable critical enhancement of the campus.  Keele has always been innovative and we need to continue with that in order to achieve what we know we are capable of.

For example, we have opened Keele in Town, an Institute of Technology in Stafford comes soon, and we have plans to develop our Science & Innovation Park into an larger Innovation District that will be a significant economic hub both regionally and nationally.

I know its not always the case that we mention money at these events but as I said earlier many of you already support us so I just want to mention that we will soon be launching our Together Fund that will highlight the support that is possible to help our students, our research and our campus.

Finally a word about the other part of the Lyndsay vision for Keele. The sense of community. We talk a lot about a sense of community. What that means has also had to evolve. Its inevitably different from the origins of the university when all staff and students lived on campus. We have a much more diverse student body both socially and in terms of ethnicity. We have a more international student body and we are doing our best to increase this. We have a significant post grad community, we have lots of students living at home, we have some studying for degree apprenticeships and we even have some studying entirely online or studing for Keele degrees at various places around the world including for example different cities in China, Sri Lanka, Singapore and soon to be launched in Greece.

COVID taught us that we need to be able to create a sense of engagment, relationship building and community building even through computer screens if needed.

But there is still something special about the sense of community here and while hard to define I am convinced that there is something about the relationship between students and the relationship between staff and students that makes Keele a bit different.

So the community spirit is still there and I am sure you will have seen it as you have gone around today.

I am extremely proud of what is achieved here at Keele on a daily basis and my aim is that we continue to make you proud of being a part of our community. In my speech in graduation ceremonies I say to our graduates that I hope they will always feel a part of a thriving and successful university that values them as part of our community.  I hope that’s how you feel.

We are very grateful indeed for your continued support, whether that be attending events, supporting us financially with donations, or volunteering your time.

So tonight, let’s celebrate to 50 years of memories, the enduring spirit of Lord Lindsay’s vision, and look forward to the future of Keele - a university that continues to educate not just minds, but hearts. 

Thank you. I'll now hand over to our Class of 1975 representative, Nici Hildebrandt.

Good evening and welcome to this wonderful gathering of Keele University alumni.

My name is Corey and I am the Experience and Community at Keele Students’ Union.

It is an honor to stand before you tonight, surrounded by so many accomplished individuals who have walked the same halls and shared the same experiences.



As we come together to celebrate our shared journey, I am reminded of the unique spirit that defines Keele University. It is a place where curiosity is nurtured, where friendships are forged, and where dreams are realized. Our time at Keele was more than just an academic pursuit; it was a transformative experience that shaped us into the people we are today.



The vibrant campus life, the late-night study sessions, and the lively debates that challenged our perspectives. We were encouraged to think critically, to question the status quo, and to strive for excellence in all that we do. These values have stayed with us, guiding us in our personal and professional lives.

Keele Students’ Union has undergone significant development over the last few years at Keele. We are now a registered charity with dedicated staff for our clubs and societies and a team of professional, confidential and impartial advisers who provide support and representation to students – who have dealt with just under 800 cases so far this year. We have over 150 societies and over 35 sports clubs, this gives every student a place to feel welcome and accepted. They put on weekly social events from film screenings to dressing up in the widest costumes I have ever seen. They are a core part of everyone’s time at Keele and we are so grateful for all that they do. I'm also thrilled to announce that we have once again triumphed in Varsity this year, maintaining our status as champions! 



We are seeing student engagement in extra curricular activities continuing to increase year on year. We have a 60% student engagement vs 40% national average.

Student representatives now sit on virtually all decision-making bodies at the University and as a Students’ Union we make sure that at every available opportunity we use them to be a voice for students.



We have ran a number of different campaigns this year including SHAG week (Sexual Health Awareness and Guidance week) where we aim to educate and demystify certain taboo topics. We also run a warmer winter campaign, where we give out supplies such as hot water bottles, draft excluders and heated blankets, all with the intention of lowering student bills while keeping sustainable for the environment and keeping students warmer over winter. The cost of living crisis has affected student life more than I can put into words. We are aiming both as a university and a students Union to be always lowering costs of our events and social activities as isolation contributes to the mental health crisis. However in times when the student loan often doesn’t even cover rent costs and parents are less likely to be able to help students, a sector average of about 70% student now have to have some form of part time job just to pay bills and afford to eat, not just splash the cash on pints. This makes what we do as a Union all the more vital, putting on low cost and free events both during the daytime and nighttime to suit schedules and needs, as there is no such thing as free time any more as time is money, so when a student chooses to come to us we always strive to make it worth their while. 


Many of these fantastic, vital and student led projects are funded by alumni donations. So, on behalf of the Students’ Union, I’d like to thank you all for your generosity. Your contributions help drive forward Keele’s fantastic student projects help our students develop, lead and learn outside the classroom.



Tonight, we celebrate not only our past but also our future. As alumni, we have a responsibility to carry forward the legacy of Keele University. We are ambassadors of its values, and it is up to us to make a positive impact in our communities and beyond. Whether we are educators, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, or artists, we each have the power to inspire and lead.

Let us also take a moment to acknowledge the incredible faculty and staff who supported us throughout our journey. Their dedication and passion for education were instrumental in our success. We owe them a debt of gratitude for their unwavering commitment to our growth and development.

As we enjoy this evening of camaraderie and celebration, Keele University has given us a lifelong network of friends and colleagues, and it is through these connections that we can continue to support and uplift one another.

I would like to raise a toast to Keele University and to all of us who proudly call ourselves Keele alumni.

May we continue to embody the spirit of Keele, to pursue our passions with vigor, and to make a difference in the world.


Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the evening.