Student protest led to prison sentence

On a cold evening 40 years ago 400 students tried to storm a Greek dinner at the Garden House Hotel.

Eight Cambridge undergraduates were sent to prison for their part in the demonstration. Among them were Nick Emley and Rod Caird who spoke to the News about the fervent mood of student radicalism which led to the protest and how it changed their lives.

Nick has never forgotten the moment a diner grabbed a metal ladle from a soup tureen and smashed it into his head. Another person punched the 19-year-old in the stomach before he was bundled into a police van.

40 years on, now greying and semi-retired, Nick rooted around in his kitchen drawer and returned brandishing a large, menacing serving spoon, "something like this," he mutters, thwacking the air. "Left quite an impression."

On February 13, 1970, Cambridge students bearing placards bottle-necked into a small cul de sac outside the Garden House Hotel on the River Cam. Inside, an evening of Greek music and food was in full swing.

It was a publicity stunt to get people to 'Go Greece' for their holiday, a country then under fascist rule.

"I can distinctly remember our anger that evening," explains Rod Caird, 61, an ex-ITN and Granada broadcaster, who worked for the student newspaper, The Shilling, that had helped to organise the protest.

"You forget, Greece was under an incredibly vile regime and to promote a week of tourism there in the heart of a university that had had three years of student radicalism was incredibly stupid."

Who smashed the first window isn't clear, but suddenly the hopeful idealism combusted into violence and glass rained on to guests' food as police grappled with the students, who were spilling into the dining area, turning over tables.

Plates and cutlery flew, the university proctor had a brick thrown in his face and before it ended, Nick and Rod had been arrested, destined for Wormwood Scrubs.

Unluckily for the defendants, the judge in the case was Melford Stevenson. One of the last 'hanging judges', he was "a legendary, anti-progressive relic", according to Nick.



The judge made it clear he thought the students weren't scholars, they were thugs.

The riot provoked an unprecedented backlash nationwide against "long- haired intellectuals living at public expense".

Cambridge branded the event disgraceful and councillors nicknamed them 'Lenin's infantile leftists'.

At the end of July, Nick entered a young offenders' institution for nine months and Rod was sentenced to 18 months in Coldingley prison.

The Garden House Riot not only paralysed student unrest in the UK, it marked the first deliberate attempt to establish a rule of law over them.



After their release, they returned to their degrees and, besides a permanent criminal record, were allowed to fade into obscurity, the golden age of activism over.

"This was a time of youthful, revolutionary fervour," Nick says sadly.

"We invented sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll and serious politics for change. And so we were unbearably arrogant and we all felt fantastic, we really thought we were changing the world."