Cedric “Spike” Mays, one of the department’s mature students, was 45yrs old when he enrolled in 1952. His application includes a letter of reference from poet Edwin Muir as warden at Newbattle Abbey College where Mays was a contemporary of George Mackay Brown. Prior to attending the college he had been in the army for 20 years.
Originally from Essex, Cedric’s memoir “Reuben’s Corner: An English Country Boyhood” was first published in 1969 and subsequently re-issued as “The Only Way Was Essex” in 2013.
He kept in touch with staff and refers in a letter to his association with Lieut. Col. Alfred Wintle, subject of the book and biopic “The Last Englishman” for whom he was organising a lecture tour of the USA following the Colonel’s short imprisonment in the late 1950s.
“A man of very considerable ability as well as of unusual experience”