SECURITY measures said to approach those put in place for the then-recent New York visit by the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, were taken at Glasgow University on Friday, October 21, 1960.
Quintin Hogg, Viscount Hailsham, the Minister for Science (above, centre), was being installed as rector of Glasgow University in a ceremony at Bute Hall. The university wanted to avoid a repetition of the wild disorder that greeted the installation as rector of Home Secretary, R.A.Butler, at St Andrew’s Hall, in 1958. Butler had been struck in the face with a bag of flour thrown from the audience. On the eve of the Hailsham ceremony, a spokesman for the Students’ Representative Council warned that any repetition of such scenes “would without doubt mean the end of the rectorship for all time.”
On the Thursday evening Hailsham, seated on the hood of an open landau, was in exuberant mood as he led 200 students on a torchlight procession, even though their reception was raucous and, at times, almost hostile, as they chanted “Ban the bomb” and “Free beer and vodka for the workers.”
At Bute Hall, however, the Glasgow Herald reported, Hailsham’s installation address “was received in rapt silence by an audience of 1,000 students, and thunderously applauded at the end.” Bearing in mind the scenes of two years earlier, “the demeanour of the students ... was almost unbelievable.”
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