The University of Nottingham

There was more than 70 years between them but when the former Students’ Union President met his modern equivalent the age gap was irrelevant.

Victor Harold Taylor chatted with SU President Alex Cork-Adelman as he arrived back at the University with his family this summer to mark his 95th birthday.

Vic is possibly the oldest and proudest University of Nottingham alumnus (unless you can tell us otherwise? alumni-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk) and wears his personalised University fleece wherever he travels.

When he started at University College, Nottingham in 1936, there were 800 students, 75% of which were men. Alex told him that this year’s undergraduate football trials alone attracted a similar number. The two chatted about University sport and the Varsity Series with Vic proud of having represented the University playing for the 1st XV at rugby and the 2nd X1 at cricket.

A photo held in the University’s Manuscripts and Special Collections shows Vic, as SU President welcoming teacher training students from Goldsmiths College in London as they were evacuated to Nottingham in 1939.

Vic said: “Everything was based in the Trent Building in my day including the labs and as SU President I started a fund to raise money so that we could have a Student Union building of our own at some point in the future.”

Vic, who studied an external degree in Physics and Maths, is a member of the Ordo Caligulae (Order of the Boot) awarded to those who have given outstanding contribution to the SU.

As a youngster he was nearly expelled in his first term for dropping acorns into empty coal wagons as the train passed under a bridge on which he and his friend were standing. Then, at a University of Nottingham reunion in 1995 he chanced to meet up with the other boy…Ron Derry!

In 1938 Harold’s wife-to-be Winifred Cooley (Physics 1940) joined him at the University and completed her degree in just two years. The couple married in 1942 and went on to have top secret government careers, Vic with the Admiralty, at one time the only civilian scientific advisor to Lord Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord. Win, meanwhile, spent the war working on top secret radar developments.

Vic Taylor factfile

Born in Bulwell in 1917, Vic remembers going to Goose Fair when it was in the Old Market Square. His father was a rep for Shipstones Brewery. He survived scarlet fever and three strokes of the tawse (whip) for pretending to sell the inkwells they all used behind the teacher’s back.