John Lloyd

Journalist John Lloyd has sound advice for current students based on his own experiences of life at Edinburgh and beyond.

Your time at the University

I had recently turned 17 when I came to university, after some months working as a caddie in Canada (I had taken my Highers at 16).

It was too young: and like many who were the first from their family to go to university, I had too little background and had done too little preparation. The school - Waid, in East Fife, a comprehensive - was a good one, with some very good teachers: but to take university seriously, you need to think more carefully than I did about how to approach and benefit from it.

I wanted to be a writer - and settled on journalism, which became my trade for much of my life. That meant that I spent long hours in the second year at The Student newspaper, first as an assistant, then as editor. My studies suffered, of course. I made up some way in the third and fourth years - and got a 2:1. But I read too little, thought too little.

I worked in every holiday: as a farm worker, a waiter, a relief refuse collector. I was lucky to get a small flat, in a tenement off the Pleasance, which were being cleared and rented to students while waiting for development to start: the rent was £1.10s a week - a godsend for a slim budget.

A neighbour was a prostitute, who didn’t have a heart of gold but was friendly enough. I wrote a play, “The Sound of Flesh”, for the DramSoc and had a story read on the BBC R4. I hung out with other would-be and present writers: my closest friend, Mark Hill, now dead, was a fine poet, who won a prize for his poetry but turned to Buddhism and didn’t write again. We started a magazine, Chrysallis, which ran for three issues.

Tell us about your Experiences since leaving the University

I wanted to write the great Scottish novel; came to London, took a job as a nightwatchman in a warehouse, tried to write it, but didn’t.

I slid into journalism - through the ‘alternative’ press - Ink, Time Out - then a short spell on the Evening Standard (fired); a longer stretch on the new all-news radio station, LBC; two years on a TV current affairs programme , “Weekend World”; then the FT, on which Ive been Labour Editor, Industrial editor, East European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, founder and editor of the Weekend magazine and now - off the staff - a contributing editor.

I've come and gone - in between, I edited thje New Statesman. In the last eight years, I co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, which, after a bad start, has become a success. I've written several books - one on new technology and work; one on the 1984-5 miners’ strike; one on Russia; one on the media and politics.

I was Journalist of the Year in 1984 and Specialist writer of the year in 1985; won the David Watt prize in 1998; and the Biagio Agnes prize for international reporting in 2013. I’ve had a full life in journalism, and still live in it: I do a column for the Rome daily La Repubblica and another for Reuters, as well as writing still for the FT.

I wanted to write the great Scottish novel; came to London, took a job as a nightwatchman in a warehouse, tried to write it, but didn’t.

I didn’t put enough into the university to get enough out of it (see wisdom below).

I did have good professors: John Sutherland, who went on to be Regius Professor of English Literature at University College London - and who married a classmate of mine (they’re divorced now); Stephene Mulrine; John Butt, the great Pope scholar; and others.

I made friends, a few of whom remain. I grew up a bit. But most of my education - in reading, in learning to be a journalist at home and abroad, in learning languages, in coming to grips with the world - was after.

Alumni wisdom

One piece of advice is: think before you enter university about what you can take from and give to it. Find someone on whom you can depend who can advise - and listen. It’s a disorienting time, and needs to be given a purpose and a framework. Edinburgh is a very great university: it offers a vast amount, and you have to learn how to take it.