At that time, as I recall, I allowed myself of the order of £10 a week for entertainment and light refreshments, £5 a week living expenses and tuition fees did not really exist, in the sense that that was some transaction between your home county and the institution concerned, about which you did not really need to know. Clothes and other clobber nowhere. So a total of £750 a year, of which perhaps a third came from holiday earnings, at a time when the full student grant, for those few who got one, was around £500 a year. I gloss over the business of where one might be living during the holidays.
Against that £5 a week for living expenses, this advertisement is offering room only for £300 a week, between £13,000 and £15,000 a year. If we include some food, a hundred fold increase. Applying the same factor to entertainment and light refreshments, we get to £1,000 a week, which seems a little excessive, particularly since I have been advised that students don't booze like they used to.
But maybe the point is that they can't afford to? Poverty has made them sober if not sensible - and hard working.
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