Into the Boarchive – Volume 47, Issue VI

This section – looking back at three stories from The Boar’s archive – originally appeared in Volume 47, Issue VI of The Boar, published on Wednesday 4 June, 2025.

1985: An explosive hoax 

In May 1985, a story titled ‘Bomb Scare’ appeared on the side of The Boar’s front page, after an incident the week before which saw Warwick Arts Centre evacuated due to a mysterious phone call.

Author Julie Hulme wrote that ‘the Arts Centre was cleared after the booking clerk received a phone call at 12:25pm from a young male with an Irish accent’. “There is a bomb in your building”, was the brief content of the call. “I’m not telling you where it is”, the man said, before hanging up.

After a thorough search by the police and fire brigade, a holdall containing a wired device was found in the building’s bookshop. Turns out, it was just a student’s personal radio accidentally left behind in the building.

And so at 1:15pm, less than an hour after the call, the Arts Centre resumed normal service, the incident assumed to be a hoax. The staff probably thought it was bang out of order, but it sure would’ve been an explosive conversation starter for our ‘80s predecessors. 

2000: Club Trop-leak-cana 

Nothing says 12.30am in POP! more than the blissfully clean bathroom floors (sarcasm most certainly intended). For clubgoers in 2000 however, the cleanliness of the toilet floors wasn’t their only concern.

Attendees of the SU’s End of Term Disco were kicked out of Warwick’s ‘Market Place’ club after vandalism in the women’s toilets caused the toilets to overflow onto the dancefloor.

With no alternative venue, students’ celebrations were cut short – with no refunds offered on their £3.50 ticket.

We can only hope that one winning SU Sabbatical Officer of the millennium year wasn’t in attendance – for they had already had a pretty expensive toilet-related year. Post-election celebrations may have got slightly out-of-hand – and an outdoor wee, caught by campus security, left them £25 out of pocket.

The Boar does not condone such behaviour for this year’s Full-Time Officers. 

2015: Books… or balls? 

Pints at the Dirty Duck, sweet treats from Curiositea, sunbathing on the FAB green – the perennial activities of a Warwick student as exam season continues to trundle on, seemingly never-ending. Students 10 years ago were having other ideas on how to survive the endless days of revision, though.

As reported by The Boar’s Rosie Hurley in 2015, one student set up a petition “asking for slides from each floor of the library to a ball pit”. The petition may have garnered 391 signatures – but, unfortunately, the proposal never became a reality. It seems we’ll all be awkwardly waiting for the library lifts for a little bit longer. Unless, of course, Stuart Croft is feeling like introducing a Forum-inspired pink slide sometime soon.