Going well off the subject into speculation here, but Ruth Dudley-Edwards says that:

This trend was just beginning in the late 1960s, when, in Cambridge, I was teaching day-release apprentices.

Now, who else do we know who was teaching day-release in Cambridge in the late 60s? Err, Tom Sharpe perhaps? Fenlands Polytechnic it became in the Wilt series (which if you haven’t read you ought to).

So, did their paths cross? And if so, which character in the novels is in fact Ms. Dudley Edwards?

A slightly bizzare thing happened once. Back in the 80s (still apartheid days remember) I was working with a South African waitress who abhorred the then extant regime, which was why she was in London. I mentioned Sharpe and his novels (Riotous Assembly for example) as being great satire (farce is probably a better word)  and her response was yes, she liked them too, especially as Sharpe had, when living in SA, taken her baptismal pictures. Or so she said.