Student, 62, sets masters record

Many people would consider studying for just one master's degree in their retirement quite an achievement. Not Tom Norton. The 62-year-old former civil service librarian, who took early retirement a decade ago, is about to take his eighth.

Tom, from Farnborough in Hampshire, won a nomination for a senior learner award as part of this year's national adult learner awards. A spokesman for the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education, which runs the awards, said: "I've never heard of a record like it."

Tom had been inspired by an article he read on retirement about a prisoner who had set a record of six MAs in 13 years. "I thought 'I can beat that'," he said.

He confessed he had wasted his time at university in the 1960s by getting a 2:2 in Turkish studies at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. "I was president of the students' union and I was drinking and there were girls and I really wasted my time," he said. "I just thought I could do better."

He began his first MA - in teaching English - in 1996 at the Institute of Education. Since then he has taken MAs in the history of English, literature, history, classical studies, history of the book, and history of art.

At one stage, he was studying for three MAs at the same time. He says his motto is taken from EH White's book, The Once and Future King, and cites a paragraph which begins: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails."

His latest MA is in Turkish studies, again, for which he has returned to Soas. "It's very different nowadays," he said. "When I was there in the Sixties, there were a lot of colonels and missionaries. Now undergraduates are in the majority."

He is thinking of continuing and taking even more, but admits to feeling tired. He says that he might take a gap year.

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