Promise of a Dream
SHEILA ROWBOTHAM
Promise of
a Dream
Remembering the Sixties
This edition first published by Verso 2019
First published in the United States by Verso 2001
First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000
© Sheila Rowbotham 2000, 2001, 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-480-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-482-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-481-3 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Linotype Sabon
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
1960–61
CHAPTER 2
1961–4
CHAPTER 3
1964–6
CHAPTER 4
1967
CHAPTER 5
1968
CHAPTER 6
1969
Notes
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
1) Sheila Rowbotham as sixth former
2) Sheila’s student identity card
3) Bob Rowthorn
4) Hermione Harris (courtesy Hermione Harris)
5) 12 Montague Road
6) Mary Costain
7) John Hoyland (courtesy John Hoyland)
8) Wisty Hoyland (courtesy John Hoyland)
9) Jean-Luc Godard filming ‘British Sounds’ (© Irving Teitelbaum)
10) David Mercer (© Irving Teitelbaum)
11) Sheila holding the policeman from her puppet show
12) Tariq Ali with Stokely Carmichael and British black power militants (© Red Saunders)
13) Raphael Samuel (courtesy Stuart Hall)
14) Posters from the late 1960s (courtesy John Hoyland/Red Saunders)
15) Protesting against the Vietnam War (© Irving Teitelbaum)
16) British Fascists marching in support of Enoch Powell (© Irving Teitelbaum)
17) Anti-racist demonstration (© Irving Teitelbaum)
18) The offices of Black Dwarf (courtesy John Hoyland)
19) Sheila and Roberta Hunter Henderson
All photographs are supplied by the author unless indicated otherwise. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Tariq Ali and Richard Neville, who inadvertently sparked off this book. In an unusual coalition, they got me on to a Radio 3 programme about the sixties which provoked the idea of writing down my story. Nikos Papastergiadis’s interest in the artistic movements of the decade inspired the realization that I could take a new slant on my own memories, while Mike Savage reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s metaphorical ‘“labyrinth” where all kinds of lost dreams, hopes and artefacts, swept aside by more recent fashions and developments, resided’. The image became my standard as I wrote and rewrote.
My agent, Faith Evans, encouraged me to begin writing and was constantly supportive as I meandered through version after version. She gave me detailed editorial comments on the first draft I considered ‘finished’, combining much-needed firm criticisms with reassurance. Her skill and experience have been crucial factors in enabling me to find my way through an unfamiliar form of writing and I owe her a great debt.
I am similarly grateful to Tariq Ali, Vinay Chand, Barbara Davy, Monica Henriquez, Roberta Hunter Henderson, Tony Kaye, Marsha Rowe, Lynne Segal, Hilary Wainwright and Susan Watkins, who from the outset communicated a cheering faith, regardless of the lack of palpable evidence, in my capacity to write personal history. Their belief in me and in the value of doing Promise of a Dream was more vital to its completion than any of them realized. Along with Sally Alexander, Robin Blackburn, Nigel Fountain, Tony Garnett, Lindsay Harford, Hermione Harris, Jane Harris, Adam Hart, John Hoyland, Alison Light and Roger Smith, they also gave their time when I pestered them for facts and dates. Thank you to Stuart Hall, Hermione Harris and John Hoyland for photos and posters from their private collections and, for permission to reproduce their work, Red Saunders, Irving Teitelbaum and Arnold Cragg, who took the picture used for the cover. Ros Baxandall, John and Joan Bohanna, Barbara Davy, Stephanie Hunt and Hilary Wainwright all read parts of the manuscript at various stages and gave helpful comments. Monica Henriquez also read an early version with the graphic eye of a film editor and, with a few deft and imaginative suggestions, made me understand how to begin and how to connect crucial bits of the text. She made explicit for me what was buried and implicit.
The late Marc Karlin’s enthusiasm for my return to discarded memory sites was inestimably precious. Before he died in January 1999, he was beginning to make a film about radical history which was to include the writing of Promise of a Dream. We had time only for a preliminary discussion. As I completed the manuscript for the last time my thoughts were with him in a continuing unanswered conversation.
I am grateful to Dorothy Thompson for permission to quote from two letters of another friend, the late Edward Thompson, whose astute criticisms and generous-hearted praise in a succession of missives over three decades educated and sustained me.
I received wonderful help and support from my editor at Penguin, Margaret Bluman. Like my copy-editor, Lesley Levene, she responds with zest and an ebullient commitment well beyond any call of duty. Both have that great and miraculous gift of making a writer feel wanted and are a delight to work with.
Some of the material which went into Promise of a Dream was rehearsed in talks: the day event on radical film ‘If Only …’, organized by the British Cinema and Television Research Group from De Montfort University in Leicester, Kent University’s Conference on 1968 and a seminar for Manchester University history graduates. Thanks to the participants for the feedback they gave me.
Introduction
A Guinness advert fascinated me as a child. ‘Don’t look now but I think we’re about to be swallowed,’ one drink declared to the other, an uneasy grin on its frothy cream head. I can recognize its discomfort now. Like many people who have lived through the sixties, I feel that my memories of what happened then have been swallowed several times over. This disjuncture between memory and interpretation is not only an inevitable consequence of time passing. It has arisen because, as the hopeful radical promise of the sixties became stranded, it was variously dismissed as ridiculous, sinister, impossibly utopian, earnest or immature. The punks despised the sixties as soppy, the Thatcherite right maintained they were rotten, the nineties consensus was to dismiss them as ingenuous. Dreams have gone out of fashion, making a decade when they were very real appear incongruous and elusive.
Then, even as the political and social radicalism of the era was being buried deep under the waste deposits of Conservatism, sixties pop culture was sent off to rehab. A sanitized ‘sixties’ were to re-emerge, glossily packaged as the snap, crackle and pop fun time, to be opened up periodically f
or selective nostalgic peeps on cue: the pill, the miniskirt, the Beatles, Swinging London, Revolution in the Streets. As if anything was ever so simple!
Alternately reviled and idealized, the sixties remain the controversial decade you are expected to see as all good or all bad. By wrenching aspects of experience out of context, this dichotomy inevitably distorts and so this is a book that refuses to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’.
By writing my own story of the sixties, I want to evoke what it felt like at the time, situate responses and relate my subjective take on events to a wider social picture. Of course a personal narrative is by definition partial, but it can also introduce unexpected slants by looking at what occurred from a point of view which has not previously been taken. The return to a specific source can move the angle of vision, skew the existing record and lay a new trail.
Sixties radicalism has become retrospectively incomprehensible because the framework of assumption has been so thoroughly eclipsed and because the record has been so often filtered through sneers or a bluff historical patronage. These derisory stances cannot adequately explain why thousands of us marched in protest against nuclear weapons or the American government’s bombing in Vietnam. They have been unable to either comprehend our motives or communicate what we feared or opposed.
Many obvious questions about the left in the sixties have simply never been asked and many areas of political and social experience have been curiously ignored. For example, amidst all the words expended on the sixties, women make very limited entrances, usually as legs in miniskirts. Radical young women suddenly arrive in the record during the seventies as the Women’s Liberation movement emerges. But what of us in the sixties? Where did all those ideas about reinventing ourselves come from after all?
My generation in the sixties was living through big social changes: the expansion of higher education, the opening of new employment opportunities, the increase in consumption and the growth of the media. These were combining to alter the boundaries between public and personal aspects of life. In a general sense it is not difficult to see that such large-scale structural transformations were likely to have an effect upon women’s identity. However, it is much harder to pin down their effect upon specific individuals.
Running through the outer story of my own political radicalization is a troubled questioning of what it meant to be a woman, long before women’s liberation surfaced as a movement. Young women like myself, on the nexus of popular culture and left politics, were profoundly affected by the broader shifts in society. At the same time our beliefs and activism meant that we were caught in an uncomfortable gap between the manifold aspects of ‘femininity’ – our personal destiny – and a public discourse about democracy and equality. This divide was lived and experienced as a private discordance which seemed apart from politics. The contradictory personal perceptions which resulted, and were working their way beneath the surface of many women’s lives, rarely appear in historical accounts of the sixties.
If radical middle-class women’s consciousness has been bypassed, the views of the working-class women and men who took part in strikes, demonstrations and community struggles have been more or less completely ignored. The sixties saw the beginning of a politicized labour movement which spilled over existing institutions and was to mobilize on a bigger scale during the seventies. It was also the period when the first indications of the changes in the working class can be detected. Women were beginning to play a more confident part as trade unionists; there was a new presence of Asian and Afro-Caribbean workers in the unions and in community politics. The course of their activism, along with that of the organic intelligentsia within the various currents of black radicalism, has been only sketchily recorded.
Not only have particular groups been written off, the connections between movements and ideas have been largely missed. In an era of expanding radicalism like the sixties, individuals criss-cross over boundaries. Contrary to many abstract theories about social movements, actual social movements in the sixties were not completely distinct from or absolutely opposed to ‘labour’. The grass-roots movements of the sixties, from CND to Women’s Liberation, were not simply composed of the middle class and there was considerable interaction between the working-class left and young middle-class radicals like myself.
Reflecting from three decades on, it is apparent too that the radical ideas associated with the sixties go back much further than the arbitrary boundary stone of 1960. The decade tends to be treated as intact, but the people who inspired me and many others – Brecht, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Gramsci – had been writing much earlier. We were assimilating the ideas of a great crowd of left-wing thinkers from the past at high speed – philosophy, psychology, politics, aesthetics.
I discovered as I wrote how the currents which flowed into left social movements permeated the culture much more than I had realized at the time. Looking back, it became evident how oral life stories on the radio, realistic TV drama, a dynamic view of class in social history, a sociological interest in the marginal, the stigmatized and disregarded had all shaped sixties New Left politics.
Tracing the convergences and counter-eddies of lifestyle and culture which affected me and the people I knew, I was frequently surprised by the extent that cultural attitudes and radical politics intermingled. Debates in the arts, for instance about ‘authenticity’ and ‘the real’, or the emphasis on fluidity and on the ‘living’, along with a fascination with synchronicity and simultaneity, all found political echoes.
In both the visual arts and drama during the sixties there was also a preoccupation with process which passed into the student movement and then into the libertarian left and feminism during the seventies. This was marked by the desire to dissolve demarcations between forms, an impulse to auto-destruct rather than be compromised, along with the often contradictory commitment to extend participation through mutual ways of working.
Our concern about how was of course partly a political revulsion against Stalinism, but equally it was embedded within the material and social changes occurring around us. As the influential Marshall McLuhan insisted, the medium shaped the message, and the medium of communication was being materially transformed. In these circumstances a degree of instability was hardly surprising.
Sixties culture oscillated between dramatic lunges towards modernity and nostalgic flirtations with the old which embraced the earthed simplicity of arts and crafts and the exotic coils of fin de siècle degeneracy. A similar indecisiveness about the future and the past marked libertarian left politics. We looked backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards as the world spun round. Our sense of crisis, our intensity, our conviction that time was running out, these did not simply derive from a youthful self-importance. We faced the very real problem that capitalism was changing much faster than we were.
A heightened awareness of subjective identity can be seen in both the new radicalism and mass popular culture. ‘The personal is political,’ declared the American New Left, and the slogan passed into the women’s movement. They might have added, ‘The personal is also big money.’ Ironically, openings created by social movements were to present market opportunities – the slogans transmogrified into designer labels and some quick-footed ‘alternative’ capitalists emerged from the mêlée. Yet the radical dream of the sixties was to be stillborn, for we were not to move towards the cooperative egalitarian society we had imagined. Instead the sixties ushered in an order which was more competitive and less equal than the one we had protested against.
It is not then simply a matter of memories having been swallowed; our hopes have been appropriated, our aspirations twisted. In these circumstances, claiming space to remember not only defies an overtly guarded set of political assumptions but also touches the sources of desire. By describing how I thought as I thought and did what I did in personal terms, I hope to bring some of the dreams of the sixties back into view. This is partly because the historian in me is concerned to record and partly be
cause I still believe in their relevance for the future. Retrieval has become an act of rebellion.
Retrieval, however, possesses an undeniable momentum of its own. ‘He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging,’ said Walter Benjamin. I did indeed dig – sometimes like a rabbit furiously, hind legs vanishing, and sometimes like an archaeologist, sifting, noting layers of deposits. At the very beginning I could remember only in snatches, making little lists in a notebook. Then I was drowning in memories. Some were triggered off by reading; others by talking to friends. Some were sought out by that strange and often disturbing process of focusing upon a particular period; others would literally spring to mind when I was not thinking about the book at all. These were stray, short-lived, wandering thoughts which dissolved unless I wrote them down. So I remembered and forgot, struggled to remember, was surprised by remembering too much and finally came gasping up for air.
In the course of writing, I had to unlearn some habits. Instead of the sources being external, as they are in writing history, a personal account required that I look inward, giving rise to an uncomfortable feeling of turning my insides out. Subjectivity is of course always there in writing history, but it is continually being pushed aside, held down. You learn to suspect your immediate response, hold it in check, remove yourself in order to enter and tell other people’s stories. It took many drafts before I could relate a personal story because I was so accustomed to recording from without rather than within.
Another problem was self-imposed. I had sought to find words which could express inner feelings, while reaching towards outer worlds of politics, social existence, culture. This is much easier said than done and two contrary anxieties kept presenting themselves. I wondered sometimes whether the sensations I was recounting were so uniquely peculiar to my own experience that they could be of no interest to anyone else at all. Conversely, as I located attitudes and ideas which I had always assumed to be my own in the wider culture, I began to fret about whether I had anything unique to my name at all. I hadn’t bargained for metaphysical angst.
Promise of a Dream Page 1