Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  Not only did the Oxford regime induce hypocrisy and fear, it was also manifestly unfair. The penalties we faced in the women’s colleges were much more severe than those governing male sexuality. In my first year Cathy, a wiry, small, dark-haired girl whom I knew slightly, was found in bed with her boyfriend in St Hilda’s by a don. She was kicked out of college, lost her grant and could not get into any other university. He was sent away from his college for two weeks, rusticated’. The institutional injustice was blatant and the issue was personal behaviour not some distant cause. This could so easily have been me. Politics had landed in my lap. The sexual dissidents in the college cohered and a group of us indignantly signed a petition in protest. Whereupon the principal assembled us for a stern talking to. ‘What will the gardeners think?’ she demanded. It was a rhetorical question; she wasn’t inviting debate. But my mind wandered back to the sexy Pete at Hunmanby and the succession of fifth-years in the stables. Was the principal worried that the gardeners would get ideas and, shades of Lady Chatterley, fuck furiously between the flower beds or was she concerned to protect their moral scruples in case they might revolt like the serfs of yore against the decadence of gentlefolk? As far as I was concerned, this was another piece of evidence that principals, like headmistresses, were completely batty.

  The incident within St Hilda’s escalated into an issue when our college principal found an ally in an English lecturer called David Holbrook. Though known for his radical views on education, Holbrook argued in an article in the university magazine, Isis, that sex should be confined to the act of reproduction. Judith Okely, along with a group of other students, wrote a critical reply. The university authorities responded by heavy-handedly putting a ban on any discussion of sex in Isis. The St Hilda’s dons then interrogated Judith about whether she was arguing her case from personal experience. Cannily, she responded by pointing out that she had to write essays on many subjects outside her personal knowledge. They left it at that. However, the case had hit the headlines. Sex and women at Oxford had become newsworthy. Ridicule, the unwelcome publicity and our rebellion were to have an effect on the college authorities, who had misjudged the subterranean shift in attitudes which had been occurring. Slowly Oxford was to be forced to change during the course of the sixties.

  Judith embarked next on a campaign to get women into the Oxford Union – we were still not allowed to be members. The Daily Express arrived to take pictures and Judith recruited me as the voice of the grass roots. I said rhubarb, rhubarb to oblige her, but I felt like a charlatan. I had mobilized out of a genuine sense of outrage at Cathy’s treatment, but the demand to enter the Oxford Union was another matter. While I supported Judith’s cause in principle, the truth was that I had no desire to go into the place personally. I was similarly lukewarm about the subsequent struggle for the right to get married at St Hilda’s. I voted for it, grumbling that I didn’t believe in marriage anyway.

  I still hankered after the existential extremism which was increasingly beginning to look like my lost youth. Towards the end of my first year, my reputation from Mesopotamia distribution led to selling tickets for a performance of Jack Gelber’s play about a junkie, The Connection. The Oxford cobbles had not been laid with high-heeled stilettos in mind and I clattered awkwardly between the bumps as I headed towards two tall, striking-looking men. Both were dressed in the dark-blue donkey jackets which, inspired by Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, were replacing duffel coats as alternative student fashion. The taller of the two had a dark fringe and a faintly clipped, slightly bashful manner. At the performance he was sitting next to Judith, who later informed me that he was called Bob Rowthorn and was a maths graduate from Newport in Wales. They were going out together. Hmm, I thought to myself.

  During my first term, I had drifted towards the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Anne Henderson had started going out with Braham Murray – who was to become director at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester – and Braham was auditioning for his first production, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. ‘Be a whore,’ he told me. All those Marseilles and Toulon bars stood me in good stead and to my delight I got the part of Bobo. Braham believed in Method acting and encouraged us to enter our characters as much as possible. After a lecture, I zealously tried out my whore walk. Rolling my hips, I stalked Bobo-like down the High Street, still wearing my short black student gown. I must have looked like an undulating oxymoron. There was a crunch and a bang. I glanced to the left. A man was staring at me out of his open car window, mouth agape. He had just collided with the bumper in front of him.

  Along with the Method acting, I learned from Braham how to say ‘fuckin’ hell’ in stage Irish and do the twist. After twisting vigorously we had to line up and sing ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me’ with pathos. Most nights genuine tears were pouring down my face because I would invariably be elbowed on the nose by taller people. I played my modest part to the full. It could not be seen as exactly demanding: on the other hand, I was convinced that it was going to take me towards greater things. With the bright lights beckoning, clad in a towel, I delivered my single line, was hauled off the stage by one of the punters and necked with the wistful ‘hostage’, a blond-haired Michael Johnson (later to be known as Michael York). I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself. My photo in fishnet stockings was displayed outside the Oxford Playhouse and I received a special mention in Isis. I had found my métier.

  The St Hilda’s dons had quite a different take on this. I was summoned before the principal and told that I had been seen looking ‘conspicuously untidy’ around college – which rankled, because the woman had no idea whatever of style. They had decided that my work was suffering and I was banned from acting for a term. A term was the equivalent to eternity. Anything could happen in a term.

  They were right about my work; it wasn’t good at all. But this was not just because of the acting. My whole frame of mind was the problem. Whereas I had thrived on Olga’s social and intellectual history at school, I couldn’t take to the works of Gibbon or Macaulay, which we had to read for our ‘prelims’ in the first term as texts rather than in the context of the history of history. I could just about get into the eighth-century monastic chronicles of the Venerable Bede through my beatnik interest in a spiritual vision of the world – though the big disadvantage was that Bede wrote in medieval Latin. Only the French aristocratic historian Alexis de Tocqueville, with his probing social eye, had really aroused my interest. An added bonus was that our young tutor, Hugh Thomas, could be lured into conversations about Ruskin and other nineteenth-century organic conservatives who featured in his thesis, and I always enjoyed learning what I was not meant to be studying. Moreover, I felt attuned to his tutorials because we were both high from lack of sleep. He and his wife had recently had a baby, while I was doing so many other things in the day I could find time for my essays only at night. Despite Hugh Thomas’s sports jacket with leather elbows, I thought exhaustion gave him a gaunt Byronic air.

  My tutor for European history, Charles Stuart, was a Conservative without any romance or Ruskin about him. Devoted to Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, Charles Stuart was a stiff, grey-haired Christ Church don who recognized only diplomatic sources as having any validity. He would rasp with irritation about ‘these chaps like Asa Briggs who look at newspapers’. I was quite unable to get the hang of diplomatic history, which seemed like an elaborate dance without defined steps. Charles Stuart, who couldn’t say his ‘R’s, would commence with a brisk, ‘Now, Miss Lobottom –’ My heart would already be sinking. ‘If Austria were to –’ My face would go blank. I knew what was coming and I knew I had no answer. ‘What would Plussia do?’ Far away in the distance, old diplomatic exchanges rustled in anticipation of the recognition they felt was their due, but I remained in a silent, sound-proofed antechamber of incomprehension.

  In those tutorials with Charles Stuart, all sensuous human existence turned into something fusty and dry. Liking acting, f
or instance, became ‘your predilection for the boards’, while one day, when I told him that I felt cheerful when the sun was shining, he responded with, ‘Not a historian, but perhaps a philosopher, Miss Lobottom.’ I simply did not know how to assert, ‘I’m interested in social and intellectual history.’ Partly because I did not know how to categorize and name aspects of knowledge, but also because before 1968 it was quite inconceivable that an undergraduate could have any say over what they studied.

  It was the medieval historian Trevor Aston who was to remind me how much I liked history. I was sent off to him for four tutorials in the summer term with Hermione. He threw my first essay, cribbed from textbooks, on the table. ‘We read too many books,’ he announced. I blinked. The sunlight was beaming through the narrow windows of the old room in Merton and playing on the stone. He wanted to know if we’d seen a Japanese film that was showing – that was the way to understand feudalism. I looked back, delighted at the eccentric figure with his long, lugubrious face and thinning hair. Some shutter in my brain opened. I had lost my way in the peculiar legal terms and had had no conception of how to orientate myself to the early Middle Ages as a significantly different society from any I had experienced. The flash of understanding made me diligent. I came across a book by a Russian called Kosminsky. One thing that seemed to annoy all teachers was to quote Communists. To my amazement, Trevor Aston calmly made some critical observations – this, after all, was an editor of the radical social history journal Past and Present. When I asked him shyly if he had read Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium (on the beat reading list because it described the religious fervour of rebellious heretics), he replied, ‘You should read a much better book by my friend Eric Hobsbawm, who writes jazz criticism in the New Statesman as Francis Newton.’

  I’d read Francis Newton on jazz and eagerly hunted for Primitive Rebels, which was to be the first book I ever read about social movements from a Marxist perspective. It proved to be revelatory, not only because I was instinctively sympathetic to peasant rebels, anarchist subversives and outlaws, but because it introduced me to a thoughtful Marxist approach to history. This was a rare find. The radical movement in social history was still just beginning, while Marxism was not exactly high profile as an intellectual force in the late fifties and early sixties. Trevor Aston’s tutorials, along with Eric Hobsbawm’s book, awakened a desire to connect the stray bits of knowledge about Marxism which had accumulated by chance and hung around in my head like an annoying clutter of jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit together.

  ‘Monkeys could type the Bible,’ the boy at the Student Christian Movement day school for sixth-formers in Filey had announced, declaring that he was a materialist. I bought A Christian Guide to Communism to try to understand materialism and how the monkeys could do it, but the author was mainly concerned to warn everyone against Reds. I was to discover that materialism had an attachment called dialectics in an unlikely place: A. L. Rowse’s The Uses of History. Excited by thesis and antithesis, I ran down the corridor to tell Lindsay and Bar that there was this great theory about history. At Oxford, Marxism had not shown up much; however, a lecturer on religion in the Middle Ages, referring to a book by Gordon Leff on Bradwardine and the Pelagians, had sneered, ‘If you want to read a Marxist on medieval heresy…’ Of course, I had tried, but the Marxism was obscurely coded and I didn’t know how to crack it. Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘primitive rebels’ proved more companionable.

  I still did not identify cultural rebellion or radical approaches to history with ‘politics’, which I believed was merely about power and ambition. However, I was beginning to shift away from an exclusive preoccupation with the personal and to consider broader social factors. This rearrangement of my mentality, combined with an inclination to revolt, disposed me to the left. It was not only to be books and ideas which exerted an influence, but the kindness of several older people towards me. In differing ways they communicated a socialism which was conscious of irony, critical and open to ideas.

  ‘Flemish Renaissance,’ Claire Brayshaw, the mother of a friend from St Hilda’s, had declared when I was introduced to her. Why couldn’t I have been brought up with people who talked like that, looked at paintings and piled their houses high with books! Claire, a warm, round, grey-haired woman in her fifties, told me how she became a socialist when her father took her to see the slums of Manchester in the thirties. Not only had she joined the Communist Party, Claire had become an art student, dressed in a boiler suit and been painted by Modigliani. She approached life with a high-pitched chortle. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, she recounted being sent out slogan-painting by the Communist Party branch with a young man and told she should pretend he was her boyfriend if they were caught. What were they to do with the paint pot, I wondered? For speed they began their slogan at opposite ends. ‘Try spelling Czechoslovakia backwards,’ Claire challenged. I couldn’t.

  My allies among the dons at St Hilda’s, Bridget Hill and Beryl Smalley, were both socialists too. I discovered later that they had combined to rescue me when I was in danger of being kicked out after doing badly in the prelims exams. Bridget Hill was refreshingly enthusiastic and straight-spoken in the donnish atmosphere, and I was later to learn that she had a long-standing interest in the emancipation of women. Though I admired Beryl Smalley, I was less comfortable with her because she seemed scholarly in a remote, rather monastic way. She was, in fact, a Catholic Marxist with deep radical convictions. Observing my wretched bewilderment with the history of diplomacy, she sent me off to the iconoclastic historian of the French Revolution Richard Cobb to study European social history. This act of perception had decisive consequences for me. The impish figure with subversive eyes and a complexion veined with drink was to introduce me to the exciting ‘history from below’, which was beginning to note the voices and opinions of the poor. Moreover, when I went to Balliol to discuss what I should read during the holidays, Cobb instructed me to visit some friends of his in Halifax. ‘They write about Chartists,’ he declared, waving his arms vaguely.

  I rang Dorothy and Edward Thompson from Leeds and shyly mumbled about being a student of Richard’s. I had no idea as I tramped up the steep hill to their house that I was about to meet two friends who would profoundly influence my approach to history and to left politics. Nor did I know that these were two formidable former Communists who, along with 10,000 other dissidents, had left the party in 1956.

  An attractive dark-haired woman in her thirties dressed in black slacks and a black polo-necked jumper greeted me warmly in the kitchen. I took to Dotty immediately and loved the house, with its stark old farm furniture and all those books again. After a while a tall man with a craggy face and uncoordinated limbs emerged from his study. He jutted out into the surrounding space of the room at unexpected angles. Not only was Edward striking in appearance, there was a suppressed energy about all his movements. He repeatedly ran his fingers through a shock of hair which refused to stay flat. When he spoke, enthusiasm mixed with earnestness and jokes spluttered out.

  That night, Dorothy and Edward took me in a Land Rover which Dorothy said reminded Edward of the tank he drove in the Second World War to see the Halifax Thespians perform Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker. When he bumped into a pillar in the car park I could see what she meant, though it was hard for me to imagine this man as a soldier. It was never to be easy for me to envisage the war. The forties as a decade still loomed too close to be distinguished as history, while hovering just outside my conscious memory. This blankness always exasperated Edward. ‘Your generation has so many choices,’ he observed once.

  When I came to know them better, Dorothy and Edward laughed about my arrival. A cowardly Edward had been in hiding because they had decided my nervous voice on the phone must be that of a student, abandoned, possibly pregnant, from the nefarious Richard’s time at Leeds University. He had emerged only when Dorothy had hissed into the study, ‘It’s all right.’

  Around the same time I came a
cross a socialist closer to my own age, the poet Ken Smith, who was then working on Jon Silkin’s literary magazine Stand. When we bumped into one another in Leeds reference library, Ken was swathed in a long second-hand tweed overcoat – Leeds market pioneered retro chic – and he had just had his front teeth out. The amalgam resulted in an endearing appearance, part small boy and part tramp.

  I used to visit Ken and his wife, Ann, who were the first couple I knew with small children, in a tiny one-up, one-down house in Pudsey and later in their Chapeltown flat in Leeds. Ken’s accounts of his working-class childhood in Hull and the painful sense of separation which came from going to grammar school gave me a glimpse of the alienation Barry must have experienced at Oxford. He enthused about the First World War poets Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, and berated the contemporary establishment of academic, sophisticated poetry as middle class and removed from everyday experience. Ken was associated with a rebellious group of Northern poets, which included Ted Hughes, and they were intent on defying the London ethos of middle-class gentility. Ken introduced me not only to the fierce class struggles of contemporary poets but also to his friend from childhood, a young intellectual shop steward on Hull docks called Dave Godman. Through Dave’s angry class consciousness, I began to comprehend the meaning of class in the context of collective resistance, not simply as a sense of individual dislocation.

  In July, Judith Okely and I set off for a holiday in Paris. She and Bob Rowthorn had split up, while I had concluded that I might as well settle for being frigid, rather than the more interesting option of nymphomania. Consequently we had resolved that this trip would be a period of contemplation, a rediscovery of the mind. We would spend our time quietly reading and thinking in our old haunts. Things started according to plan. I read our text book introduction to political thought by Sabine on the ferry. On the Left Bank we browsed contentedly through bookshops, perused books in cafés and wandered like female flâneurs.