Jubilant and excited, we hurried back to Wisty Hoyland, who had been watching the boat race on TV. Wisty announced ruefully that, yes, our banners had shown up, but we had forgotten about the direction of the camera following the boats. As a result we had reached millions with the challenging anagram SNRUB MANTEIV ELIHW SELDDAP EGDIRBXO. It was shades of Czechoslovakia backwards.
That April the assassination of Martin Luther King was followed by an attack on a leader of the German student movement, Rudi Dutschke, who was seriously wounded. Tariq rang round VSC supporters and a group of us left the rally in Martin Luther King’s memory and headed off to protest against the Axel Springer press group, which had offices at the Daily Mirror. The right-wing Springer press had been pouring out the most vicious attacks on the student movement, contributing to the mood of hatred which had resulted in the shooting.
Our internationalism was implicit and simply taken for granted. It did not occur to us to justify or explain why we were connected to King or to Dutschke. These assumed attitudes of an era are often the most puzzling to people subsequently. One influence on us had been CND, which had always included peace protesters from other countries. There had also been the anti-colonial movements and the connection to southern Africa. Then came the war in Vietnam, along with opposition to the regime of the right-wing Greek Colonels. Indeed, Melina Mercouri was speaking in Trafalgar Square on 19 April and we were out demonstrating once more. This internationalism was much more than an abstract political idea, because the students who came from South Africa, Rhodesia, Latin America, the United States, Greece, Italy and Ireland brought information and radical ideas from their own milieux. Friendship and love affairs made the connections to other countries’ predicaments all the closer. International relations were thus personal as well as political. Another letter from Lawrence arrived on Red Cross notepaper that April. He had been classed as schizophrenic and was in a mental hospital, but was suspected of being sane. ‘Please don’t say anything on the envelope against the war.’
Enoch Powell’s notorious speech against black immigration, in which he referred to the River Tiber in ancient Rome ‘foaming with much blood’, brought the focus sharply back to the dangers of racism on our own doorstep. On 23 April I was going home to Hackney, sitting on the top of the bus, musing, when I caught sight of a clump of working-class men huddling defensively near the Houses of Parliament – East End dockers supporting Powell. I looked at them with a heavy heart. I would normally have seen a workers’ demonstration and felt support. But this time we were on opposing sides and it hurt.
Their response to Powell’s speech, which legitimated racism as a scapegoat for Britain’s economic ills, made left political activity seem more urgent, more serious, regardless of any personal exasperation about sectarianism. It felt like a repeat of fascism in the thirties, a context in which individual concerns appeared less significant.
When I went in to teach the Port of London Authority messenger boys a few days later, they stood up as I entered, giving the fascist salute. We battled throughout the lesson, but there was no budging them. However, one boy – the ironic football enthusiast who usually seemed half asleep – was not having any of it. He had been arguing every day at work on the docks non-stop. His quiet courage was impressive. It was him and me against the rest. I used everything I could fling at them, from the music they liked to appeals to human decency and to ridicule at being taken for a ride by a man who was contemptuous of the working class.
We argued for several weeks. It was eventually to be the information on the flyer for a new, radical newspaper called Black Dwarf which Tariq Ali was editing that dented their support for Powell. Along with a big picture of Powell in Nazi uniform, it revealed that he supported 3 per cent unemployment as a solution to inflation. This information enraged the east London further education college students and Enoch Powell promptly ceased to be their hero. Ironically, by getting all steamed up about Powell’s speech, they were later to become much more interested in political and social issues in general.
This volatility made me realize how important it is to keep arguing. Watching the apprentices change, and knowing them over several years, also made me aware how contempt for both women and blacks was so closely bound up with feelings of self-hatred. My battles in Tower Hamlets left me convinced that to counter racist views you had to dig around for what is behind them and start undermining at the source.
Of course this is not always physically possible, as I was to find on the 1 May worker-student anti-racist march to Transport House, when we carried the big flyers for Black Dwarf. A young woman from Hackney Young Socialists and myself tried to leaflet a group of dockers who were jeering from behind the police line. We weren’t expecting a welcome, but we misjudged their mood. The knot of burly men surged towards us. I shall never forget the unrelenting hatred in their eyes – being women was not going to protect us. The police braced themselves and I had to eat my pride and feel grateful to the law for saving us. As we backed off hastily, one man spat accurately past a policeman’s ear; venom hit my face. This was the fascist hard core and we had to concede defeat.
Throughout the march other dockers were wandering, defensive and troubled, arguing with all and sundry. I remember one mild, bewildered man in his fifties, wearing a cap, who kept repeating that he wasn’t racialist and was in a tenants’ association, but, ‘You can only fill the cup so far.’ An Indian demonstrator dressed in a smart striped lawyer’s suit had adopted him and was instructing him on economic theory in a quiet and friendly manner. The docker was utterly disorientated by the encounter. He thought there was a fixed amount of wealth which was apportioned through the land. ‘You can only fill the cup so far,’ he responded, shaking his head. ‘You are being misled,’ his companion told him, benignly tapping the older man on the shoulder.
As I went down to get the tube I saw a man with grey hair dressed in a denim jacket and jeans. He carried a situationist banner from Notting Hill and was disgorging his scorn of the dockers in a posh voice. I stood there mutely, feeling wretched. I hated their racism, but I also felt that it was satisfying to a man like that to be able to despise workers. It fed into his feeling of being superior.
The New Left May Day Manifesto, which the Thompsons and Bob had been working on with a group of socialist intellectuals, was published by Penguin in a revised edition that May and launched at an evening meeting. Edward spoke supportively of the German students, but was critical of what he regarded as the provocative violence of some strands in the US left. In contrast, he praised the young people who had cut their hair and were campaigning for Eugene MacCarthy. As I listened I felt torn between admiring their dedication and thinking how horrible it must be to go around with those American short back and sides haircuts.
The Manifesto in 1968 was edited by Raymond Williams and sought to ground a New Left politics in an understanding of what was happening in capitalism rather than the ‘holy writ’ of Communism or Trotskyism. It was ahead of its time in looking at Britain’s position in relation to a global economy and pointed to several questions which were to become more relevant over the next decade, including the implications of communication, the nature of technology and the meaning of work. It criticized the implicit values of capitalism, while proposing realistic changes, challenging for instance the exalted faith in modernization which marked Wilson’s Labour Party policies.
If we want to test the validity of modernization as an economic panacea, we have to see it in its real context: as not a programme but a stratagem; part of the language and tactics of a new capitalist consolidation…
It opens up a perspective of change, but at the same time it mystifies the process, and sets limits to it. Attitudes, habits, techniques, practices must change: the system of economic and social power, however, remains unchanged. Modernization fatally short-circuits the formation of social goals…
In more sober times the May Day Manifesto initiative might have been the basis for a regrouping of
the left. But the meeting that night had a feeling of flatness and the Manifesto was to be side-lined. Its failure to strike a chord in 1968 among people my age was not to do with the prescience of its proposals but because of our political disposition. We were full of our revolutionary toughness even before the May events – a stance which infuriated our elders – and the Manifesto didn’t have the frenzied intensity which was a feature of the resistance to the Vietnam War and now to anti-Powellism. It looked too respectable, too safe.
I was far more excited by Tariq’s new paper, Black Dwarf. A group of writers and designers, which included David Mercer and Adrian Mitchell, aimed to start a non-sectarian radical newspaper in the spirit of Tom Wooler’s early nineteenth-century Black Dwarf. The flyer announced, ‘The New BLACK DWARF will not pick quarrels with other left-wingers – but with our principal enemy, Capitalism.’
Tariq was even more ebullient than usual at the May Day Manifesto meeting. He came sweeping down the aisle and took me off to meet Clive Goodwin, a left-wing literary agent who was the driving force behind Black Dwarf. Clive seemed very worldly and sophisticated to me. In his mid-thirties when I met him, he had been radicalized by Suez and involved in left theatre and TV. Banned from producing for TV after he said he smoked marijuana in an interview, he was an agent for, among others, Dennis Potter and the uncompromising Manchester writer Jim Allen. He was also closely connected to the talented group associated with first the Wednesday Plays on the BBC and then with the independent company Kestrel Films. I knew nothing about Clive’s media world when I met him, but I was attracted to the concentrated energy. He was like a creative power pack – everything was purposeful, no waste, no scattering to the winds.
He was smooth and expensively dressed – unknown territory to me. But it was the contradictory bits that interested me; under Clive’s eyes there were dark rings and the skin was crinkly and old-looking. I was to learn that his wife, the Pop artist Pauline Boty, whose interview I’d read in Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women, had died the year before of cancer.
We went out for a meal and he offered me a lift home. Instead, I ended up staying the night at his flat in Cromwell Road, waking up in an alien world of expensive sixties modernity – no wooden CND bowls for Clive. Clive maintained a contrived distance, a detachment, which intrigued me and which I found sexy. He would retire like a brown tortoise into his shell and then suddenly an incredibly warm smile would flash out and the lines crease.
If the night-times were about pleasure, the days were all work and bustle. Clive directed a great team of helpers and was constantly on the telephone – a posh, modern, white telephone. This seemed an extraordinary way of organizing to me. In the Young Socialists few people had telephones: we communicated with Roneoed narrow strips of writing through the post. Clive, in contrast, moved fast. I suspect he saw me as a walking data base. In London I knew the activist left and had left-wing friends scattered all over the country. Just as Clive’s left media world was unfamiliar to me, my academic and labour movement connections were terra incognita to him.
Within a few days of knowing Clive I was conscious of being handled. Despite his charm, he was far more overtly autocratic than was customary in the left I knew. Left-wing men could be exasperating about women, but they kept up the appearance of democracy. Democracy never entered Clive’s head where women were concerned; he simply assumed it was the men’s job to talk politics. Once he’d got the addresses from me, he sent me off up to the bedroom to stuff envelopes with the other women. I had acquired a respect for the mail-out, so I went meekly enough.
Thanks to Clive, I met someone up there who was to become one of my closest friends. Sitting on the floor, enviably slender in a close-fitting ribbed top, with ash-blonde streaks in her hair, was Sally Alexander. She waved her arms in extravagant dramatic gestures and was extremely funny, telling me how Clive had been sending her round to raise money from theatre people.
Sally, who had recently been divorced from the actor John Thaw, had a young daughter and was wondering what to do next. When I heard she was an Equity member, I told her there was this trade union college called Ruskin. ‘You could go there, Sally.’ And she did.
I was surprised by the interest she expressed in Trotskyist groups. My women friends rarely related to my love–hate preoccupation with understanding their fissiparous histories or the nuances of difference which divided them. Sally kept telling me to go on because the leader of the Socialist Labour League, Gerry Healy, was making a real bid to recruit left-wing media workers. I gave her as fair an account as I could, but I considered the Socialist Labour League and its bullying, authoritarian leader to be bad news. So I echoed the advice Brian Smith had given me when I joined Hackney Young Socialists: ‘You want to stay away from them.’
Sally told me later that she’d repeated my warnings to Clive. ‘How do you know all this, Sally?’ he’d asked, perplexed. Clive himself resisted the SLL’s blandishments doggedly. He was not susceptible to being guilt-tripped – one of the Trotskyist tricks of the trade. In the fifties he had put all his energy into leaving the Willesden working class, where his father had worked as a waiter. Poverty held no romance and he retained a horror of the smell of sweat. He’d worked his way up to Cromwell Road and was not apologizing. Clive was a socialist because he detested deference and saw that a large part of the upper-class establishment were pompous, incompetent confidence tricksters. He wanted to call their bluff. He once said to me, ‘We’ve all been through the things people are made to believe are important and we’ve seen them for what they are. We’ve got to communicate that understanding.’ Exposing the hold of the trappings of power and privilege and achievement really was the most subversive message of the late sixties, and Clive was utterly committed to this process of divesting authority of its cover.
When news came through in the first week of May of student demonstrations and barricades in Paris, Clive rushed over there and returned with an eyewitness account for Black Dwarf, written by the situationist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had ‘liberated’ the stock exchange with a huge white banner decorated with a joint. In Hackney I silently prayed to the god of revolutions, ‘Please don’t let them be defeated.’ I wouldn’t let myself hope. My classes at Tower Hamlets pooh-poohed it all. ‘Students,’ they snorted disparagingly.
They hoisted me on my own petard, rising in revolt themselves and staging a mock trial. The manifesto of the ‘Trial of Sheila’ declared:
We accuse you of boring lessons about government. We are not interested in government. Government is something to do with upper-class people and students. We are working-class people and nothing to do with government. We’re not interested in what students do. We want lessons about everyday things, e.g. sex.
We accuse you of brainwashing us. We accuse you of keeping us cooped up in classrooms and then wondering why we go mad the first time we’re let out.
We say if we were let out more we would become used to it and not go mad.
Or throw things.
WE HAVE THEREFORE HAD A REVOLUTION.
As soon as the students went to the factories and young workers began to join the rebellion on the Left Bank, my Tower Hamlets classes changed their tune. ‘Can you organize a march for apprentices?’ they wanted to know. Demanding the impossible was one thing, but I wasn’t able to conjure apprentices out of the air.
When the general strike of 12 May was followed by factory occupations it really did seem that all those industrial relations experts and sociologists who had said it could never happen were wrong. The French working class were cocking a snook at those who interpreted the world and all that seemed secure and settled was revealed as shaky and mutable. Along with many others, I’ll never forget the extraordinary sight of power wobbling like a nervous jelly in those weeks. The actions of the French students and workers that May were to leave a lasting impression upon my politics.
De Gaulle called on the armed forces for support in June. The police stormed the occupied factories
. It was over. It was true that they lacked any political alternative to de Gaulle and that the faith in spontaneous insurrection proved illusory. Yet the implications of May ’68 continued to splutter long, long after. The anarchical young rebels had resuscitated questions about the purposes and meaning of work, the role of technology, the relationship between experience and knowledge, desire and reality, which were to resonate through the seventies. They demonstrated a presentiment of a new capitalism coming into being in which knowledge and communication would be of strategic significance. Yet they looked to this future, while re-enacting the past. Sadly their time-honoured barricades were not made of the stuff which could check the profit-led transformation which was to come. Work and the everyday were to be turned inside out by new technology, but not in the democratized, egalitarian or cooperative ways which we glimpsed in that extraordinary month.
Some friends went over to Paris but it always seemed to me that I should be in Britain, arguing through the political implications of what was taking place in France. This was certainly a less glamorous position to be in. History might have been happening across the Channel, but in east London the old routines continued to tick over. I was still doing open-air meetings, but this time for the East London Vietnam Solidarity Committee, one week in Walthamstow market, one week in Ridley Road. Local working-class shoppers were even less interested in Vietnam than they had been in joining the Labour Party. Regardless of their indifference, we all had to mount a little box and explain about the Vietcong. A photo appeared in the Hackney Gazette of me in my red 1900s tartan cap, but I had no talent as a street orator. My one moment of glory came when an old Ulsterman decided I was being unpatriotic and hit me with his umbrella. To my surprise, a bodyguard of enraged middle-aged women formed around me like an impenetrable blanket. ‘Give the girl a chance to speak,’ they bellowed.
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