Indeed Edward Short, the Labour Secretary of State for Education, was profoundly hostile to the students, saying it was time that ‘one or two of these thugs are thrown out on their necks’. Robin was eventually to be sacked, not for taking the gates down – he had been in a seminar at the time – but for expressing sympathy with the students’ action. Remembering the habitual drunken violence of upper-class young men at Christ Church in Oxford, for which they would be reprimanded and fined, the LSE hysteria about the attack on the gates seemed to me out of all proportion. They had become a metaphor of power.
That January I set off to various universities, taking copies of Black Dwarf. At Essex I found the students planning a Revolutionary Festival for 10–12 February and they decided, partly because of our women’s issue, to include a session on ‘women’. I got a lift down with Jean McCrindle and Sally Alexander to what was to be our first public meeting. Although unsure what to expect, we were charged with a powerful sense of anticipation. I remember the intensity of our talking and the feeling of shared discovery. Ideas, in these early days of Women’s Liberation, seemed to just spring out of a process of recognition. This connection of experience was all the more remarkable because it was an exchange of perceptions which had been so private. All those reactions, those vagrant thoughts which you had kept to yourself, suddenly came to acquire a new social meaning.
With the new-found affinities came a corresponding realization of distances. I sat in the back seat of the car thinking how Sally and Jean had a bond which I could not share, for they both were the mothers of young daughters. Despite our common perceptions, I was conscious of being just slightly apart. I was a detached, atomistic one, not a mother. There were things I did not know. Contrary to the stereotypes, the early women’s movement was respectful towards the women with children – they were our equivalent to the Marxist proletariat. But this remained abstract. Motherhood persisted as the uncrossed barrier and was inwardly mysterious to me. There were whole realms of my friends’ lives which I could not comprehend. This early intimation of closeness and separation was to be replicated over the years in the women’s movement in various contexts. I think this was because the utopian longing in our politics for union, ‘sisterhood’, carried with it the opposite awareness of being necessarily, as individuals, apart. The two polarities were difficult to negotiate.
It was a freezing winter’s day and the isolated campus of Essex University had the air of a besieged space station in some bizarre science fiction other-world. I trailed around with Roberta, lifting the long dresses which we now wore, to prevent them from becoming sodden in the much-tramped snow. Also sludging along with us was the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, who was looking for revolutionary students to include in his film British Sounds. Radicalized by the May ‘Events’ the previous year, Godard was defying the film as art object and making throwaway works which could help finance the left. Unluckily for him, the Essex students, who were heavily influenced by the situationists’ critique of the ‘spectacle’, were suspicious of all film-makers and dramatists, regardless of politics. The tenacious Godard did manage several interviews, though, despite this suspicion of the ‘bourgeois’ media.
The iconoclastic anarcho-situationist politics combined with the bleak and remote setting of the campus to make the Revolutionary Festival a chaotic and fraught event. The women’s meeting, held in a large lecture hall, was electric with tension as Branka Magas from the New Left Review began to read a theoretical paper. She held her head down, speaking in a low voice with a Yugoslavian accent. Now this was a cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof kind of meeting, not an academic seminar. You could feel the currents of emotion charging around the hall. Reason and analysis did not cut much ice that day. Yet the fight for her space to speak undisturbed felt like a life and death struggle. Again we were being treated with ridicule. One of the students came in laughing with a woman on his back. Someone threw toilet paper from a balcony and it cascaded down in long white tendrils. The lights were turned on and off.
In the discussion a sedate member of the Communist Party (which was regarded as the equivalent to the right wing) tried to take another tack. When a woman complained about having to type the leaflets, he stood up to explain that there had to be some division of labour, as not everyone understood what should be put in the leaflets. By this time the women in the audience were in an angry mood and we hissed and booed.
One man, at least, was appalled by the men’s response. A visiting German student stood up in the left corner of the room and spoke with a calm authority. He warned the men that they would be making a big mistake if they failed to listen and acknowledge what the women were saying. In Germany already the men’s derisive reaction had created a very bitter rift. Despite the hysteria-edged political ethos at Essex, his words carried conviction. There was a pause; people were reflecting.
We weren’t about to let it go at that and announced a follow-up meeting. Two men came along to this smaller meeting. One was a bearded Sikh Maoist from Hemel Hempstead, who told us we should read Mao, Lenin and Stalin. Things went from bad to worse when the other man there declared that we sounded like a women’s tea party (shades of Potter’s tea-bag rebels) because we kept giggling in high-pitched voices. Militancy was being thrust upon us.
When those of us from London exchanged addresses we discovered a group formed by North Americans was already meeting in Tufnell Park. We fixed a time to make contact again, knowing something momentous was happening but with no idea just what it was. This realization was offset by the intensity surrounding us; we had grown accustomed to taking the unusual for granted. Claims for ‘liberation’ were sprouting everywhere.
*
On 14 February, in the midst of rebellion at the LSE, Black Dwarf came out with the headline ‘Create 2, 3, many LSEs’. The New Left Review had developed the idea of red bases from Régis Debray’s ideas about guerrilla strategy. The ‘vanguard’ view of the students had merged now into this peculiar conviction that universities and colleges were to become liberated territory, bases for intellectual guerrillas combating ideology. My friends in the International Socialist group had their own version of that Dwarf headline: ‘Create 2, 3, many balls up’. At the Black Dwarf editorial, while Fred Halliday defended red bases, I argued against them, along with Bob and Kim Howells, who was aware of the demoralization at Hornsey College after the occupation.
I stayed in IS for eighteen months, because they provided an alternative to the dead end of simply escalating student militancy within institutions. Another reason was more personal: I was friendly with and respected the commitment of many IS members. I was not to prove a very successful recruit, though initially things went well enough. I had been allocated to ‘youth work’ by the Hackney International Socialists – nearly twenty-six and feeling pretty elderly, I concluded they must regard me as young at heart. But I was not complaining, because ‘youth work’ provided a means of wiggling out of those early mornings on Shacklewell Lane with the African prince. Instead I organized meetings on sex and psychology, or why terrorism was only the correct tactic if you happened to be in the Russian Revolution – all more interesting than bothering about points of order in the Young Socialists. David Widgery came along to the Britannia pub (now Samuel Pepys) in Mare Street from his flat above an electrical shop in Islington’s Chapel Market to speak to my youth group on rock music. Going back on the 38 bus, I decided to relent about the Solanas feminist terrorist hit list. After all, we weren’t in the Russian Revolution, and he was only twenty-two and wearing a particularly beautiful, antiquated brown-leather jacket.
Other aspects of my youth work involved organizing the leafleting of schools. The ulterior motive was to recruit proletarian Hackney youth, who would then be able to raise class issues about education in the Schools Action Union. In fact, I really liked the young organizers of the Schools Action Union, which included some lively sixth-formers from Camden School for Girls who were in contact with the French lycée rebels of 1968.
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br /> The International Socialist idea of a worker-student alliance was not a chimera in 1969. Left trade unionists felt betrayed by Labour and a new confidence had developed among workers. They were resolved not only to resist the attempt to get more work out of them but to demand a greater share of profits. The result was to be a unique period in industrial relations in which workers took the offensive. Though 1969 has been eclipsed by the attention which has focused on 1968, it was to be a year in which the basis for the working-class militancy of the early seventies was being laid. There was a sixties generation in industry, as well as in student politics and radical popular culture, and they were to be hammered the heaviest in the long run.
On 24 February Ford workers came out on strike against management’s attempts to curb resistance in the plants and the Ford stewards invited the students to join their demonstration. Resistance had been building up since the publication of Barbara Castle’s White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ in January, proposing a month’s cooling-off period and the threat of prosecution through the new Industrial Relations Court. Ironically, industrial action was being politicized by Labour’s emphasis upon state intervention in disputes. In retaliation, the shop stewards and militants on the shopfloor were adopting arguments for democracy and control within the workplace. One Ford worker I met on the march, inspired by the TV drama about an occupation of the docks, The Big Flame, written by Jim Allen, declared, ‘We want to see the big flame all over.’
At an Agit Prop meeting during February, Hubert and Dorothea, two German left-wing students who were friends of the injured Rudi Dutschke, now staying in London with a member of International Socialist active at Ford, suggested that we should go out to Dagenham with a street theatre play. A group of us went off, very shyly, and performed Stuff Your Penal Up Your Bonus. It was not great drama but the Ford workers welcomed support and laughed anyway, urging us to come back.
We were at Ford when a massive 4,000-strong meeting voted to stay out. Not only did I witness for the first time the incredible power of workers in a large plant, but the stewards amazed me by doing the most complex mental arithmetic for the darts score in the pub afterwards while drinking pint after pint. Yet they were inordinately grateful when I typed and corrected the spelling in one of their leaflets. They were cynical about the multitude of sects who came leafleting. ‘Like the Salvation Army,’ one man remarked wearily. They also viewed the smoother left intellectuals askance, comparing them to the type of younger personnel officer who arrived at Ford with a liberal approach and commenting grimly, ‘They turn out the worst.’ I became friendly with some of the stewards who would gang up with my next-door neighbour from Jamaica, Barbara Marsh, to tease me for being middle class and knowing only bookish things. But amidst the banter they were as romantic about ‘students’ as we were about workers. After the strike they decided they wanted to go to a Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation meeting in Manchester to ‘thank the students’. I rang up Claire Brayshaw, the tiny, round ex-Communist who had befriended me when I was at university. She did not bat an eyelid at being asked to put up seven Dagenham shop stewards. They came back delighted by Claire and still drunk on the talk, incredulous that students would talk about politics non-stop for three days.
The Agit Prop expedition to Ford made me think more specifically about the process of communicating across class boundaries. ‘Communications’ had been the theme of a May Day Manifesto meeting that January which had included Raymond Williams on the structure of the media industry. Perry Anderson had talked about something I didn’t understand, but was to hear much more about in the future, called ‘semiotics’. But it was the more immediate problems that confronted us on Black Dwarf which really engaged me. During 1968 we had been carried along by a tide of militancy when the accelerating impetus of the student movement and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations provided us with a constituency. By 1969 we could no longer ride along on that wave of conviction. Radical activity was not abating, but it was diversifying, appearing in the workplace, in schools, among squatters, tenants, women, the black community and within radical culture. This fragmented radical movement did not have any automatic affinities. I wanted Black Dwarf to reach outwards, not only to students but to workers, and be a means through which these differing kinds of radical movements might communicate with one another. However, there were problems of both style and content. We were never to find how to communicate with the differing potential readerships – the ‘left’ in the broad rather than the narrow sense of the word.
My apprentices at Tower Hamlets College had made me aware how words could have several simultaneous interpretations. Quite everyday political language changed its meanings in their heads. ‘Capitalism’ they interpreted as ‘freedom’, ‘fascism’ meant ‘against the government’, while ‘democracy’ was translated as ‘government’. A metaphorical form of writing which created pictures and told parables, before arriving at an abstraction, could act as a bridge between direct experience and abstract thought, but this was absent from the sociologically influenced ‘left theory’ of the period. Consequently a lot of our writing just went over most people’s heads.
At the end of February Tariq went home to Pakistan, where a student revolt had acted as a catalyst for a broader rebellion. While he was away, Douglas Gill, whom Bob and I had brought on to the board, edited the paper. Douglas decided that Black Dwarf should become a left-wing version of the Daily Mirror in order to gain popular appeal. There were two snags about his approach. First, the Mirror was aiming at a set of reforms grafted on to the existing society, a bigger piece of the pie. We were meant to be baking something else entirely. Yet we had no idea how to connect this abstract ‘revolution’ with the everyday. Black Dwarf began to sound as if it had a permanent frog in its throat. The second difficulty was that Mirror journalism was a special craft skill which none of us possessed.
I knew something was wrong, and was puzzling away about it, when, shortly after Tariq had left for Pakistan, Gus Macdonald, who was then working on the TV current affairs programme World in Action, happened to wander into the Black Dwarf office. The small Anarcho-syndicalist group Solidarity were stapling together the Roneoed pages of their magazine on Tariq and Ann’s big working table. Gus picked up an issue and pointed to the dialogue quoted in an account of a strike. Solidarity’s politics emphasized the consciousness which came from the rank and file. They were completely opposed to the vanguardism of the Trotskyist groups. It was the voice from below which mattered to them, not the direction by generals from on top. Gus said to me he could never understand why the left didn’t realize that they had a tremendous asset in access to people’s voices. ‘Of course!’ I thought to myself, and after that quoted copiously.
I landed bang in the middle of a communications problem of my own when Jean-Luc Godard offered to include Agit Prop in British Sounds, which he was making with Kestrel Films for London Weekend Television. Aiming to catch specific instances of left organizing and consciousness, Godard had decided he wanted to use my Black Dwarf article on women. He aimed to do an Oz in reverse. His idea was to film me with nothing on reciting words of emancipation as I walked up and down a flight of stairs – the supposition being that eventually the voice would override the images of the body. This proposal made me uneasy, for two quite different reasons. I was a 36C and considered my breasts to be too floppy for the sixties fashion. Being photographed lying down with nothing on was fine, but walking down stairs could be embarrassing. Moreover, while I didn’t think nudity was a problem in itself, the early women’s groups were against what we called ‘objectification’. New and powerful images were being projected all around us in the media. Contesting how we were being regarded and represented had been one the sources of our rebellion. Where did you draw the line over images? Why on earth did the pesky male mind jump so quickly from talk of liberation to nudity, I wondered? On the other hand, Agit Prop needed to move out of John and Wisty Hoyland’s house, because they had a new b
aby. We were trying to raise money for an office.
Godard came out to Hackney to convince me. He sat on the sanded floor of my bedroom, a slight dark man, his body coiled in persuasive knots. Neither Godard the man nor Godard the mythical creator of A Bout de Souffle, which I’d gone to see with Bar in Paris, were easy to contend with. I perched in discomfort on the edge of my bed and announced, ‘I think if there’s a woman with nothing on appearing on the screen no one’s going to listen to any words,’ suggesting perhaps he could film our ‘This Exploits Women’ stickers on the tube. Godard gave me a baleful look, his lip curled. ‘Don’t you think I am able to make a cunt boring?’ he exclaimed. We were locked in conflict over a fleeting ethnographic moment.
In the end a compromise was settled. The Electric Cinema had recently opened in Notting Hill and needed money. A young woman (with small breasts) from there agreed to walk up and down the stairs and I did the voice-over. When British Sounds was shown in France, Charlie Posner told me the audience cheered as I declared, ‘They tell us what we are … One is simply not conscious of “men” writers, of “men” film-makers. They are just “writers”, just “film-makers”. The reflected image for women they create will be taken straight by women themselves. These characters “are” women.’ As for Godard’s intention for making a cunt boring, I cannot say, except that a friend in International Socialism told me that his first thought had been ‘crumpet’ – until the shot went on and on and on, and he started to listen.
British Sounds was to have an unexpected series of repercussions which I did not grasp at the time. Humphrey Burton, then head of arts at London Weekend Television, refused to show it. The ensuing row fused with the sacking of Michael Peacock from the board of LWT in September 1969. Whereupon Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd from Kestrel, along with other programme-makers, resigned in protest. LWT decided to go for higher ratings and brought in an Australian newspaper owner called Rupert Murdoch. The last thing he wanted to do was to make a cunt boring.
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