Anna declined. I said nothing. The figure of the woman in the park, the nude on the staircase, the bare‐breasted cheerleader at the free concert, very soon translated into a symbol of alienation, schizophrenic breakdown. Chris Petit, launching a career as a television essayist, had a great success when he concentrated on air hostesses (fully clothed) reminiscing over the good times. Fluffy boudoir clouds and glinting silver wings: Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison on the soundtrack. But when he confronted the death of the middle classes in a film about bank managers, night‐drifts in retail parks, a naked model parading through a deserted bank in Herne Hill, he took critical flak. The symbol was too stark and the nakedness too naked. Who was this person? What was her story? Was she one of Marc Karlin’s Nightcleaners saving on her clothing allowance – or experiencing, in the solitude of the building, a moment of liberation (before the installation of CCTV systems)? Carrying a candle, she became a gothic spectre, an unclothed revenant. Kaporal, Petit’s researcher, spent the entire day’s shoot trying to get the model’s number. His flat, he whispered, was conveniently close at hand. Vodka and cold chicken in the fridge.
David Widgery, who sits proudly in reminiscences of period and place (Hackney: 1965–92), had no problem with nudity: personal nudity. Leaping naked, as we have heard, into the London Fields Lido. The pool itself, just as naked, abandoned, squatted, reoccupied, became a privileged memory‐space. Enclosed, tree‐surrounded, off‐limits: and therefore interesting. Announcements of its make‐over, its glorious renovation, were issued at regular intervals, to deflect protests over all the other padlocked Hackney pools. Spring, summer, autumn: grand openings were advertised on posters and in leaflets dropping like dandruff on our mat.
‘Construction problems have pushed the opening back until October at the earliest,’ gloated the Standard. ‘The hold‐up is a severe embarrassment to Hackney Council, the Labour‐run borough behind the £38 million Clissold Leisure Centre fiasco in Stoke Newington. Hackney, one of the three Olympic boroughs, has only one public swimming pool for serious swimmers.’
I found David Widgery’s memorial, the drinkers acknowledged it with uplifted cans, in the little park to the south of St Anne’s Limehouse, where I had worked as a gardener. And where I often ate my lunchtime sandwiches, while brooding on the mysteries of Hawksmoor’s overwhelming architecture. The drinkers gave me space.
DR DAVID WIDGERY (1947–1992)
PRACTISED LOCALLY AS A GP.
AS A SOCIALIST AND WRITER
HIS LIFE AND WORK WERE AN
INSPIRATION IN THE FIGHT
AGAINST INJUSTICE.
Widgery’s dynamism was intimidating. I had been sleepwalking through the same territory, struggling to read the signs but achieving nothing braver than keeping my own family more or less afloat and publishing a few booklets. The doctor part of this equation was raw: I couldn’t follow my father and grandfather down that route. And while I blundered, without skill or vocation, from labouring job to labouring job (eyes open, notebook at the ready), Widgery limped and talked and drove: damp flat to hospital to committee room, to pub to party. He was engaged, hot with language. Qualified to give a clinical description of every wanderer he noticed on the street: ‘The distinctive gait of the depot‐medicated schizophrenic, the manneristic grimaces of the manic‐depressive, the shuddering cough and luminous facies of pulmonary tuberculosis.’
While we sat in kitchens and debated, or drove out across Hackney Marshes, a smudged sun burning off the early mist, other groups were reasserting the dissenting spirit of old Hackney; or challenging it, finding new ways to make a nuisance of themselves. Quoted in memoirs, visible in documentaries, the Montague Road gang had a recoverable legend. The Angry Brigade and their associates in Amhurst Road continue to be mythologized, to inspire works such as My Revolutions, the novel by another Hackney dweller, Hari Kunzru. In Balls Pond Road, David Medalla and the Exploding Galaxy commune, living close to the historic site of Oswald Mosley’s recruiting centre, made performance art – theatre, publications, court cases – out of a cannabis arrest. Planted, a report on events in 1968, featuring photographs, poems, drawings, was now a collectable artefact.
Juliet Ash, David Widgery’s partner, still lived in the Eleanor Road house where he died: between the north side of London Fields and Graham Road. Juliet, who alerted me, years before, to the Limehouse memorial plaque, agreed to give an interview.
She was culling her library. Len Deighton paperbacks were boxed for disposal. The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg and New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, would be reprieved – along with a marching line of red‐covered Karl Marx. Juliet had a spread of papers on the table, she was working on a book about prison costumes: backwards from Guantánamo Bay. The weird chic of high‐fashion outfits inspired by orange prison fatigues.
We talked of lost Hackneys: military barracks, bottling plants, music halls, pubs. And people.
There were eight of us in a collective house in Parkholme Road, near where Michael Rosen lives, opposite the George. I wasn’t with David Widgery. I was with my previous person. I moved to Eleanor Road in 1979.
There used to be a swimming pool on London Fields. We used to go there for breakfast when it was nice weather. Before taking the kids to Gayhurst. Did your kids go there?
It must have been about 1986 when the pool closed. Now it’s coming back, they’re revamping it after years of neglect. Because of creeping gentrification. The Olympic effect.
Whiston Road, I remember that pool. The primary‐school kids used to go there for their lessons. A lovely pool. But now, since the fire in Clapton baths, there is no swimming pool in Hackney. Not a single one. They say the London Fields Lido will open again, but we’re still waiting.
By the late 1980s all the money was going into the City, into Docklands. Hackney, increasingly, is becoming Islington. There is no sense of history. Which is why getting rid of Spirit and his little shop from Broadway Market, and getting rid of Tony’s Café, is so appalling. The people in the surrounding flats and tower blocks use those places. They’re being excluded. The only real stall left, the guy who did vegetables through the 1980s and 1990s, sells at an eighth of the price of the organic products on sale in the Saturday market. People still go to the original stall. For ordinary local vegetables.
I remember thinking, back in the 1980s, wouldn’t it be nice to have a café where you could get a decent cup of coffee? Now that it has come, you realize what comes with it. You lose all the local things that were good. The council could have included the best of the old, along with the gentrification. It could have worked.
Dave Widgery was very much involved with the Socialist Workers Party. I was expelled from that in the 1970s. First I was in IS (International Socialists), which later became the SWP, but the faction I was in disagreed with the party’s line on Troops Out (out of Ireland). We thought we should be involved more actively. I was always being expelled for being interested in fashion, for not taking the party line on various political actions.
Dave was as much interested in cultural politics as in the rank‐and‐file stuff. One of the things he felt, being a doctor in Limehouse, and being involved in the closure of Bethnal Green Hospital in the 1970s, was that unless you were part of an organization, politically, you had no power. There were different ways of operating. You operate within a party organization. You involve yourself with trade unions. There was no way you could have any clout unless you were within the party. But there was another strand, which Dave understood very well, in terms of race and music and radical politics. Even when this meant associating with people who were not involved with the party. That’s why, in the 1980s, Dave Widgery worked for the Hackney Empire restoration project. He battled alongside Roland Muldoon and his partner, Claire. We knew that the Hackney Empire would go bankrupt. It wasn’t like Ocean, the music venue that replaced the Central Library in Mare Street. The council poured vast amounts of money into Ocean, along with lottery funds. And still
it failed, spectacularly. We won. We saved the Empire. And we did it with very little support from the council.
Dave’s whole thing in Hackney in the 1980s was about how it was important to fight Thatcher in the culture, as well as through political organizations. Because he worked so much, because he wrote books and grafted away, and appeared in films, the SWP allowed him a certain amount of scope. There were areas where they didn’t agree with him – on Wilhelm Reich and his sexual theories, for example. They were uneasy when he talked about sexuality and politics.
It was Dave’s sense of history. He saw the IS and the SWP operating on a trajectory back into the old Communist Party of the 1920s and 1930s. His knowledge of the history of Communism and Marxism was what kept him going in terms of party politics. The sign we have on our wall – ‘Workers’ Circle Friendly Society’ – Dave got from a skip, at the back of the Hackney Empire. There were quite a few of these to be found in the borough at the turn of the century.
Knowing the history of the co‐operative movements led to us reviving the Hackney Literary and Philosophical Society. We met in the George, upstairs. I have all the records, the minutes of our meetings. This paper is from the original Society, in 1815. A talk on ‘The Natural Magic of Chemistry’. A talk on ‘The Female Poets of Great Britain’. A talk on ‘The Philosophy of the Earth and its Wonders: Things Not Seen’. Between 1815 and 1817, they met at the Lamb Tavern in Homerton. Then they moved to St Thomas’s Square. The last meeting, in 1817, was a talk on ‘The Character of the Female Heart’. ‘This proved so contentious,’ say the minutes, ‘that the Institute did not meet again.’ It was dissolved in May of that year.
Our revival ended around 1990. Clifford Turner gave a talk on Bedlam. We’ve got tapes of all the talks. Nigel Fountain gave one of them. ‘Dr David Widgery,’ according to the minutes, ‘then insisted we sit in a circle and hold hands and raise the spirit of ’68.’ Raphael Samuel gave a talk about the history of Hackney. Bill Fishman gave one on 1888. There was a talk on Hackney and its asylums. Mike Rosen spoke about children’s writing. I’m sure Sheila Rowbotham talked, but I can’t find a record of that.
There was a sense in the 1980s – I don’t know if it was because we were all much younger – that you could do things in Hackney. There were the Victoria Park Open Festivals with the Anti‐Nazi League. That’s gone. I feel that events have been taken out of our hands. History has disappeared. We can’t win now.
We succeeded with the Hackney Empire because Mecca put it up for sale. Roland Muldoon bid for it and got it. That didn’t happen at Labyrinth in Dalston Lane. It was already in the hands of sinister property developers. I used to go to the Four Aces, with Dave, and to Labyrinth. We went with friends and we were accepted. The place was run on a shoestring. It doesn’t happen now.
I don’t remember much about Tony Blair living in Hackney. I wasn’t aware of him in local politics. Patrick Wright remembers seeing him through the window, after the move to Islington, perched on the edge of a chair, watching footage of himself on Newsnight in total fascination.
We were living in Islington in 1971, we came to Hackney for a party in Sheila Rowbotham’s house, off Cecilia Road. By the Norfolk Arms. Sheila and Dave were good friends. She was involved with Black Dwarf, with Tariq Ali, that lot. Have you read Promise of a Dream?
It was funny the way Dave came to the East End. He was living in Islington, a medical student, around 1967. He passed his exams. He had to be an in‐house hospital doctor. He made a stab at the London A–Z and landed on Bethnal Green. He was very involved with the 1970s sit‐in, the occupation of the hospital, when they closed it down. He was in the middle of making a film at the time.
Marc Karlin had this vision of independent cinema. He was very keen on Channel 4 at the beginning. He made films with Dave and Sheila. He did the famous Nightcleaners documentary. When Marc died he was in the middle of a new project.
Dave was really close to Marc, really really close. I used to go round there all the time after Dave died. Marc said that Dave was like a monkey perched on his shoulder, keeping him informed, whispering in his ear. Then, when Marc died as well, it was unbelievable. Poor Nigel, the third man, had to speak, endlessly, at his friends’ funerals. And very well, movingly. He has left Hackney now. He writes a lot. He’s just written a book called Lost Empires. It’s about all the Empire theatres, right back to the 1890s. It was partly inspired by the Hackney Empire.
He can’t make enough money to write his books. He’s an obituarist now. He works, so he says, on death row.
He gets very upset about the fate of his Hackney novel, Days Like These. He knows everything about Dave and the Oz trial. Dave was very friendly with Richard Neville. I only saw Richard when he came over here. I’ve got copies of the old Oz magazines. Dave would write about anything. There was an excitement of being on the edge. A sort of Surrealism. Dave saw himself as a Surrealist. He wanted to shock the bourgeoisie: drugs, sex, art, rock’n’roll. He managed this by not doing a huge amount of household chores. Ha! He loved his children enormously and put an enormous amount of energy into his relationship with them. He was always a very exciting figure. He had ideas up his sleeve. There never was a moment when he wasn’t doing something. If he did childcare, it was absolutely 100 per cent.
He took time away from medicine to write Some Lives! And, apart from that, he’d write British Medical Journal columns on a Saturday evening, between four and seven. Then go out and have a good time.
The thing about Dave, there was always a sense that time was short. He’d had polio and TB. He’d been in hospital a lot when he was young. He felt that he had to put everything into every moment of every day. He wrote a wonderful piece called ‘Last Exit’ for a magazine called ZG (Zeitgeist) that I edited in the early 1980s. A cross‐cultural magazine. Dave’s piece was about Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. There is a line in there about ‘you’re never as good as you are when you die’.
I was reading your Limehouse book, the one where you are working as a gardener, what was it called? It so happened that Dave worked right alongside the Hawksmoor church in Gill Street. Now he has a plaque on the boundary wall of St Anne’s. I go there occasionally, a magic spot. One day I found three blokes sitting by the plaque. As I went up to it, they said, ‘Did you know ’im?’ I said, ‘Yes, he was my husband.’ Tears came into their eyes. ‘Do you want a drink? We knew Dave.’ They were inviting me to have a drink. ‘So sad,’ they said, hugging me. You know how drunks go back over things, again and again, and the emotions well out of them.
St Anne’s is such a pivotal place. The vicar was a nice guy. To do the plaque I had to get in touch with the LDDC. Dave was always ranting against them. Long before Canary Wharf was built. He became furious at any mention of them. He organized huge campaigns against all of them. And the irony was that I had to go to them to get that plaque on the wall: a heritage wall, a Hawksmoor wall. Eventually they allowed it. We had a little ceremony.
Dave was not very careful about his drinking. But he cared deeply about the working people he treated in Limehouse. If he was short with artists like Jock McFadyen when they came to him with worries about alcohol consumption, it wasn’t because he didn’t have time to waste on neurotic painters. It was the fact that he liked a drink himself. He was a terrifically controlled person – who, on the other hand, was totally abandoned to drink. When he was on call, he was absolutely responsible. But afterwards? A lot of doctors do that. They didn’t have locums when Dave was around.
Michael Rosen, a near neighbour, wrote an obituary tribute to Widgery, focusing on his uncontained energy, his activism, the cropped head on the platform at the London School of Economics.
‘We have seen through the fancy dress of modern capitalism,’ Widgery pronounced, ‘and found the irrational violence and the hopelessness at its core.’ His enthusiasms were all‐embracing: Allen Ginsberg, Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, William Carlos Williams, Ian Dury. And his anathemas: Thatcher, the LDD
C, closed hospitals.
He died in Eleanor Road on 26 October 1992. Rosen doesn’t say how or in what circumstances.
Leaving Eleanor Road, on the morning of the interview, I walked home through London Fields. I was beginning to get a sense that Kaporal, with his conspiracy theories, his unravelling of hidden patterns, might be on to something. At our latest debriefing, in the Victory pub in Vyner Street, he was rambling about Joseph Conrad’s monkey – which I now connected with Juliet Ash’s description of her husband’s relationship with Marc Karlin. Then there was the way that these characters arrived in Hackney, as if by accident or psychogeographical karma. Sheila Rowbotham with her partner’s compass sweep of railway stations, David Widgery jabbing his finger into the London A–Z. Or the way I plotted that dérive out of Hampstead, walking a line from the ashes of Freud in Golders Green Crematorium, by way of the massive head of Karl Marx in Highgate, into the topographical instructions laid down in Blake’s Jerusalem. Everything stemmed from that unthinking excursion.
SAVE OUR SCHOOL. THE MAYOR’S A FOOL.
A crocodile of schoolchildren, holding up banners and flags, beating drums, blowing whistles, protested the closure of a school, the erection of a mobile‐phone mast. Stepping back to give them plenty of room, I nudged a large greyhound of benign or brain‐damaged temperament. The close companion and official carer of local painter Jock McFadyen. Jock had a lock‐up studio, alongside a Chinese import/export business, in a unit by the railway arches.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 30