by Alan Davies
London SW1
12th May 1983
Dear Sir,
Recently, I am sure you will have become aware of the controversy surrounding the construction of the latest nuclear power station. For the following reasons, I, as one of your constituents, urge you to support the proposed ban on such power stations in this country.
Firstly, nuclear power stations are potentially very dangerous. The near meltdown at Three Mile Island in America endangered thousands of people. Such a catastrophe in such a densely populated country as ours could kill millions of people.
Secondly, the C.E.G.B. has admitted that, for the amount of money involved, the current nuclear power stations are producing very poor returns in terms of energy.
Thirdly, the new Pressurized Water Reactors which your party are intending to build are even more dangerous than their predecessors. Some workers may be exposed to up to five times the radiation levels previously encountered in other nuclear power stations.
Fourthly, investing in nuclear power inevitably leads to the development of nuclear arms, the biggest threat to civilisation as we know it of all time. Never before have we been on the verge of total destruction as we are today. “We are living on borrowed time” to quote Paul Weller, an idol of thousands of young people. The banning of nuclear power would be an excellent start in the struggle for nuclear disarmament.
Fifthly, the money spent on a PWR station could be used to insulate hundreds of thousands of lofts, or to research in to wind, solar, and wave power.
It is for these reasons I implore you to grant your support for this campaign to ban nuclear power.
Yours faithfully,
Alan Davies.
Sixthly, life at college was suiting me; you could cite Paul Weller in your mock O Levels!
I was becoming highly suggestible and eager to please and it was this as much as anything that caused me to embrace Antonin Artaud.
Piers loved Artaud, a French theatre practitioner who, in 1938, had published The Theatre and Its Double in which his stated theatrical aim was to stage the innermost desires and fears of humankind: the lust, the crime, the dreams and the fantasies experienced or perpetrated by humans. The audience’s attention was to be inevitable and the performance to run through them like their own blood. He called for a Theatre of Cruelty, in twin manifestos, and exhorted others to follow his desire to create a new language of sound and expression to fuel it. He believed that the multi-layered conventions of human behaviour concealed and controlled true impulses and desires, which emerged in dreams or terrible acts and that such impulses needed to be expressed, with the theatre the only place to display them. The human race could be purged of cruelty only in a Theatre of Cruelty. A functioning crucible for the cleansing of all humanity.
This was going to be a tall order for our drama group, particularly if Dean was going to be on sound.
Willingly I tried to follow the teachings of a maniacal dead Frenchman passed on by a nice man from Derbyshire in pinstripe dungarees.
Artaud’s anger was bottomless. Theatre’s true potential was being mocked by a devotion to revered masterpieces and bourgeois social conventions. I could imagine him throwing up all day after an evening at the theatre.
‘No more masterpieces,’ he declaimed, and it was a compelling mantra to follow. If we don’t understand the so-called classics, if they are elitist or elusive, then we can express those ideas in our own way for our own times. This was excellent news as I didn’t really understand any great masterpieces and could now legitimately stop trying to, having read only three plays.
Before we did anything Artaudian though, we first had to stage a panto. Though I had no aptitude for being a dame, I was the most shameless performer in first-year theatre studies, so I donned a purple frock (with some football socks beneath, to be hilariously revealed) and screeched my way through a show we concocted.
I have no memory of any compliments afterwards, which does not mean I have forgotten them. Piers was pleased though, perhaps because all the cast had turned up for once.
The college hall was the site of all our attempts at theatre. Continually pushed to create our own shows, our best was a short play about the abdication of Edward VIII, in which I played the self-interested king (piece of cake) and a teenage girl called Kathryn was a remarkably able Stanley Baldwin.
Every effort to produce something Artaudian was defeated by a collective failure to really understand what he was on about. Still, it was beneficial trying to be creative, even if there was more often failure than not. Artaud had influenced theatrical greats like Jean Genet and Peter Brook. His work hadn’t been wasted on them even if it was wasted on us.
We were encouraged to go to the theatre and taken on regular trips to the homely and unpretentious Stratford Theatre Royal in East London as well as the Barbican to see Judi Dench and Zoë Wanamaker in Mother Courage.
In college, SNAP Theatre would visit and stage daytime adaptations of books on the English syllabus like To Sir with Love and Cider With Rosie. With the audience on all four sides of a rectangle, no lighting or set and only a few props, they made a big impression on me with their innovative staging. I still remember two actors combining to make the shape of a sash window and then a third lifting an arm to ‘open’ the window and shout down into the imaginary street below. The pleasure was as much in how they told the story as in the story itself.
The next event in the college hall that I was involved in, though, was to be the hustings for the student union elections.
We politicized media studies types decided to field candidates and make a TV programme about it. I put myself forward to be president. When Andy, the psychologist, found out, he said: ‘Another promising student wasted.’
He needn’t have worried. Far from being the opportunity to synthesize my twin ambitions to be an actor and an MP, the hustings, where candidates were to make a short speech and take questions, were an excruciating embarrassment.
Months before, during a three-day blockade of the college refectory over inadequate common room facilities (we had our picture in the local paper, which made up for not changing anything), we had decided that the principal of the college was ‘really bad’. I had extrapolated from there and, though I knew nothing about him, was adamant he spent all his time playing golf and drinking scotch.
Come the hustings at lunchtime, I took to the stage and began to rant, about the effing principal and his effing golf and his effing scotch and the effing previous president of the effing students’ union who was effing useless, and on and effing on.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I stood on the North Bank at Arsenal every week and adopted the tone of those terraces whilst trying to emulate the impassioned speeches I’d heard at rallies in front of tens of thousands, but this was in the college hall, at lunchtime, in front of maybe eighty students. I would have to go next door to the refectory in a minute and sit amongst them, seriously diminished.
I had no policies, no ideas, no humour and could not stop swearing. Exiting the stage to near silence with my media colleagues still filming I passed a lecturer, who I’d seen at Greenham Common at Easter.
‘Do you think I laid it on a bit thick?’ I said.
‘Just a bit,’ she said, looking worried.
The outgoing president, Winston, leapt up to the stage to defend himself. He pointed out that I was only seventeen so wasn’t eligible to stand anyway (a point he’d previously been prepared to overlook since there were no other candidates). Winston was black; so were many of his friends who came in to college each day from Leyton and areas less suburban than Loughton itself.
From my extensive understanding of political campaigning I quickly surmised that all the black kids were going to vote for Winston, who announced his intention to stand again. I was now unpopular with them for putting Winston down. I don’t even know why I did it; he was absurdly apolitical for a union leader and had no agenda, other than he liked to be called the president, but he was qui
te a nice bloke. He’d play the piano at lunchtime occasionally and people would sing songs. He wasn’t angry enough for me, I suppose, but then no one was.
An all-black union committee was elected, since the majority white vote were the abstaining working-class Thatcherites who believed unions to be evil. I had hoped to have the support of Gary Cranston, a charismatic Jamaican who was a good speaker and had become a friend and confidant. He was no longer a student, though, and he couldn’t be there that day.
Gary had started PROCS, the Progressive Cultural Society, to encourage black and white students to mix. I attended the PROCS meetings and was the only white person there.
Confident in my status as a card-carrying anti-racist, I endeared myself to them immediately with questions about Caribbean names, asking if, as I believed, so many black people were called Winston because their parents named them after Winston Churchill in an effort to ingratiate themselves on arriving in Britain. There was a moment’s silence before I was calmly disabused of that notion. The looks I received during that silence stayed with me for a while. Since then I’ve had less trouble noticing when someone thinks I’m a fool.
Watching the footage of my speech back in the TV studio, there was an uncomfortable silence, followed by an awkward chat. Gill Bucknall, the 23-year-old mature student in our group who undertook a great deal of teen counselling at different times, came up to me and grinned:
‘Don’t worry about it, mate, I thought you were brilliant!’
A few months later, during a shambolic union general meeting, I proposed a vote of no-confidence in the committee, which was passed. To my irritation, a Tory-supporting lecturer muttered, ‘About time,’ as I proposed the vote and the black kids were kicked off the committee. Soon afterwards, there was a college investigation into the union funds. The new committee had embezzled £200, which caused a bit of a stink and led to proper elections being organized the following year.
I should have listened to Andy, the psychologist. I was no politician, and not being involved had left me free to pass my A Levels, and meant the avoidance of further humiliation at union meetings with the effing principal.
Tony Benn
In December 1982, 30,000 women travelled to Greenham Common in Berkshire where a US military base was to become home to cruise nuclear missiles. Their intention was to encircle its nine-mile perimeter in a demonstration called ‘Embrace the Base’. The right-wing press, led by the Daily Mail and Daily Express, made mention, in large print on their front pages, of the presence of a Russian TV crew filming the demonstration. The implication was that the state-run Soviet news agencies would only broadcast, to the abject Russian populace, propaganda that intimated Western resolve was weakening in the Cold War and that the women at Greenham were therefore unpatriotic, putting the interests of the Soviets ahead of those of their own people. Media slurs on the women of the Greenham Peace Camp were sustained throughout their long and arduous stay outside that airbase.
At the time, CND reported a survey showing that 60 per cent of Britons did not want cruise missiles based in the UK. These missiles could strike directly into the Soviet Union and while the US government, with the British characteristically following, stated that the threat of Soviet SS20 missiles needed to be matched with missiles of a similar range, the reality was that SS20s, based behind the Iron Curtain, could not reach the USA.
Plans appeared to be afoot for a limited nuclear war, should it come to that, within the confines of Europe, leaving America unscathed. Britain, or Airstrip One, as CND members referred to it, was now a target like never before and CND’s membership grew exponentially as the British people, at least those not in thrall to their daily papers, woke up to the danger they were being asked to face.
Margaret Thatcher cited the special relationship between Britain and America and could barely conceal how thrilled she was whenever she was seen with Ronald Reagan. Thatcher, from a generation of Britons in awe of American silver screen stars, seemed hypnotized by the down-home charm of Reagan, while he was in awe of her bossy energy and her tack-sharp brain, not a requirement for the presidency of the United States.
Newspaper attacks on the left were a feature of the 1980s. The only way to guarantee a fair hearing for left-wing politicians, who were opposed to arms proliferation and the spending of billions on weapons while unemployment was rising and North Sea oil revenues were sustaining social security, was to hear them speak in public. Which they did frequently. The most impressive speaker at all the rallies I went to at that time was Tony Benn.
I’d heard of Benn before. My history teacher, the one with a penchant for picking out the Jews and Catholics in his classroom, never tired of telling us that Anthony Wedgwood Benn, once a Viscount, came from ‘one of the richest families in Britain’ and made much of his privileged background.
Benn had rejected his peerage when he inherited it in 1960. He had been an MP for ten years by then but could no longer sit in the Commons as a peer. A bye-election was held in 1961 to replace Benn, after his succession, but he stood as an independent and won. The seat was awarded to the Conservative runner-up but two years later legislation was passed allowing hereditary peers to renounce their titles. Benn renounced his twenty minutes after the law was passed.
As a speaker at CND rallies in the early ’80s, Tony Benn often shared the stage with Joan Ruddock, chair of CND and Monsignor Bruce Kent, the general secretary.
Ruddock always seemed taller than Kent. It may have been her heels. She was dark-haired and articulate with a metropolitan air and a resemblance to Joan Bakewell. The acceptable face of the peace movement to the media, with her matching boots and handbag, she was made-up, groomed, and in full grasp of the arguments. No paper could drag her into attempts to dismiss the women’s peace movement as a bunch of hairy-legged lesbians with no make-up and no dignity, wallowing in mud, smoking roll-ups and making soup. She was a Labour MP within a few years and later became Tony Blair’s Minister for Women, which seemed, to many, to be the job she’d been doing throughout the ’80s, if only in a shadow capacity.
By contrast, Kent, with his weary smile and dog collar, offered an avuncular, morally resolute demeanour with, appropriately, dogged determination. His conventional kindly pastor looks again gave the lie to media portrayals of CND as fools led by extremist fools.
Ruddock and Kent commanded wide respect inside the peace movement and beyond, but both had to live with constant MI5 and Home Office surveillance, as the attempts to prove that CND had appointed figureheads to disguise a Soviet insurgency in dungarees continued.
Tony Benn delivered, in his speeches, historical context, a rational understanding of the dangers faced, and the motives of those in power, while addressing the moral issue of such frightening destructive powers being wielded by governments over their people. He spoke not in anger, but with a smile. Afterwards, you were left feeling the collective was strong, that you were not only standing on the shoulders of those who had gone before you, but that to offer your shoulders to the next generation was a noble calling.
No arms race had ever ended without war and history told Benn and the leaders of the peace movement to maintain a struggle. Many people at the big rallies, and CND supporters came from all walks of life, were there following their instincts and to have their own half-formed ideas crystallized, and eloquently expressed, was rewarding for a crowd who craved someone to speak for them.
Sometimes I’d find myself arguing with people who regarded the prospect of unilateral disarmament as tantamount to an open invitation to Russia to invade unopposed. Each time, to have had Tony Benn at my side would have made things so much easier.
Being at Loughton College meant I’d heard, at last, of the Guardian newspaper and its alternative view of the Conservative government, unemployment and the arms race. The Guardian reported the peace camp at Greenham as if it were a protest by principled women taking a stand. Elsewhere they were ridiculed for spelling Wimmin without using ‘men’ (thereby disassoci
ating themselves from men as the creators and users of all weapons of war), while they were mocked for their songs and for their hippy naïvety. If they were straight, it was emphasized how dirty they were, if they were lesbians, that was further evidence of mental instability.
The favourite targets, it seemed, were women who had ‘abandoned’ their husbands and families, to be part of the camp. If they said their families supported them, they were assumed to be lying.
The women at Greenham, who camped outside all year round, who faced changes in local law to enforce their eviction, and who faced constant harassment, took solace in one another and strength from worldwide messages of support. They had no interest in conventional views of the ‘fairer sex’. In this fight they were seen by many as the saner sex, with an anarchic, spirited defiance that came to symbolize the efforts of ordinary people standing up to a government acting at the behest of a foreign power against the will of the majority.
In Easter 1983 the ‘Wimmin’ at Greenham co-operated with CND, who organized a mass demonstration that was to be open to all.
The plan was to link Greenham, by a human chain, via the research facility at Aldermaston, with the nuclear weapons factory at Burghfield. It was a fourteen-mile route through the so-called ‘nuclear valley’ that was going to need tens of thousands of protestors to cover.
Piers, my drama teacher at college, had a friend, Martin, who lectured in the physics department and who was keen to go down to Greenham for the demo. They asked if any of us wanted to go. In the end nine people climbed into Martin’s old VW camper van and headed down towards Newbury.
Arriving the night before, we had to make sleeping arrangements. I was on the front seat of the VW, which was not long enough and left me unstraightenable in the morning. That was far from the short straw though, as people squeezed into contorted positions. We must have had tents as well, I suppose, but I can’t think how we managed, what we ate, or what facilities there were.