While the Sheerness Times Guardian concentrated its coverage on the Isle of Sheppey, the mainland Kentish papers that sometimes also caught Johnson’s eye in the pub had a broader reach. Published from Chatham, the Kent Evening Post aimed to cover the towns of the entire Medway region, while also mixing its local reports with coverage of national and international events. Had he picked up a copy during his first year in Sheerness, Johnson might have learned that the former American GI and soul singer Geno Washington would soon be playing in Strood again, although without the support of the Ram Jam Band, from which he had recently split. A “Sheppey Supplement”, printed on 29 April 1975, would have tried to convince him that the Isle of Sheppey’s economy had at last recovered from the catastrophic closure of the naval establishment and associated army garrison at Sheerness in 1960 (“It was never so good” lied the headline of the “Industrial Spotlight” page, which also trumpeted plans to nearly double the island’s population). Meanwhile, Medway council was exploring the possibility of addressing the housing problem by commissioning a cheap new kind of “plastic home” for newlyweds, and the domestic class war continued in line with inflation: the members of the National Union of Public Employees were demanding a 33% pay rise at their annual conference in Scarborough. All this was reported alongside the fall of Saigon, a ghastly collision of high-speed trains in Munich, which left forty-two dead (9 June 1975), and the termination of the Red Army Faction’s murderous siege of the West German embassy in Stockholm.
The future kept leaning into view too — alternating between imminent catastrophe and implausible suggestions that the nation might actually benefit from scraping the mud of imperial history off its boots and seeking new life as a member of the European Economic Community (“a cooperative effort to build a just, peaceful and prosperous world” as the editor of the Kent Evening Post, Arthur Potter, had insisted at the time of the 1975 referendum2). As for Britain’s other source of hope, the Johnsons were still in the first year of their Sheerness decade on Wednesday 18 June 1975 when Labour’s Energy Secretary Tony Benn came to Kent by hydrofoil to join one hundred VIPs assembled at BP’s oil refinery on the Isle of Grain, directly across the Medway from Sheerness. He was there to welcome the first loaded oil tanker to arrive from the British sector of the North Sea. Having turned on the discharge valve, and with ships in the Medway hooting in unison, Benn would “jubilantly” hold up a bottle of the “black gold” that promised to be “Britain’s new lifeblood”.3 A dose of something transformative was direly needed. The pound was sliding to a new low, a railway strike was looming, and, that very day, even the power-broking golfer and trade union boss Hugh Scanlon was successfully ambushed by militant members of his own Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers: the annual conference had passed a motion moved by Jimmy Reid, then well-known as the communist leader of the upper Clyde shipbuilders’ work-in, rejecting any sort of “wage constraint” that might interfere with free industrial bargaining in accordance with Harold Wilson’s Industry Bill.4
Entitled “It’s Your Opinion”, the Post’s correspondence column was maintained as a lively arena in which reasoning peacemakers had to shout if they were to be heard over the hectoring cries of zealots, the lamentations of civilisation’s last-ditch defenders, and the groans with which defeated readers piled up conspiracy theories in an attempt to make sense of their worsening circumstances. The page burned with agitation about the failings of local government, the Christian (or not) virtues of the “public sector”, and what was likely to happen to the already sinking country when Tony Benn’s North Sea oil ran out.
The Post also provided Johnson with a kaleidoscopic array of English resistance movements to appraise. If Britain’s place alongside the other six West European nations in the Common Market was a matter of abiding concern to the paper’s letter writers, so too was the British state and its various apparatuses, national as well as local: the BBC, whose many crimes included a radio programme on “Modern Poetry” that spurned John Betjeman for stuff that neither scanned nor rhymed (“Poetry?” asked Mary Rankin of Higham: “I call it rubbish”); the public health lobby, which had somehow won Margaret Thatcher’s support for the enforced “mass medication” that was fluoridation of the public water supply; and the Commission for Racial Equality, the mere existence of which had goaded one Kentish patriot to imagine that minority groups would soon be “taking our citizens to court for celebrating Trafalgar Day, St George’s Day, maypole dancing, a return to Christian teaching… Is it against the law to boast of being English with hopes of retaining some of our heritage, such as family life, a moral code, self-respect and a sense of responsibility?”5 After the general election of 3 May 1979, there were also letters about the early works of Margaret Thatcher — loved by some but not by Mr Ken Horton, a Labour councillor who regretted that, three months into her first term (and several years before she formally adopted the cause of “Victorian values”), the Prime Minister, who would indeed call time on the world as all these correspondents knew it, had already given new meaning to the saying “putting back the clock”.
Occasional optimists fought back, as Johnson will have noticed from his bar stool observatory: writing to insist on the progress represented by the innovation known as the “fitted kitchen”, or the possibility that the writer who had earlier stated that Rochester was nowadays only “fit for pigs” might be exaggerating a little: after all, this Medway town now boasted a new Charles Dickens Centre (recommended slogan: “back to the old days!”), which surely showed how the struggling economy might be revived by the coming new “industry” that was tourism.
By the beginning of the Eighties, when Uwe Johnson chose to intervene in this chorus of howling grievances, the Kent Evening Post was edited by a young journalist named Barrie Williams who saw the case for a wider perspective that might inform and perhaps even give ideological coherence to some of these passionate outbursts of local opinion. Williams opened his pages to an elderly political commentator named John Baker White (1902–1988), whose columns regularly stirred up controversy on the letters page, including the example that eventually prompted Johnson to break his self-imposed silence. By-lined as a former MP for Canterbury, Baker White, whose family had extensive farming interests in east Kent, had indeed held that constituency for the Conservative Party between 1945 and 1953. There was, however, rather more to say about him than that.
Baker White, who dedicated his maiden speech to supporting a government bill that promised the restoration of the war-disrupted inshore fishermen of Whitstable and other small coastal ports,6 had entered parliament as a seasoned anti-communist campaigner who had devoted a long career to the cause he’d adopted with the encouragement of Mrs Nesta Webster, a friend of his mother’s who gained notoriety as well as continuing influence after 1917 as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who attributed the French and Russian Revolutions and a great many other perceived ills to an alleged Jewish “plot against civilisation”. White had embarked on his life’s project shortly after leaving school in 1920, spying on the first meetings of the British Communist Party and then joining various organisations and groupings in the intelligence and propaganda fields. Having cut his teeth with the Industrial Intelligence Board, a shadowy blacklisting organisation formed by the Scottish agitator George MakGill, he had gone on to work with both the Anti-Socialist Union and the Economic League, another anti-subversive worker-vetting organisation, of which he was director from 1926–1939.
In his younger days, then, Baker White had moved in a world of anti-communist conspiracy and covert manoeuvres and covered traces of the kind that made an enduring mystery of the “Zinoviev letter”, a forgery that did for Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party when published by the Daily Mail just before the general election of 1924. Like others involved in the interwar “secret state”, and as readers of the Kent Evening Post were not informed, he appears to have developed a soft spot for fascism, viewing it as a bracing response to the rising communist threat. Baker White
was among the Britons who attended the Nuremberg Rally in 1937. Indeed, he stayed in Germany until April 1939, later claiming to have been there as a “spy” all along. He had continued his activities in the post-war years, both as Conservative MP for Canterbury and also as chairman of the National Freedom Association in Kent.
In October 1971, after the House of Commons approved British entry into the European Common Market by an unexpectedly large majority of 112, Baker White commended Edward Heath both for winning this “great decision” against fierce socialist and nationalist opposition and for sticking to his guns with an unwavering commitment that had sadly not been shown by some vacillating members of his cabinet. He also remembered coming across Heath at the Nuremburg rally of 1937 and later meeting up with him again in his room at Balliol College: “We came back sharing the conviction that a dangerous and evil force was loose in Europe, something that one day had to be fought and defeated”.7 That, so Baker White had informed readers of his “World Spotlight” column in the Sheerness Times Guardian, was the origin of Heath’s vision of “Britain as part of a unified Europe”. Unlike Enoch Powell and his followers, this Kentish right-winger had come to terms with the idea that Britain, which could no longer dominate the globe as an imperial nation, might use its new European affiliation to carry on giving the world “her accumulated experience, unique and inimitable, and her indefinable quality, known as the British way of life”.
Johnson and Johnson
By the late Seventies, the Kent Evening Post was giving pride of place to Baker White’s pungently expressed surveys of world events. Subjects that passed under his scanner included the history of Yugoslavia after Tito, and the coming of a new form of warfare in which “international terrorism” would be squared off against “ordered stable systems of society”. In August 1979, it was the state of the shipyards and the claimed folly of the striking British workers who seemed too dim to understand that they would only lose their jobs to Polish yards on the Baltic. On 10 September 1979, at the time of the annual Labour Party conference, he denounced the admirers of “Soviet Communism” already in positions of power — he named Eric Heffer, Tony Benn, Frank Allaun — and reminded readers that the Labour Party was originally based on Methodism, not Marxism. On 21 January 1980, his pronouncements had been concerned with Afghanistan and how the West must act quickly to prove that the ongoing Soviet invasion of that remote and landlocked country was a terrible mistake. As for the debate that would eventually tempt Johnson to pick up his pen, Baker White kicked this off in January 1981, when he reviewed world affairs over the previous year and hailed the rising leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, as both “the man of the year” and, by implication, a proper hero of the political right.
The editor of the Kent Evening Post, Barrie Williams, may himself have stood close to Baker White in the camp of Thatcher and Reagan (he would go on to play a significant role in restructuring the regional press within the Northcliffe empire). However, he also knew that a lively and polarised letters page was good for circulation and Baker White was adept at drawing communists as well as soft-hearted but sometimes still shirty liberals into open view. One of Baker White’s most persistent epistolary antagonists was a self-described shift worker named Bryan Johnson, a British communist whose views would definitely not have placed him among the reformers who gathered around the party’s “theoretical” journal Marxism Today from 1977. While these modernisers were studying Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “hegemony” and developing more sophisticated arguments about the emerging phenomenon they dubbed “Thatcherism”, Bryan Johnson was with the hardline “Tankies” whose admiration for the USSR had survived successive post-war challenges, including those posed by Khrushchev’s revelations about the crimes of Stalin, and the later uprisings in Eastern Europe that meant so much to Uwe Johnson. Having read Baker White’s review of 1980, and his commendation of Lech Walesa as the man of the year, Bryan Johnson sat down in his house in Rainham to insist that it was a “total falsehood” to assert that 266 million people in the USSR were closer to the hunger line than they had been for half a century. Convinced that the Soviet people were thriving thanks to the five-year plan completed in 1980, the English Johnson condemned a Western reaction that seemed to consist only of “spreading falsehood” about the USSR and issuing nuclear threats.
These views were not welcomed by Mrs M.E. of Rochester, who had hoped that, with the coming of the New Year, she would be spared “the platitudes and Bolshevik rambling of Bryan Johnson”. Speculating that no real person could really hold such absurd views, she wondered if “Bryan Johnson” really existed: “Perhaps, after all, you are just a figment of the Editor’s imagination”. The editor added a note assuring her that this really was not the case — as did Bryan Johnson, who came back railing against the cramped and confined outlook of Mrs M.E., which he likened to that of a caged bird: “All she knows and understands about the world is what she can see from her perch in Rochester”. Her use of the name “Bolshevik” was “fifty years behind the times”, he declared patronisingly, and she only had to consider the level of street violence in America or the coexistence of “food mountains in Europe” with starvation in Indo-China to realise that “It is Western Capitalism that lacks Humanity”. As for the floundering British economy: “Our only growth industry is pornography”.
Correspondents on Mrs M.E.’s side of this dispute assailed Bryan Johnson for his “red-tinted spectacles” and wondered how anybody who had not lived under the communist regime could consider himself qualified to “tell people how wonderful it is”. One of her defenders introduced the secondary theme of tourism. There were, this correspondent observed pointedly, “not many Russian tourists” to Britain, “unlike American ones”. Mrs M.E gave the discussion new momentum when she reversed the direction of this thought: “I would still like to see Bryan Johnson on the East side of the Berlin wall” — although “perhaps that too does not exist either since we are all such liars and believe those red bogy fairy tales”.
When Bryan Johnson resumed his ironclad rhapsody about the workers’ paradise, this time gloating over the fact that 2.5 million people were now registered unemployed in the country that was becoming known as “Thatcher’s Britain”, Barrie the editor started adding his own comments at the foot of Johnson’s printed letters — each one a mocking judgement pinned to the chest of a man who was slow to realise he had stepped into the capitalists’ pillory. His first note wondered whether Bryan Johnson had watched Malcolm Muggeridge’s television programme A Winter in Moscow on BBC2 earlier that week. Muggeridge had been there in the early Thirties and was among the reporters who followed Gareth Jones in breaking news of the catastrophic famine Stalin had engineered in Ukraine. Another writer was less obscure, saying “I thought for a crazy moment that Bryan Johnson had finally gone to his Utopia in Russia, after all the stick he had taken here from readers”. Happily, though, the useful idiot had stayed around to pen another load of “claptrap”: “He must have done his 30 years of research in a nuclear shelter”.
The suggestion that Bryan Johnson should be sent to Moscow to experience the land of his dreams hardly worried the man himself. On 13 March, in a letter published under the heading “Frozen mitt for Russia”, he urged Barrie Williams himself to “Go there with a small delegation from the Medway towns”: “enjoy the hospitality” and “see for yourself”. He repeated his suggestion on 25 March 1981. In a letter headed “Russian dream is coming true”, Bryan Johnson claimed that all the arguments of his critics were merely lies of the sort to be expected from “the media”. Having pointed to the murders perpetrated by the US-backed junta in El Salvador, he returned to the Red Paradise he had praised so often before: “Go there and you will find no unemployment, no inflation, a healthy expanding economy, expanding industry, and ever rising standards of living for all. If some people prefer to bury their heads in the quicksands of Thatcherism that is their free choice but all the lies in the world can never change th
e truth and reality itself”.
Mr Bryan Johnson may never have understood that he was exactly the sort of left-winger the Kent Evening Post liked to have exposing himself in its letter’s column — a man of such dogged and simple-minded faith in the USSR could be relied on to incriminate himself and, by tabloid association, the democratic left too. As for the other Johnson, Uwe, who would soon be writing caustically in the fourth and closing volume of Anniversaries, about the well-dressed British Stalinists he had seen enjoying a holiday as guests of the GDR cultural authorities at Ahrenshoop in the early Fifties, he definitely noticed, as he followed this correspondence from his stool in the Sea View or Napier, that his namesake was not entirely alone in his illusions. The same day’s paper included a letter, which the editor headed “Stop hating”, from one J. Box of Pelham Green, Twydall, who also wanted to “dispel the hatred and fear this country has for Russia”. Having reiterated that the “way to prevent war is not to spend massive sums on defence but to visit and make friends”, Box went on to assert some “facts”, which he had on the authority of a visit made by members of the National Association of Local Government Officers in 1960 and also, he freely admitted, of more recent pronouncements made by Radio Moscow. Unlike British workers, declared Box, Russians paid only 5% of their income on rent, and “no rates are payable. Old people are treated like royalty, paying half-price for fuel and travel”. Under the “preventative health system”, readers should know that “everyone has to be examined 10 times a year”. This recycled propaganda was too much for Barrie the editor. Beneath this letter, he stated “For the information of Messrs Johnson and Box a one-way ticket to Moscow costs £264. Send us a card, lads — Editor”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 45